The Crossing by Andrew Miller review – a remarkable novel about loneliness and self-possession

The follow-up to the Costa-winning Pure is an extraordinary portrait of an enigmatic woman, an unlikely marriage and a solo sea-crossing

Andrew Miller’s characters often have a peculiar relationship with pain. The protagonist of his first novel, the Impac-winning Ingenious Pain, was an 18th-century doctor who couldn’t feel it at all, while Maud Stamp, the briskly contemporary heroine of his latest, has at the least an exceptionally high threshold. She spent her childhood taking blows at judo and battering herself on dinghies, and, when we first meet her, is falling silently past us from the elevated deck of a yacht in dry dock: “a movement through the air, a blink of feathered shadow”. When she lands, on brick, she refuses to stay down, and staggers 12 paces before collapsing.

But is this exceptional bravery, or just bald insensitivity? Is Maud a mythic figure – a “feathered” angel or perhaps a mermaid – or just a brusque, dull scientist with a touch of Asperger’s? Most people Maud meets, it seems, are fascinated by this question, and by Maud herself, for, again like a mermaid, Maud is not merely enigmatic, but very sexy. Everyone, from her professor to her father-in-law, falls for her “blunt brown stare”, but none harder than Tim Rathbone, the fellow student who watches her fall. He is so interested, in fact, that he braves years of chills and rebuffs to become her lover, then partner, then main carer of their child.

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