Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, thoughtful, moving story by a great writer
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Some vivid descriptions but generally a rather dull read
Review: My sister recommended me this book, and I was looking forward to read something that at least was partly set in my native Australia. And the thought of reading a recently published work that would be reminiscent of My Brilliant Career was very inviting. This is a novel of choices, and the price we pay for making certain choices in our lives. And I think the novel does show that in the 1920's choices for women and how well they could control their lives were quite limited. A condition of Faith, however, was a big disappointment and unfortunately a rather dull and lack-luster read. I had a real problem with Miller's style - his short, sharp sentences didn't allow the narrative to really flow. Lots of time is given to description of what the characters are doing in their domestic lives, but there is little if any description of their internal workings - their psyches or their motivations. There is no doubt that Miller has done a mountain of research to really recreate the period in Melbourne, Paris and North Africa, but I think he just gets too bogged down in period description without letting the characters' motivations tell the story. I also didn't buy the Emily's central motivation: would a well educated, upper middle class Australian girl like Emily from the 1920's impetuously jump into a sudden marriage with a Frenchman? And would she have done what she did with the Bishop in the Crypt in Chartres? I found this unconvincing; therefore, I found the rest of the story equally implausible. As everything in the novel is filtered through Emily's eyes, we really get to know little about the other characters and what motivates them - we know that Georges is driven by obtaining the tender to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but we never really get to know him and how he deeply feels about Emily - he comes across as stock stereotypical Frenchman, committed to Emily as long as she plays dutiful wife and mother. To be fair there are some good things about Conditions of Faith. I quite liked the scenes in Tunisia - Miller really managed to capture the intense heat and atmosphere of that part of the world. He brings this part of the world vividly to life, particularly with the sub-plots involving Arab nationalism and the history of Carthage, yet these subplots kind of fall flat and never really go anywhere. And his descriptions of Emily painfully studying in the Library in Paris are indeed riveting and heart breaking; you really get a sense of her inner conflict and struggles. It was also nice to have a history lesson on the development of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Generally though, Conditions of Faith is a pretty dull and flat read. If you want to read some Australian literature that is really representative of the Australian psyche, read some Martin Boyd, particularly the novel A Difficult Young Man. Michael
Rating: 
Summary: "A Novel of Good Talk"
Review: 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. 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. 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. 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! 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. 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. 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 other characters talk more than she, and more interestingly. Still, regardless of who's speaking at a given moment, the writing is provocative and absorbing on subjects ranging from Arab politics to the politics of motherhood, from freedom of choice to purpose in life. For example: Is finding no purpose in life more frightening than finding a purpose that wholly takes it over? Can ambition substitute for purpose? Georges' ambition to build a fabulous bridge doesn't lead him to ask about what purpose it might serve - - a question that "'involves a kind of moral uncertainty ' for which Georges possesses no curiosity.'" But is purpose really different from ambition, or desire? Perhaps "'all passions are the same passion'" in that "'our passions always require from us a betrayal of our former state.'" This kind of talk makes you glad "Conditions of Faith" can't be described as a page-turner. You want to put this book down and think about it.
Rating: 
Summary: Very ordinary
Review: With the exception of the first couple of pages that describe perfectly an Australian beach on a hot day (and which made me think that I would enjoy the book), this is a very ordinary novel. I lost interest completely in the characters, who I thought to be cardboard, and found the incident in Chartres with the priest very silly. Perhaps the problem I had was that I read this straight after reading Atonement. Conditions of Faith pales in comparison.
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