It's hard to outrun one's past, as Stephen Rose discovers in The Slowworm's Song, the traumatic yet beautiful ninth novel by Andrew Miller (The Crossing). Rose, a 51-year-old with a lifelong drinking problem, has managed to put out of mind a life-altering event from his time in the British military 30 years earlier and has since lived a quiet life in Bristol, where he works at a shop called Plant World and spends time at a Quaker meeting house. Then he receives a letter from something called the Commission. They want him to travel to Belfast, where he was stationed during the Troubles, so that they can interview him about his involvement in a deadly 1982 incident.
The novel is a long essay Rose writes to Maggie, the adult daughter he barely knows, "to get in my side of the story before they got in theirs." In Miller's characteristically elegant prose, he takes readers through the salient events of Rose's life: his relations with former partner Evie (Maggie's mother); his upbringing with a Quaker father; and the odd jobs and checkered events, including a conviction for drug dealing, that led him to a Royal Air Force base near the Irish border, ready to fight the Irish Republican Army. The result is a moving work about the need to atone for past wrongs, the value of second chances for those lucky enough to attempt them and the possibility of finding kindness in the unlikeliest sources. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer