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Sunday, May 14, 2017

Ingenious Pain

One of the best books I read recently was a novel simply titled Pure,  a historical fiction novel about a young engineer who is given the daunting task of clearing the Les Innocents Cemetery.
As I read it, I gradually fell in love with its story, characters and vivid depiction of France, a few years before the revolution. I vowed to seek out more novels by the author, Andrew Miller and eventually, I decided to go back to the beginning and make my next Miller-novel; the first one that the author got published, way back in 1997: Ingenious Pain.

Set primarily in England during the 18th century, Ingenious Pain is the story of James Dyer, who is born without the ability to feel any physical pain: Break his kneecap, tear his nails out, whatever you do, James won't feel it. In addition, he's also been blessed with a rather remarkable healing-factor. The down-side to all this is that James Dyer is also completely lacking in any sort of empathy for others. As such, he's not exactly overcome with grief when he looses his entire family to smallpox at a young age. Thus, young Dyer sets out into the World, the first step on his journey sees him becoming the assistant to the fraud Mr. Gummer, who uses the boy to demonstrate the efficiency of his healing tonics. Soon, James is 'rescued' from Gummer by Mr. Canning, a wealthy eccentric who collects so-called human oddities. In Canning's home, James acquires knowledge by reading the books in his host's library and is acquainted with some of the other 'items' in Canning's collection; a pair of Siamese twins and a real-life mermaid.

Eventually, James is re-united with Gummer and leaves Canning. From there on, the two soon find themselves aboard a man-of-war, where James becomes the assistant to the ship's surgeon and discovers that he possesses a genius for surgery; his utter lack of compassion for his patients actually being an asset in this case, allowing him to perform complex operations without the fear of failure. James Dyer's journey eventually sees him as the participant in a race among doctors, all the way to Russia. Catherine the Great wishes to be inoculated against smallpox by an English doctor and whoever reaches St. Petersburg first, gets the honor and of course, James is determined that it shall be his.

I came into Ingenious Pain with some expectations, and all I can say is that those expectations were more than fulfilled. Considering that this was Miller's first published novel, one would perhaps think that his prose would not be on par with that of Pure, one of his later works. Well, one would be mistaken. In fact, if I hadn't been aware going in that this was his debut, I doubt I would've been able to tell: As with Pure, the prose in Ingenious Pain is incredibly evocative. Miller truly has a gift for bringing the 18th century to life, both the filth and superstition, as well as the forward-thinking and progress that characterized this time-period. There are some notable differences between Ingenious Pain and Pure though, and I'm not just talking about the respective country each novel is (mostly) set in, or the nature of its protagonists, but other stuff as well:

First of all, Ingenious Pain covers a much larger time-period, chronicling its protagonist's life from birth to death. Secondly, it begins at the very end, with James already lying dead while his friend, rev. Lestrade watches as his corpse is being dissected. The narrative than jumps back to one year before Dyer's death, before finally taking a gigantic leap backwards in time, to the time and place of his conception (we learn here that he's the unfortunate by-product of his mother being raped while ice-skating).
As such, the reader already knows how James' story concludes, but as it is with a lot of things, its the journey that's the interesting part not the destination and this is a journey that's well worth embarking on. As a travelling companion, James Dyer is not the most sympathetic fellow, but he is always interesting.

All in all, Ingenious Pain is an outstanding novel that continues to establish Andrew Miller as one of my favorite living authors. Highly recommended.


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