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Oxygen: Man Booker Prize Shortlisted British Literature – An Intimate Novel of Three Men and Last Chances
It is the summer of 1997. Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice, a task that only reinforces his deep sense of inadequacy. In San Francisco, his older brother Larry prepares to come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Lászlo Lázár seems to have it all--critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends--yet even he is haunted by guilt and tragedy. For each of them the time has come to assess the turns taken, the opportunities missed. And for each there will be one last chance to break free from the past and find redemption in a moment of clarity and courage.
Andrew Miller has given us an intimate, compelling meditation that evokes an extraordinary range of emotions and insights-- Oxygen lives and breathes beyond the final page.
Andrew Miller has given us an intimate, compelling meditation that evokes an extraordinary range of emotions and insights-- Oxygen lives and breathes beyond the final page.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
95 people are currently reading
1210 people want to read
About the author
Andrew Miller
15 books563 followersAndrew Miller was born in Bristol in 1960. He has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland and France, and currently lives in Somerset. His first novel, INGENIOUS PAIN, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour prize in Italy. His second novel, CASANOVA, was published in 1998, followed by OXYGEN, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize in 2001, and THE OPTIMISTS, published in 2005.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 135 reviews
January 29, 2021
Oxygen is a strange book. There's not much plot; the characters aren't particularly compelling and yet I really miss it now I've finished. This is because of how well Andrew Miller writes. He has a way of making you see the familiar in a fresh, vibrant and brilliantly perceptive way.
Up until now all the novels I've read of Andrew Miller have been historical fiction. This is my first with a contemporary setting. Anna is dying of cancer. Her two sons are both grappling with a sense of failure. Larry's career in San Francisco as a soap opera star has stalled; Alec is earning little money by translating a play by a Hungarian exile who lives in Paris. Lazar, the play's author, provides most of the novel's dramatic tension. He has a guilty secret, some failing during the Hungarian uprising that haunts him.
It's a beautifully written novel about failure and the attempts at redeeming oneself. 4+ stars.
Up until now all the novels I've read of Andrew Miller have been historical fiction. This is my first with a contemporary setting. Anna is dying of cancer. Her two sons are both grappling with a sense of failure. Larry's career in San Francisco as a soap opera star has stalled; Alec is earning little money by translating a play by a Hungarian exile who lives in Paris. Lazar, the play's author, provides most of the novel's dramatic tension. He has a guilty secret, some failing during the Hungarian uprising that haunts him.
It's a beautifully written novel about failure and the attempts at redeeming oneself. 4+ stars.
February 16, 2022
I don't know if I have a bee in my bonnet about what I see as literary writing, but sometimes it just doesn't tell a story as a reader, this a case in point. I do seem harsh, as I'm aware that he is a literary prize-winning writer whom many say writes excellent prose - so maybe I'm a dumbass who wants to read excellent stories and not necessarily excellent prose? 3 out of 12
2007 read
2007 read
April 25, 2012
Oxygen
Andrew Miller
Having enjoyed Andrew Miller’s beautifully crafted prose in ‘Pure’ it wasn’t surprising to discover the same elegantly perceptive writing in “Oxygen” except that my enjoyment was heightened by the sensitive unravelling of his characters facing bleak and challenging tasks, notably being forced to confront critical illness and difficult reminiscences, and imminent bereavement and loss. The writing throughout is moving and profound as his characters approach the climactic of their lives harbouring deep seated regrets.
The accuracy of the analysis charting acute sibling rivalry between Alec and Larry is scalpel sharp, especially when the buckle on the family belt, their mother, Alice, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, This is a “rites of passage” book and family and friends must reposition themselves and confront their impending loss and evaluate all that the dying patient meant to them. Alice is already bed bound, “where people were forever giving her books, as though cancer were a sort of dull cruise for which she needed some distraction. A pastime.” She readily admits she doesn’t make a promising subject, ‘alien and wretched and smelling like a child’s chemistry set.’
And the virulent cancer means she is in need of stronger painkillers, ‘she glanced at the pill box its segments like the chambers of a gun.’
Thirty four year old bachelor, Alec, is left to organise things for his ailing mother from his house in London and on an early visit to Brooklands reflects that his mother had turned into a “bit of an Aztec” and that in certain light ‘her face puffed up by the steroids, her gaze refined by suffering, look more like a tribal elder of some delicate mournful people in the great plains or rainforests than a middle-class English woman, and retired headmistress.’
With death stalking the family the grieving process has already begun as Alice diminishes further, there is one final gathering of friends, almost a death bed reunion, and as her visitors steel themselves for the awkward denouement, Alec, the playwright-dramatist son observes : ‘He had noted recently how people needed to communicate to Alice something intense and private, to give voice to the seriousness she provoked in them, as if her affliction flushed out the trivial from their lives and made them all mystics and philosophers.’
Elder brother, Larry, is a fading soap star from prime time American TV and he has been an absentee son, in denial about his future prospects, his marriage, his daughter Ella and his mother’s illness. Former child tennis prodigy but now out of work and desperate for affirmation Larry returns to Brooklands, the West Country family home with wife, Kirsty fresh from Yoga and alternative therapies, and their challenging daughter, Ella, whose erratic behaviour and inability to express her feelings openly they cannot fathom but sense it might be through poor parenting.
Alec uses the old children’s playroom to reflect upon his life and his future and “what from the tidal wash of oddments might be kept….though the truth was that the room still retained for him something of its air of refuge …. Where he could breathe the gentle anaesthetic of nostalgia”.
As a child Alec, the academic of the two, was bullied by his competitive sporting elder brother, and feels he is always walking in his brother’s shadow, but is now at work on translating a modern play in the mode of Samuel Beckett, 'As Alec worked he was aware of his Mother glancing up at him from her book and he had enjoyed that watching, felt its weight and warmth, that regard never quite uncritical but of a quality and intensity he was quite certain no other person would ever have for him'
Alec is adapting a play by exiled Hungarian playwright Laszlo Lazar, now living amongst émigrés’ in Paris and who finds himself the unwitting target of a group of young Hungarian dissidents. He, too, needs to return to his mother country for reconciliation and atonement following his involvement in the 1956 Uprising.
The book is a challenging read with rare insights into the insulated worlds these characters inhabit, and explores family breakdown and individual failure, with disparate characters unravelling through envy and self-doubt.
Headmistress Alice advised,
‘Really stupid children were a rarity and she used to tell her young teachers, never write off a child. Never assume the problem is theirs rather than yours.’
And on mortality she ponders ‘But did nothing last? Was the “She” who thought all this just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up…Or was the afterlife just others remembering you, so that you died, truly died, when you were truly forgotten.’
On the bleakness of marital breakdown Alice is pessimistic:
“People do change, you know!”
“Do they? I thought they just got more like themselves”
He used to shout at her. This shocked her at first because she had never been shouted at in that way before, never seen how extraordinarily ugly a person can be when they are angry. She had been frightened for a moment, a little dizzy from the sheer unpleasantness of it but when their eyes did meet there was a distance between them that neither of them would ever cross and she felt an immediate pang of nostalgia, not for him, but for an idea she had about her own life, some understanding she had suddenly outgrown.”
On the vitality of sexual attraction : 'Her smile told him everything important he needed to know about her: she was as much without darkness as any human being he'd ever known. Her charm made men of all ages want to be her friend, as well as put a hand on her thigh'
On knowing another person, and truly knowing : 'He had given up trying to understand her, for unless you had grown up beside a person from the very beginning, breathing the same air, then there was too much about that life you'd never be able to explain. You had to love as an act of faith and uncomprehendingly, like a sleepwalker moving in the dark but with an innate sense of knowing you were right’
Spoilers
The Oxygen theme reappears throughout the book and it would be churlish to spoil the reader’s own conclusions as to the linkage as Alice’s increasing dependency on her oxygen bottle is paralleled with the trapped miners in Laszlo’s play; and there are pills brought across from America and as they pass through various hands building tension as to who might use them and how ; or to suggest an answer to the conundrum posed on the deathbed when Alice in extremis denounces Alec with her final mortal thought, en francais, ‘menteur!’ (or ‘traitor’)
And there is a rogue pistol that sustains tension throughout the volatile scenes set in bohemian quarters of Paris where the friends of Laszlo prove, like him, unstable and with little sense of self-worth, but the opportunity for a final epiphany :
‘In his hand he held the thread that ran through the labyrinth he only had to follow it’
Truly, a mesmerising experience reading this wonderful novel.
Andrew Miller
Having enjoyed Andrew Miller’s beautifully crafted prose in ‘Pure’ it wasn’t surprising to discover the same elegantly perceptive writing in “Oxygen” except that my enjoyment was heightened by the sensitive unravelling of his characters facing bleak and challenging tasks, notably being forced to confront critical illness and difficult reminiscences, and imminent bereavement and loss. The writing throughout is moving and profound as his characters approach the climactic of their lives harbouring deep seated regrets.
The accuracy of the analysis charting acute sibling rivalry between Alec and Larry is scalpel sharp, especially when the buckle on the family belt, their mother, Alice, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, This is a “rites of passage” book and family and friends must reposition themselves and confront their impending loss and evaluate all that the dying patient meant to them. Alice is already bed bound, “where people were forever giving her books, as though cancer were a sort of dull cruise for which she needed some distraction. A pastime.” She readily admits she doesn’t make a promising subject, ‘alien and wretched and smelling like a child’s chemistry set.’
And the virulent cancer means she is in need of stronger painkillers, ‘she glanced at the pill box its segments like the chambers of a gun.’
Thirty four year old bachelor, Alec, is left to organise things for his ailing mother from his house in London and on an early visit to Brooklands reflects that his mother had turned into a “bit of an Aztec” and that in certain light ‘her face puffed up by the steroids, her gaze refined by suffering, look more like a tribal elder of some delicate mournful people in the great plains or rainforests than a middle-class English woman, and retired headmistress.’
With death stalking the family the grieving process has already begun as Alice diminishes further, there is one final gathering of friends, almost a death bed reunion, and as her visitors steel themselves for the awkward denouement, Alec, the playwright-dramatist son observes : ‘He had noted recently how people needed to communicate to Alice something intense and private, to give voice to the seriousness she provoked in them, as if her affliction flushed out the trivial from their lives and made them all mystics and philosophers.’
Elder brother, Larry, is a fading soap star from prime time American TV and he has been an absentee son, in denial about his future prospects, his marriage, his daughter Ella and his mother’s illness. Former child tennis prodigy but now out of work and desperate for affirmation Larry returns to Brooklands, the West Country family home with wife, Kirsty fresh from Yoga and alternative therapies, and their challenging daughter, Ella, whose erratic behaviour and inability to express her feelings openly they cannot fathom but sense it might be through poor parenting.
Alec uses the old children’s playroom to reflect upon his life and his future and “what from the tidal wash of oddments might be kept….though the truth was that the room still retained for him something of its air of refuge …. Where he could breathe the gentle anaesthetic of nostalgia”.
As a child Alec, the academic of the two, was bullied by his competitive sporting elder brother, and feels he is always walking in his brother’s shadow, but is now at work on translating a modern play in the mode of Samuel Beckett, 'As Alec worked he was aware of his Mother glancing up at him from her book and he had enjoyed that watching, felt its weight and warmth, that regard never quite uncritical but of a quality and intensity he was quite certain no other person would ever have for him'
Alec is adapting a play by exiled Hungarian playwright Laszlo Lazar, now living amongst émigrés’ in Paris and who finds himself the unwitting target of a group of young Hungarian dissidents. He, too, needs to return to his mother country for reconciliation and atonement following his involvement in the 1956 Uprising.
The book is a challenging read with rare insights into the insulated worlds these characters inhabit, and explores family breakdown and individual failure, with disparate characters unravelling through envy and self-doubt.
Headmistress Alice advised,
‘Really stupid children were a rarity and she used to tell her young teachers, never write off a child. Never assume the problem is theirs rather than yours.’
And on mortality she ponders ‘But did nothing last? Was the “She” who thought all this just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up…Or was the afterlife just others remembering you, so that you died, truly died, when you were truly forgotten.’
On the bleakness of marital breakdown Alice is pessimistic:
“People do change, you know!”
“Do they? I thought they just got more like themselves”
He used to shout at her. This shocked her at first because she had never been shouted at in that way before, never seen how extraordinarily ugly a person can be when they are angry. She had been frightened for a moment, a little dizzy from the sheer unpleasantness of it but when their eyes did meet there was a distance between them that neither of them would ever cross and she felt an immediate pang of nostalgia, not for him, but for an idea she had about her own life, some understanding she had suddenly outgrown.”
On the vitality of sexual attraction : 'Her smile told him everything important he needed to know about her: she was as much without darkness as any human being he'd ever known. Her charm made men of all ages want to be her friend, as well as put a hand on her thigh'
On knowing another person, and truly knowing : 'He had given up trying to understand her, for unless you had grown up beside a person from the very beginning, breathing the same air, then there was too much about that life you'd never be able to explain. You had to love as an act of faith and uncomprehendingly, like a sleepwalker moving in the dark but with an innate sense of knowing you were right’
Spoilers
The Oxygen theme reappears throughout the book and it would be churlish to spoil the reader’s own conclusions as to the linkage as Alice’s increasing dependency on her oxygen bottle is paralleled with the trapped miners in Laszlo’s play; and there are pills brought across from America and as they pass through various hands building tension as to who might use them and how ; or to suggest an answer to the conundrum posed on the deathbed when Alice in extremis denounces Alec with her final mortal thought, en francais, ‘menteur!’ (or ‘traitor’)
And there is a rogue pistol that sustains tension throughout the volatile scenes set in bohemian quarters of Paris where the friends of Laszlo prove, like him, unstable and with little sense of self-worth, but the opportunity for a final epiphany :
‘In his hand he held the thread that ran through the labyrinth he only had to follow it’
Truly, a mesmerising experience reading this wonderful novel.
May 4, 2011
One of those novels where the reader is kept bobbing on the surface of interest, an empathetic reaction, or real excitement, for the entire duration, without ever experiencing interest, an empathetic reaction or real excitement for the entire duration. Miller is a good craftsman: a carpenter who gets the words in the right order, without the allusions to Jesus or Owen Wilson. No messing.
The book weaves three narratives together with an overly descriptive prose style, depressingly inept middle-aged males, and an incongruous Balkan conflict plot to give the novel ‘interest’ and heft. All in all, it will pass the time if you aren’t thinking too hard, or if cancer novels are your bag. See also Erasure (for a novel on a similar theme). (The author also has a pierced ear in his bio shot. Says a great deal).
The book weaves three narratives together with an overly descriptive prose style, depressingly inept middle-aged males, and an incongruous Balkan conflict plot to give the novel ‘interest’ and heft. All in all, it will pass the time if you aren’t thinking too hard, or if cancer novels are your bag. See also Erasure (for a novel on a similar theme). (The author also has a pierced ear in his bio shot. Says a great deal).
January 1, 2015
There is such a quiet power to this book, such understated pain and beauty. While I love audio books, every now and then I encounter a book that I really regret listening to rather than reading, because there are so many gorgeous, astute lines that my fingers are just itching to underline so that I can ponder them later. Here is just one of many examples:
"He had given up trying to understand her, for unless you had grown up beside a person from the very beginning, breathing the same air, then there was too much about that life you'd never be able to explain. You had to love as an act of faith and uncomprehendingly, like a sleepwalker moving in the dark but with an innate sense of knowing you were right"
I will definitely have to purchase a paperback copy to re-read at some point, with pen in hand.
"He had given up trying to understand her, for unless you had grown up beside a person from the very beginning, breathing the same air, then there was too much about that life you'd never be able to explain. You had to love as an act of faith and uncomprehendingly, like a sleepwalker moving in the dark but with an innate sense of knowing you were right"
I will definitely have to purchase a paperback copy to re-read at some point, with pen in hand.
June 14, 2010
This is the kind of contemporary writing that makes one realize there will never be shortage of remainders to fill the bargain bins at the local bookstore. Was it well written? Kind of. Was there a good plot? Well, no. Were the characters engaging? Definitely not. It seemed like a tired story. You know, the one where the almost middle-aged sons return home to the English manor to watch their mother die. One neurotic and needy. The other a fading soap star who has become bankrupt (in more ways than one) during his extended stay in America. Never has ordinary life been less appealing; a waste of good reading time.
October 8, 2020
Τρεις άνθρωποι που συμπλέκονται: Ο Λάρι, ένας άνθρωπος της σόου μπιζ που το τηλεοπτικό του άστρο σβήνει, ο Λάσλο Λαζάρ, ένας Ούγγρος θεατρικός συγγραφέας που βίωσε την εξέγερση του 1956 και ο Άλεκ, αδελφός του Λάρι, που ζει με την άρρωστη μητέρα τους και ταυτόχρονα μεταφράζει το έργο του Λάσλο Λαζάρ.
Τρεις ιστορίες που διασταυρώνονται: Η ανάγκη για επιτυχία που αποσαθρώνει τα θεμέλια της ύπαρξης, οι τύψεις για μια ελάχιστη στιγμή δειλίας που θαμπώνουν τη χαρά της ζωής, και η αβάσταχτη συναίσθηση της ματαίωσης ονείρων και προσδοκιών η οποία, βουβή και σκιώδης, συνδέει του πάντες και τα πάντα.
Χειμωνιάτικο βιβλίο, μελαγχολικό, ιδανικό για τον χειμώνα του καιρού και της ζωής που έρχεται.
Τρεις ιστορίες που διασταυρώνονται: Η ανάγκη για επιτυχία που αποσαθρώνει τα θεμέλια της ύπαρξης, οι τύψεις για μια ελάχιστη στιγμή δειλίας που θαμπώνουν τη χαρά της ζωής, και η αβάσταχτη συναίσθηση της ματαίωσης ονείρων και προσδοκιών η οποία, βουβή και σκιώδης, συνδέει του πάντες και τα πάντα.
Χειμωνιάτικο βιβλίο, μελαγχολικό, ιδανικό για τον χειμώνα του καιρού και της ζωής που έρχεται.
September 22, 2010
This is the only Andrew Miller book I've read, and 3 1/2 stars is appropriate. I thought at first it more of a "guy" book since all 3 main characters are men, and it is their lives, thoughts, and aspirations the reader is exposed to. The 2 brothers seem very much in need of some good therapy, and the playwrite heals his own wounds through a secret political assignment back to his home country, Hungary. In the end you really can only guess what is going to happen to the 3 characters. One Goodreads reviewer said it ends on an optimistic note, but I think one could also think just the opposite and that events will turn very sour for all of them. Personally, I like resolutions to the story lines; and without them, I feel the author has not fulfilled his commitment to the reader. I recommend this, though, if only to see what my friends think of it.
March 10, 2014
...giving up on page 85. I heard NPR's Nancy Pearl recently say something like, "there are too many good books in the world. If you don't like one, don't feel compelled to finish it; move on." I feel no attachment to plot, characters or prose in this novel. I'm moving on to those many other good books in the world.
August 6, 2016
A bore. Political lectures. 323 pages of cliches, minutiae, product placement--don’t make a novel.
November 20, 2018
It's quite ironical that a book titled Oxygen would be suffocating it's characters. This is the sort of book you are warned about while picking up booker shortlists - beautiful words communicating near to nothing and proud of it.
Alice Valentine is dying which brings her two sons together for her birthday party. Alec Valentine is the coward who won't even visit his mother at the hospital and fantasizes running away. Larry Valentine the blue eyed soap opera star is fighting his own demons of failure in career and family. So much so that he carries in his pocket suicide pills(or pleasure pills, since he has forgotten). The book alternates between the perspective, memories and lives of the family members which makes it as sultry as a humid day.
There is another storyline loosely connected with the family of Lazlo who is stuck in 1967 after his failure in war results in the loss of a life he held dear. This plot had more meat, but the marination (in anecdotes, side characters and homosexuality) makes it rubbery.
One thing which is definitely right about the book is the prose. The author goes out of his way to make sentences sound beautiful and monotony seem colorful. But will that make up for the lack of effort to make the characters connect to the reader - I don't know.
Though initially I was full of hope for the book, I was glad it ended. And ended the way it did. How I wish I had skim read the chapters not looking to make sense of the happenings!
Skip worth.
Alice Valentine is dying which brings her two sons together for her birthday party. Alec Valentine is the coward who won't even visit his mother at the hospital and fantasizes running away. Larry Valentine the blue eyed soap opera star is fighting his own demons of failure in career and family. So much so that he carries in his pocket suicide pills(or pleasure pills, since he has forgotten). The book alternates between the perspective, memories and lives of the family members which makes it as sultry as a humid day.
There is another storyline loosely connected with the family of Lazlo who is stuck in 1967 after his failure in war results in the loss of a life he held dear. This plot had more meat, but the marination (in anecdotes, side characters and homosexuality) makes it rubbery.
One thing which is definitely right about the book is the prose. The author goes out of his way to make sentences sound beautiful and monotony seem colorful. But will that make up for the lack of effort to make the characters connect to the reader - I don't know.
Though initially I was full of hope for the book, I was glad it ended. And ended the way it did. How I wish I had skim read the chapters not looking to make sense of the happenings!
Skip worth.
January 9, 2013
Well, I loved, loved this book. I know I seem to say that about every book, so I'm putting it down to the exceptional reading tastes of the ladies of Allenheads. If Peter Stamm's narrative was Camus like in its sparseness and absurdity, then Miller is a bit like a modern day Dickens or perhaps a Thomas Hardy. The description flows abundantly throughout the book; in fact, it never, ever stops. Every minute detail of place and character, even every innimate object, is observed so keenly it almost hurts. And the description is poetic in its ability to draw the most unusual and yet obvious comparisons. To give an example, I loved the description of TBone's rather repulsive house and its interior decoration "The pictures stood in the shade of a tall vase of exotic white flowers. The impression was of a shrine to the dead". Of course, Larry is slowly dying, sucked into this nether world of Z list failure. And I loved the description that Laslo gives of his writing career "it felt like something he did in order to avoid doing something else, a forty year displacement activity..."
Miller has researched the background to his characters to an almost unbelievable degree. His descriptions of the trails of cancer are quite remarkable, especially if (as I'm sure is the case) he hasn't suffered from chemotherapy. I was shocked and moved at the description of Alice returning from her first chemo session - "smelling like a child's chemistry set". Alice's admission that she likes books that she has already read, or short books, because "they made her tired in a more interesting way than most things did" is also wonderful, and so true! I also love how irritated she is with people buying her books "as if cancer were a sort of dull cruise". He description of vomiting on the first night after chemo and then staring up into nothingness was so true to my experience I felt Miller had read my mind.
I don't know whether I have ever cried out loud whilst reading a description in a novel but the description of Larry washing his mother whilst confessing his inadequacies is one of the most beautiful passages of writing I've ever read (remember, ladies, I have high quantities of FEC drugs coursing through my viens, so this could explain it all away). Due to the horrors of illness, I have been on both sides of this intimacy (although thankfully the shits were not involved!) and it really touched something in me. There is nothing more intimate, nothing more loving and selfless, than seeing through the physical repulsion of illness in order to tend someone you love and this passage completely revealed this - just fantastic writing.
On the theme front (I know I'm the queen of themes - woo hoo), I was interested in the use of Hamlet as a preface to the two sections of the book. Ostensibly, the first quote presents the first section of the book as the detailed description of the demons of each character: Alec's neediness and inability to fully connect, Larry's steady moral decline, despite being essentially a good man, Lazlo's decades' long guilt at not saving his lover (even Kirsty's claustrophobic obssession with motherhood). The second quote - "the breathing time of day" - indicates that the cahracters are all starting to act upon their predicaments in some way. Lazlo's clandestine trip to Hungary makes him feel as if he has served penitence for earlier sins of inactivity; Larry's penitence is served whilst cleaning his mother; Alec finally finds the courage to end his mother's suffering - she had originally asked her more alpha son to do this, if she were ever to loe her mind, but eventually it is her more timid child who is more courageous. I love the way that Alec is the only one who can understand Alice when she starts to ramble, as she is doing it in French. All through their lives, Larry has been the more easily loved son, the more straightforward one, the less needy one and yet at the end of her life, Alice is more inextricably linked to Alec. I love the way this book explores the completely different relationships that you have with your children. It's done in a subtle and very moving way.
I also think that all of the characters could be seen as horribly and almost comically mistaken in their belief that they are finally freeing themselves from what has burdened them. Larry is last seen taking flowers to his wife - but did his mother really understand his confession and will he really be able to extricate himself from his financial situation? Alec is giving his mother a pill that he thinks will end all of her suffering but Larry couldn't remember whether the pill was the death sentence one, or some sort of viagra and he only has a junkie porn star's "urban myth" type reassurance anyway. Lazlo finds himself in an absurd mirror situation at the end of the novel - he couldn't shoot the man who shot his friend and now another friend is about to shoot him. The characters are trapped in private prisons that they have created for themselves and which are hidden from everyone but themselves and they are all willing to do the most extraordinary things in order to "free"themselves.
Finally, it's interesting that Hamlet has been used, especially as the quotes come from Act 5, which is seen by most critics as the pivotal act in the play, especially Act 5 Scene 5, in which Hamlet confronts his mother about her relationship with his uncle and the dubious morality of her second marriage in the light of his father's death. He accuses her of "honeying and making love over the nasty sty" and in many stagings of the play, the movement between mother an son is hugely sexual and very unnerving. This book is certainly in part about mothers and sons and the subtlies and intricacies of their relationships. There is something sexual in the way Alice keeps the newspaper cuttings of Larry - almost as if she were a starstruck fan - and also something sexual in Alec curling up at the bottom of his mother's empty bed - often something Hamlet does in Act 5 Scene 5. Hamlet is also famous for not being able to decide what to do - to be or not to be etc - and all of these characters are stuck - like Hamlet - in a web of indecision.
Anyway, I give it 9. And I will definitely be reading more Andrew Miller.
Miller has researched the background to his characters to an almost unbelievable degree. His descriptions of the trails of cancer are quite remarkable, especially if (as I'm sure is the case) he hasn't suffered from chemotherapy. I was shocked and moved at the description of Alice returning from her first chemo session - "smelling like a child's chemistry set". Alice's admission that she likes books that she has already read, or short books, because "they made her tired in a more interesting way than most things did" is also wonderful, and so true! I also love how irritated she is with people buying her books "as if cancer were a sort of dull cruise". He description of vomiting on the first night after chemo and then staring up into nothingness was so true to my experience I felt Miller had read my mind.
I don't know whether I have ever cried out loud whilst reading a description in a novel but the description of Larry washing his mother whilst confessing his inadequacies is one of the most beautiful passages of writing I've ever read (remember, ladies, I have high quantities of FEC drugs coursing through my viens, so this could explain it all away). Due to the horrors of illness, I have been on both sides of this intimacy (although thankfully the shits were not involved!) and it really touched something in me. There is nothing more intimate, nothing more loving and selfless, than seeing through the physical repulsion of illness in order to tend someone you love and this passage completely revealed this - just fantastic writing.
On the theme front (I know I'm the queen of themes - woo hoo), I was interested in the use of Hamlet as a preface to the two sections of the book. Ostensibly, the first quote presents the first section of the book as the detailed description of the demons of each character: Alec's neediness and inability to fully connect, Larry's steady moral decline, despite being essentially a good man, Lazlo's decades' long guilt at not saving his lover (even Kirsty's claustrophobic obssession with motherhood). The second quote - "the breathing time of day" - indicates that the cahracters are all starting to act upon their predicaments in some way. Lazlo's clandestine trip to Hungary makes him feel as if he has served penitence for earlier sins of inactivity; Larry's penitence is served whilst cleaning his mother; Alec finally finds the courage to end his mother's suffering - she had originally asked her more alpha son to do this, if she were ever to loe her mind, but eventually it is her more timid child who is more courageous. I love the way that Alec is the only one who can understand Alice when she starts to ramble, as she is doing it in French. All through their lives, Larry has been the more easily loved son, the more straightforward one, the less needy one and yet at the end of her life, Alice is more inextricably linked to Alec. I love the way this book explores the completely different relationships that you have with your children. It's done in a subtle and very moving way.
I also think that all of the characters could be seen as horribly and almost comically mistaken in their belief that they are finally freeing themselves from what has burdened them. Larry is last seen taking flowers to his wife - but did his mother really understand his confession and will he really be able to extricate himself from his financial situation? Alec is giving his mother a pill that he thinks will end all of her suffering but Larry couldn't remember whether the pill was the death sentence one, or some sort of viagra and he only has a junkie porn star's "urban myth" type reassurance anyway. Lazlo finds himself in an absurd mirror situation at the end of the novel - he couldn't shoot the man who shot his friend and now another friend is about to shoot him. The characters are trapped in private prisons that they have created for themselves and which are hidden from everyone but themselves and they are all willing to do the most extraordinary things in order to "free"themselves.
Finally, it's interesting that Hamlet has been used, especially as the quotes come from Act 5, which is seen by most critics as the pivotal act in the play, especially Act 5 Scene 5, in which Hamlet confronts his mother about her relationship with his uncle and the dubious morality of her second marriage in the light of his father's death. He accuses her of "honeying and making love over the nasty sty" and in many stagings of the play, the movement between mother an son is hugely sexual and very unnerving. This book is certainly in part about mothers and sons and the subtlies and intricacies of their relationships. There is something sexual in the way Alice keeps the newspaper cuttings of Larry - almost as if she were a starstruck fan - and also something sexual in Alec curling up at the bottom of his mother's empty bed - often something Hamlet does in Act 5 Scene 5. Hamlet is also famous for not being able to decide what to do - to be or not to be etc - and all of these characters are stuck - like Hamlet - in a web of indecision.
Anyway, I give it 9. And I will definitely be reading more Andrew Miller.
August 3, 2016
[rating = B]
Take a breath; and live. Two stories wrap around the ideas of life and death, things done and left undone. Alec and his brother Larry have an ailing mother, Alice, who will die any day. Laszlo, an aging playwright, is in search of something he lost in his youth. Each has to deal with what is to come. They have the opportunity to change or to cause some effect on the life or destiny of another. Choices, ideas, what to do. Andrew Miller writes with a very witty, perhaps more funny, hand. he has created very realistic problems and very realistic solutions, but whether these will be carried-out, we do not know. But the lives are passionate, striving towards knowledge or truth, and they give a certain credibility to the author. Sometimes it is better to just breath and think, and at others, it is time to act. A novel that entices you to read on; at times it seems you have read 50 pages in two seconds. Although the two tales are a bit stung together, they work well to prove a point, what that point is up to the reader.
Take a breath; and live. Two stories wrap around the ideas of life and death, things done and left undone. Alec and his brother Larry have an ailing mother, Alice, who will die any day. Laszlo, an aging playwright, is in search of something he lost in his youth. Each has to deal with what is to come. They have the opportunity to change or to cause some effect on the life or destiny of another. Choices, ideas, what to do. Andrew Miller writes with a very witty, perhaps more funny, hand. he has created very realistic problems and very realistic solutions, but whether these will be carried-out, we do not know. But the lives are passionate, striving towards knowledge or truth, and they give a certain credibility to the author. Sometimes it is better to just breath and think, and at others, it is time to act. A novel that entices you to read on; at times it seems you have read 50 pages in two seconds. Although the two tales are a bit stung together, they work well to prove a point, what that point is up to the reader.
August 11, 2016
If this novel had been set up as four short stories about loosely connected characters it might have made more sense to me. Written as a novel, the four stories intertwined but the main characters still felt disconnected from each other, despite three of them being members of the same family. Perhaps it was the incongruity of the family of three in England - two brothers and their mother with terminal cancer - and the fourth character, a Hungarian living in Paris, who is connected only loosely with one of the brothers. His story didn't intersect with theirs in any meaningful way that I could spot. Reading this was like listening to a pub bore droning on and on. You feel you may go to sleep through sheer boredom, but then he unexpectedly says something interesting, something coherent, and you sit up and listen for a while. I wish that had happened more often because when this book was good it was very good, but ultimately it was more concerned with being clever and profound than with entertainment.
August 26, 2025
This is a strange sort of book - two narratives run alongside one another but do not intersect beyond one single thread of connection between them. I didn't dislike that in and of itself, but it did feel a bit like maybe that was because neither story had enough to it to make a full book. Miller is a wonderful writer and so the characters and emotions leapt off the page at me, but the plot (such as it is) did feel like it ran out of steam towards the end, at least for one of the two narratives. There are also a couple of plot threads that just go absolutely nowhere but don't feel well-explored enough during the time they have in the book to feel worth it. That being said, I did enjoy reading it and it was interesting to read a non-historical book by him. 3.5 maybe but I don't feel strongly enough about it to make it a 4.
September 24, 2017
Blech....this was one of those books where I kept thinking, "Where am I?" "Why can't I figure out who these characters are or what is going on?" I never full understood where we were in the narration or in the characters' lives...or why I should care. And I finally let myself put it down about half way through.
February 26, 2015
Marvellous, loved this. Wasn't expecting it to be so different from the only other book of his I've read (Pure) which I loved too.
Read
May 14, 2019A pair of adult sons return home to tend to their dying mother; a Hungarian playwright hopes to redeem himself for a youthful moment of weakness. Very good. High literature without a cheap hook, sincerely written, thoughtful, sad, hopeful. A serious man trying to grapple honestly with the terrible despair and occasional joy of human existence. Very good.
December 19, 2023
I've given this one the 100 page test and I'm going to abandon it. I liked Pure by the same author and whilst this has nice sentences there doesn't appear to be much story and the characters aren't inspiring me to carry on.
April 12, 2024
Just 3 stars, I was hugely disappointed with this book having enjoyed all his other books, 4 and 5 star ratings.
It was well written beautiful descriptions, but little storyline, the plot jumps between 3 locations and I wasn't even sure why Lazlo was in the book!! I didn't find a character I could be empathic to so generally a poor read
It was well written beautiful descriptions, but little storyline, the plot jumps between 3 locations and I wasn't even sure why Lazlo was in the book!! I didn't find a character I could be empathic to so generally a poor read
November 19, 2025
I liked it, didn’t love it.
Larry was a bollocks, and there was a very tenuous link between Lazlo and the other two.
But I liked it. Not sure if it’ll stay with me but the writing was nice, and there were so tender, moving moments.
Larry was a bollocks, and there was a very tenuous link between Lazlo and the other two.
But I liked it. Not sure if it’ll stay with me but the writing was nice, and there were so tender, moving moments.
February 28, 2012
When I first began Oxygen, I was taken in by the writing, by the author's deft use of words, his economy of language. I could tell right away that Miller knew how to work a pen (or, nowadays, a word processor). But I must confess that I wondered, for a while, if anything was really going to happen. There is certainly a story here (three in fact), but in all honesty, not that much happens. I was fully expecting this lack of grounded action to undermine the novel's rather deceptively simple and beautiful tone.
I am pleased to report that I was wrong.
Brothers Larry (moderately famous soap opera star gone to seed and trapped in a dying marriage with a klepto daughter who is, by all accounts, creepy in her emotionless demeanor) and Alec (the French translator who is perched on the edge of a life of tepid failures and regrets that mask themselves as hopes and dreams) find themselves forced to deal with the decline and inevitable demise of their mother, Alice, a strong-willed woman who is fighting a losing battle with cancer and the accompanying senility that comes with dying so messily.
This story is connected by a few thin (but strong threads) to the tale of the Hungarian playwrite, Lazar, who has a life that is successful, rich with meaning and love, and in all other ways, admirable. Still, of course, there is something missing -- something serious -- and it plagues Lazar with the same insinuating tenacity as the disease that plagues Alice (and, by proxy, her sons).
What makes this novel so remarkable (aside from Miller's ability to manipulate words in a manner that is as playful as it is revealing, as meaningful as it is masterful) is that whenever something solid and certain DOES happen -- something that could be called the undergirding of a crucial plot element -- it usually takes place either off screen or ambiguously. The firing of a gun, the taking of a pill, the indescretions of men and women: these are hinted at, heard from another room, suggested.
Miller doesn't just suggest events, he suggests reasons, he suggests outcomes, he suggests decisions. There are no easy answers in his book, and in place of predictable plot machinations or trite bits of drama, Miller gives us compellingly simple and real insights into the characters and how they view the various disintegrations of their respective worlds.
This is a return to true literature, I think, a lost art wherein the audience is not plied with the easy levers of emotive dialogue or overt symbolism. We are given what is there, and are left to make do with what we have. The endings to all four stories (Alice's, Larry's, Alec's, and Lazar's) are left open to interpretation. An optimist could probably see upswings all around, but it would be just as easy to argue that the stories are all bound to end sadly.
Either way isn't really the point, and that's the final and greatest thing about the novel. A true novel isn't really about what happens to the characters, it's about what the characters do and who they are. Miller seems to be suggesting a final and ultimate truth about humanity, that being that we are not our circumstances: we are how we respond to our circumstances. Viewed in that light, this book is truly a success, and the characters in it richer than the words used to describe them. They each end the novel taking deep breaths before stepping into the unknown.
If you're anything like me, you'll end the novel with the opposite: a sigh.
I am pleased to report that I was wrong.
Brothers Larry (moderately famous soap opera star gone to seed and trapped in a dying marriage with a klepto daughter who is, by all accounts, creepy in her emotionless demeanor) and Alec (the French translator who is perched on the edge of a life of tepid failures and regrets that mask themselves as hopes and dreams) find themselves forced to deal with the decline and inevitable demise of their mother, Alice, a strong-willed woman who is fighting a losing battle with cancer and the accompanying senility that comes with dying so messily.
This story is connected by a few thin (but strong threads) to the tale of the Hungarian playwrite, Lazar, who has a life that is successful, rich with meaning and love, and in all other ways, admirable. Still, of course, there is something missing -- something serious -- and it plagues Lazar with the same insinuating tenacity as the disease that plagues Alice (and, by proxy, her sons).
What makes this novel so remarkable (aside from Miller's ability to manipulate words in a manner that is as playful as it is revealing, as meaningful as it is masterful) is that whenever something solid and certain DOES happen -- something that could be called the undergirding of a crucial plot element -- it usually takes place either off screen or ambiguously. The firing of a gun, the taking of a pill, the indescretions of men and women: these are hinted at, heard from another room, suggested.
Miller doesn't just suggest events, he suggests reasons, he suggests outcomes, he suggests decisions. There are no easy answers in his book, and in place of predictable plot machinations or trite bits of drama, Miller gives us compellingly simple and real insights into the characters and how they view the various disintegrations of their respective worlds.
This is a return to true literature, I think, a lost art wherein the audience is not plied with the easy levers of emotive dialogue or overt symbolism. We are given what is there, and are left to make do with what we have. The endings to all four stories (Alice's, Larry's, Alec's, and Lazar's) are left open to interpretation. An optimist could probably see upswings all around, but it would be just as easy to argue that the stories are all bound to end sadly.
Either way isn't really the point, and that's the final and greatest thing about the novel. A true novel isn't really about what happens to the characters, it's about what the characters do and who they are. Miller seems to be suggesting a final and ultimate truth about humanity, that being that we are not our circumstances: we are how we respond to our circumstances. Viewed in that light, this book is truly a success, and the characters in it richer than the words used to describe them. They each end the novel taking deep breaths before stepping into the unknown.
If you're anything like me, you'll end the novel with the opposite: a sigh.
August 10, 2011
Oxygen by Andrew Miller is set in the summer of 1997, and tells the linked stories of four characters. Three are the members of a single family. Alice Valentine, an ex-teacher, is slowly dying of cancer in her home in the West Country. She reflects a little on her past and tries to cope with the expectations of her family while struggling with the relentless downward course of her illness. Her younger son, Alec, returns from London to the family home to stay with her. He has always lacked confidence in life and relationships, but has now found a niche as a translator of foreign literature into English. Alec has lived very much in the shadow of his elder bother Larry, clearly Alice’s favourite. Larry is in many ways the opposite of Alec – socially adept, a world-ranked tennis professional who has travelled the world before marrying, settling in Los Angeles and becoming a soap opera star playing the role of a hospital doctor. However, Larry’s life is slowly unravelling – he drinks too much, is currently unemployed and in financial trouble, has an unhappy marriage and a disturbed young daughter. He has managed to hide most of this from his family and the public, but as he returns to England to his mother’s bedside it is clear that something will have to give.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Hungarian playwright Lazlo Lazar continues with his literary life. He is a well-established, successful figure, with a happy long term relationship and a close circle of friends. Perhaps only his works – a succession of nihilistic, gloomy, existentialist plays – give a clue that he, too, is struggling with the past. Lazar is linked only at a distance to the Valentine family back in the West Country – Alec is translating one of his plays into English. However, during the course of Oxygen, he (like the other characters) finally confronts the issue that has been troubling him, and has an opportunity to break free from his past.
Oxygen was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, the year in which Peter Carey won with The True History of the Kelly Gang (a book devoid of commas). It is a well written and engrossing piece of literary fiction, and was certainly worthy of this accolade. Andrew Miller creates four quite different characters, and writes from the perspective of each in a convincing way. Reading the book, I could understand the dilemmas of each and why they had arrived at their current place. Each was paralysed in a different way – circling around a problem in their life and unable to take definitive action to resolve it. Each was given or created an opportunity to finally break free. It might be too much to say that Oxygen was an enjoyable read, but it was always an interesting one.
All of this sounds a little gloomy, and indeed the tone of much of the novel is a negative one. However, at the end most of the characters have a glimpse of a more positive future, and there is a sense that it is there for them to take if they wish to do so. However, be warned – Oxygen does not provide any neat endings or plot resolution. If you prefer to finish a novel with a sense of a story which is complete and certainty about the fate of the participants, then Oxygen is definitely not for you.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Hungarian playwright Lazlo Lazar continues with his literary life. He is a well-established, successful figure, with a happy long term relationship and a close circle of friends. Perhaps only his works – a succession of nihilistic, gloomy, existentialist plays – give a clue that he, too, is struggling with the past. Lazar is linked only at a distance to the Valentine family back in the West Country – Alec is translating one of his plays into English. However, during the course of Oxygen, he (like the other characters) finally confronts the issue that has been troubling him, and has an opportunity to break free from his past.
Oxygen was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, the year in which Peter Carey won with The True History of the Kelly Gang (a book devoid of commas). It is a well written and engrossing piece of literary fiction, and was certainly worthy of this accolade. Andrew Miller creates four quite different characters, and writes from the perspective of each in a convincing way. Reading the book, I could understand the dilemmas of each and why they had arrived at their current place. Each was paralysed in a different way – circling around a problem in their life and unable to take definitive action to resolve it. Each was given or created an opportunity to finally break free. It might be too much to say that Oxygen was an enjoyable read, but it was always an interesting one.
All of this sounds a little gloomy, and indeed the tone of much of the novel is a negative one. However, at the end most of the characters have a glimpse of a more positive future, and there is a sense that it is there for them to take if they wish to do so. However, be warned – Oxygen does not provide any neat endings or plot resolution. If you prefer to finish a novel with a sense of a story which is complete and certainty about the fate of the participants, then Oxygen is definitely not for you.
November 9, 2016
This was an excellent read, a 4.5 star review (if Goodreads had such a thing). Tells three stories, two of which are closely interwoven and the third has a loose connection. Brothers Alec and Larry are living diverse lives, Alec in the UK, struggling with demons which aren't fully explained and taking the reins when mother Alice is diagnosed with terminal cancer; and Larry in the US, struggling with demons which are explained in some detail - a failing acting career in a long running daytime soap opera leading him to some questionable choices to bring in income, a failing marriage to a woman we are never fully introduced to (she's a vague presence), and failing as a dad to understand the mercurial and mischievous behaviour of his 6 year old daughter.
These two stories start off as separate threads which, about halfway through the book, are brought together very nicely as Larry makes the trip across the Atlantic to be with his brother and mother during the traumatic final weeks of her life.
The other story, of Laszlo the Hungarian playwright living in Paris, doesn't connect to the other two stories at all, except for the very loose association that comes from Alec translating Laszlo's latest play from the French into English. Apart from that, Laszlo's story really could stand alone - it would make an excellent novel of its own.
I found this a very beautifully drawn book. It was tender without being morbid, it was honest without being raw, it was real without being obnoxious. The author can tell a cracking good story and draw some really interesting characters for us to enjoy. I was interested in how all the stories came to a conclusion, and was kept in a form of suspense (this isn't really a mystery or a thriller so the suspense was gentle) all the way through.
The pace was excellent, the dialogue believable, the people equally believable. The ending wasn't as conclusive as some might like, and I kind of wish we were definitely told what happened, rather than be left to imagine the various endings - or the various next chapters in the lives of the characters we had been travelling with on their stories so far.
Will be looking up and reading other Andrew Miller books after my enjoyment in reading this one.
These two stories start off as separate threads which, about halfway through the book, are brought together very nicely as Larry makes the trip across the Atlantic to be with his brother and mother during the traumatic final weeks of her life.
The other story, of Laszlo the Hungarian playwright living in Paris, doesn't connect to the other two stories at all, except for the very loose association that comes from Alec translating Laszlo's latest play from the French into English. Apart from that, Laszlo's story really could stand alone - it would make an excellent novel of its own.
I found this a very beautifully drawn book. It was tender without being morbid, it was honest without being raw, it was real without being obnoxious. The author can tell a cracking good story and draw some really interesting characters for us to enjoy. I was interested in how all the stories came to a conclusion, and was kept in a form of suspense (this isn't really a mystery or a thriller so the suspense was gentle) all the way through.
The pace was excellent, the dialogue believable, the people equally believable. The ending wasn't as conclusive as some might like, and I kind of wish we were definitely told what happened, rather than be left to imagine the various endings - or the various next chapters in the lives of the characters we had been travelling with on their stories so far.
Will be looking up and reading other Andrew Miller books after my enjoyment in reading this one.
November 6, 2022
Lots of potential, which I don’t think it ever reached. It started on a very slow build and kept moving slowly, until each of the more or less connected characters sort of came to their own conclusion. I found myself drawn more to some characters than others, though I don’t know if that had to do with my own proclivities or that the author put more care and/or interest into some characters over others. It sure felt like it. I would love a book just on the Hungarian character. To the book and author’s defense, there is some lovely prose….
Quotes that caught my eye
…for unless you had grown up beside a person from the beginning, had breathed the same air, there was too much about that life you would never be able to explain. You had to love, if you loved at all, as an act of faith, uncomprehendingly. (22)
But she had been rude to him and now she was sorry. Unless the drugs were to blame. How could she tell? How could she know what was her, this old Alice, and what was sime kind of toxic side effect? (25)
She knew now what turning your face to the wall meant, and it tempted her, saying no to the fag-end of life, yes to oblivion. If that’s what it was. Oblivion. But not quite yet. There were still good times. Little unexpected pleasures. A card from an old friend. The greenness of grass. Some nonsense on the radio that made her laugh. Even the sound of Mrs samson singing to herself in the kitchen. A fifty-year-old woman singing like a girl. You couldn’t explain it to people without sounding gaga. But when the light began to fail, however lovely the evening, she became nervous and plucked at herself. Drawing the curtains didn’t help. Night thickened behind them, pressing at the glass like floodwater. (27)
Restless people, the Americans. Everyone wanted to be Peter Pan or Tinkerbell. Foolish to found a country for the pursuit of happiness. People just got into a panic when they hadn’t got it. (31-32)
… and turned off the reading light. For a moment the room disappeared, then returned, slowly, in familiar grey outlines. It was like being sent to bed as a child before it was properly dark, lying there wondering what the grown-ups were doing, somewhat amazed that the world went on without you, that after all you were not necessary to it. (32)
Around her, the boards of the house, the old beams and joists, cooling now, creaked and whispered. It made the air seem talkative. Well inhabited. Full of presences not quite apparent. (33)
What she did remember often seemed quite random, as though her life were an old lumber room through which memory moved like a drunk with a torch…. (71)
None of us, she thought, none of us survives our imperfections. (72)
But at my age it’s difficult to change the way you see the world. We take on a certain view when we are young then spend the rest of our lives collecting the evidence. (104)
And secret happiness, as when he was in love with Peter, almost a burden, as though he had won the lottery yet could share the news with no one. (111)
The stories they told, the same they must have been telling each other for decades, they told again as if for the first time, and with the earnestness of people who must explain the whole truth in a single charged anecdote, or risk losing their dead a second time, burying them not in earth, but in silence. (112)
True, the lotions, teased into his skin with gently circling fingertips, had not made him look any younger, but he was convinced they had retarded the process of decay, protecting him a little from gravity and toxic air, from the effects of too much smiling or frowning, even perhaps from that scourge of all faces: guilt. (129)
He yawned, stretched and was about to turn off the lamp when something on the floor between the two desks caught his eye, and he reached down to pick it up. It was the napkin in which he had carried the gun from the dining room. He looked about for a few moments but there was no sign of the weapon and he it had gone. For a night at the end of May, the study seemed unseasonably cold. (133)
Alec held out his hand but Larry pulled him into a hug, immediately learning more of the true history of the last weeks than any amount of talking could have produced. Not just the fizz of tension in his brother’s body, but that smell of unhappiness, like a room in a house where children have been punished. (191)
…but the hedgerows were still tall and in their way unmannerly and uproarious with June. (193)
To Alec the scene was the most profoundly embarrassing he thought he had ever witnessed, and he stared fixedly at the gravel, afraid he would make some shocking noise, a bark of grief.
‘Can we go in now?’ he asked. But nobody moved, and it seemed they would be there for ever, stupefied by emotion. (200)
Ever since coming down from London he had longed for others to share the burden with him. Shield him. But now that they were here he found he missed the solitude of the week before when the garden’s great resource of quiet had begun to tease out something equivalent in himself, which now all these voices drove away. It made it hard to be civil. It certainly made it harder to think. (204)
Two men in a bed in the act of adoring each other was as subversive as a secret printing press,… (210)
… the tumours, weevil-like, eating away at the furniture of adult judgment;… (230)
… and came out on to Steindl Imre utca, where immediately he felt some barometric shift in the atmosphere, as if the density of the known, the familiar, the ingrained, had subtly increased. (271)
Lives such as theirs had not been conducive to longevity. (272)
…they crossed the road to catch the number 2 tram, which was arriving with a tap-tapping of the overhead wires, like a giant yellow grasshopper robbing its steel legs together. (273)
… Laxzlo had sat up feverishly trying to pass the moment through the machinery of reason, for already, at sixteen, he was condemned to be an intellectual, possessor of a mind that stared at itself. (275)
A small golden cross swinging from the rear-view mirror as Tibor gunned the car on a blind bend past a lorry loaded with stone. (As a rule, Laszlo avoided taxis with religious trinkets in them after nearly dying in one in Spain that had an entire shrine on the dashboard. Recklessness was a trial of faith for these men.) (286)
Ahead of him was a space about the size of a soccer pitch. A large formal garden rather than a park, though without a single tree or flower. White sanded paths connected a pattern of grass rings, and around the edges of the rings the statues – those saved from the gleeful acetylene torches – were deployed in the sunshine like pieces of defunct weaponry. Soldiers, political leaders, abstracts of ideal citizens cast in monumental bonze (sic) or sharp-edged steel or stone, their hands raised, their bodies straining forward to greet the future. Some he recognized. Others dated from after ’56 and were new to him. But glowing in the mid-afternoon sunshine they were still impressive, still exercised some remnant of their old imperium, the light flashing from their massive shoulders, their bayonets, their metal chins. The strangeness was in seeing them all together, corralled in the park, walled in, as though they might break out and impose themselves again on the squares of the city. It had been wise of someone to insist on keeping them. There was even an element of humiliation to it, a sense that the monuments could be shamed, their failure kept in public view. And how utterly of the past they were! How soundly beaten! But moving among them, Laszlo began to feel a flutter of unease, like the survivor of a sea battle washed up among the bodies of his enemies, afraid that one might groan and stagger to his feet and be vengeful. (287-88)
He gazed at the toes of his shoes, the sand in the suede. In this heat it was difficult to think things through, and he began to feel like a figure in the far background of a painting, two or three strokes of the brush, no real face at all, there simply for balance or colour, while in the foreground the emperor’s army rode past on their magnificent horses. (289)
Life, which a child could dab out with the pressure of her thumb, was also mystifyingly persistent, the flesh outliving the will, all pleasure, all usefulness, going on and on in the grip of some biochemical imperative, something fashioned right at the start, before we had bigger brains or better hands. Sheer blind tenacity. (305)
Quotes that caught my eye
…for unless you had grown up beside a person from the beginning, had breathed the same air, there was too much about that life you would never be able to explain. You had to love, if you loved at all, as an act of faith, uncomprehendingly. (22)
But she had been rude to him and now she was sorry. Unless the drugs were to blame. How could she tell? How could she know what was her, this old Alice, and what was sime kind of toxic side effect? (25)
She knew now what turning your face to the wall meant, and it tempted her, saying no to the fag-end of life, yes to oblivion. If that’s what it was. Oblivion. But not quite yet. There were still good times. Little unexpected pleasures. A card from an old friend. The greenness of grass. Some nonsense on the radio that made her laugh. Even the sound of Mrs samson singing to herself in the kitchen. A fifty-year-old woman singing like a girl. You couldn’t explain it to people without sounding gaga. But when the light began to fail, however lovely the evening, she became nervous and plucked at herself. Drawing the curtains didn’t help. Night thickened behind them, pressing at the glass like floodwater. (27)
Restless people, the Americans. Everyone wanted to be Peter Pan or Tinkerbell. Foolish to found a country for the pursuit of happiness. People just got into a panic when they hadn’t got it. (31-32)
… and turned off the reading light. For a moment the room disappeared, then returned, slowly, in familiar grey outlines. It was like being sent to bed as a child before it was properly dark, lying there wondering what the grown-ups were doing, somewhat amazed that the world went on without you, that after all you were not necessary to it. (32)
Around her, the boards of the house, the old beams and joists, cooling now, creaked and whispered. It made the air seem talkative. Well inhabited. Full of presences not quite apparent. (33)
What she did remember often seemed quite random, as though her life were an old lumber room through which memory moved like a drunk with a torch…. (71)
None of us, she thought, none of us survives our imperfections. (72)
But at my age it’s difficult to change the way you see the world. We take on a certain view when we are young then spend the rest of our lives collecting the evidence. (104)
And secret happiness, as when he was in love with Peter, almost a burden, as though he had won the lottery yet could share the news with no one. (111)
The stories they told, the same they must have been telling each other for decades, they told again as if for the first time, and with the earnestness of people who must explain the whole truth in a single charged anecdote, or risk losing their dead a second time, burying them not in earth, but in silence. (112)
True, the lotions, teased into his skin with gently circling fingertips, had not made him look any younger, but he was convinced they had retarded the process of decay, protecting him a little from gravity and toxic air, from the effects of too much smiling or frowning, even perhaps from that scourge of all faces: guilt. (129)
He yawned, stretched and was about to turn off the lamp when something on the floor between the two desks caught his eye, and he reached down to pick it up. It was the napkin in which he had carried the gun from the dining room. He looked about for a few moments but there was no sign of the weapon and he it had gone. For a night at the end of May, the study seemed unseasonably cold. (133)
Alec held out his hand but Larry pulled him into a hug, immediately learning more of the true history of the last weeks than any amount of talking could have produced. Not just the fizz of tension in his brother’s body, but that smell of unhappiness, like a room in a house where children have been punished. (191)
…but the hedgerows were still tall and in their way unmannerly and uproarious with June. (193)
To Alec the scene was the most profoundly embarrassing he thought he had ever witnessed, and he stared fixedly at the gravel, afraid he would make some shocking noise, a bark of grief.
‘Can we go in now?’ he asked. But nobody moved, and it seemed they would be there for ever, stupefied by emotion. (200)
Ever since coming down from London he had longed for others to share the burden with him. Shield him. But now that they were here he found he missed the solitude of the week before when the garden’s great resource of quiet had begun to tease out something equivalent in himself, which now all these voices drove away. It made it hard to be civil. It certainly made it harder to think. (204)
Two men in a bed in the act of adoring each other was as subversive as a secret printing press,… (210)
… the tumours, weevil-like, eating away at the furniture of adult judgment;… (230)
… and came out on to Steindl Imre utca, where immediately he felt some barometric shift in the atmosphere, as if the density of the known, the familiar, the ingrained, had subtly increased. (271)
Lives such as theirs had not been conducive to longevity. (272)
…they crossed the road to catch the number 2 tram, which was arriving with a tap-tapping of the overhead wires, like a giant yellow grasshopper robbing its steel legs together. (273)
… Laxzlo had sat up feverishly trying to pass the moment through the machinery of reason, for already, at sixteen, he was condemned to be an intellectual, possessor of a mind that stared at itself. (275)
A small golden cross swinging from the rear-view mirror as Tibor gunned the car on a blind bend past a lorry loaded with stone. (As a rule, Laszlo avoided taxis with religious trinkets in them after nearly dying in one in Spain that had an entire shrine on the dashboard. Recklessness was a trial of faith for these men.) (286)
Ahead of him was a space about the size of a soccer pitch. A large formal garden rather than a park, though without a single tree or flower. White sanded paths connected a pattern of grass rings, and around the edges of the rings the statues – those saved from the gleeful acetylene torches – were deployed in the sunshine like pieces of defunct weaponry. Soldiers, political leaders, abstracts of ideal citizens cast in monumental bonze (sic) or sharp-edged steel or stone, their hands raised, their bodies straining forward to greet the future. Some he recognized. Others dated from after ’56 and were new to him. But glowing in the mid-afternoon sunshine they were still impressive, still exercised some remnant of their old imperium, the light flashing from their massive shoulders, their bayonets, their metal chins. The strangeness was in seeing them all together, corralled in the park, walled in, as though they might break out and impose themselves again on the squares of the city. It had been wise of someone to insist on keeping them. There was even an element of humiliation to it, a sense that the monuments could be shamed, their failure kept in public view. And how utterly of the past they were! How soundly beaten! But moving among them, Laszlo began to feel a flutter of unease, like the survivor of a sea battle washed up among the bodies of his enemies, afraid that one might groan and stagger to his feet and be vengeful. (287-88)
He gazed at the toes of his shoes, the sand in the suede. In this heat it was difficult to think things through, and he began to feel like a figure in the far background of a painting, two or three strokes of the brush, no real face at all, there simply for balance or colour, while in the foreground the emperor’s army rode past on their magnificent horses. (289)
Life, which a child could dab out with the pressure of her thumb, was also mystifyingly persistent, the flesh outliving the will, all pleasure, all usefulness, going on and on in the grip of some biochemical imperative, something fashioned right at the start, before we had bigger brains or better hands. Sheer blind tenacity. (305)
April 5, 2013
Such beautiful sentence structure (weird that I start a review with that) that seems to only be concerned with fluidity. It's as if Miller believes periods create blockages. Sometimes his sentences stretch on for paragraphs--always sustained; never running on. He exerts a masterful control over everything. And with that flow comes beautiful imagery. Some of the most wonderful, emotional-laden descriptions I've seen in prose.
The central metaphor is spectacular, too: oxygen. He sets it up near the beginning and then never reminds you of it again. Miller let's the reader draw his/her own conclusions about it. That, in an age of preachy allegory, is admirable and welcomed.
I love this author. Just be cautious, it's very hard to read in segments. I believe it's designed for as few reads as possible. Closing the book and going to bed, to him, is much like a period. It ruins the masterful flow. That is great for people who can read a book in one setting, but is largely impractical for the rest of us.
The central metaphor is spectacular, too: oxygen. He sets it up near the beginning and then never reminds you of it again. Miller let's the reader draw his/her own conclusions about it. That, in an age of preachy allegory, is admirable and welcomed.
I love this author. Just be cautious, it's very hard to read in segments. I believe it's designed for as few reads as possible. Closing the book and going to bed, to him, is much like a period. It ruins the masterful flow. That is great for people who can read a book in one setting, but is largely impractical for the rest of us.
September 1, 2018
Shortlisted for Booker and Whitbread prizes, well-written analysis of the decline of a British middle-class family. the sense of unachieved potential is huge and the malaise is tracked back through the previous generations. The story is intercut with that of a Hungarian playwright, now successful and living in Paris, but full of guilt for his cowardice, despite being known as a resistance fighter. My problem is with the ending which gave me no feeling of closure. at the core of the book is the rivalry between two brothers and almost at the end we encounter a similar position in another family but the parallels were not drawn out sufficiently for me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2020
This is a good book, as I'm beginning to discover more of Andrew Miller's works. So far, he hasn't failed to please. But this isn't his best book.
But this story, painted on only slightly overlapping canvasses, doesn't quite hit the mark somehow. Brothers Alec and Larry are as different as can be in many ways, as are their relationships with their ailing mother. And dissident playwright Laszlo adds a different perspective on the whole as well.
Whilst the book is well written, and the characters are all very well developed, the whole doesn't really match the sum of the parts - you're left grasping at thin air a little at the end of it all, wondering really what it's all about.....
But this story, painted on only slightly overlapping canvasses, doesn't quite hit the mark somehow. Brothers Alec and Larry are as different as can be in many ways, as are their relationships with their ailing mother. And dissident playwright Laszlo adds a different perspective on the whole as well.
Whilst the book is well written, and the characters are all very well developed, the whole doesn't really match the sum of the parts - you're left grasping at thin air a little at the end of it all, wondering really what it's all about.....
June 19, 2007
This book was lovely, langourous, hypnotic. Written (like so many novels these days) from several perspectives and each of the characters had a different undercurrent of desperation about him/her and what I especially admired was that the other characters recognized and found embarassing those notes of desperation and weakness as well. There was a connection between the inner life of the characters and the outward perception of them. Also had some brilliant similes and beautiful use of weather symbolism.
October 20, 2013
I found this tortured and overwritten. Rather than creating vivid characters and a captivating narrative, the author used a cliched cancer story to try to evoke sadness in the reader. I could almost feel him going "Look how artsy that sentence was!" and "Are you sad yet? How about now?" and "I am clever, as proven by this analogy about flowers!"
Not for me.
Not for me.
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