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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"What kind of person can take photographs like these?", 2 Jan 2006
Returning from central Africa where he photographed a massacre in which three thousand innocent women and children were hacked to death, forty-year-old photographer Clem Glass finds himself too stunned to function in the "normal" world of London. Dividing his life into the "time before" and the "time after" the horrifying event, Clem is "without desire," a man unable to work or think about the future. When his older sister Clare, an art historian, suffers a breakdown, Clem, with no assignments or job to occupy his time, offers to become her "primary carer" in Colcombe, a remote village where his aunt has a cottage. Imposing some sort of order on their lives, he helps Clare to become less fearful, and begins to confront his own memories and face his own problems. A trip to Toronto where he meets the journalist with whom he shared the African nightmare, followed by a trip to Brussels, where he pursues the architect of the massacre, "the Bourgmestre," Sylvestre Ruzindana, whom he hopes to bring to trial, lead to Clem's realization that people and issues are far more complex than he has previously believed--that Ruzindana, despite his crimes, is a real, complex human being, not simply a "monster." Miller is an exceptionally clear writer with the ability to create unusual and engaging characters facing unusual, but understandable, problems. Clem's inability to cope with the magnitude of the slaughter (based on a real event in Rwanda in 1994) parallels the similar inability of the comfortable reader, and the western world in general, to do so. Wisely, Miller never describes much of the massacre, leaving it up to the reader to imagine the horrors which would drive a professional photographer to such despair. Through the personal terrors of Clare's much smaller but no less frightening world, he puts her psychological trauma into a perspective that allows the reader to understand and care about her recovery, too. The use of symbols enhances the themes--the faint outline of leaves in paving stone is a reminder of the miracle of life superimposed on stone. A swim becomes a sort of baptism and rebirth. The trying on of a pair of glasses suggests the seeing of life from someone else's perspective. These details are gracefully integrated, broadening the novel's scope without being ponderous. In a surprising conclusion (and like the proverbial snake biting its tail), Clem harks back to an early event, revisits it, and ultimately learns something new and important. Rewarding on many levels, The Optimists is carefully written and well-developed literary fiction in which every detail adds to the psychological tension and to the development of themes. Mary Whipple
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by Andrew Miller
by Andrew Miller
by Andrew Miller
by Andrew Miller
by Andrew Miller
