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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
shattered pieces, November 28, 2005
This novel is about being human as it focuses on brokeness. A photojournalist that has witnessed the horror of Central Africa returns to Scotland. Although making sense of things would be futile, nonetheless our character attempts to achieve a piece of mind by making trips to Belgium, Toronto, and the northern UK by connecting with individuals. As he makes his journeys he falls into not 'dead ends', but 'detours' that allows him to come across others that also have their stories to tell. While reading it, I would observe others around me in the city at cafes or on the city train acknowledging that we all have a ubique story to tell. The novel is about a character who is very real and desires goodness after seeing evil. READ THE BOOK!!!
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Journey into the heart of darkness, April 27, 2005
The Optimists is a remarkable, essential novel - but it does take a brave reader as well as a brave writer to follow the book's journey and to engage with such dark and troubling themes. The story concerns Clem Glass (names have an almost mythic significance throughout this novel) a photojournalist who has witnessed a genocide of obscene proportions in an unnamed African township. The novel is not about the massacre itself - though there are fragments of description of it - but about the aftermath, Clem's attempts at coping and some sort of recovery. Arguably, the novel's premise provides a way of exploring recovery from any form of intense and shocking grief, charting as it does the stages - denial, apathy, anger and so on - that are well-documented in any account of bereavement.
Clem, like many of us without the protection of an unshakable set of religious beliefs, must find a way to go on living while shaken to the core by what he's seen. The novel quietly explores and, for the most part dismisses, some of the possibilities on offer - separatism from the world as personified by Clem's father and his life in a religious order; acts of charity as pursued by Clem's former colleague Silverman. Clem's own solution revolves around his extended family, specifically from acts of kindness while caring for his sister, Clare, an art historian who is suffering from a breakdown. The siblings retreat to the landscape of their childhood, to an everyday existence of strawberry jam and haircuts, which provides a gentle respite from their damaged lives. At the end of the novel, Clem attempts to confront the man responsible for the massacre, a way of staring deep into the devil's eyes - though Miller, to his considerable credit, does not present this as an easy resolution to Clem, but instead takes us through a series of stranger and more jolting realisations.
In outline this novel may it sound like a philosophical treatise, but it was one of the most emotionally affecting novels I've read for a long time. In spite of its bleakness, in spite of the way it forces the reader to confront when they would far rather pull back, there is always hope running through its pages, always a sense that recovery can and will happen, but uncompromisingly, realistically, a thoughtful and intelligent optimism rather than the oblivious joy of fools. Time and again when I was reading I was struck by the way fiction is a more powerful medium than television or film in exploring emotional experience in close focus - the images in one's head are not only more horrific, but once conjured seemingly impossible to escape from. Like Clem Glass, I simply couldn't make the pictures go away.
As in all Miller's novels the writing is immaculate, resonant and beautiful. His use of imagery is as poetic and precise as ever, and is all the more striking for being used more sparsely here than in the lush world of Ingenious Pain or Casanova. His ability to evoke a very English sort of family life, or to capture the sense of a place in a few phrases is unrivalled. He is undoubtedly one of the best writers of his generation.
I know The Optimists has made me see the world differently, which is the mark of any worthwhile book.. I loved this novel in spite of all the tears and nightmares it brought me.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Too much sorrow makes a heart like a stone.", April 10, 2005
Clem is a photographer, a maker of images. The horrors he witnesses in an African village are burned into his mind, indelible, so that even when he returns to London, he cannot erase such visions from memory. He walks in shadows, avoiding, unable to connect to anything or anyone, suspended in his discomfort without relief. Certainly, he's photographed tragedy before, in Desert Storm and other distant places, but this recent genocidal massacre has strangled his perspective.
When Clem's sister, Clara, suffers a recurrence of her old "trouble", one that has not surfaced in twenty years, Clem instinctively understands that he is in no condition to help anyone else, that "his heart had locked fast the night he had straddled the dead with his lenses." After a short visit to the sanatorium, he impulsively flies to Canada to meet with a fellow journalist, Frank Sullivan, the older man who shared his experiences in Africa. Other than communicating a similar struggle over what they have witnessed, the visit fails to resolve Clem's dilemma.
Clem returns to Scotland to remove his sister from the facility where she is being treated, taking her instead to live for a time in a familiar childhood place, the country home of their aunt with a small cottage where they can stay. The time spent with the depressed Clare is a lesson in the complexities of brother/sister relationships, the love that ameliorates their days, Clem reaching into a distant place to find the strength to help his sister in her personal anguish. After his own recent emotional devastation, this is an act of extraordinary generosity, an attempt to reach out to another equally in pain.
Miller's prose is luminous, his descriptions of place so fine that the sights take shape, the perplexed photojournalist as familiar as a dear friend or close relative, his psychological conundrum made real and imaginable. The author views all with a practiced eye, noticing subtle details others might overlook, the outrage of genocide, the shock of returning to a city mired in the comfort of daily routine, the desperate urge to make right terrible wrongs. The novel is profound in its simplicity and directness, the attempt to help Clare achieve serenity contrasted with Clem's ambivalence and occasional violent urges, a need to purge the outrage of injustice that fills him with disquiet. Brother and sister are guided blindly toward recovery, reaching for normalcy and a quieting of their personal demons.
The plot is brilliant, contrasting the senseless massacre with the somnolent Somerset countryside, where Clare's mind is beset with its own indefinable shadows, leaving her as shattered in her ordered life as Clem in his pursuit of justification for the world's random carelessness. At the core is Clem's moral dilemma. If the monster who engineered the massacre is captured, what will the photographer do, how will he confront the loss of objectivity that has overtaken him since his return from Africa?
Pushed from the quasi-safety of the sheltered days nurturing his sister to the real possibility of a contretemps with the engineer of death, Clem is confronted with the difficult choices of a man undone by atrocity, realizing that healing is possible, if not forgiveness. Tested to the depths of his soul, Clem wrestles with the resolution of past and present. In an astonishing denouement, the man with a compassionate, if damaged heart confronts the brutal reality of evil, his actions defining a future with the faint promise of hope. Luan Gaines/2005.
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