The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller is not well known in our country, but he is highly regarded in England. His first novel, Ingenious Pain, appeared in 1997, and his latest, The Slowworm’s Song, came out just this year. The story concerns an ordinary man whose life was almost irreparably damaged by his experience as a British soldier in Belfast during The Troubles. Summoned to testify at an inquiry in Belfast some thirty years later, his first concern is that his daughter, Maggie, will reject him forever when she learns what he did there.

The story is narrated by the man, Stephen Rose, a recovering alcoholic, who is living in his deceased father’s house. He was in jail for small time drug dealing when Maggie was born, and when he got out, he didn’t try to join her and her mother. She has only recently tried to get to know him, moving near the small town where he lives to set up a tearoom with her partner, Lorna. He writes a diary/autobiography to try to explain himself to her.

This may sound like desperate stuff, but the novel is really about different kinds of love and forgiveness in daily life, in a completely unsentimental way. There is the love between Stephen and his father, Stephen’s love for Maggie, the love between Maggie and Lorna, and, to a lesser extent, between Stephen and his high school girlfriend, now a friend, and between Stephen and Maggie’s mother. Miller gives Stephen a distinctive voice and character and the writing is vivid. How could a decent young man be involved in an atrocity? How can an army veteran become an alcoholic knowing that he’s ruining his life? We are made to understand these things in a deeply affecting way.