“I have examined my conscience more than most,” reflects Stephen Rose, the tormented protagonist of Andrew Miller’s new novel. “To sift your intentions is hard . . . The mind is not a box you can just empty out.”
The course of Rose’s life has turned decisively on one moment, one incident: 1982, a door in a house in Belfast, and Rose, a British squaddie on a tour of duty. This pivotal instant is indicated so clearly in advance that its specifics, when revealed, come as no surprise – and in any case, it is the aftermath which interests Miller, a novelist whose work has always dwelt on the destructive potential of such life-changing moments and decisions.
The names in Miller’s fictional worlds tend to be semaphores – and those in The Slowworm’s Song signal a lost grace or Eden: Rose’s name reminds us of William Blake’s invisible worm that with “his dark secret love does thy life destroy”; his former partner is Evie; and he is – fitfully – employed at the Plant World garden centre. The pastoral beauty of his Somerset surroundings is evoked memorably, but this ostensibly serene loveliness soon falls away: Rose’s life in the decades since 1982 has indeed been destroyed by guilt and remorse, and the scale of his ruin is detailed in unflinching terms.
Miller is always an elegant writer, but the graceful tone of this novel jars with what we know of the narrator: to be sure, Rose is of Quaker stock and thus accustomed to a certain meditative examination of life and mind; but he is also a destructive alcoholic, barely clinging on to existence, and his brutalising, dehumanising army experience has shattered his ability to forge and maintain relationships.
He is also deeply self-involved – and here lies the moral dilemma: Rose’s anxious sifting of his own history and memory ultimately marginalises the sorrows of those he has wronged; he has never truly, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt’s memorable formulation, “trained his mind to go visiting”. For all his own suffering, Rose nevertheless seeks absolution and redemption while avoiding the material inconveniences of actual justice.
In demonstrating that performative empathy is ultimately an exercise in vapidity, Andrew Miller places a deeply disturbing truth at the heart of this troubling novel.
