The Optimists

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'ANDREW MILLER'S WRITING IS A SOURCE OF WONDER AND DELIGHT' Hilary Mantel

'ONE OF OUR MOST SKILFUL CHRONICLERS OF THE HUMAN HEART AND MIND' Sunday Times

'Exceptional'
Sunday Times

'Powerful and lively'
Financial Times

'A delight'
Time Out

The extraordinary fourth novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of Oxygen

In a world where people slaughter the innocent without mercy or retribution, how can we have faith in humanity, or the future?

Clem Glass, a photojournalist, returns from Africa to London convinced there is no hope for mankind. Yet after his sister falls ill and he takes her back to the West Country of their childhood, he cannot ignore the decency and kindness he encounters, or the pulse of goodness in his own heart. When news comes offering Clem the chance to confront the author of his nightmares, he must choose what sort of man to be.


PRAISE FOR ANDREW MILLER

'Unique, visionary, a master at unmasking humanity'
Sarah Hall

'A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts'
Independent on Sunday

'A highly intelligent writer, both exciting and contemplative'
The Times

'A wonderful storyteller'
Spectator

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Clem Glass is understandably a little disoriented. He's returned to London after photographically documenting African genocide. When his older sister Claire suffers a relapse of her mental illness, Clem first runs to Canada to avoid involvement, but, shamed by a fellow photojournalist who cares for a group of refugees, eventually returns to care for her. Their idyllic routine in Somerset proves mutually therapeutic but ends when Clem realizes that the man responsible for the genocide is hiding out just across the channel in Brussels. The Optimists is a quiet meditation on responsibility and the accountability for evil, which may remind listeners of Graham Greene, especially given Gordon Griffin's understated, very British narration. Greene, however, usually took care to involve the listener, with more action underlying his philosophical musings than Miller provides. The book takes forever to get started and to make its points; listeners may have long since lost interest. Recommended only for large collections.-John Hiett, Iowa City P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A powerful study of emotional trauma, English writer Miller's third novel (after Ingenious Pain and Oxygen) probes the horrors of genocide as well as what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." Clem Glass is a veteran photojournalist who thought he was inured to man's inhumanity to man until he witnessed the aftermath of a genocidal massacre in Africa. Unable to wipe the images of murdered women and children from his mind, Clem wanders distraught around London. When his older sister, Clare, a professor in Dundee, has a recurrence of the mental breakdown she suffered some years earlier, Andrew is at first unable to deal with any additional emotional problems. Instead, he flees to Canada to consult a colleague, a journalist who also witnessed the massacre and found solace in caring for society's outcasts. Eventually, Clem takes responsibility for his sister and nurses her back to health. When he finally confronts the man responsible for the slaughter in Africa, he realizes it's impossible to exact revenge for an act of such cosmic evil. He himself must hit emotional rock bottom before he achieves a tentative optimism and reaffirms his faith in life. Miller's story is starkly illustrative of the wide range of human behavior in the so-called civilized world. The guardedly positive ending reveals the irony in the book's title; only "a small, stubborn belief" can be wrested from the circumstances of modern life. (Apr. 5) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

For photojournalist Clem Glass, the camera captures truth and beauty--but also pain. After witnessing the aftermath of a massacre while on assignment in Africa, the 40-year-old Londoner can't get his life back on track. Glass isn't the only member of his family in a precarious state. His older sister, Clare, has lapsed into mental illness after a two-decade reprieve, and his father has fled civilization for an eerie Scottish retreat. Numb even to the pleasures of love and sex, Glass finds solace as a caregiver to his sister. Miller, the author of Oxygen (2002), renders potent, polished prose. Here, Glass revisits his photograph of a young girl in the wake of violence: Ten years old, bandaged, graceful as a blade of grass. The daughter of murdered parents, the friend of murdered children. She returned the camera's stare with a gaze of the quietest imaginable outrage. Alas, the plot loses its punch near the end, finishing with a nebulous conclusion that lacks both nuance and nerve. --Allison Block Copyright 2005 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Booker- and Whitbread-shortlisted Miller (Oxygen, 2002, etc.) follows the shell-shocked wanderings of a British photographer haunted by an African massacre. Clem Glass has returned to London, not even daring to develop the negatives of the photos he snapped at the church in N--, where hundreds of men, women, and children were hacked to pieces on the orders of a man named Sylvestre Ruzinanda. (An Author's Note acknowledges the incident is based on an actual one in Rwanda.) He's drinking heavily, going to mindless movies, afraid to be alone with his thoughts when his father phones to say that Clem's older sister, Clare, has had a nervous breakdown, similar to one she suffered 25 years ago as a college student. There's some mysterious distance between Clare and their father, who's retreated to a monastery since the death of his wife, a politically active socialist lawyer. At first Clem can't deal with her either, but he finally takes Clare from the sanitarium to a Somerset cottage they vacationed in as children. She begins tentatively to improve, even as sensitively rendered interactions with the siblings' cousins and aunt (it's her cottage) suggest that no one in their extended family is without emotional wounds. Clem remains obsessed with the massacre at N--, particularly after reading the written account handed him by his fellow eyewitness, journalist Frank Silverman. When he learns that Ruzinanda has surfaced in Brussels, Clem hops the next plane for the book's curiously irresolute climactic section, in which he confronts the killer and is challenged by a young woman (related in some way to Ruzinanda) who reminds him of Europeans' genocidal activities in Africa. As in his previous three outings, Miller subtly limns the characters' anxieties and anomie, creating a palpable atmosphere of tension and moral dread. But we long for a finale more definitive than a nearly irrelevant wedding and Clem's bizarre confession to a crime that never occurred. Beautifully written, astutely observed, and as maddeningly inconclusive as life itself. Miller remains a gifted, thoughtful writer in search of stronger plot lines. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.