Oxygen [Hardcover]

In Andrew Miller's third novel, Oxygen, the IMPAC-award winning author of Ingenious Pain offers an intense, claustrophobic tale of parallel lives experiencing regret and redemption.

A family reunion of sorts is underway in the summer of 1997 for Alice, a newly retired, long-widowed schoolteacher, dying of cancer at her home in the English countryside. Gathering at her side are her two sons: Alec, a myopic, indecisive translator, and the more gregarious Larry, an unemployed TV soap star whose glittering US career is about to take a nosedive into the shabby territory of porn films, so he can stave off bankruptcy and hold on to his disintegrating marriage. The counterpoint to this scenario is Laszlo Lazar, Hungarian exile and fêted playwright, whose latest work, Oxygene, Alec is translating. Lazar, who has a comfortable existence in one of the more fashionable Paris quartiers, seems to possess everything that Alec does not: critical success, a loving partner, a longstanding circle of artistic friends. Yet Lazar is tormented by memories of the 1956 uprising and a comrade he feels he betrayed. When a political splinter group asks him to undertake a mysterious mission, he seizes his chance to atone for the past.

Shifting between a quintessentially English idyll, the carousing bars of Paris, the physical and emotional aridity of California, and a Budapest of the past and present, Miller skilfully evokes his characters' stories and their common theme-the liberation of self--even if the end result is that self's destruction. He writes compassionately of the terminally ill Alice, clinging to the last vestiges of life, the last agonising breath: "Was that the last to go? Certain gestures, reflexes, a way of cocking the head or moving the hands in speech?" He reminds us that human beings have choices, even in despair, and he provides a suitably ambiguous ending to round off a wise and engrossing novel.--Catherine Taylor

"Casanova - 'I was absolutely captivated by it... There's no trickery here, but superb craftmanship, combined with real feeling. I wish I'd written it' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times; 'I was thoroughly amused, stimulated, entertained and instructed by the whole book... I don't think I've read anything which has brought 18th-century London so powerfully to life... brilliantly acute' Jonathan Coe; 'Miller's prose is jewelled; the heritage details - clothes, streets, interiors - have a haunting, graphic sheen... an elegant, elegiac meditation on the death of purpose' TLS; 'resonant of time and place while remaining fresh and modern... He captures brilliantly the downfall and partial redemption of this charming isolate' The Times

'[A] beautifully written novel, which extols the power of love ... it grabs your attention to the last page.'

'Tender, funny, witty, profound, Oxygen confirms Miller's exceptional gifts and leaves one gasping for more.'

'His complex characters are unravelled with a depth and elegance that is breathtaking.'

'Miller's use of imagery is always unexpected, sometimes astonishing...'

'Powerful and moving'

'... his startling sentences, both beautiful and distressing, can lodge themselves in your brain.'

'Miller's use of imagery is always unexpected, sometimes astonishing ... the subtlety of his observation remains a delight'

'His prose is perfectly balanced, both beautiful and exact'

'Poignant, probing, brainy fiction, animated by an intense and complex narrative drive... enlivened by a sly, stoical wit'

In a house in the English countryside a woman in her sixties, Alice, is dying. In the garden, her younger son is working on the translation of a play by a celebrated Hungarian playwright, Lazlo Lazar. In San Francisco, Alice's other son, a one time soap actor and now heavily in debt, is on his way to a meeting with a pornographic film producer. And in Vienna, Lazlo Lazar is having supper with his lover, Kurt, and an American painter, discussing action, courage and the revolutions of 1956 and 68. Each of these characters will soon face a test of courage. Each will be forced to take part in an act of liberation - though not necessarily the one they foresaw. Naturally, there are certain coloured pills, a revolver, and a child who cannot be trusted as the summer of 97, the summer of the comet, reaches its surprising conclusion.

Andrew Miller was born in Bristol in 1960 and grew up in the West Country. He has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland and France, but currently lives near Brighton. His first novel, INGENIOUS PAIN, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Award for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour prize in Italy. His second novel, CASANOVA, met with similar acclaim on its publication in 1998, and both books are being adapted for film.

Inside the house his father's clocks were striking the hour. Faintly, the chimes carried to where he stood in the garden, a lank young man in a summer sweater and shapeless blue trousers, wiping the lenses of his glasses with the corner of a crumpled handkerchief. He had spent the last hour with the hose watering the flower-beds and giving the ground around the younger trees a good soaking, as he had been instructed to. Now, having carefully coiled the hose, he made his way back towards the house, his progress shadowed by a cat that pushed through the stems of delphiniums and peonies and oriental poppies. At the top of the house, the light in Alice's room shone dully from between half-open curtains.

It was the dusk of his third day back at Brooklands, the house in the West Country with its grey stone walls, brown-tiled roof and rotting summerhouse, where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life. His own small flat in London was shut and locked, and his neighbour, Mr Bequa, whose clothes carried their own atmosphere of black tobacco and failed cooking, had agreed to forward the mail, though there would not be much. Bequa had even come down into the street to wave him off, and knowing where he was going and why, had done so with gestures of extravagant melancholy, 'Goodbye, Alec friend! Good heart! Goodbye!' Wandsworth Bridge, Parsons Green, Hammersmith. Then west along the M4 past out-of-town superstores and fields of rape. A journey he had made so many times since Alice was first diagnosed he often completed the entire trip in a daze of inattention, startled to find himself rounding the last corner by the poultry farm, the sky ahead of him falling in luminous sheets towards the estuary and Wales. But this time, as each familiar landmark had dwindled in the rear-view mirror, then passed out of sight, it had seemed irretrievable, and carrying his suitcase into the hallway at Brooklands he had known with utter certainty that it was his last true homecoming, and that one half of his life was about to slough off like tons of earth in a landslide. For fifteen minutes he stood there surrounded by the soft weight of coats and hats, old boots, old tennis pumps, staring at the over-vivid snap on the wall by the door into the house – himself, Larry and Alice; Stephen must have taken it – arm in arm in the snowy orchard twenty years ago. And he had bowed his head, hearing from upstairs the chatter of his mother's radio and the rasping of her cough, and had wondered to himself what could possibly comfort him. Where on earth he might look for consolation or ease.

Coming from the garden, the house was entered by descending a short flight of mossy steps from the lawn to the terrace, and opening the glass doors into the kitchen. Here, by the worn mat, Alec slipped off his shoes and went through the house to the stairs, hoping that Alice would already have fallen asleep and would not need him. She had refused to have a room made up for her on the ground floor, despite everyone – Dr Brando, the visiting nurse Una O'Connell, and even Mrs Samson, the woman who for as long as Alec could remember had come in one morning a week to clean the house – saying how much better it would be, how much easier on good days to get into the garden. Wasn't there a perfectly suitable room downstairs, undisturbed for years other than by the daily swipe of sunlight across the mirror? But Alice had smiled at them all like a child made special and irreproachable by illness, and said that she was too used to the view, to the potato field, the church, the line of hills in the distance (like a boy, she once said, lying on his belly in the grass). And anyway, her bedroom had always been upstairs. It was too late to start 'rearranging the entire house'. So the subject was dropped, though for an angry moment Alec had wanted to tell her what it was like to watch her, that twenty-minute ordeal, hauling herself a step at a time towards the landing, her fingers clutching at the banister like talons.

Some measures she had agreed to. She took sit-down showers instead of baths, had a raised plastic seat on the toilet, and on Alec's last visit he had rigged up a bell, running the wire down the stairs from the bedroom and screwing the bell-housing to a beam by the kitchen door. There had even been some laughter when they tested it, Alice pressing the white knob by her bed (complaining that it sounded like the dive klaxon on a submarine) while Alec moved around the house to check the bell's range, and then went out to the garden, giving the thumbs-up to Una, who leaned dashingly from the bedroom window. But by evening, Alice had decided that the bell was 'a silly thing', and `quite unnecessary', and she had looked at Alec as if its installation had been tactless, yet another item among the paraphernalia of her sickness. More inescapable proof of her inescapable condition.