In the winner of Australia's top prize for fiction, three central characters explore their family histories over the centuries and across the continents, revealing the connections they share and discovering their spiritual destinies.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
While noble in ambition and geographically broad in scope, Miller's attempt to unite the spiritual destinies of three disparate characters across a variety of international settings is marred by a less than fluid narrative and confusingly similar character voices. The players include Lang Tzu, the son of a Chinese landowner, who collaborates with the Japanese when they invade the mainland; August Spiess, the family doctor who delivered him; Speiss's artist daughter Gertrude; and Steven Muir, an Australian whose narrative overview is intended to integrate the various parts and pieces of the nomadic plot. Most of the story takes place in mainland China in the 1930s and concerns the decision of several characters to emigrate to Australia following the tumultuous collapse of the feudal mandarin system. Miller's third novel (winner of last year's Miles Franklin Award for Fiction in Australia) will reward those patient readers with a bent for the more obscure spiritual fiction by such writers as Hesse, Goethe and Mann with many eloquent passages about the links between art, identity and sense of place.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
The Ancestor Game is like an elaborate house of many floors and wings and hidden rooms, all interconnecting in unlikely and surprising ways, and inhabited by a richly divergent family of characters. The lives, the pasts, and the imaginations of the three central characters, Steven Muir, Lang Tzu, and Gertrude Spiess are powerfully and poetically interwoven. As the riveting history of each unfolds, the reader is drawn into an intricate, often mysterious series of paths traversing centuries and continents, Steven, Lang, and Gertrude find that their internal homelands, their personal landscapes of enchantment, change profoundly as they examine and recreate their family histories. -- Midwest Book Review
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I am in the secret place I once knew in my imagination.",
By
This review is from: The Ancestor Game (Hardcover)
"The ancients of all nations understood that we don't belong anywhere real. They understood that the mystery of life, the paradox of our existence, is located in that charged space between the present reality of our individual life and the dream of the immortality of our species. It's the Phoenix, among the mythical beasts, which embodies this paradox for both the occidental and the oriental worlds alike." (p.259) Winner of Australia's coveted Miles Franklin Award more than decade ago, Alex Miller's "The Ancestor Game" is probably still the post-colonial novel par excellence. Recently returned to Australia after his father's death in England, Steven Muir sets out to write a series of biographical sketches from the life of his friend, the Chinese-Australian artist and collector Lang Tzu. His sources include a memoir from one of Lang's relatives who spent her life in the sprawling Melbourne mansion he now calls home, and the diaries of Lang's family doctor from Shanghai, the expatriate German August Speiss, translated by his daughter Gertrude. Weaving extracts from these sources, Muir's biographical sketches, and the contemporary story of Steven, Gertrude and Lang, Miller's novel becomes a mesmerizing tour through early twentieth-century China, the International Settlement, the Ballarat goldfields and 1976 Melbourne. Yet this isn't some melodramatic historical potboiler. Indeed, some detractors have criticised this novel for lacking an engaging plot. While this isn't entirely true - the vignettes are well-plotted and the novel's climax is one of the most unexpected and effective I've ever read - Miller's novel isn't about telling a single compelling story. It just doesn't proceed that way, nor could it. This novel does its work by an arrangement which is non-linear, which relies more on echoes and resonances, on the reader noticing the symbolism of objects and episodes and the near-perfect craftsmanship in the construction of every scene. Miller clearly enjoys the visual arts, and that's an apt way of thinking about the way this novel is structured: like a series of paintings, only a few of which are "thrilling", but which make an incredibly powerful statement when viewed together. If you're bored by this approach, stick with it. Read slowly, read carefully. Read it again (you'll want to). Miller has plenty interesting to say about the notion of "extraterritoriality", colonialism, storytelling, and the way we antipodeans forge our identities with, or against, the claims of ancestry.
0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Boring, and yet strangely compelling,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Ancestor Game (Hardcover)
I confess I picked up this book based on my usual criteria of pleasing-title-and-cover-design-gestalt, but I felt that the synopsis showed promise.
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