The Slowworm's Song (signed First Edition) -m Andrew Miller :: Buy from Oxfam on The UK High Street

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Andrew Miller is interested in human failure - specifically "those sudden tests of worth and courage" which, if not passed, can destroy a life, as the exiled Hungarian playwright Laszlo Lazar finds in 2001's Oxygen. Many years ago, a few seconds' hesitation by Lazar led to his lover's death, and he's been trying to reconstruct his idea of who he is ever since. Miller's novels are often built around such moments of disruption: Oxygen gives us not just Lazar himself, but the ironically named Alec Valentine, who is aware that he is letting down his terminally ill mother through his own incapacity to love. At other times the disruption is a broader failure to connect: in Miller's 1997 debut, Ingenious Pain, we meet James Dyer, an 18th-century doctor who can't feel either pain or pleasure, while 2015's The Crossing features the scientist Maud Stamp (another of Miller's carefully chosen names), whose blunt sense of purpose translates into a profound emotional isolation from those around her. Most recently Captain John Lacroix, the hero of 2018's Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, set during the Napoleonic wars, is tormented by the mistakes he made during the British retreat to Corunna. Miller's ninth novel revisits the theme, and it's handled in a way that is bolder and more exquisitely menacing than anything he's done before. Stephen Rose is a former soldier and recovering alcoholic who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Thirty years later he's living quietly in Somerset, trying to establish a relationship with his daughter, Maggie, whose upbringing he missed. He is in infrequent contact with Maggie's mother, Evie (the memory of their youthful love affair is, as her name suggests, a lost Eden). Stephen has a job at a garden centre called Plant World: plants and gardens are important in a story that draws on the work of the Romantic poets in a way that's unabashedly allusive, but entirely Miller's own. Awake to the dreadful ordinariness of life - and death ... Andrew Miller. Awake to the dreadful ordinariness of life - and death ... Andrew Miller. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian This Rose is, in William Blake's phrase, sick. He has a canker, an invisible "slow worm" of regret, that is consuming his life. Like Lacroix, he is crucified by the memory of a particular failure of judgment: in this case, an incident that took place in Ardoyne, north Belfast, in the distant summer of 1982, when he was a new recruit to the British army. The question of what exactly happened that day (there are conscious echoes of Bloody Sunday here) is resurrected when he receives a summons to an inquiry in Belfast. Instead of responding immediately, he begins to write a version of his past for Maggie that's both a confession and a love letter. It's also a peculiarly moving account of casual youthful error, and of the hell that such errors can send us to. When Stephen says that the document he is writing seems like "a record of madness", we believe him.
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The Slowworm's Song (signed First Edition) -m Andrew Miller

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