Conditions of Faith

Carefully researched yet curiously flat, Miller's (The Ancestor Game) fifth novel follows a young Australian woman as she attempts to find her place in the world in the early 1920s. The daughter of a professor at Melbourne University, Emily Stanton has just graduated from that institution with a First in the history of classical civilizations. Though her father feels she has potential as a scholar and urges her to go on to study at Cambridge, Emily marries Georges Elder, a Scotsman who grew up in Chartres, works as an engineer in Paris and has come to Australia to plan a bridge for Sydney Harbor . Returning with her husband to Paris, Emily is disillusioned with her new life, and a visit to Chartres to meet Georges's widowed mother, the formidably stout and pious Madame Elder, and his Aunt Juliette, only exacerbates her feeling that she has entered a stiffling environment. An erotic encounter with a priest in the cathedral further confuses Emily. Soon after, Emily's health begins to fail, and Georges sends her to Tunisia to recover. There she meets working archeologists and her interest in history, particularly in the Christian-claimed martyr Perpetua, is rekindled, an intellectual need that will eventually be pitted against Emily's role as wife and mother. Although Miller meticulously reconstructs Paris, Chartres and a Tunisian village in the early '20s, his thorough and indiscriminate attention to detail and his sometimes wooden prose make the novel slow going. A few striking scenes later in the novelDone capturing the disconcerting blend of familiarity and formality between husband and wife, for instanceDwill reward the patient reader. Miller's characters, however, are broadly sketched and lack convincing interior lives. Despite the novel's careful construction, his tale never acquires vitality. Agent, Arnold Goodman. (July) FYI: In 1993, Miller received both the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.