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mojolake's review against another edition
emotional
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
vgk's review against another edition
3.0
Beautiful writing as usual, but I didn't feel that this came together quite as well as (his other book) Oxygen. I struggled a bit more to connect with the characters (which surprised me, as I had more in common with them than the characters in Oxygen), and their development arc didn't seem as natural. I still enjoyed this book, but perhaps not his finest work.
runkefer's review against another edition
3.0
Deals with weighty subjects: guilt, getting back to a "normal" life after major disruption, the personal vs. the political, genocide, etc. The various themes don't necessarily hang together all that well, and the tone of the book is more like a very long short story than a fully-engaging novel. I like Miller's writing, and, while I didn't exactly enjoy the book, I didn't mind reading it. I don't think I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone as a "must-read."
scarpuccia's review against another edition
2.0
I've now read all Andrew Miller's novel and without doubt I saved the worst one to last. The majority of his other novels have been set in past periods of history; this is set in a contemporary world and quite frankly you can see why he is attracted to the distant past because, on this evidence, he doesn't have much of interest to say about the contemporary world. No surprise then his characters here are all engaged in a retreat from the contemporary world. The problem he always has creating an engaging central character is even more on display here than usual too. His characters throughout his novels have a tendency to be emotionally impotent and, more problematic, charmless. Clem Glass is the epitome of the author's constant losing struggle to create a compelling central character.
Clem Glass is a photographer. In Africa he goes on assignment to a church where an atrocity has taken place. The experience traumatises him. Canada gets a cameo when he goes there to speak to the journalist who was with him in the church. He is helping feed homeless people and one gets a glimpse of a better novel and a more engaging character in the endeavours of this friend. But soon Clem is back in London and the plot is laboured when it isn't a little absurd. And it probably has one of the most ridiculous faux dramatic endings I've ever encountered in a novel.
I have a lot of love for Andrew Miller as an author, especially as a sentence writer, but if you're going to read him avoid this one.
Clem Glass is a photographer. In Africa he goes on assignment to a church where an atrocity has taken place. The experience traumatises him. Canada gets a cameo when he goes there to speak to the journalist who was with him in the church. He is helping feed homeless people and one gets a glimpse of a better novel and a more engaging character in the endeavours of this friend. But soon Clem is back in London and the plot is laboured when it isn't a little absurd. And it probably has one of the most ridiculous faux dramatic endings I've ever encountered in a novel.
I have a lot of love for Andrew Miller as an author, especially as a sentence writer, but if you're going to read him avoid this one.
williamc's review
2.0
The leads in the three of Andrew Miller’s novels that I’ve read are plagued with emotional removal. “An Ingenious Pain” focuses on, literally, an unfeeling doctor. His second novel, “Casanova in Love,” is remote and cruel in its treatment of women. “The Optimists,” which I read after its release in 2005 and again now, deals with a man, a photographer who has abandoned his craft – named, with heavy authorial nod, Clem Glass – and who is removed, because of trauma, from his entire world.
Miller’s goal is always the bringing-round rather than the getting-to, and we know Glass as removed from the start. Miller does a good job – perhaps too good – of capturing emotional withdrawal, but the larger problems with “The Optimists” are that the plot feels to be all dread and little story, and that the method of removal this time around is used to questionable purpose.
You could argue that “The Optimists” is not really about Africa, or about the “well documented atrocity in Rwanada in 1994” mentioned in the Author’s Note. You could argue that the genocide only sets in place the events more to our concern, and that we are viewers removed from what could be any tragedy: a European genocide, a Western superpower confronting terrorist attacks, etc. But such a view does injustice to the real and individual tragedies that are glossed over by the approach. That the chosen conflict is still fighting for legitimate attention from Western media, and that Westerners have never been great about differentiating the nations and peoples of the World’s second-largest continent, creates a cloud of discomfort over Miller’s tone that, considering one plot point’s improbable turn, isn’t left behind at novel’s end.
In invoking Africa only as a giant mass and a few moderately drawn figures, Clem’s tragedy is too general, and too much aligned with the Western expectation that most news from Africa – a continent that to us may as well be of any size, really – be tribally affiliated, unspecific in motive or pall, but also as horrific as we can imagine. The difficulty for authors like Miller in exploring this world is that the exploration can seem culturally removed, even colonially paternal, and gruesome for its own sake, as if the tragedies are so expected, so within the realm of our experiential vocabulary, that they could almost be relegated to their own genre of form, sort of like what we’ve done with Holocaust-themed fiction.
All this fuss over what is probably a minor part of the novel suggests to me that the story itself is so withdrawn and generic as to not warrant much discussion. It is a story of removal-from and returning-to comfort and conscience that weighs heavily on the latter.
Miller’s goal is always the bringing-round rather than the getting-to, and we know Glass as removed from the start. Miller does a good job – perhaps too good – of capturing emotional withdrawal, but the larger problems with “The Optimists” are that the plot feels to be all dread and little story, and that the method of removal this time around is used to questionable purpose.
You could argue that “The Optimists” is not really about Africa, or about the “well documented atrocity in Rwanada in 1994” mentioned in the Author’s Note. You could argue that the genocide only sets in place the events more to our concern, and that we are viewers removed from what could be any tragedy: a European genocide, a Western superpower confronting terrorist attacks, etc. But such a view does injustice to the real and individual tragedies that are glossed over by the approach. That the chosen conflict is still fighting for legitimate attention from Western media, and that Westerners have never been great about differentiating the nations and peoples of the World’s second-largest continent, creates a cloud of discomfort over Miller’s tone that, considering one plot point’s improbable turn, isn’t left behind at novel’s end.
In invoking Africa only as a giant mass and a few moderately drawn figures, Clem’s tragedy is too general, and too much aligned with the Western expectation that most news from Africa – a continent that to us may as well be of any size, really – be tribally affiliated, unspecific in motive or pall, but also as horrific as we can imagine. The difficulty for authors like Miller in exploring this world is that the exploration can seem culturally removed, even colonially paternal, and gruesome for its own sake, as if the tragedies are so expected, so within the realm of our experiential vocabulary, that they could almost be relegated to their own genre of form, sort of like what we’ve done with Holocaust-themed fiction.
All this fuss over what is probably a minor part of the novel suggests to me that the story itself is so withdrawn and generic as to not warrant much discussion. It is a story of removal-from and returning-to comfort and conscience that weighs heavily on the latter.
bitterindigo's review
3.0
I almost gave up after the first couple of chapters, probably chiefly because I was comparing it to Ingenious Pain, which is in my top ten of all time. It was a case of 'yes, yes, he's a photographer, he's witnessed atrocities, he's come home all scarred and disenchanted, wanders around, has an unsatisfying visit with a prostitute (duh) - anything else?' And yet, in telling the story of a man who thinks that to go on living is impossible and then proves himself wrong by, in fact, going on living ('I can't go on, I'll go on'), it ends up working. Also, there's the enjoyable touch of his friend Silverman who finds redemption by feeding the homeless in the 'bleakness' of Canada (the wild colonial wastelands of Toronto). It's still not nearly as good as Ingenious Pain - but what's going to be, right?
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