Andrew Miller’s characters often have a peculiar relationship with pain. The protagonist of his first novel, the Impac-winning “Ingenious Pain”, was an 18th-century doctor who couldn’t feel it at all, while Maud Stamp, the briskly contemporary heroine of his latest, has at the least an exceptionally high threshold.
She spent her childhood taking blows at judo and battering herself on dinghies, and, when we first meet her, is falling silently past us from the elevated deck of a yacht in dry dock: “a movement through the air, a blink of feathered shadow”. When she lands, on brick, she refuses to stay down, and staggers 12 paces before collapsing.
But is this exceptional bravery, or just bald insensitivity? Is Maud a mythic figure — a “feathered” angel or perhaps a mermaid — or just a brusque, dull scientist with a touch of Asperger’s? Most people Maud meets, it seems, are fascinated by this question, and by Maud herself, for, again like a mermaid, Maud is not merely enigmatic, but very sexy.
Everyone, from her professor to her father-in-law, falls for her “blunt brown stare”, but none harder than Tim Rathbone, the fellow student who watches her fall. He is so interested, in fact, that he braves years of chills and rebuffs to become her lover, then partner, then main carer of their child.
While they live together in a country cottage, Tim harnesses the mores of the village around him to change the question about Maud. Now, instead of wondering if she is truly part of the world, Tim and the yummy mummies in the school playground ask something crueller and more invidiously gendered: is such a self-contained woman fit to be a mother?
In six years, Tim can find no answer. He and the village find this frustrating — we readers, on the other hand, have a most fabulous time. Placing the strange blank of Maud, who goes out to work each day in a biotech business creating — what else? — painkillers, in the self-satisfied midst of “Jack and Maggie, Chris and Bella, Lally and Tish”, all of them liberal, “all of them white except for Tish whose mother is Burmese, university educated and with money in the bank”, shines a lab light on their deep social conservatism, and is extremely funny.
Even better is Miller’s ruthless exposure of Tim’s wealthy family, the Rathbones, with their beautiful food and manners, their “secret streams” of money, their troops of children and troves of furniture, their deep sense of uselessness and thousand-year-old snobbery and misogyny.
And best and most subtle of all is the portrait of Tim himself, the dilettante musician desperately in search of the purpose and self-definition that Maud seems to have in spades, for all that she was brought up by a couple of naff teachers in Swindon.
The story of Tim’s narcissism, self-deception and deception, and of the chiming treacheries of his friends and family, is rich and delicate enough to have sufficed for most contemporary novels.
Miller, though, is more ambitious. About halfway through the novel, he chooses to wrench the marriage short with a — tremendously well done — tragic accident, and sends Maud out into the world alone: a character in her own right rather than a screen for other’s foibles. And very much alone, too, for Maud the mermaid, Maud the repressed sailor, rebuilds her boat and sets off on a solo trip across the Atlantic.
It is a risky strategy: Miller has established Maud not quite as a narrator — she tells us no stories — but certainly as a registrar: we are used to seeing the other characters and the textures and sounds of daily life through her transparent, unreflective gaze.
But now the village and the workplace and the frightful Tim are all gone, and we must set off to sea with just the churning quotidian of the boat to keep us going. Maud does not change: she simply notes the events on the yacht instead of those in the village.
“By the time the light is failing she’s mid-Channel and beating into the wind and tide. She switches on the navigation lights, the Hydrovane is steering, the lit bowl of the binnacle floating over 235, 230, 237, 235.”
And so on, through light and shade, dolphins and floating suitcases, for a thousand miles and a hundred pages. It is an extremely convincing portrait of the harassing loneliness of the long-distance sailor. But we are now in Tim’s position, nose to nose with Maud and desperate for intimacy, for narration, for stories, for a redemptive ending. Miller delivers instead a finale perhaps more original than it is satisfying, but one that guarantees that Maud, and questions about Maud, will linger in your mind long after you close this remarkable novel.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
Kate Clanchy’s “The Not-Dead and the Saved” is published by Picador.
