At the beginning of Andrew Miller’s ninth novel, a letter arrives. The narrator, a 51-year-old recovering alcoholic named Stephen Rose, is being summoned to Belfast from his home in Somerset by a body known as the Commission. The letter assures Stephen that this is not about bringing anyone to trial, but giving those involved in an incident that took place 30 years ago an opportunity to tell their side of the story. In short, the past is being dragged into the light. We know something terrible happened during Stephen’s service with the British army in Northern Ireland as a young man; the promise of learning the grisly details is what entices us through this sombre examination of shame, guilt and the long aftershocks of trauma.
Set in 2011, The Slowworm’s Song takes the form of a lengthy confessional letter that Stephen is writing to his 26-year-old daughter Maggie. While inching up to the tragic event that has blackened his life and led him to ruinous drinking, we hear about Stephen’s past and present. He works at a garden store named Plant World and fitfully studies English literature on an Open University course. He comes from a family of Quakers and is semi-estranged from Maggie and her mother Evie. At the tail-end of an adolescence marked by alienation and aggression, he enlisted for the army; his father, a devout Quaker, was startled, but quickly became supportive of his son’s choice.
Stephen recounts his army training, notably his introduction to the SLR: primary weapon of the British infantry soldier, the self-loading rifle was nicknamed the ‘“paddywhacker” and used during the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 unarmed citizens in Derry (that atrocity, and the subsequent Saville inquiry to establish what exactly took place during “15 minutes of mayhem” in 1972, run throughout The Slowworm’s Song as a parallel to the novel’s fictitious outrage). Stephen’s company is at first stationed in Germany, where the young soldiers are trained to take out tanks as the first line of defence against a Soviet invasion (“the Red Hordes pouring westward – sounds fanciful now, part of Cold War propaganda”. Well…) Then the order comes: they are heading to Belfast.
These sections detailing Stephen’s army life, and particularly those covering his tour of duty in Belfast, are excellent: immersive in their detail and atmosphere. During a tense patrol through the city’s Catholic enclaves, a woman on the street exposes Stephen to “a passionate hating I’d never come across before”. After his service is cut short by the incident around which the novel circles, Stephen returns to England and moves into a squat in Bristol with some weed-dealing hippies. There he meets Evie, the future mother of his child. When they live together as a couple she asks him repeatedly what it is, “this thing that would not let me be, that in different ways frightened us both”. Stephen bottles it up and hits the bottle. There follows a “drunk’s tour” of Europe and much self-destruction before he eventually returns to Somerset, goes into therapy and joins a 12-step programme.
The novel feels rudderless after the traumatic event is finally recounted, but gets back on track when the Commission renews its efforts to persuade Stephen to attend a special hearing. His expectation that he will be publicly shamed unhinges Stephen and his addiction rears up again. As far as what we might call Troublesome fiction goes, The Slowworm’s Song is the first novel I’ve encountered that assumes such a highly loaded perspective. Andrew Miller – a much-awarded writer stepping out of his comfort zone of omnisciently narrated historical fiction – has sufficient decorum, talent and sensitivity to do justice to his delicate subject matter. Stephen endures excruciating torments and a lifetime of bad nights, but the past remains the past: “It cannot be made less and it cannot be made safe and it cannot be hidden and it cannot be forgotten.”
Rob Doyle’s latest book, Autobibliography, is out now
• The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
