We know that memory plays tricks, but as Andrew Miller and I crank up our webcams to discuss his new novel, I reflect on how it can’t really be 25 years – can it? – since his debut novel, Ingenious Pain, was published. “I know!” he says. “Every time I publish another book, I have lunch with my editor, we look at each other with an increasing sense of disbelief that this is still going on. With a sense also of getting away with it, that no one’s stopped us yet!”
Ingenious Pain won numerous awards, including the International Dublin Literary Award in 1999, and since then Miller has published eight more novels, including his latest, The Slowworm’s Song. The foreshortened sense of time between then and now might also be connected to the fact that on my laptop screen, Miller doesn’t look much older now than he did back then, certainly nothing like his 60 years. The effect is enhanced by his holiday-like background: a white wall, a blue stable door and a floral painting in blue and yellow.
He’s not on holiday but in southwest England, in “a classic little Somerset village, more cows than people really”, his home for the past 16 years, where he lives with his 17-year-old daughter. Aptly, our two locations – Somerset and Belfast – cover the settings of his new novel.
First though, I wanted to ask him about the title of the book. He has a good ear for a resonant title, after all – Oxygen, The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird – and getting the title right is “really important to me”, he says. “It’s the opening line, in a way. When people just look at the object, the author’s name might mean nothing, but the title has to mean something.”
With The Slowworm’s Song, the title comes from Basil Bunting’s modernist poem Briggflatts: “So he rose and led home silently through clean woodland / where every bough repeated the Slowworm’s song.” Says Miller: “It was just right. There’s just something in that little scrap of verse from a long, long poem, which gave a suggestion of coming free through something.”
That sums up the theme of the novel nicely. It’s narrated by Stephen Rose, a 51-year-old recovering alcoholic living in Somerset, writing a letter of sorts to his adult daughter, Maggie, as he tries to come to terms with a defining period in his past: he was a soldier in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, and one event in particular continues to disrupt his state of mind.
When I ask where the story came from, Miller speaks of “little rootlets” for the book “going back into different places. One of them goes back into a place in Somerset, a very powerful, atmospheric sort of area, overlooked by Glastonbury Tor. It’s a very powerful sort of landscape.
“And there’s also the story of a squaddie who had been serving in Northern Ireland, and that was something that had been rattling around the back of my head for a very, very long time. It was one of those things I’d grown up with. And 250,000 soldiers served there at one time or another, and I didn’t know very much that had been coming from their perspective.
“I just felt that there was something unsaid there, which is, how do you recover from something you’ve no business recovering from? How do you come back from what you can’t come back from?”
I'm aware that my publishers have had an element of nervousness, they've been very supportive but it also immediately rang little alarm bells
This “recovery” relates to the central event in Stephen’s time in Northern Ireland. And the book is published, I mention, just after the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Did Miller have any concerns about the book from a sensitivity point of view, about writing from the viewpoint of a British soldier in Ireland?
“Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. And the more you go into it, the more you realise that actually” – he pauses and his voice drops – “we probably shouldn’t be doing this.” He laughs, perhaps nervously. “It was really as [the book] was going out to be looked at by other people that I began to think, maybe this is just gonna piss someone off terribly. But I hope not. Stephen comes at it from a particular place, and he’s got fairly mixed views on what happened around the British army in Ireland.
“But I’m aware that my publishers have had an element of nervousness, they’ve been very supportive but it also immediately rang little alarm bells. But there’s an element of ‘publish and be damned’, I suppose.”
It’s true, certainly, that The Slowworm’s Song is no celebration of the British presence (“When is it ever possible to watch film of soldiers on the streets,” asks Stephen in the book, “and not have doubts about the rightness of it?”). The focus is on Stephen’s regret, and how what he did when he was in Belfast aged 22 screwed him up.
In this sense the book follows a line in Miller’s oeuvre, most clearly from his previous novel Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, which explored culpability in another war – the British campaign against Napoleon in Spain – 200 years ago; but also in earlier novels like The Crossing, where an enigmatic lead character had to deal with a tragic accident.
Ireland, in fact, is closer to the very English-sounding Miller than we might realise: his father was born in Belfast in 1925. “He told us this quite late on, really. He wasn’t someone who sat down in the evening and said, you know, son, this was my growing up. It just didn’t occur to him, but as he got older, a little more of that started to come out. He very definitely thought of himself as a Scotsman, [but] his father was working for a company in Belfast, and he was there for five years.”
Miller himself has been to Belfast a number of times, not least because “it would be odd to set a book where the city is quite important, and not actually to have set foot in it”. But his novel of revolutionary France, Pure, is taught as an A-level text at Belfast Metropolitan College, which has also brought him over. And, inevitably for anyone with a parent born on the island, both Miller and his daughter have become Irish citizens post-Brexit. “It feels like an astonishingly generous thing on the part of the Irish State.”
I found it a struggle. And I still feel unsure about the voice, whether I pitched it [right]
Setting – time as well as place – is always key in Miller’s fiction. Where his most garlanded novels have been historical – like Ingenious Pain, or Pure – the setting for The Slowworm’s Song is almost contemporary: a man in 2011 looking back at the 1980s. It marks another break for him: known for the sweeping omniscient eye of his stories, Miller for the first time has told a story in the first person.
“And it may be the last!” he says, laughing. “I found it a struggle. And I still feel unsure about the voice, whether I pitched it [right].” The problem, he explains, is in writing in the voice of someone who’s “not a highly educated man. There’s a certain kind of literary language I wanted to stay away from. It had to be a more conservative kind of language, and I’m someone who, whatever else I am, I’m someone who’s drenched in literature. Normally, I’m like a handheld camera, I can move around, I can be right up close. And I like that, it’s much better. So I don’t know that I would be hurrying back to the first person.”
This, and the uncertainty over the setting, seem to reflect an ambiguity on Miller’s part about The Slowworm’s Song generally – or it could just be a very English sort of self-effacement. When he speaks in general terms about his next novel, he seems more enthused: “I’ve launched on something new, that feels like the thing I’ve been looking for for a long time.” No details, but “sometimes, out in the wilderness, you find the burning bush. And sometimes you have to settle for one that’s just smouldering a bit. With Slowworm there was always quite a sense of struggle.”
In any event, I offer as we end our call, I hope The Slowworm’s Song does well for him. “Well.” He pauses. “It’ll do something. It’s done now. We’ve moved on!” He is still perhaps thinking of how he’s “getting away with it” after 25 years – though readers and prize juries have been very happy with the results.
