Ingenious Pain (1997)

There's a great idea behind this book and Andrew's background (his father was a doctor, while he studied 18th century Eng. Lit. at Uni) meant he was very well qualified to write it. On the whole, this story of a freakish man unable to feel pain, works very well. You do feel you're in the times and you face the extraordinary situation James Dyer, the central character, is in. Anyone who had read and enjoyed Perfume by Patrick Süskind would have got a kick out of this, too; though its plot is not as strong.

I have one serious quibble, which makes me distrust the awards system by which this book was given two very valuable prizes. The bulk of the book is written in present tenses, which gives it a post-modernist feel and jars somewhat with the historical setting. Added to that, though, comes a chapter written in convention style - an epistle, moreover - which (incidentally) to me is the best written part. However, there is no attempt to fit these shifts of tense into the narrative, which I consider to be a flaw. I understand librarians were responsible for the most valuable of the prizes won (the IMPAC), and they should know what the reading public like. However, it also won the James Tait Black Memorial Award; which, given how it is slightly flawed, I don't think it deserved.

Anyhow, it just goes to show how insincere and corrupt the book world is. It was great for Andrew, he was suddenly living on Cloud Nine after that momentous year. I wouldn't want to take his success away from him; if pop stars can make it like that, why not writers? But such grapes do taste sour. Put it like this, if I were an athlete and I saw people in front of me who I knew were on steroids, I think I'd have pretty much the same taste in my mouth.

Literature on steroids is this: agents, publishers, booksellers, critics and book trade journalists get together to push a small number of writers. They do this to maximise sales through a practice familiar to all marketeers: brand/product placement. As if to acknowledge this, but really to take it to another level, Andrew and his mates organised workshops through the Guardian newspaper to show aspiring writers how to work the system! After creaming another two hundred quid off each of the eager punters, and with his face having appeared in the newspaper every day for three months, he only goes and scoops yet another prize for his latest historical offering! ("Pure" - which netted 25 grand in the Walter Scott Award). ( )

"And did you get what you wanted from this life,even so. I did.
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on earth" - Raymond Carver.

I have to agree with a few other people and say that it's a combo of historical fiction and fantasy. The ending was a bit sudden and disappointing, but overall I enjoyed it. Lyrical and sometimes grim. ( )

Miller's first novel, offers the life of James Dyer, a man born without the ability to feel pain, who dies having recovered the sense of pain and pleasure and relived the sufferings of his earlier life. Miller inhabits the eighteenth century easily, never striking an uneasy note with his descriptions of the time, places and people - which roots the fantastical tale at its heart in a very earthy reality. The descriptions and characterisation are detailed, physical and rooted - down to the passing servant or letter writing sailor. The structure of different narrative voices and the cycle of Dyer's life are rich and varied, preserving the uncanny mystery at the heart of the novel, just as the skunk is preserved in tobacco leaves. Miller obliquely tells us about love, pain and loss through the narrative, death and rebirth, freakishness and normality - leaving the reader room to think and to imagine. A compelling first book.

There is an astonishing and luminescent opening - a post-mortem carried out in the stable of a Devonian rectory in 1772 - to this hidden masterpiece. Ingenious Pain tells the life story of surgeon James Dyer, beginning with an examination of his corpse. The novel is an exploration of the idea that pain is necessary for us to express our humanity. Throughout his life Dyer has been unable to feel either physical or emotional pain. The book is full of rich historical detail and, at times, reminded me somewhat of Angela Carter's rollicking sensuous stories in Nights At The Circus. I think this is a very impressive debut, one that is perhaps going to be hard to top. ( )

I feel taken back to a time in the distant past that I obviously don’t know, 1772, which seems elemental yet familiar with the Reverend Lestrade seeming to be quite contemporary in the way he thinks – for it is through his (third person) eyes that we first view events. The ghoulish butchery of James’ dead body is seen through the reverend’s eyes and his disgust mirrors our own and makes the reader side with him. Perhaps the way he’s always called the reverend rather than Lestrade or by his first name also engenders some respect and liking for this character as well as reminding us of his position in society as a provileged although rather poor member of the gentry, one who can go hunting the hare and who has to provide a tithe meal annually to the farmers who support him but also one who has little more than a cottage garden and who is always bested by his sister Dido in an argument and also a person who ‘versifies’, that has written between 100 and 200 sonnets to his benefactor without letting anyone know of his secret love for her. In fact, he is shown to be a very human sort of man, one who sees the attractions of the flesh, thinking he would like to curl around the plain Tabitha and who has trouble straining on his ‘close-stool’. I think Miller has made the Reverend a very human gateway into the world of nearly two and a half centuries ago in what must be England with its descriptions of the bitterness of the cold nights so that the departing farmers imagine themselves “tramping through still, dark fields like the first or last men on earth” when they have to get back into their subsistance/draining/taking away all their energy and reason for living existence the next morning.

This is rather gloomy and I suppose the opening is even gloomier as the novel starts with the ugly post-mortem on James so we seem to enter the book at the end although in the next chapter we step back only one year to find James to be only about 32 but whose hair has turned grey and we are left to wonder at what has happened to him. He apparently used to be a fine doctor but now can’t hold a knife steady enough to bleed the Reverend and he has a limp from when he fell out of a cherry tree which mended itself but which has now unmended itself. It appears that we will find out his past from the series of “anecdotes for a child” as he is of “bawling a stream of fearful, undigested revelations” to someone. Here Miller is clearly setting up his narrative hook, one he deepens by having the Reverend sorry that James is not more interested in his sister Dido (who is clearly interested in James with her ‘strange excited laugh’ at the thought of being bled by James as James seems more interested in the mysterious Mary, someone the Reverend thinks he will be told to send away by his superiors. She is made to seem witch-like, not just because of her dramatically revealed pointed teeth which come as more of a surprise as these weren’t mentioned at all when we first come across her but more because of the way the reverend remembers her seeming to do something to an unconscious James, passing her hand through his chest without wounding him. The relationship between James and Mary seems very close, seen not just in Mary’s watch over James’ dead body but in the Reverend’s wondering about whether James has a carnal relationship with her – somehow it seems not, more a mystical one, one of shared understandings, if not experiences.

What I like about the novel is the real sense of this era that Miller evokes. He must have researched it but this research is not obvious – there are no lengthy descriptions of artefacts of the period for example – things are just referred to in passing so that it all seems natural and unforced. I also like the way the book begins with us inside the reverend’s head and then we gradually but slowly find out thins from James’ point of view, beginning on page 27 when he is trying to think of excuses not to bleed the brother and sister. This is the book opening up, giving us two viewpoints and greater depth. Not being inside Mary’s mind retains the mystery while not being inside Dido’s does not matter as we can see her as the lonely spinster that she is from the way her brother thinks so warmly and protectively about ehr even if she is quite biting with him at times.

The strangeness continues with James’ not feeling any pain and also healing so very quickly though it’s less strange against the 18th century background when readers get a sense of a murkier past, a time well before the discovery of electricity. Strangeness comes too in the areas which are not fantasy such as Gummer, presumably James’ father, returning and then James abandoning his blind sister to find his father even though he is not aware that this man is.

I think the theme of the book is broached when someone asks him if he can feel pleasure and he has to think about it and then realises that it’s a distant shore that he can’t make. On the other hand when he’s thinking about his dead mother he finds his face feels wet and when he tastes the moisture it’s salty – indicating pretty clearly that he’s been crying even though he’s unaware of it. Miller seems to be suggesting then that there is at least incipient or unconscious feelings going on.

Is the strangeness just for the sake of it, to intrigue the reader and help the plot or does it have more of a purpose. So, the man with the green eyes – was it necessary for him to have green eyes or was it just another sinister element to make us wonder about the motives of this man, just as we wonder, along with James, whether he is guest or prisoner in the house. When we discover the green-eyed man collects physical freaks, we feel uneasy, especially when we hear the twins, Ann and Anna will be separated, a procedure fraught with danger in today’s high tech world and impossible back then – and did they have anaesthetics then too?

Having finished the novel I feel its power comes from the genial, peace loving, sensitive, thwarted and kind Lestrade whose humanity connects the reader to what happens. His wavering faith, love of the married Lady Hallam, care of his sister and sympathy for both James and the non-Christian Mary and the tump, a heathen sacred site make him really quite a modern man but in his limited means and continual thoughts about his health and his occupation we find him a convincing 18th man of the cloth.

I don’t think the fantasy element takes away the credibility of the novel. The reader willingly suspends his disbelief partly because Miller so effortlessly evokes the times, partly because of the theme that emotion is more important than reason and partly because of the characterisation, all the characters coming to life in a credible way.

James Dyer (deliberate naming to remind us of his death before the book has even started to recall his life story) is not devoid of feeling before Mary massages his heart into a more feeling instrument. In fact, coming to think about it, perhaps the way James opens the chest of the negro and gives his heart the natural rhythms it needs is meant to be a physical echo of the way Mary has given his heart the sort of natural feelings it needs. The way she smiles at his death is also a way of telling us that James is fulfilled. Pain has helped him to find the happiness and love that his reason denied him. We have seen his salty tears thinking of his mother.

I also like the structure of the book. There are so many ways of telling it – letters – and even the interplay of these is interesting, warm, grateful ones to Lady Hallam are followed by blunter ones on the same subject to Dido, his sister. Then we move in and out of letters, straight narrative, but all the time forging ahead chronologically once the novel has got under way, the lack of chronology at the start adding to its interest. ( )

A couple of things really struck me as being different when I began to read Ingenious Pain. The first was that it is written in third person and present tense. Coupled with dialogue that is measured and somewhat poetic, I sometimes felt as if I were reading the stage directions and lines of a play, which was a new experience for me, as I have never read a book like this one before. The other thing I noticed was that this book begins by working backwards; first we see James Dyer as a corpse, second as an adult, and third as a baby, and Miller begins to tell Dyer’s story from there. In the early chapters of the book, Miller gives out snippets of information about Dyer, as well as setting the scene of the place where he ends his existence, which gets the mind of the reader thinking about what sort of a life Dyer could have lived.

The thing I found most amazing about this book, in more ways than one, was the style of writing, and how it changed the experience of reading the book. Throughout Ingenious Pain, Miller maintains a practised and proper style, broken by the occasional crude, out of place word like ‘guts.’ The first time one of these words came up, I had to re-read the paragraph to make sure I hadn’t read it wrong. In actuality, this writing style creates the perfect eighteenth-century, Georgian atmosphere, where the people must be prim and proper to the very powder on their wigs, but all this conceals the fact that none of them bother to bathe or wash their hands, and behind the pretty wallpaper, diseased rats crawl.

Because this book is written from the perspective of James Dyer, Miller describes pain with a brutal indifference for the majority of the novel, giving readers an extremely thought-provoking insight into pain as something that enslaves people, that becomes the obsession of a person’s whole life when it is present. Ingenious Pain carries a powerful message about the very nature of suffering, and what it means to be human.

Not exciting or ‘unputdownable’ but well-written and thought-provoking, Ingenious Pain strikes me as the kind of book that English teachers would love to analyse with their classes. Recommended for those who love to think and speculate.

I picked up this book in Paris, at Shakespeare & Company, by the Seine. Why is that an important part of my review? Because I think it influenced my decision to buy it, having been to Paris and wanting to take a keepsake from the bookstore.

Why did I decide to buy THIS book?
The reviews on the back of the book were stellar, from a wide range of sources and I found the concept of "a man who can't feel pain" - a doctor, no less - a compelling purchase.

The first chapter had me hooked (two doctors cutting into a corpse to find his cause of death), followed by chapter two (a year earlier, when the man is still alive); but from that point on next to nothing happens that actually moves the story forward. Lots of day-to-day 1700's things, some insightful moments in the narrator's voice, but overall, frustrating.

I skipped a page and found it didn't affect the plot at all. I read a bit more, then skimmed, reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. I did this for several chapters and found the plot not remotely affected, nor the characters changed in the slightest.

At that point, I quit.

I gave the author, Andrew Miller, 1 star for completing his first novel and another star for getting it published. He gets 1/2 a start for a compelling concept. That's it. Maybe his next two books are better. Odds are I'll never look into it. ( )

3760. Ingenious Pain A Novel, by Andrew Miller (read June 17 2003) This is the winner of the 1997 James Tait Black Memorial fiction award. It is laid in the 18th century in England and its central character did not talk till he was 11 and did not feel pain till a few years before he died. If there is any truth in the story I do not know it, though it does tell of doctors racing to St. Petersburg to inoculate Catherine the Great against smallpox--which is I think historical to some extent. The book is written with some elegance, though the author is unfamiliar with the word defecate and so there is crude language and also an excessively graphic sex scene. On balance the book has a certain grace in looking back on it, though the account of the central character in the insane asylum did not entrance. I did not find the book fun to read. ( )

Tells the story of James Dyer, born in 18th century rural England, who is unable to feel pain. Exploited first by a travelling showman, then by the doctor who rescues him, he becomes a successful if unlikeable doctor, apparently lacking a soul. The story is interesting and well told, but ultimately seemed to me as empty as the main character. Not to mention that someone unable to feel pain would hardly have survived the limited hygeine of the period beyond his earliest years. But that's a quibble. ( )

A brilliant surgeon who is physically incapable of feeling pain or showing emotion. Mid-18th century travel through Europe, closely observed, and an encounter with an old woman who makes him understand what he has been missing.