Will make you gasp for air... pardon, for oxygen (Oxygen - Andrew Miller)

Member Name: chris105

Product:	Oxygen - Andrew Miller
Date:	08/02/02 (631 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: beautiful and poetic in most parts, very powerful and sad

Disadvantages: may at times seem contrived/written to impress, weakish plot

We are all fascinated by Awards, Prizes and Medals. It's part of human nature to exalt the winners, the top-achievers in life. Success begets success, kind of thing. Be it the MTV Music Awards, the Golden Globe or Oscars Ceremony, or even the office annual Best Employee Medal, we are enthralled - wearing the smartest tuxedos and designer gowns (ok, not for the latter example perhaps... at least not in the office where I work!) the contestants turn up feigning nonchalance but inwardly ready to sell their grandmother for a coveted statue.

Slighly less glamorous, perhaps - but definitely increasing in importance and magnitude over the last few years, are the book awards. Besides the grand-dames of book awards, namely the Booker, Whitbread, Pulitzer and a few others, countless regional awards have sprung up, and each has been wholeheartedly embraced by the publishing industry, eager to have another accolade to print on the covers of their books. While there is much to be said about the merits of a few of these newly-sprung-up awards, there is no doubt that they serve as a powerful incentive to authors, who are otherwise neglected in the media circus (excepting the literary pages, of course... but that's hardly the point).

Over the past couple of years, the Booker and the Whitbread awards have been gaining in profile and glamour. This has coincided with (or has it fuelled? it's a chicken-and-egg situation...) the increase in consumption of books and the multiplication of bookstore-clones (note the emphasis on clones, rather than independent bookstores, which are sadly on the decline... but that's another story). The general public is coming to see reading (ironically, in this age of internet and immediate consumption) as a valid and even ...dare I say it?... a fun form of entertainment. People are reading more books, and having read their favourite tripe they will turn to the bookstores for help in choosing their next book.

On m
y last visit to London, I couldn't help but notice that virtually all the chain bookstores dedicated one or more of their prime front-of-shop shelving displays to the Booker and/or Whitbread Award nominees. This usually gives the buying public a fair indication of the validity and quality of a book.

[Don't worry, I'm getting to the review of the book...]

The flip-side of this situation is that quite a few authors are being tempted to write novels blatantly coiffeured to please the Prize-awarding juries. This made-to-measure kind of book is usually recognisable by the pretentious phraseology, the insightful asides meant to show the author's suave knowledge of "the way life is", and the invariably weak plot (on the assumption that a strong plot will turn a novel into an airport book, suitable for the masses but not for the cogniscenti...).

Occasionally, though, one book slips through the net, in the sense that the reader is not quite sure whether the novel is indeed an intelligent, if not groundbreaking, oeuvre or yet another contrived attempt at Booker status. OXYGEN, the third novel by Andrew Miller (his previous ones were INGENIOUS PAIN and CASANOVA), is one such.

OXYGEN was nominated for the Whitbread Award 2001, and although it did not bag the prize it received quite a bit of exposure, resulting naturally enough in increased sales. Of course, my professional deformity leads me to say that the attractive cover with its spot-laminated bubbles couldn't have harmed its appeal, either. The cover carries the compulsory blurb by an "Independent on Sunday" reviewer, who apparently said of the author "A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts". Umm, yes - but what those gifts are is subject to debate, I'd say.

OXYGEN relates the parallel stories of a few days in the lives of three different men: the first is Alec Valentine, translator by profession, who is tending to his t
erminally ill Alzheimer-suffering mother; the second is his brother Larry, emigrated to San Francisco and a former soap opera star now fallen into oblivion, sporting a near-failed marriage and a kleptomaniac (very) young daughter. Larry is making his way to England to be with his mother during her last days of life. The third character, across the Channel in Paris, is Laszlo Lazar, a well-respected playwright who is a Hungarian exile with emotional scars from the failed 1956 uprising, whose latest play is called Oxygene (in French), and which is presently being translated into English by... you guessed: Alec Valentine. Lazar is a successful and well-off intellectual enjoying the good social life in Paris with his boyfriend and friends.

This background is basically the pretext for a discussion into the real meaning of success, happiness, mortality, memory, and such other existential subjects. There are no cataclisms in the plot, and the story itself won't endanger any feeble hearts. A couple of red herrings are inserted, in the form of vaguely disturbing turns of events which could lead to something disastrous (it is hoped by the reader, rather sadistically - at least it was hoped by THIS reader...), but which invariably fizzle themselves out without any climax to note.

After all, it is clear from the word "GO" that the plot was never meant to be the raison d'etre of this book. It merely serves as a skeleton around which the author could weave his characterisations and insights. I've chosen a few extracts to give you an idea:

[Lazar contemplating] "...happiness was a subject as elusive as love, and one that required a similar subtlety of lexis and category. To begin with, it could be divided into two broad types: the happiness when you know yourself to be happy, and that which is only apparent afterwards... Then there was public happiness... 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. Pure happiness was rare, confined in most cases to infants, drug fiends and religious ecstatics. More common, though just as disturbing, was... happiness woven into its opposite; that paradox of wars and revolutions when the heart is so inflamed it gives birth to entirely new emotions. Terror-bliss. Grief-lust."

Personally, while having to admit the truthfulness of most of the assertions made, I found this spectacle a bit too in-your-face. Perhaps it's because I hate showing-off (unless I'm the one doing the showing-off, of course...), but I could have done with less of what I'd say verges on pretentiousness.

On the other hand, it was a good read, in that the characters were three-dimensional and the disquisitions on life and mortality and success rang a bell. There are some truths in the book. And I must admit also that some of the moments were particularly touching, such as one of my favourites, when Alec realises, suddenly and without warning (as these realisations usually happen), the enormity of his mother's imminent death:

"He knew now, with a certainty that bordered upon relief, that he wasn't going to manage. No labour of the intelligence, no artifice or soft voice could help him. Losing Alice [his mother] would not be difficult, it would be unendurable, and something in him would simply not survive it. With the others he would have to go on pretending for a while, but out here there were only bats and stars to see him, and he took off his glasses, folded them carefully, put his head in his hands, and wept."

That paragraph is poetic, and is what makes me enjoy my reading. There are many such moments in OXYGEN, and one of the most powerful is the scene, towards the end of the book, of Alice's "birthday party" which is in reality a farewell party. As each of the guests takes their leave from Alice, there
is tremendous sadness imparted from the book as their goodbye is clearly understood by all, leave-taker/Alice/reader, to be a goodbye to life. Anyone who, like me, has lost a loved one to Alzheimer's, having assisted impotently at their slow irreversible decline, will feel a dull pain when reading parts of this book. Especially noteworthy is a chapter at the onset of the novel when Alice herself speaks to the reader, in what is presumably one of her last moments of lucidity. She perfectly evokes that horrible knowledge that her brains are shutting down, and that any moment now she'll be, to all intents and purposes, a non-entity.

"He [Alec] had noted this 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."

These passages - and many more - are heart-rending, poetic and powerful. However, too much of any good thing becomes irritating and heavy. And I'm afraid Miller in this book crosses that delicate line between poetry and heavy. I was/am very undecided about whether to award three or four stars to this book. Ideally it would get three-and-a-half. Having forked out on a hardback (albeit with a £4 off discount) might be making me stricter, although that's not fair since it wasn't the author's fault that I decided I couldn't wait for the paperback.

I've got it. The word for what this book lacks to make it an excellent novel: the writing, although beautiful and insightful and all that, is not "effortless". Yes, that sums it up neatly: touchingly written but not effortlessly so.

Wait for the paperback - but do read it if you're into this kind of stuff.

Summary: