Fiction: When Douglas Dunn wrote, in his poem I Am a Cameraman, "My young friends think Film will be all of Art./ It will be revolutionary proof./ Their films will not guess wrongly and will not lie", he was exploring the nature of the relationship between art and reality.
When Douglas Dunn wrote, in his poem I Am a Cameraman, "My young friends think Film will be all of Art./ It will be revolutionary proof./ Their films will not guess wrongly and will not lie", he was exploring the nature of the relationship between art and reality. Andrew Miller - who won the International Impac Dublin Literarty Award for his first novel, Ingenious Pain - explores much the same territory in The Optimists, examining the relationship between recording and responsibility.
His central character, Clem Glass, has photographed the aftermath of an African massacre. He returns to England, haunted by the images he carries in his head and negatives he carries in his wallet. He undertakes the care of his older sister, Clare, who is recovering from a mental breakdown. He tries to rebuild a belief in the goodness in humanity. He spends the summer, with Clare, in a village that was a childhood holiday paradise. Finally, unable to quiet the ghosts in his head, he confronts the man responsible for the massacre. That, briefly, is the plot of The Optimists. Beneath the simplicity lies the profundity of Miller's writing.
In bringing us Clem Glass, Miller delivers a man who takes responsibility for his sister's illness and for the wellbeing of his extended family. A man who organises, coaxes and struggles to put people together again. But all the time, like the grainy figure in the background of a photograph in his dead uncle's study, there is a constant shadow, a reminder that crops up in the skeletons of last year's leaves on a London footpath, an epiphany that cannot be forgotten. Imagery is everywhere in this novel - delicate yet constant. Glass is the son of a mother who went blind, a man with an eye problem, a visitor to a Canadian tunnel where he meets a refugee child who keeps pet mice in a darkened tin. He is the brother of a woman who writes about paintings, a sister who, when he first visits her in a psychiatric hospital, is unsure of his identity.
"She reached out with her left hand. Her fingertips brushed his lips, his cheek. He shut his eyes and she touched his eyelids. 'I have to know it's you,' she said.
'You can see me.'
'And seeing is believing?'"
Later, as Clare begins her recovery she says:
"'What I want is to believe there's something at the end of this. Something better.'
'You don't believe that yet?'
'How can I?'
'Then I'll believe it for you,' he said. 'Until you're ready.'"
Everywhere, without ostentation, Clem supports people. When he admires a painting for "the decency of its ambition" he might be talking of himself. Yet he cannot learn to forget and a short piece in a newspaper, reporting the arrest and release in Belgium of the instigator of the African massacre, rekindles his determination to see that justice is done.
What follows, in the last quarter of the novel is beautiful, challenging and totally believable in its manic ordinariness. Clem's realisation that "forgetting might be memory's truest function" does nothing to prepare us for Miller's denouement, a last section that is made all the more chilling by the controlled writing and the continued - if only apparent - banality in Clem's life.
In I Am a Cameraman Douglas Dunn concluded that: "Truth is known only to its victims." In Clem Glass, Miller has created neither a victim nor a victor but a man driven by his own innate decency, a character in whom we can believe, a person about whom we care and that is what great writing is about.
The Optimists by Andrew Miller Sceptre, 313 pp. £16.99
John MacKenna is a novelist and short-story writer. He is currently working on a play about the disappearance of four Irish women