A Brief Affair by Alex Miller review - This is a beautifully told and deceptively simple tale

Egan is not only shadowed by something in the ether. When the novel opens, she has also just returned to her job and family after a brief but dazzling affair with a man she met in China. The exquisite feelings she encountered with her Mongolian lover both delight and castigate her daily.

Egan is the protagonist in Alex Miller's latest novel, his 15th book. This book radiates the compressed skill of Miller's long and successful career, which includes two Miles Franklin awards. It's a tale about love, beauty and belonging. It's also a tale about the "oldest story in the world" - the eponymous affair and its aftershocks.

When we meet Frances, she is stumbling at every turn. She longs to feel as alive as she did in China, but she cannot conjure up those feelings again, amid the constraints of work, the responsibilities of her two children and the expectations of a loyal but uninspiring husband.

Then she meets someone who also tasted forbidden love. The campus caretaker, Joseph, gives Frances a notebook belonging to Valerie Sommers, a former inmate who lived in the room which is now Egan's office. Valerie fell in love with an older woman, Jessie, when they were both asylum patients. In 1950s Australia however, hospital authorities would not allow the two women to be together. Jessie was separated from Valerie and killed herself.

All this longing and pain, Miller suggests, has seeped into the bones of the place in which Frances had once thought she would carve out a glorious career. Miler examines how places hold memory, long after the people who inhabited them have departed. Frances' dilemmas encapsulate the way in which reverberations from the past are all part of the present.

On one level, this is a deceptively simple tale. In a recent interview, Miller said that in every book, he strives to find the simplicity in the story and cut away anything extraneous. Elements of the novel have an almost dream-like inevitability to them, and the weaving together of seemingly disparate plot strands is immensely assured. Less successful is a tendency to stereotype minor characters like Egan's lover, her colleague Sanjeev and Joseph. These non-Anglo characters can appear one-dimensionally stoic or wise, compared to Frances, who has a host of thoroughly human contradictions pulsing through her. Miller's treatment of female characters however, is flawless both here and in earlier novels, and this is one of the pleasures of reading this masterful Australian novelist.