The writing of a novel, Alex Miller has said, ‘is a kind of journey of the imagination in which there’s the liberty to dream your own dream … There’s always got to be a model located somewhere in fact and reality … But some of your best characters are what you think of as being purely made up, just characters that needed to be there.’

There is no way of telling and no need to know if Robert Blewitt – whose mother called him Bobby Blue – is ‘purely made up’ or owes something to ‘fact and reality’, but he is certainly one of Miller’s most memorable characters, as striking in his own special way as Annabelle Beck and Bo Rennie (Journey to the Stone Country [2002]), John Patterner (Lovesong [2009]), Max Otto (Landscape of Farewell  [2007]), or Autumn Laing, whose first-person narrative begins: ‘They are all dead and I am old and skeleton-gaunt. This is where it began fifty-three years ago.’