Through a glass darkly
Sebastian Smee
THE OPTIMISTS by Andrew Miller Sceptre, £16.99, pp. 313, ISBN 034082512X ✆ £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The subject of Andrew Miller’s latest novel is the morality of sight. His protagonist is a photojournalist. Clement Glass (the sooner British fiction dispenses with these gratuitously winking names the better) has just returned from a civil war in Africa where he witnessed — and photographed — the aftermath of a massacre.
For pages at a time, the story flits enchantingly above the dangerous waters of didacticism. It is sober and beautifully written. But too often the narrative loses momentum and the reader is dunked, only to emerge again feeling heavy, wet and ever-so-slightly abused.
The first section of the book, which sees Clem wandering around London ‘lost in the space between two thoughts’, is marvellous. You feel almost physically pulled into Clem’s world, at once intimately familiar and undermined by a massive psychological shift. The writing is clear, precise, feelingly observant.
For Clem, everything has been turned inside out. His every breath is made stale and sour by futility and anger. His sister, who is affected by a depressive illness, has just taken a turn for the worse. But he is as incapable of helping her as he is of playing the Good Samaritan to a girl on a London street he believes has been raped. We follow Clem on his outwardly numbed, internally tormented meanderings. He flies to Canada to look up his colleague — a fellow-witness to the African atrocity. Silverman, who has been similarly traumatised, has since found what he claims is a ‘truer truth’, or at least a better one, in charity.
‘Do we really know what we saw out there?’ he asks Clem. He admits he can’t live with the nihilism suggested by the massacre, to which Clem responds that what he can live with is an irrelevance: ‘I’m talking about what we saw.’ Seeing — its ethics, its mechanics, everything about it — gets a real treatment in what follows. The plot, which sees Clem return to England to look after his sister, then, as normal feeling returns, fly to Belgium to confront the man responsible for the massacre, becomes a lightweight scaffolding propping up what begins to feel like notes towards a thesis.
There is the obligatory Susan Sontag quote opening Part Two. There are references to the history of photography, to Fox Talbot’s calotypes (whose name derived from the Greek for beauty) as well as to great photo-journalists such as Capa, McCullin, Weegee, Lange and Brandt.
There is his dead mother, who had glaucoma. And then there is the Bourgmestre himself, whose evil orchestration of the massacre is reduced to apparent banality in the ordinary setting of Brussels; when Clem gets an opportunity to try on his spectacles, he finds that ‘things became clearer’.
The morning after the massacre, Clem had been struck by the ‘routine magnificence’ of the sunrise: ‘crude magic’ that ‘such a night, such a concentration of darkness, could be swept away like any other’.
Beauty itself, in other words, has become confounding. Hanging a modest still life painting, he notices that it
immediately loaned the room its warmth, the decency of its ambition ... Could a painting be moral? It was an object, a production. Yet in the picture’s presence, certain wrong acts ... might be harder to commit.
Much of this is sophisticated and provocative, but it feels like an intrusion in the midst of a promising fiction. It is too persistent, too indiscreet.
Attempting to write stories that are also mature meditations on morality, writers such as Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan provide salutary examples. Bellow succeeds by making the hiccupping, jolting conflict between his characters’ moral life and the vast, inexplicable surging of human affairs an integral part of his aesthetic effect. McEwan, whose recent novels have often been defeated by too much ideamongering, nevertheless has a reliable nose for drama.
Miller is a fine writer, but The Optimists is a moral voice in search of a convincing fiction.
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