Conditions of Faith

P>Alex Miller's latest novel, like his best-known book, "Ancestor Game," centers on international travels and emigrations whose starting point is his home country of Australia. His inspiration to write "Conditions of Faith" came from his mother's journal, which he found after her death. From entries his mother made about her experiences as a young woman living in Paris during the 1920s, his novel's restless heroine was born.<p>Emily Stanton is a bright 25-year-old Australian with eager dreams of making a brave, original life for herself. In the tradition of George Eliot's Middlemarch and Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, her story turns on the irony that a woman's very determination to transcend the world's conventional restrictions can blind her to the realities hidden behind her bravest choices. As Emily tries to make herself a character in a life story that will be uniquely true to her desires, she gets tangled in the narratives of other persons.<p>It's 1923, and Emily meets Georges, a promising architect ten years her senior who has come to Australia from Paris to brainstorm designs for the proposed Sydney Harbor Bridge, which will be the longest in the world. Although Emily might have embarked on a career of her own - she earned a First in history at Cambridge -she rejects that possibility to marry Georges.<p>This hardly sounds like an iconoclastic role choice for a woman desiring freedom. But Emily makes her decision on impulse, and very much against her father's expectation that she'll pursue a brilliant scholarly career. To her, rebelling against her father is a radical gesture that throws off a great burden. She won't surrender to family demands; she'll find her own purpose in life. And she'll do it in Paris!<p>Emily soon discovers family demands everywhere. Georges takes her to Chartres, where she meets his mother. This woman has always dominated her son's life, and she makes sure Emily knows that his ancestors' names appear in the 12th-century records of the great cathedral. Emily, vexed at her mother-in-law's arrogance and at her husband's blindness to her misery, has a fling at Chartres that complicates the rest of her life. The story is full of unexpected turns that take Emily all the way to Tunisia and the archaeological dig at Carthage, where history finally becomes more than an academic subject and takes on vital meaning for her.<p>Throughout the novel we meet intriguing characters, including Emily's powerful yet vulnerable father, and her mother, a woman of moral weight and wit who sees clearly and won't mince words. Georges' friend Antoine becomes Emily's confidant in Paris, and he's a terrific talker. So are others who play major supporting roles in the book, like the Paris doctor Leon, the Arab archaeologist Hakim, and the scholar Olive Kallam.<p>This strength is also a weakness in the narrative. You'd think a heroine in a novel full of conversation, who is described as assertive and intelligent, would speak up. But all the o

....Conditions of Faith was written and published in 2000, but itsprose is that of a classic novel of the Victorian age. The writingstyle is flawless and flows along quite effortlessly. After so manyhackneyed plots and bad writing styles that continually rotate theBest Sellers racks in department and grocery stores across thecountry, it is refreshing to read such an original, intelligent, andwell-written story as Conditions of Faith. The plot is veryinteresting and was invented when Miller, a well-loved Australianauthor and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Australia'smost prestigious literary prize, The Miles Franklin Award, received ajournal his mother left him when she died, which contained only a fewsparse entries. Another carefully crafted aspect of this novel is thevivid descriptions of both Paris and Tunisia, which make the readerfeel as if she or he were really seeing these places and want toexperience life in France and Africa for him or herself. Conditionsof Faith is Miller's fifth book, but only the first to be publishedin the United States. Hopefully more of his work will be publishedhere, because this is a novel that should be treasured by all writersand readers as an example of true literary achievement and skill.

I liked this book because it was different in setting, plot, and characters. The writing is excellent. I did find some parts of the story hard to believe and the main character, Emily, is a study in contrasts that are a bit too extreme. But I enjoyed the setting - the 1920's in Australia, Paris, Chartres, and Tunisia. The descriptions were well-written without becoming tiresome. The ending was disappointing to me. It was predictable, but unbelievable.

I truly enjoyed this novel. It was an adventure to Paris, Chartres and Tunisia in the 1920's. Alex Miller paints beautiful landscapes. If you're longing to "get away", then this is the book for you. This was my first time reading a book by Alex Miller. It certainly will not be my last.

It's astonishing to me that this book was written by a man, so true and accurate is Alex Miller's portrayal of his heroine's emotional plight. Emily Stanton is a 25-year-old newly wed in the 1920's, a woman who is struggling to define herself as an individual when she becomes pregnant with an unwanted baby. She's living in an age when all women are expected to identify with motherhood, only Emily doesn't. She doesn't want to be stuck at home. She wants to see the world; she wants to be intellectually challenged. The period detail is extraordinary, and Emily is very much a creature of her world, and yet Miller makes the point that many of her experiences are actually quite similar to the struggles of women today: work vs. motherhood. It's a struggle with which I - living in the year 2000 -- certainly identify. Miller is a wonderful writer, very careful and caring in his details. The plot takes us from Australia to Europe to North Africa, and the scenery is extraordinary. I very much recommend this book.