Customer Reviews

The Ancestor Game

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"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.

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.

Sadly, The Ancestor Game turned out to be one of those books in which the 'action' consists almost entirely of characters realizing things. And realizing that other characters are realizing other things. And thinking about realizations, theirs and everyone else's. There's not a lot of present-time action to draw the reader along, nor very much to grab hold of in the main character.

And yet, I did read it through, despite not caring about any of the characters or what happened to them. Miller has judiciously sprinkled in enough flashback exposition and really almost melodramatic action to pull you back in just as you feel yourself teetering on the edge of a trip back to the library. The action of the flashbacks is at such variance with the non-action of the present that the present feels like a commercial break.

So I followed him through, but ultimately got nothing much from what was essentially a dry and self-conscious 'novel of ideas.' Presumably he was saying something about children and their fathers, and the right or ability of descendants to create their own ancestors, but I just didn't care enough to figure out exactly what.