The bearable past

Two-thirds of the way through Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), its characters come across a house standing in a valley high in the Queensland ranges. The house is empty, abandoned like some landlocked Marie Celeste, but in one room a library remains. Standing before the shelves, one of the characters removes a volume, only to find the pages eaten away to dust, the book, like the house, an empty shell. It is a scene of extraordinary power and implication, resonant with the peculiar energy that builds when meaning coalesces, however briefly, and we feel ourselves in the presence of something that runs deeper than words.

Prochownik’s Dream (as one of the characters helpfully informs us at one point, it is pronounced Pro-shov-nik) attempts something similar, probing questions about the nature of art, the responsibility of the artist to the work, the responsibility of the artist to the past, and the relationship between the artist and those who share his life.