Shock rather than jubilation has greeted the announcement of the winner of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Very few among those assembled yesterday in Dublin's Mansion House could claim hand-on-heart to have backed the Paris-based English writer Andrew Miller's stylish historical novel, his fiction debut, Ingenious Pain, to take the £100,000 prize ahead of New Yorker Don DeLillo's strongly tipped epic Underworld. However, win he did, confounding critics and pundits alike.
First published in 1997, Ingenious Pain tells the story of James Dyer, an 18th-century surgeon who is conceived during the legendary great freeze which took place in the reign of George II. Young Dyer is incapable of experiencing any form of physical pain. He is also singularly emotionless.
Written in the continuous present tense, the novel is concerned throughout with issues of morality and humanity, and although narrative-driven, Ingenious Pain is a thoughtful book which skilfully slips between the wonderful and the brutally real. For all the graciousness and formal execution of the book which could, just possibly, be read as a love story, it is outlining life as lived in a particularly harsh 18th-century world.
While it won the 1997 James Tait Black Memorial Award and has been consistently critically well regarded since its publication, Ingenious Pain is at heart a rather cold book. Circumstances dictate Dyer's life and for much of the novel the reader is left regarding a central character possessing a strange passivity. For all its style, atmosphere and intelligence, Ingenious Pain charting as it does the triumphs and failures of a man of the Enlightenment, is a self-conscious book and though easy to admire also leaves the reader aware of several pangs of deja vu.
If the judges, having already chosen a strong and representative short list, set out to create an upset, they have succeeded.
From the announcement of the eight-title short list last March, DeLillo's Underworld seemed the overwhelming and obvious, perhaps too obvious, winner, while the inclusion of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, guaranteed a race was on.
Now in its fourth year, this is also the first time the prize has gone to a first novel. While a magnificent achievement for Miller, this win also confers a much-needed boost for the English novel by now well accustomed to being overshadowed by the dominance of US fiction and the increasing rise of the Indian and African novel. Andrew Miller, who spent a year in Dublin and whose second novel, Casanova (1998), has also been well received, believes in the enduring power of historical fiction as a genre. "It is never a turning away from the Now", he argued recently, stressing it is "one of the ways in which our experience of the contemporary is revived. Janus-like, a good historical novel looks two ways, a version of the past and the present". The ongoing success of Ingenious Pain testifies to Miller's thesis.
