The slowworm's song

Belfast, 1982, "two people, one red line between them." Award-winning novelist Miller (Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, 2018) opens the story with the arrival of a summons for Stephen Rose to testify at a commission examining events from his time as an ordinary British soldier during the Troubles. Now 51, just getting by, coping with chronic illness and addiction, he dreads revisiting an incident he's repressed for 30 years. Fearful of losing a fragile relationship with his adult daughter, Stephen struggles to write her a letter explaining what happened in Belfast and how his life and family relationships unraveled in the aftermath. Miller slowly unwinds Stephen's story in an internal monologue, the voice perhaps of conscience, of the "inner teacher" of his Quaker upbringing. Miller renders character and setting in immersive, everyday details with highlights of poetic imagery. For example, a pair of corduroy pants have "the look of finely beaten metal, bronze or gold" from long wear. Examining broadly relevant topics--namely the complexity of war, in which the line between innocents and enemies becomes blurred--this is a moving, beautifully written portrait of a legacy of shame, loss, and regret from one traumatic, morally ambiguous moment.

In this meditative if diffuse offering from Miller (Pure), the past comes calling for an ex-soldier whose actions 30 years earlier during the Troubles continue to weigh on him. As a young British infantryman patrolling Belfast in 1982, Stephen Rose was involved in a fatal incident, the specifics of which are murky. Now, a recovering alcoholic working at a plant store in Somerset, he receives a letter requesting he travel to Belfast and give an account of the tragedy for an impartial body known as the "Commission." As he decides whether to comply, he composes a long letter to his estranged, 20-something daughter, Maggie, hoping to reconnect. "If one day you were to look at me as some of the people in that room in Belfast would look at me. Could I survive it?" he asks. The narrative tentatively circles around what happened in 1982, as Stephen recounts being raised by a pacifist father, training for combat, and, in the novel's slackest sections, drying out in rehab centers. The dramatic highlights do not exert quite enough pull to sustain the novel's tension; as Stephen himself reflects, "I'd say it's a fine line between telling old stories and just banging on about the what-was." There's a lot driving this affecting exploration of truth and reconciliation, but it doesn't quite hang together. (Oct.)

When a former soldier in the British Army receives a letter inviting him to testify before a Belfast tribunal about a fatal incident that happened 30 years ago, during his tour of duty in Northern Ireland, the reawakened past threatens to destroy not only his hard-won sobriety, but also his newfound--and equally delicate--reconnection with his adult daughter. Stephen Rose, at the age of 51, has a precarious hold on a quiet existence in Somerset, England. A recovering alcoholic with a wrecked marriage behind him, he is sustained by the reappearance in his life of his daughter, Maggie; by his doctor; and by the unobtrusive support of his Quaker brethren. Stephen knows, however, "how fragile it all is, how we have nothing under our feet, nothing that can be depended on." A letter requesting his appearance before a Belfast tribunal investigating crimes committed during the Troubles reminds him of this, prompting him to begin the epistle to Maggie that constitutes this moving and insightful narrative. "My head is so crammed with the past," he writes, "I sometimes have to hang on to things...to stop myself sliding down into it." Stephen doesn't slide; he plummets back into the memory of a summer day in Belfast in 1982 when a house search by the British Army turned deadly. The novel's evocation of that time and place is cinematically clear, and the narrative revolves around that single dread-filled moment. But Stephen's daily life, in all its middle-aged dreariness and incidental sweetness, is just as sharply drawn, as is his sojourn in the rehab center that sets him on his unsteady feet again and heading back to Belfast. "For a minute or two time circled," he observes of his first night there. "I was a fifty-something-year-old lying in the filtered air of the hotel room, and a twenty-something sprawled post-patrol on the black plastic of an army mattress." This immensely skillful novel suspends the reader, too, in that mysterious midway state. A moving drama of trauma and recovery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.