Last Stop for Nicky Dreams Book

Oxygen

Andrew Miller

Having enjoyed Andrew Miller's beautifully crafted prose in 'Pure' it wasn't surprising to discover the same elegantly perceptive writing in "Oxygen" except that my enjoyment was heightened by the sensitive unravelling of his characters facing bleak and challenging tasks, notably being forced to confront critical illness and difficult reminiscences, and imminent bereavement and loss. The writing throughout is moving and profound as his characters approach the climactic of their lives harbouring deep seated regrets.

The accuracy of the analysis charting acute sibling rivalry between Alec and Larry is scalpel sharp, especially when the buckle on the family belt, their mother, Alice, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, This is a "rites of passage" book and family and friends must reposition themselves and confront their impending loss and evaluate all that the dying patient meant to them. Alice is already bed bound, "where people were forever giving her books, as though cancer were a sort of dull cruise for which she needed some distraction. A pastime." She readily admits she doesn't make a promising subject, 'alien and wretched and smelling like a child's chemistry set.'

And the virulent cancer means she is in need of stronger painkillers, 'she glanced at the pill box its segments like the chambers of a gun.'

Thirty four year old bachelor, Alec, is left to organise things for his ailing mother from his house in London and on an early visit to Brooklands reflects that his mother had turned into a "bit of an Aztec" and that in certain light 'her face puffed up by the steroids, her gaze refined by suffering, look more like a tribal elder of some delicate mournful people in the great plains or rainforests than a middle-class English woman, and retired headmistress.'

With death stalking the family the grieving process has already begun as Alice diminishes further, there is one final gathering of friends, almost a death bed reunion, and as her visitors steel themselves for the awkward denouement, Alec, the playwright-dramatist son observes : 'He had noted 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.'

Elder brother, Larry, is a fading soap star from prime time American TV and he has been an absentee son, in denial about his future prospects, his marriage, his daughter Ella and his mother's illness. Former child tennis prodigy but now out of work and desperate for affirmation Larry returns to Brooklands, the West Country family home with wife, Kirsty fresh from Yoga and alternative therapies, and their challenging daughter, Ella, whose erratic behaviour and inability to express her feelings openly they cannot fathom but sense it might be through poor parenting.

Alec uses the old children's playroom to reflect upon his life and his future and "what from the tidal wash of oddments might be kept….though the truth was that the room still retained for him something of its air of refuge …. Where he could breathe the gentle anaesthetic of nostalgia".

As a child Alec, the academic of the two, was bullied by his competitive sporting elder brother, and feels he is always walking in his brother's shadow, but is now at work on translating a modern play in the mode of Samuel Beckett, 'As Alec worked he was aware of his Mother glancing up at him from her book and he had enjoyed that watching, felt its weight and warmth, that regard never quite uncritical but of a quality and intensity he was quite certain no other person would ever have for him'

Alec is adapting a play by exiled Hungarian playwright Laszlo Lazar, now living amongst émigrés' in Paris and who finds himself the unwitting target of a group of young Hungarian dissidents. He, too, needs to return to his mother country for reconciliation and atonement following his involvement in the 1956 Uprising.

The book is a challenging read with rare insights into the insulated worlds these characters inhabit, and explores family breakdown and individual failure, with disparate characters unravelling through envy and self-doubt.

Headmistress Alice advised,
'Really stupid children were a rarity and she used to tell her young teachers, never write off a child. Never assume the problem is theirs rather than yours.'

And on mortality she ponders 'But did nothing last? Was the "She" who thought all this just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up…Or was the afterlife just others remembering you, so that you died, truly died, when you were truly forgotten.'

On the bleakness of marital breakdown Alice is pessimistic:
"People do change, you know!"
"Do they? I thought they just got more like themselves"
He used to shout at her. This shocked her at first because she had never been shouted at in that way before, never seen how extraordinarily ugly a person can be when they are angry. She had been frightened for a moment, a little dizzy from the sheer unpleasantness of it but when their eyes did meet there was a distance between them that neither of them would ever cross and she felt an immediate pang of nostalgia, not for him, but for an idea she had about her own life, some understanding she had suddenly outgrown."

On the vitality of sexual attraction : 'Her smile told him everything important he needed to know about her: she was as much without darkness as any human being he'd ever known. Her charm made men of all ages want to be her friend, as well as put a hand on her thigh'

On knowing another person, and truly knowing : 'He had given up trying to understand her, for unless you had grown up beside a person from the very beginning, breathing the same air, then there was too much about that life you'd never be able to explain. You had to love as an act of faith and uncomprehendingly, like a sleepwalker moving in the dark but with an innate sense of knowing you were right'

Spoilers

The Oxygen theme reappears throughout the book and it would be churlish to spoil the reader's own conclusions as to the linkage as Alice's increasing dependency on her oxygen bottle is paralleled with the trapped miners in Laszlo's play; and there are pills brought across from America and as they pass through various hands building tension as to who might use them and how ; or to suggest an answer to the conundrum posed on the deathbed when Alice in extremis denounces Alec with her final mortal thought, en francais, 'menteur!' (or 'traitor')

And there is a rogue pistol that sustains tension throughout the volatile scenes set in bohemian quarters of Paris where the friends of Laszlo prove, like him, unstable and with little sense of self-worth, but the opportunity for a final epiphany :
'In his hand he held the thread that ran through the labyrinth he only had to follow it'

Truly, a mesmerising experience reading this wonderful novel.