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 László Lázár finds in 2001’s Oxygen. Many years ago, a few seconds’ hesitation by Lázár 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 Lázár 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.
