FICTION: A struggling British ex-soldier tries to come to terms with a terrible incident in his past, and with the daughter he barely knows.
"The Slowworm's Song" by Andrew Miller; Europa Editions (251 pages, $18)
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The past comes calling for Stephen Rose in the form of a letter from "an organisation calling itself the Commission," asking him to come to Belfast and make a statement about something that happened in 1982, when Stephen, a young soldier in the British army, was stationed in Northern Ireland in the midst of the Troubles. What happened we don't learn until well into this brief, powerful book, but we do know that it was horrible enough to have haunted him for 30 years. "My life, at twenty-two," he says, "was spoilt."
"The Slowworm's Song" is also a letter and a statement, a confession of sorts and an account of his life written by Stephen for his daughter Maggie, who grew up without him and has only recently made a tentative effort to know him. He tells her about leaving his Quaker father to join the army, about his training, service and separation; about dossing with hippies in a decaying Victorian house and selling drugs, which earned him a short stint in prison and a sharp break from Maggie's mother; and about going back to his dying father and settling in his childhood home — darkening the margins, a recognition of the drunken wreck he's made of most his life.
The British author Andrew Miller, whose work has won a Costa Book Award and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, gives Stephen a way of writing that seems deceptively natural — just about possible from a middle-aged recovering alcoholic of minimal formal education and rough experience — while managing moments of great subtlety and, sometimes, a quiet beauty.
Snow, an hour or two after dark, "fell orange through the light of the streetlamps and settled blue in the garden." Voices "lap over each other like water in a cellar." A Quaker elder looks "like a man having rich and godly thoughts but also trying to remember where he'd left his glasses."
As Stephen's story moves inexorably toward the date of the Commission's meeting, the more consequential suspense inheres in the question of how Maggie will receive his accounting. He wishes he could have kept it from her, he says, but "it cannot be made less and it cannot be made safe and it cannot be hidden and it cannot be forgotten."
Whether he will make it that far is another question, as the desire for drink, his demon, is "a poor goatish thing that withers but cannot quite die."
A daughter, no matter how estranged, would almost have to be a monster to resist such an overture — and a monster Maggie is decidedly not, any more than her tormented, tender-hearted father, forever faced with the conundrum: "How do you fix something when you don't know what it is, what it's supposed to be?"
"We have to be careful not to get trapped by our stories," Stephen is advised, after a crisis averted by chance. The hope is, by telling his story he will finally be free. And as he tells Maggie, "Sometimes better to hope than to know."
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Ellen Akins is a writer and a teacher of writing in Wisconsin.
