One Morning Like a Bird
by Andrew Miller
Sceptre, 373pp, £16.99WORDS FLIT SOFTLY FROM Andrew Miller's picture-perfect imagination. They melt into meaning, soft, snowy flutters caressing the senses. Pages accrue in drifts o
f imagery, feathery paragraphs, into which it becomes an indulgence simply to sink. The writing feels weightless, recklessly casual, almost random, yet every word, every punctuation mark, has an impact.
Sifting more slowly, while reading this book for a second time, I began to notice the sheer fastidiousness of Miller's approach to sentence construction (some sentences rolling out to 20 clauses – more than 150 words – yet beautifully poised and completely coherent), verb choice (conjuring scenes with a single, beautifully chosen, word) and the author's care for the music, rhythm and balance, the poised, pre-eminence of meaning.
In sum, Miller's writing is a joy, yet he failed to make this year's Man Booker list. Critics might argue that One Morning Like a Bird is much too constrained, too uneventful, perhaps even lightweight. It largely depends, in the end, on how much you value the craft of writing, the making of worlds – even tiny and glistening ones – luminescent and complete.
Miller's hero, Yuji Takano, would rate him highly. Yuji, a poet in the making, is a connoisseur of the sensual, a ruminant fed on dreams, and a little effete. He loves the arts, holding sacred the thought that the artist is raised above other mortals.
Yuji's Japan is embroiled in a war against the Chinese at the novel's outset. The conflict in Europe has just begun. It is 1940, and having failed his army medical, Yuji is spared the messy business. Pampered, protected, nursing the dream of becoming a writer, of being "exceptional", Yuji drifts in the safe cocoon of his Tokyo life.
He visits the home of Monsieur Feneon, whose soirées are graced by Feneon's daughter, Alissa, who is greatly accomplished in dance and piano, and who holds all the bucks in her thrall. But Yuji's eye is on Kyoko Kitamura, wife of the bully who spat in his mouth, making his schooldays hell. While the bully is far away, engaging the Chinese enemy, Yuji conducts a stealthy wooing, Kyoko his pawn in an act of revenge. It comes to little.
Miller conveys the feckless drift of Yuji's life. He brilliantly conjures up the family: Yuji's father, "a disgraced but still august professor of law", the mother an invalid, the grandfather making brief visits, a self-made man who shells out surreptitious funds to his grandson.
Miller's portraits are instant and complex, ablaze with colour, and often studded with crucial character clues. Will Yuji make it as a writer? Will he ever see the letter written by Rimbaud (one of his great heroes) to Monsieur Feneon? Will Alissa, who seems attracted to Yuji, finally get her man? And what of the coming war with America – might it tilt Yuji and other conscientious weaklings into conflict?
Two of these questions remain unanswered. The letter, however, is duly found; and Alissa triumphs, binding Yuji (who by now is attempting to write a screenplay to earn some real money) to her fate. The bully too, returns from war – minus a foot and wielding a crutch. He resumes his hold on Yuji until something happens to bring new perspective, and for Yuji, the birth of a child, becomes a symbol of survival in a world of increasing distress.
Yet, over everything, the sombre note of history holds sway. We watch the characters making plans and cannot warn them of their folly. By now it matters. Miller has wormed them into our minds, despite the sometimes satirical, dryly humorous, distance he manufactures, even while keeping Yuji in every scene so that the book has the impact of first-person presence while its third-person telling wields the power of total vision.
This is a memorable novel, one that stays true to the randomness of life, to unplanned acts and fateful outcomes. There is no innocence here, or purity, only goodness served in flawed measures, and the evil horror of war, portrayed by almost bearable means and in close-up focus.
Deeply moving, written with loving attention to language, it felt like Pasternak back from the dead.
The full article contains 713 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
