Alice valentine is dying, but not before a last birthday is due, and under the circumstances she wants her family around for the occasion. That means sons Larry and Alec. No problem for Alec, he is single, works as a freelance translator, and has already moved into the West Country family home to support his mother. For Larry, ex tennis star and latterly soap actor, it means a return from the US where he lives uneasily with second wife, Kirsty, and kleptomaniac six-year-old daughter, Ella.
Meanwhile in Paris, playwright Laszlo Lazar, Hungarian exile since the 1956 uprising, is hosting a small dinner party. Guests are his live-in secretary Kurt Engelbrecht, an artistic American couple, and a fellow eastern European émigré.
The two narratives move forward - the Valentines’ painful reunion and Laszlo’s party and aftermath. The connection between the two is tenuous – Alec Valentine’s latest commission is to translate Lazar’s new play ‘Oxygene’. But (no spoiler, there is nothing to spoil) the expected collision of the two strands never happens. What commonality there is concerns the emotional states of the key characters. Loss of purpose, regret for past action (or inaction), timidity to grasp opportunity, to name but a few.
Lives are laid bare by Miller’s precise nuance-filled prose, so that by the end the reader knows these people well; and as each is challenged afresh, has a good idea how they will respond this time.
A quietly intense
piece of writing that draws you in and keeps you interested to the end.
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