Some years ago, the photograph of a starving Sudanese child struggling towards a feeding station, being watched closely by a nearby vulture, shocked the world and brought us to tears. It also won 33-year-old South African photographer Kevin Carter a Pulitzer Prize. Just months after the prize ceremony came the news that Carter had gassed himself to death in his pickup truck in Johannesburg. “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist,” said his suicide note. We can’t turn our faces away from evil; and yet, sometimes evil is just too terrible, in its enormity and its darkness, to be looked at directly. Those who go into the heart of the inferno to bring us despatches from the edge often pay a heavy price for their labours. They can never really return unchanged from their travels. And as the times we live in get more and more unsettling, one recalls T.S. Eliot: “Go, go, go, said the bird, humankind cannot bear very much reality.” In the epigraph to the first part of The Optimists, Andrew Miller quotes from Fergal Keane’s Season of Blood, about the Rwandan genocide: “It was unlike any other event I have reported on and in different ways it changed everybody — the survivors most of all, but also the doctors, the aid workers, the priests, the journalists. We had learned something about the soul of man that would leave us with nightmares long into the future.” The central horror in The Optimists is a genocide in central Africa. It has already happened when the novel begins. Clem Glass, a photojournalist who records the aftermath of the genocide, returns to London with his faith broken. Through a series of mechanical actions, he seeks to put the horror behind him: “He put his boots and the clothes from his case into a black bin-liner. He carried the bag down to one of the dustbins in the basement courtyard, then came in and scoured the skin of his hands.” But he cannot put all his memories into black bin-liners, and so he waits for them to become less terrifying: “Would something happen now? Could something be let go of? It was like waiting to be sick.” Day by day, week by painful week, Glass returns to the world of real people and normal, everyday events. He visits his father, meets his aunt, helps his sister; he sees the happiness of others and warms to their kindness. Slowly, something heals inside him. He returns to life, and, yes, to believing in life; and to a kind of optimism. But his biggest lesson is yet to come, and that is what forms the middle part of the book. An old-fashioned novelist, Miller writes a sturdy, plain-vanilla prose. His strength is in writing about the great little things in daily life — siblings, relationships, park walks, phone calls, weddings, food, family gatherings, kindnesses — without making them sound twee or cloying. Similarly, when he writes about the darker side of life — illness, death, evil — his prose is measured and composed. “Language was not compliant: it had its own agendas and grew more interested in itself the more he used it, its truths all at curious angles to his own.” Miller’s first novel, Ingenuous Pain, won several awards; his third novel, Oxygen, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001. The Optimists, his fourth book, is a quiet but deeply affecting work. It may not win prizes, but it asks searching questions about evil, faith and forgiveness. Questions that are all too important in our times.
