The unknowability of Andrew Miller, or in search of 'some more satisfactory form’

Lyudmila Yegorova

Vologda State University

The Unknowability of Andrew Miller, or In search of ‘Some More Satisfactory Form’

Andrew Miller (born in Bristol in 1960) is the author of eight novels. Here I would like to write about his seventh novel The Crossing . In his article in The Guardian Andrew Miller explained that after six novels, fiction – in novels, films, on TV – had begun to seem to him ‘like a rather hollow formula’: fiction ‘had become more

competent than interesting, more decorative than urgent, more conventional than otherwise’. Might there be some problem with ‘traditional narrative’? He shared Tim Parks’s feelings: ‘So many writers now are able to produce passable imitations of our much-celebrated XIX century novels. Their very facility becomes an obstacle to exploring some more satisfactory form… Is there a way forward in words that would explore a quite different vision of self and narrative?’ Andrew Miller tried to let us feel what this ‘more satisfactory form’ might be:

I suppose my one ambition for The Crossing that survives its completion is that it should be hard to close down on, hard to precis. Again and again while writing, I fell back on something explained to me by a painter friend <…> – the idea of a line that goes out across the paper and which, for as long as possible, remains simply that, a line with all its potential intact before, the moment no longer deferrable, it becomes, at last, something: a head, a tree, umbrellas in the rain. In the visual arts, that experience of the line’s potential belongs principally (exclusively?) to the artist. In The Crossing , I hoped it might also belong to the reader, and that even at the very end of the book the line would still be travelling, still be, in some way, undeclared. It is, I think, in the moment before we can say, “it’s this”, that we are in the more interesting place. As we settle on a thing we often miss it [Miller 2016].

The first sentence of the novel lets us know that it is ‘early spring, the new millennium’, ‘a young woman walks backward along the deck of a boat’. We’ll remember ‘walks backward’ – we’ll have many opportunities to see this young woman as unusual, but now it’s just the Bristol university sailing club. Tim is watching Maud on a deck of a boat – first with sensual pleasure, when she’s falling onto bricks from about twenty feet – with dread. Seemingly dead she lay on the ground, then stood and walked – ‘bare foot, dressed foot, bare foot, dressed foot – twelve or fifteen steps until, without warning, she crumples to the ground, face down this time’.

Tim is shocked. Susan Kimber, Maud's professor (Maud is strong in science research), while listening to him ('She got up. She started walking'), is not: ‘The professor smiles. 'Yes,' she says. 'Yes. That sounds like our Maud'’.

Tim, a guitar-playing ex-English student, dreams of being a musician and composer. Being subsidized by his rich family, he spends his days ʻwith his guitars, his yoga, his experimental cookery, his walks across the city…’ He becomes Maud’s lover, then her partner. Maud is involved in her research job. She is modern, and yet primeval – grand and magnificent in her silence. Isn’t it great to remain enigmatic even to your teacher, to your husband? You cannot but remember Professor Kimber’s words at Tim and Maud’s flatwarming party:

'Now which do you think she is, Tom – very fragile or very strong?'

'Tim,' he says, 'rather than Tom.'

She smiles. 'I suppose you'll find out in the end,' she says. 'I suppose we all will'.

But ‘Tim rather than Tom’ finds Maud frustratingly difficult to understand. Gradually he gets desperate:

‘There are moments when he believes that in the last six years he has learnt nothing important about her at all, nothing that shows her to him. More frequently now, much more frequently, are those occasions when he simply shakes his head and walks away, cannot be bothered to try to figure it out’.

Having seen Maud through the eyes of her partner and his family, we move closer to her own perspective though she never becomes quite fathomable. After the catastrophe in her family she takes refuge in 32-foot yacht, Lodestar, and sets alone on her voyage across the Atlantic. We see her battle huge storms and master the sea: ‘(Strength is weakness rearranged, a rope plaited from grass.)’.

To master the land is easier. First ‘she is not steady on her feet’, but soon ‘she is almost running’ – ‘a woman right at the edge of flight’. In an unknown country she meets children whose mother died and father left them but they wait for him to return and meanwhile manage on their own. The youngest come to Maud before going to bed just to be held – they need motherly embrace. Probably for the first time in her life Maud hears that she is ‘a real good teacher’. Having guessed about Maud’s loss of her daughter the eldest boy and girl perform a ritual for her. The girl asks the woman to open her heart: 'Can you do that, Maud? Can you open your heart?'

The usual formula is: life is returning to her. Andrew Miller points out both a mystery of this miracle and legitimacy of it. On one hand, ‘life is happening to her; she has no part to play, or her part is like that of the blind men, madmen and cripples in the Bible stories…’ On the other hand, Maud has ‘a talent for surviving’, and she uses it every time.

One of the most interesting effects of the book is impossibility of capturing something definitively. There are a lot of lines with their potential intact, and the experience of seeing the line’s potential, thinking it over, changing the view is captivating.

The second reason why reading becomes more creative is that the main heroine is not at all articulate. Even the old vicar feels uncomfortable when he prays for Maud and then looks up to find her looking back

‘with a gaze that predates his religion <…> The hieroglyphic stare. The impression of a mind like a shaped and painted scapula, a mind like a horse’s, moral as grass’. Tim never knows what Maud notices: ‘Half the time she seems in a dream, the other half she looks at you and your skin is glass’.

It is for the reader to interpret what is going on. It is for us to realise what ‘the wound’s journey’ means. With a silent heroine our interpretation is based a great deal on our individual perceptions, experiences, backgrounds, etc. We can suppose but never be sure: ‘As we settle on a thing we often miss it’. Andrew Miller makes his reader ‘explore a quite different vision of self and narrative’.