“What you really need to know is what the underwear is. Once you know what they’ve got on underneath then you are kind of there,” the novelist Andrew Miller explains over a cup of tea in his Somerset kitchen. “Eighteenth-century underwear, particularly women’s, was very complicated. Either there was none at all or vast amounts of it.”
He is talking about creating convincing historical characters, which he has been doing to much acclaim from his prizewinning 1997 debut Ingenious Pain, about an 18th-century surgeon unable to feel pain, to his eighth and latest novel, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. The “hint” of the idea for the new novel came to him several years ago, while he was learning to play a Scottish song called “Mary Young and Fair” on his mandolin. At the bottom of the sheet was written “collected by Captain So and So in the Hebrides in 1815”. “I didn’t know who this captain was, but 1815 was a pretty significant year in British military history, a strange year perhaps to be wandering round the Hebrides collecting songs.” Although he wasn’t ready to begin writing, it started him thinking.
He knew he wanted the novel to have music at its heart. Captain John Lacroix, haunted by his dereliction of duty during the disastrous British retreat to Corunna in northern Spain in 1809, fetches up in the Scottish isles with only his father’s fiddle and the clothes on his back; his past is hot on his heels in the form of two former soldiers sent to kill him as restitution to the Spanish. The soldiers’ names are taken from those in the American platoon who perpetrated the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968, which “somehow connected effortlessly” in Miller’s mind with the events at Corunna. “You know that stuff you learn as a teenager about the world. It always stayed with me,” he says.
The picaresque pursuit subplot, dash of Romanticism and wind-swept love story – more full orchestra than solo mandolin – make this an enjoyably lavish 19th-century novel in both style and setting. Robert Louis Stevenson looms large. Celebrated for his poetic prose and pacy storylines, Miller was deliberately looking back to “the kind of energetic adventure stories” he loved when he was growing up. “There are fight scenes!” And the novel could be said to fulfil a teenage flirtation with joining the military, when he had in mind “a Napoleonic grand army” – which might have been hard to find growing up in the south-west of England in the 1970s.
The novel marks a return to firmer, more familiar ground for Miller, after a difficult period following Pure, which won the Costa book of the year award in 2011 and was memorably praised for its “extraordinary scenes of corpses and cemeteries and sex” in pre-Revolution Paris. Writer’s block misdescribes it, he says now. “It was a sense of not being able to become interested in anything. I couldn’t read. I would start reading and put the book down because I felt: ‘I know just what this is.’ I couldn’t watch films – the same feeling. I couldn’t get any kind of traction, any grip on things.” He began to fear he would never write again: “Once the possibility is there, things start to unravel. It’s like the tightrope-walker looking down.”
The book that got him over this impasse was, appropriately, The Crossing, published in 2015, which he calls his “crazy novel” about a troubled marriage, in which the reader is adrift on a boat with the inscrutable Maud. “It felt like just jumping off a high board in the dark. That sense of taking a big enough risk, a certain foolhardiness that perhaps was enough to re-engage my interest.
“I am back now!” he declares. Returning to an era and country with which he feels comfortable, he says this novel was “a pleasure to write”. He makes little distinction between his historical and contemporary work. Ingenious Pain was followed by Casanova in 1998, a lively imagining of a midlife crisis suffered by the infamous Venetian roué, which again seduced critics, including Hilary Mantel. But fearing he might write himself “into a corner”, he escaped the 18th century for his third novel, Oxygen, an intimate portrait of a woman dying of cancer and her unhappy grown-up sons, with a parallel 1950s story about the haunted Hungarian playwright Laszlo Lazar, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2001. Since then, he has swung between past and present, perhaps more comfortable in the former (his publisher’s preference, he suspects). There is certainly a greater theatricality or playfulness to his historical fiction. “I feel like Fellini with a backdrop,” he jokes.
Miller is not interested in allegory (“too cold”) or modern parallels (“too clunky”); the references in his work are mainly literary. There is a seriousness to his writing, yet he was keen for there to be comedy in this novel, and what distinguishes his fiction, “rather than an absence of humour”, is an unfashionable lack of irony. “I don’t have a cool way of writing,” he admits. “It’s not how I am and it’s not how I like to write.” He once described novels as “a collection of anxieties held together, more or less well, more or less interestingly, with the chicken wire of plot”.
He has a habit of talking with his eyes closed, searching for just the right words, and our conversation meanders from meditation – he describes himself as “a very dilute Buddhist” and has recently returned from a silent retreat in Wales – to the second Mamma Mia! film, which he went to see the previous evening with his 13-year-old daughter: “A terrible film. Terrible! But actually quite moving.” His kitchen has a cosy, below-decks quality – all skylights and painted wood, with Miller tall beneath the low ceilings; his study in the eaves is similarly cabin-like. This seems fitting: so many of his characters are “all at sea” one way or another (literally in The Crossing and Now We Shall Be …). “All my characters are lost,” he says cheerfully.
And despite the range in periods and locations, a cloud of regret lingers over Miller’s inner landscapes. His characters are connected either by a lack of feeling (most obviously Dr Dyer in Ingenious Pain, but also the emotionally stunted Alec in Oxygen and Maud in The Crossing) or past failure, what Miller calls “a Hamlet-like struggle towards a moment of being able to act decisively”. The question at the heart of many of his novels is voiced by Lazar, who didn’t pull the trigger at the crucial moment to save his lover. “What better than those sudden tests of worth and courage? Those moments when you must step forward and declare yourself ... run back into the burning house without the least hesitation.”
Miller is less interested in why we fail than in how we deal with the burden of failure – the psychological equivalent of excavating the Parisian cemeteries to get rid of a poisonous past, as is so viscerally described in Pure. “What do people do afterwards? An event happens, you are caught up in it. And then what?” he asks. “How do you live with any of this stuff? It completely shapes the rest of your life.” He likes, he confesses, “to strip people back to a kind of zero point. And then try to let them build a life again.” He wants to know what makes people go on. The latest novel opens with Lacroix returning to England a broken man, stripped, washed and nourished back to health by his devoted housekeeper, Nell.
He recalls how Penelope Fitzgerald, “a writer I adore”, claimed to always know the title, the first and last paragraphs, before she began writing. “And this time I kind of did.” It’s no spoiler to reveal that the title is also the last line. One of the challenges of the novel, he explains, was to make that idea of absolute freedom “not entirely ironic”.
At the age of 17, living just outside Bristol, Miller experienced “a little epiphany”. “It was A-levels. I was at home. It was summer. I was coming to the end of reading The Rainbow.” He describes himself as “an unashamed Lawrentian” and put off reading Women in Love because he wanted it always to be in the future. To the young Miller, Lawrence made writing seem a “noble enterprise” and that to pursue it would be “to begin a wonderful life. This is about how you transform yourself, others, the world. It’s your politics. It’s a kind of revolution.”
His father, a doctor (“my Beano and Dandy were the BMJ and the Lancet” – hence, perhaps, all those corpses in Miller’s fiction), was not thrilled at his chosen path. But Miller, who left school with one A-Level, had “a ridiculous faith” that it would happen, and at 22 an essay on Lawrence led to a place at Middlesex Polytechnic to read humanities: “philosophy, history of ideas, which was perfect for me”. His confidence only began to falter when he hit his 30s: “Who was I kidding?” He enrolled on the now legendary creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia, catching the glory days when Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage were still teaching. The novelist Rose Tremain was also one of his tutors and he began Ingenious Pain at the end of that year. “It felt as if I was writing to save my life.”
Happily, it paid off. The success of Ingenious Pain – which won one of the literary world’s richest prizes, the Impac award – was “very unexpected and glorious”, he says. “The gods had showered me, a level of generosity that slightly alarms you. Immediately I felt, there’s a hammer swinging somewhere. But I had the sense to just relish the moment.”
He is unruffled by his new novel not making it on to this year’s Man Booker longlist. “You spend the day feeling obscurely offended and depressed,” he says cheerfully. “But it is just one day.”
Over the years, Miller has lived all over the world, including Tokyo, Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam and Barcelona, often teaching English or creative writing to support his own work. He has never felt part of any London literary scene, he says. For the past 12 years he has settled on the Somerset/Dorset border to be with his daughter, who lives with him part of the time. His working day begins “later than I usually like to admit” by meditating to ease himself over that “turbulent passage … almost as if you’ve got to do yourself some sort of minor violence” between sitting down and actually starting to write. Meditating, he muses, “is like sitting in the rain. You get wet, but it turns out that’s OK. Whatever you are feeling is very survivable and then calms and changes. I love it when I’m writing and I feel like that.”
But writing, he believes, “should always at some point feel like the hardest thing you can do. If you didn’t on several occasions feel completely blocked, stumped, lost, upset and the rest of it, I don’t think it’s anything worth finishing.” A combination of “fear and desire” gets him through each time. He teaches less these days. “Perhaps the only thing worth teaching,” he says, is that “when you start, you enter a process and if you just have some faith and have some patience, if you keep giving it whatever you’ve got in the way of energy and time … The good news is that it will happen. You have to have faith..”
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