The Optimists

Andrew Miller is a precise writer. It would be easy for many readers to find in his words nothing but a trove of meticulous boredom, something that is obviously crafted with care but is also not all that interesting. Miller works with the oft-foggy contours of human nature, more so than he does with the sharp details of inciting action or significant events. His works are treatises on what makes us the way we are, and how (if at all) we are to change. It's no easy task to write about such things, or even to write about them with the skill that Miller wields so effortlessly. This novel focuses on a photo-journalist, Clem, who has just witnessed (and, with his camera, preserved) a genocidal tragedy in Africa of such horrific proportions that it has caused him to lose his own internal focus. Some lens inside of him (both abstract and physical -- his eyes are beginning to bother him) has been damaged, perhaps under the weight of such a sight. This book is entirely about how he attempts to repair that damage. Miller doesn't attempt to put his finger on any kind of clean diagnosis, not as Clem delves into shameless self-dismay, or as he goes on the clumsy path of vigilante justice, or as he circles around the drain of his own consciousness, his moral compass spinning with him. Miller dispassionately (and, somehow, touchingly) provides us with a gorgeous and omniscient view of Clem's now-troubled life, a stance that is exquisite enough for empathy, but also uncluttered by needless poignancy. Midway through the novel, Clem travels across the country to nurse his sister, Clare, back to health. She has experienced a relapse of a mental breakdown that is vague, at best, and Clem (in a burst of slightly cliched inspiration) tries to find recompense for himself through the hope of his sister's renewed emotional and spiritual health. What is wrong with Clare is never fully explained, but that's in keeping with the rest of the novel. Miller isn't interested in giving us definitions, in fencing in the muddy realities with any kind of pristine clarifications. What is wrong with Clem and Clare (and the other "optimists" of the novel) isn't exactly the point. Perhaps because the telling of it would never really convey its true impact, the massacre that caused Clem's breakdown is only touched upon in fragments. And even the few points in the novel where something could actually be said to happen are offered up in half-lights. For anyone familiar with Miller, this is nothing new. His pen does not work its magic around anything you can touch; it details (with sometimes stunning clarity) the shadows that those things cast. This story is no exception. However, Miller's writing, in spots, loses its luminosity and comes across as worn-thin and rote. Miller pretends to no sleight-of-hand, and he isn't trying to pull off any tricks, which lends his literature a heavy dose of credibility, but on the same token, he has chosen a story (or, more accurately

This novel is about being human as it focuses on brokeness. A photojournalist that has witnessed the horror of Central Africa returns to Scotland. Although making sense of things would be futile, nonetheless our character attempts to achieve a piece of mind by making trips to Belgium, Toronto, and the northern UK by connecting with individuals. As he makes his journeys he falls into not 'dead ends', but 'detours' that allows him to come across others that also have their stories to tell. While reading it, I would observe others around me in the city at cafes or on the city train acknowledging that we all have a ubique story to tell. The novel is about a character who is very real and desires goodness after seeing evil. READ THE BOOK!!!

Forty-year-old Clem Glass is suffering a wasteland of loneliness, grief, and loss. Clem works as a photojournalist, and as the novel opens, he is wondering the streets of Ladbroke Grove, London in a type of existential daze, haunted by the images he witnessed of a church massacre in a former Belgian colony in Africa known only as N--. For Clem is emotionally exhausted, fraught with a type of shell-shocked moral fever from all his years of traveling the world recording death and destruction. Indeed, his life is unraveling around him - he makes a date with an ex girlfriend and can't keep it, the office calls him for new work assignments but he won't accept them, and he spends his days drinking and smoking far too heavily. Alhough the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is never mentioned by name, there are enough clues peppered throughout the narrative hinting that this was the massacre that Clem witnessed. But rather than focusing on these atrocities, Miller instead concentrates on the aftermath - the effect these images have on the minds eye. Clem is suffering from a type of post-traumatic stress disorder, a disorder that he just can't seem to shake off. Clem returns home to London a battered and broken man. If only he could pull the thorn from his eye. "He would get free of this thing before he no longer knew how to." In Clem's world the dead crowd in among the living, "thin as leaves." They recruit the living; crave justice, the form, the sacrifice, and "the appetites that murder breeds." Only through supporting Clare, his mentally troubled sister, does Clem begin to achieve some sense of normalcy. Clare's illness is both more severe and more inexplicable. An art historian with a knack for pretentious academic book titles, she is so fearful and anxious that she cannot bear to turn off the light and tapes the windows of her flat closed. Their father is shut up in a religious order on some island off the coast of Northumberland, and their mother is dead. Ensconced with Clare in a ramshackle cottage in Colcombe, rural Somerset, Clem wrestles with his demons, attempting to return to some resemblance of emotional health and stability. Miller fills their lives with unremarkable accounts of the daily minutiae of shopping, furnishing, meal preparation, and visitor reception. Perhaps through the appealing tedium of days spent doing these simple chores, can Clem "be borne away, slowly, on currents from the stench of blood." Both Clem and Claire need to make use of the ordinary. Clem tries to instill the ordinary in Clare; it could always be found because it is rooted in the routines and appetites of the body. After much struggle, Clare seems to find happiness, and like all happy people she makes it look so easy, "a simple adjustment like leaving the house through a different door or changing the parting in her hair." Eventually, Clem begins to have thoughts about the future, ideas that come, it seems from quite a different mind to the one he had grown use

The Optimists is a remarkable, essential novel - but it does take a brave reader as well as a brave writer to follow the book's journey and to engage with such dark and troubling themes. The story concerns Clem Glass (names have an almost mythic significance throughout this novel) a photojournalist who has witnessed a genocide of obscene proportions in an unnamed African township. The novel is not about the massacre itself - though there are fragments of description of it - but about the aftermath, Clem's attempts at coping and some sort of recovery. Arguably, the novel's premise provides a way of exploring recovery from any form of intense and shocking grief, charting as it does the stages - denial, apathy, anger and so on - that are well-documented in any account of bereavement. Clem, like many of us without the protection of an unshakable set of religious beliefs, must find a way to go on living while shaken to the core by what he's seen. The novel quietly explores and, for the most part dismisses, some of the possibilities on offer - separatism from the world as personified by Clem's father and his life in a religious order; acts of charity as pursued by Clem's former colleague Silverman. Clem's own solution revolves around his extended family, specifically from acts of kindness while caring for his sister, Clare, an art historian who is suffering from a breakdown. The siblings retreat to the landscape of their childhood, to an everyday existence of strawberry jam and haircuts, which provides a gentle respite from their damaged lives. At the end of the novel, Clem attempts to confront the man responsible for the massacre, a way of staring deep into the devil's eyes - though Miller, to his considerable credit, does not present this as an easy resolution to Clem, but instead takes us through a series of stranger and more jolting realisations. In outline this novel may it sound like a philosophical treatise, but it was one of the most emotionally affecting novels I've read for a long time. In spite of its bleakness, in spite of the way it forces the reader to confront when they would far rather pull back, there is always hope running through its pages, always a sense that recovery can and will happen, but uncompromisingly, realistically, a thoughtful and intelligent optimism rather than the oblivious joy of fools. Time and again when I was reading I was struck by the way fiction is a more powerful medium than television or film in exploring emotional experience in close focus - the images in one's head are not only more horrific, but once conjured seemingly impossible to escape from. Like Clem Glass, I simply couldn't make the pictures go away. As in all Miller's novels the writing is immaculate, resonant and beautiful. His use of imagery is as poetic and precise as ever, and is all the more striking for being used more sparsely here than in the lush world of Ingenious Pain or Casanova. His ability to evoke a very English so

Clem is a photographer, a maker of images. The horrors he witnesses in an African village are burned into his mind, indelible, so that even when he returns to London, he cannot erase such visions from memory. He walks in shadows, avoiding, unable to connect to anything or anyone, suspended in his discomfort without relief. Certainly, he's photographed tragedy before, in Desert Storm and other distant places, but this recent genocidal massacre has strangled his perspective. When Clem's sister, Clara, suffers a recurrence of her old "trouble", one that has not surfaced in twenty years, Clem instinctively understands that he is in no condition to help anyone else, that "his heart had locked fast the night he had straddled the dead with his lenses." After a short visit to the sanatorium, he impulsively flies to Canada to meet with a fellow journalist, Frank Sullivan, the older man who shared his experiences in Africa. Other than communicating a similar struggle over what they have witnessed, the visit fails to resolve Clem's dilemma. Clem returns to Scotland to remove his sister from the facility where she is being treated, taking her instead to live for a time in a familiar childhood place, the country home of their aunt with a small cottage where they can stay. The time spent with the depressed Clare is a lesson in the complexities of brother/sister relationships, the love that ameliorates their days, Clem reaching into a distant place to find the strength to help his sister in her personal anguish. After his own recent emotional devastation, this is an act of extraordinary generosity, an attempt to reach out to another equally in pain. Miller's prose is luminous, his descriptions of place so fine that the sights take shape, the perplexed photojournalist as familiar as a dear friend or close relative, his psychological conundrum made real and imaginable. The author views all with a practiced eye, noticing subtle details others might overlook, the outrage of genocide, the shock of returning to a city mired in the comfort of daily routine, the desperate urge to make right terrible wrongs. The novel is profound in its simplicity and directness, the attempt to help Clare achieve serenity contrasted with Clem's ambivalence and occasional violent urges, a need to purge the outrage of injustice that fills him with disquiet. Brother and sister are guided blindly toward recovery, reaching for normalcy and a quieting of their personal demons. The plot is brilliant, contrasting the senseless massacre with the somnolent Somerset countryside, where Clare's mind is beset with its own indefinable shadows, leaving her as shattered in her ordered life as Clem in his pursuit of justification for the world's random carelessness. At the core is Clem's moral dilemma. If the monster who engineered the massacre is captured, what will the photographer do, how will he confront the loss of objectivity that has overtaken him since his return from Africa? Pushed from th