Oxygen
Andrew Miller Sceptre, 325pp, £14.99
ISBN 0340728256
Andrew Miller is a graduate of Malcolm Bradbury's famous creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. His two previous novels were greeted with ecstatic reviews, won a shedload of prizes and were translated into umpteen languages, with big-screen adaptations pending. They both dealt with matters 18th-century. This one is set in 1997, as you can tell by the mention of the comet Hale-Bopp.
"Inside the house," we are told at the beginning, "his father's clocks were striking the hour . . . It was the dusk of his third day back at Brooklands, the house in the West Country with its grey stone walls, brown-tiled roof and rotting summerhouse, where he had spent the first 18 years of his life."
Exposition is a difficult art, but this is School of Snoopy rather than Malcolm Bradbury, isn't it? The cartoon beagle used to perch on the doghouse with his typewriter and start bashing out Great Novels in a very similar style. Then again, Snoopy was no fool, and this is precisely the kind of so-so stuff that does tend to bring in rave reviews, prizes and movie deals.
The chap who has come home is Alec. His widowed mother, Alice, is dying of lung cancer and has to keep an oxygen bottle by the bed. On behalf of the Royal Court Theatre, Alec is translating from the French a philosophical play called Oxygen, about a group of miners trapped underground and the people trying to rescue them before they suffocate. Alice often thinks of her father, an Arnhem veteran who got the DSO for rescuing a wounded comrade under fire. She wonders when some kindly person will rescue her from pain by administering a large dose of something fatal.
Laszlo Lazar, an expat Hungarian playwright living in Paris, is considered a hero of Hungary's 1956 uprising. Alec, who chickened out of teaching at a tough comprehensive, enviously treasures a Telegraph Magazine photo of him, captioned: "As a young man Lazar knew how to handle a tommy-gun."
You could say the same about John Peel, or the late Auberon Waugh, or anyone who did national service. The photo shows Lazar mooching harmlessly in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Would a competent hack really use such a daft caption? Well, it's a necessary device because, we soon learn, Lazar is in fact haunted by his abject failure to use his tommy-gun when required, to save a friend from secret-police goons. Poignant irony, you see.
Lazar is offered a chance to atone for the past, in a roundabout, partial fashion. Since Miller is going heavy on the parallelisms, Alec has to redeem himself by some decisive act. And what about his louche brother Larry, former tennis champ turned soap star, now reduced to acting in porn videos? As he flies in from California, Larry feels pretty seedy and recalls the rumour that they pipe thinner oxygen into economy class. His little daughter is asthmatic. She is also a kleptomaniac - a much-emphasised point whose relevance becomes apparent only towards the end, when she pinches a small but significant object.
Some readers will find the account of Alice's decline very moving. Others may find it too calculated, in the context of an intensely schematic novel where the author is always striving for effect. The writing has its moments, but much of it is self-consciously literary and doesn't quite pay its way: "Night thickened . . . pressing at the glass like floodwater"; "It was the hour for such strange thoughts: moths that flew only at dawn"; "None of us, she thought, survives our imperfections".
The plotting would never pass muster at a crime writers' convention. For some reason, posh-prose writers can be very slack on that score. Miller introduces a loaded gun and a deadly poison capsule on the feeblest of pretexts. Equally gimcrack is the way the "oxygen" and the "rescue" motifs are made to keep recurring. Finally, Miller cuts the story off just before the point you might expect, leaving things up in the air. We have been told that Lazar's acclaimed masterpiece of a play ends like this, so it must be clever. But it isn't - it's an absolutely routine technique. Miller will have to ditch a few pretensions if he wants to be good.
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