David Miller's first novel, Today, is published by Atlantic Books.
Loss and Grief
It still surprises me that I have written Today, as I long ago put away any thoughts I might be a writer. I became a literary agent instead, helping writers attain the audience their books deserve, and working with authors used up what creativity I had. But when my father died, three years ago, I found myself reading about death, and - suddenly - writing fiction. My book is set over three days in August 1924 and centres on the reactions of a family who have lost the head of the house, and the reactions of friends and servants. Writing it allowed me to explore my grief in imagining it in others. The book has some laughs, as life goes on - something all the books I've selected share - the sense that nothing is ever really over.
David Miller, February 2011
1. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Greene’s 1951 novel is the supreme elegy to a lost love affair and also to the grief felt for a loved one. Recounting the relationship Bendrix, a novelist, has with a married woman Sarah during the war, based on a relationship Greene himself had. Tennyson wrote “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” You sometimes wonder if Greene agreed.
2. Elegies by Douglas Dunn
This collection won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1985, a moving and intensely observed work written after the death of his first wife in 1981. “We went to Leeds for a second opinion” begins one poem, which ends with the poet being comforted by the doctor – all Dunn can see is the medic’s wedding ring.
3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Joan Didion’s account of her grief after the death of her husband, the author John Gregory Dunne, in 2003 is a mesmerising portrayal of shock and loneliness. The distant, almost off hand manner in which Didion recounts her grief and attempts to understand her condition make this a classic book to give to anyone who has lost someone. The fact that, when writing the book, Didion’s daughter also died makes the book doubly devastating.
4. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Perhaps not an obvious choice. Ford’s masterpiece isn’t usually seen as being about loss or grief, but reading it again last year made me view it in a different way. Usually seen as a tale of adultery and deception, it is also one in which lost lust looms as much as anything else. John Dowell, the narrator, examines what was shattered when his wife fell for a man with whom he himself is awestruck, especially as the dead bodies pile up and Dowell is left with little around him.
5. Last Orders by Graham Swift
Swift’s Booker winner is told from the different viewpoints of a group of old friends, veterans of the Second World War who gather to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodd, one of their pub friends, in Margate. In the telling of the story of the trip to Margate, small revelations are made about their relationships to devastating effect.
6. A Grief Observed by C S Lewis
The other classic book on grief, written by Lewis shortly after the death of his American wife in 1960. It was first published under a different name and only reissused as being by Lewis after his death in 1963. It’s a short book, quietly angry and suffused with Lewis’ faith but even for a non-believer its account of Lewis frequent despair is incredibly moving.
7. The Gathering by Anne Enright
The Booker obviously enjoys books about death and funerals. Less than a decade after Graham Swift bagged it for the book mentioned above, Anne Enright won with a different tale, also ostensibly bleak – a Dublin housewife Veronica Hegerty sets out to bring back from Brighton to Dublin the body of one of her brothers, who has killed himself – but it is so subtle in its observation, its language and its purpose the reader is ultimately left alert to the possibilities of life and love.
8. The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot by Angus Wilson
Angus Wilson is so oddly under-valued these days. There was a brief moment in 1992 when all his works were reissued, but he has faded again, which is a shame as some of his work is superb, especially this novel. Meg Eliot is married to a Bill Eliot barrister. They live a comfortable, monied life until – on a trip abroad – she is shockingly widowed and has to put her life back together again, and in doing so comes to see her husband wasn’t quite what he seemed. The scene when Bill Eliot is shot during a stopover in a toilet in Karachi airport shows you where Ian McEwan learned a few things.
9. Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
Why have I chosen this and not his recent Nothing to be Frightened About, or his stories Pulse? Because Flaubert's Parrot is the first book by Barnes I read and it is so drenched in death, dressed up. The book is told by a doctor whose wife has committed suicide (something that happened in Madame Bovary). All he can do to try to explain this to himself is entomb himself in a search for Flaubert, a search for meaning in literature. I suppose it’s slightly like what I did in writing Today.
10. The Next Big Thing by Anita Brookner
Don’t be fooled by the title – the next big thing is death, and Brookner’s story is about a retired shopkeeper analysing his life and what is left of it, and fussing about the lives of those around him. It may not be her best novel, but it is told with her customary lucid, smooth prose – a book that lingers on the loss and lost opportunities of a man’s life. Brooker once wrote “death is only a small interruption.”
Thursday, 24 February, 2011
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