Everybody loved Andrew Miller's first novel - and with good reason. A juxtaposition of his own obsessions with the warts-and-all realities of 18th-century Europe, Ingenious Pain attracted fervent reviews and was compared to Peter Ackroyd, John Fowles, Angela Carter, Patrick Sⁿskind. But the wild disparities of the comparisons told their own story. Ingenious Pain wasn't really like any other book at all: visceral to the point of viciousness, delicately metaphysical, it appeared to have invented an entire new category, the historical novel of ideas.
For his second novel, Miller stayed with the 18th century and tried to apply the same weirdly wonderful slant to one of its most notorious celebrities. It had its moments, but Casanova - the Italian stallion as unlikely English squire - had the air of a book that had somehow got away from its author. What had emerged as originality and oddness in Ingenious Pain veered, in Casanova, dangerously close to simple crudity.
It's perhaps not surprising that in his third book Miller has abandoned the historical milieu to tell a very 20th-century story. Oxygen has four central characters: Alice, who is dying of cancer in the West country; her son Alec, who has come home to care for her; Lβszl≤ Lβzβr, the exiled Hungarian playwright, whose play Alec is translating; and Alec's brother Larry, summoned from San Francisco to be at the bedside of his dying mother.
Her early life devastated by the war which reduced her father to a silent, chain-smoking presence at the bottom of the garden, Alice has endured a mediocre marriage while cherishing memories of an early romance. Alec is an enigma to us, to his mother's young nurse, and to himself. Larry, a former soap star who turns to hard-core porn for a bit of hard cash, is on the verge of breaking up with his wife. Of the four, only Lβszl≤ appears to have cracked it: elegant apartment in Paris, critical acclaim, loving boyfriend. But Lβszl≤ is haunted by what he regards as his cowardice in Budapest in 1956, when his failure to act led to the death of his first love.
As the novel slowly revolves, the English country garden gives way to the wider world, with the Alice/Alec axis shifting in favour of Larry/Lβszl≤ - is the symmetry significant? - but only up to a point. In spite of its subject matter, Oxygen is an oddly bloodless book. In spite of Miller's fondness for internal organ metaphors, we never really get inside any of his characters.
"In the science room of his old school, dissected organs, human and animal, had been preserved in sealed bottles for the instruction of the pupils. He was sure there had been a lung there, floating in its syrup, an object that looked to have grown on the side of a tree or on a submerged rock, and which even as a young boy he had found improbable as the organ that funded human speech and laughter."
So muses Lβszl≤, before popping into Air France to buy the ticket that will take him to deliver a briefcase full of cash to an Albanian terrorist group in Budapest - a form of catharsis which, for a middle-aged gay bourgeois intellectual, this reader finds improbable to the point of unacceptable.
Yet Oxygen is on this year's Booker Prize longlist. Either I've missed something, or that list says more about the general state of English fiction than it does about this particular book.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
