The Crossing

by Andrew Miller

From the author of the Costa Book of the Year Pure, a hypnotic, luminous exploration of buried grief and the mysterious workings of the heart.

She is sailing. She is alone. Ahead of her is the world's curve and beyond that, everything else. The known, the imagined, the imagined known.

Who else has entered Tim's life the way Maud did? This girl who fell past him, lay seemingly dead on the ground, then stood and walked. That was where it all began.

He wants her - wants to rescue her, to reach her. Yet there is nothing to suggest Maud has any need of him, that she is not already complete. A woman with a talent for survival, who works long hours and loves to sail - preferably on her own. A woman who, when a crisis comes, will turn to the sea for refuge, embarking on a voyage that will test her to the utmost, that will change everything …

From the Costa Award-winning author of Pure comes a viscerally honest, hypnotic portrait of modern love and motherhood, the lure of the sea and the ultimate unknowability of others. This pitch-perfect novel confirms Andrew Miller's position as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Novels, Ebooks, Literature, Literary Fiction, 21st Century

336 pages, Hardcover

First published August 27, 2015

About the author

Andrew Miller was born in Bristol in 1960. He has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland and France, and currently lives in Somerset. His first novel, INGENIOUS PAIN, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour prize in Italy. His second novel, CASANOVA, was published in 1998, followed by OXYGEN, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize in 2001, and THE OPTIMISTS, published in 2005.

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update... for those who want to read this and have it it’s they Kindle special today for $2.99.
Reminds me that I’d like to read more books by Andrew Miller


Old review

I need to fall back to sleep now...
but I couldn’t put this down.
This was my first Andrew Miller novel.

We meet Tim & Maude...
There was a line
“It’s not clear if they will have sex”...
THERE IS MUCH THAT IS NOT CLEAR ABOUT Maude STAMP...

In the first part of the novel, Tim & Maude are brought together by an accident Maude has on a sailboat. Gripping- intriguing- the entire way the accident unfolds.
They are both members of the University sailing club.
Tim spends every minute ‘helping’.... at the hospital/ then at her ‘bare-bones’ minimalistic apartment. An eerie loneliness was felt inside her home.
Maude’s incredibly mysterious...(a biologist)... quiet .. isn’t at all curious about Tim’s life.
Even after they do become lovers ...I wondered ..
“what’s wrong with her?”...
Tim, who is completely different from her, comes from a wealthy family, ... and because money doesn’t seem to be an issue - he can spend his days doing yoga and playing his guitar. He’s obsessed with Maude. His mother tells him - she would have wished another type of girl for her son... but he says he loves Maude.

Many people are drawn to Maude - yet it’s not as though she is overtly trying to attract attention. Maude
was aloof, simple - the opposite of flashy.
We wonder if she is meek and frail or actually quite clear and strong.
Tim & Maude get married...but she’s not particularly happy with him.

Things change tragically & drastically in the second half ....’The Crossing’ is the perfect title...

We take a journey with Maude to Paris and about...
Enter motherhood - and children
Maude seems the most unlikely character to be satisfied with a child dependent on her....
I’ll say no more....

Andrew Miller’s writing is seductive. His prose convincingly captures the mysterious Maude Stamp.

Back to sleep! Nite! 😴

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Crossing tells the story of Maud and, initially, her relationship with Tim. They share a passion for boats. Tim is clearly not husband material. He's a boy man with a trust fund and a pipe dream of writing a symphony for guitar. Maud is studying biology and then works at a pharmaceutical research centre. Throughout the novel Maud's emotions are muted. She's the archetypal emotionally dysfunctional scientist, except in female form. Miller makes no attempt to provide any psychological insights on this score. We just have to accept this is the way Maud is made which can be frustrating at times, never more so than when she discovers Tim is cheating on her and her response is to not respond. She asks no questions, has no private thoughts even.

Then tragedy strikes. Maud, with no precise plan, sets off in her boat. This for me was when the novel collapsed in on itself to some extent. On the open sea every day is more or less identical and Miller began filling the pages with an overload of technical detail about sailing. Way too much research which felt like it was sinking the novel, especially because Maud spends her life living exclusively in the present moment so all relationship departed from the novel and quite frankly it got a bit boring.
However, Andrew Miller pulls off a riveting surprise towards the end and turned this from a three star read to a four. As always with him there's lots of beautiful writing.

[Roz Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that stopped the world for me. Husband would suggest a DVD; I would plead more time with this novel instead.

It centres on a woman, Maud, who is a loner. The first half is mainly concerned with her unsettling effect on others, while the second follows her interior life - and inevitably the consequences of events from part one. Miller has created a character who is not as warm as other people seem to expect, and indeed as they require. To an extent, this seems to be a fascination of his, as in Ingenious Pain he explored the idea of a man who was unable to feel any kind of uncomfortable stimulus.

Maud is truly a haunting character, and I'm still trying to work out why. This is not a book of simple emotions. You don't feel sorry for her; you don't know what to feel, which of course is why she is so disconcerting to the others around her. Especially those who expect to have a two-way relationship with her - her boyfriend and his family, her colleagues. You could say she's the original cold fish, but there are no easy ways to describe her. There are also no labels to suggest we can package this as a study of Asperger's, which is quite fashionable at the moment. Besides, she doesn't have many of the features of Asperger's; she is simply a person with these characteristics, complex and truthful. And she's painted with such empathy that you understand what it is like to have her peculiar wiring. Kurt Vonnegut said that a good book allows you to meditate in the mind of another - and Miller can turn you into Maud. Or perhaps we all have a little of her in us.

The Crossing contains a shadow of another book, too; Miller's capacity to create moments of great tenderness. In The Crossing, this comes after Maud and her boyfriend Tim have had a scare in their boat. The way Miller describes their reaction creates a complex and subtle bond between them, and I found myself rereading those lines, like a child discovering a new game. Similarly, there are moments with other characters that carry this warm humanity. He achieves a similar thing in Pure, with the main character and his wife. The words used for that scene forever create a deep sense of closeness, in lines you can return to and puzzle over. However, The Crossing is not a retread of that relationship by any means. The similarity is very temporary.

Miller's prose is beautiful, but never trips up the narrative. It's plain when it needs to be, enchanting when that's called for. You will find moments of delight and poetry, but the story will keep pulling you on.

So why four stars instead of five? Truth be told, I wasn't happy with the ending. There is resolution, but I didn't find it satisfying enough. It seemed predictable. I've often found Miller's endings to be disappointing, as though he simply ran out of steam. Or perhaps the end is something that simply doesn't interest him. Certainly he gave me enough delight during the voyage that I don't mind too much about it. So - four stars, and I'm happy to recommend.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andrew Miller is a versatile writer whose books are always worth reading. This one is a curious hybrid of several different genres, held together by the heroine Maud, who is feisty but reserved and aloof.

In the first part of the book we follow Maud's relationship with Tim. They meet as members of a university sailing club and are brought together after Maud has a fall while working on the boat. They become a couple, Maud starts a steady job as a scientist, and the rather vain and narcissistic Tim dreams of being a musician while being subsidised by his rich family. Maud persuades him to buy and repair a neglected but seaworthy yacht, but their plans for it are derailed when Maud becomes pregnant.

The second part is several years later. Tim has been the main carer for their daughter Zoe, but he and Maud are drifting apart when Tim is involved in a tragic road accident in which he is badly injured and Zoe is killed. He then leaves her and after a confrontation with his family she is forced to take extended leave from her job and, at a loose end, decides to sail the boat, with little more than a vague plan to head west.

The voyage is described in detail, as something of an Arthur Ransome style adventure story. From here on I will use spoiler tags, as the remainder of the story has some unexpected twists, which I can't avoid discussing. The boat is badly damaged in a storm in the mid-Atlantic, and Maud just manages to reach land, probably in Brazil, though this is not stated explicitly. She is forced to abandon the boat and walks away in search of humanity.

She is found close to death by a girl who speaks English, and is brought into a community of religious children who are surviving alone while waiting for there father to return from a long trip. This section is surreal, dreamlike and somewhat unsatisfactory.

The book is always readable, if somewhat heavy on nautical terminology, it has some fine descriptive passages, and Maud is a fascinating character, but overall I felt the book did not quite work, and tries to cover too many incompatible bases.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down. Stayed up way too late last night reading it.
What a skilled author, what a smart writer. What a sad lonely story, beautifully drawn.
I'm off to my library's web site to reserve some of his earlier books...
I don't remember who recommended this to me, but, whoever you are: thank you.

[Steve Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book isn’t exactly long, but it takes you on an amazing journey. In the character of Maud, the author has created someone both mysterious and scientific, rooted in the world. When she’s met by tragedy her journey alone across the Atlantic, one moment calm and the next terrifyingly wild, is gripping. I wasn’t so sure about the ending, but this seems to me a resonant book for our times.

[Leah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Passionless...

Maud and Tim are an unlikely couple – he gregarious and open, she lacking any kind of personality whatsoever, of any kind, and apparently unable to speak in sentences longer than four words, despite her intelligence. However, he falls in love with her and she... well, acquiesces is the word that springs to mind. They have a good deal of fairly passionless yet intimately described sex which, thankfully, results at last in a pregnancy. I say thankfully because the exhaustion brought on by the child stops them having more sex for a while. But after a few years of living together, during which Maud's contribution to the household conversation gradually adds up to roughly twenty words, tragedy strikes! No, sadly not Maud. She survives – proving yet again that there is no justice in this world. Unable to express her emotions, assuming she has any, Maud takes off in her beloved boat where she can sail and sail and sail without having to speak to anyone at all. Fortunately she manages to have a last bout of sex just before weighing anchor, just in case any reader was missing it...

Oh dear! Sometimes a book and a reader just don't gel and I fear that's the case with this reader and this book. And yet I feel I'm probably being unfair. It reminded me in many ways of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, only much better written I hasten to add, and while I thought that book was pretty awful, 99% of the rest of the universe seemed to think it was wonderful. Basically it's a coming to terms with grief story but with a central character with so little personality that I couldn't feel any empathy for her. Perhaps we're supposed to assume that inside she's a seething cauldron of suppressed emotion, but if so it's too well suppressed. Or perhaps she's supposed to be autistic. I don't know – but she behaves like a speech-free automaton for the whole book, forming no real relationships with any of the other characters, though of course all the men she meets are attracted to her, for no reason I could understand.

The first half is taken up with her one-sided relationship with Tim, who seems to think she's vulnerable and that he needs to take care of her. But in fact, she's so self-sufficient that the rest of the world doesn't really impinge on her at all. When their child is born, Maud returns to work leaving Tim to be the child-carer. After a failed attempt to get the baby to enjoy sailing, Maud begins to leave Tim and the child at home at weekends while she goes off alone in her beloved boat.

The tragedy happens about halfway through and from there on the book tells us of Maud's attempt to deal with her (presumed) grief by taking to the seas on a solo sailing trip. I hoped that might be more interesting but sadly Maud's lack of emotion now becomes coupled with endless, tediously over-detailed descriptions of how to sail a boat, using a bunch of nautical terminology that meant most of it created no images in my mind.

“She shackles the tack to the base of the spare stay then hanks on until she reaches the head...She uncleats the halyard, slithers back to the jib, undoes the halyard shackle with the marlinspike she once gave to Tim as a present but which later, somehow, became her marlinspike, attaches the head of the jib, frees the sheets from the furling jib, reties the bowlines through the clew of the storm jib, hoists the jib from the mast, regains the cockpit, sheets in the jib, cleats it, and sits on the grid of the cockpit sole, her chest heaving, her clothes soaked through.”

Perhaps people who sail will find this kind of description riveting, but I'm afraid I found it about as thrilling as the instructions on a piece of Ikea do-it-yourself furniture, and even less comprehensible. By the two-thirds stage I was skimming pages, hoping desperately to get to the end.

And then the ending brings the same kind of semi-mystical mumbo-jumbo that nauseated me so much in Harold Fry. Miller avoids the sickly sweetness of that book, but unfortunately also avoids either credibility or emotional warmth. But maybe it's just a matter of taste.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Hodder & Stoughton.

[Issicratea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always found Andrew Miller a frustrating novelist to follow. He is a great stylist, without doubt, master of the show-stopping phrase or sentence; that’s the main reason why I generally at least attempt his novels. He also has a good eye for a subject (his most famous novel, Pure, tells the story of a young engineer in immediately pre-revolutionary France hired to clear the ancient cemetery of Les Innocents and demolish its church.)

What frustrates me about Miller is that the fairy who showered him with these great gifts seems to have forgotten to give him the gift of structuring a narrative. Just about everything I have read by him (Pure, Oxygen, Ingenious Pain: A Novel—probably my favorite of his novels—and Casanova in Love) starts very strongly and then peters out. Miller’s novels seem all original concept (setting, time, ideas) and no “story.” Characters are also not a forte.

The Crossing I thought worked better at the level of narrative arc than most of Miller’s novels, although it’s a strange, bisected, or trisected piece. We start in the realm of the contemporary realist novel—not Miller’s usual territory—watching an improbable “opposites attract” marriage gradually crumbling apart. Class tensions play a role in this disintegration (Tim is posh; Maud is not); but so also does Maud’s opaque, self-sufficient, “unfeminine” character.

So far, so OK. Where the book came alive for me was in the second segment, where, for reasons that can’t be revealed without a spoiler, we follow Maud on a transatlantic one-woman voyage, the crossing of the title (or one of the crossings, the most literal.) This is a virtuoso sustained piece of technical writing, challenging for the non-sailors amongst us (“she uncleats the halyard, slithers back to the jib,”) but with a wonderful, drifting, incantatory rhythm to it. This is voyage as therapy, a vital space outside human commerce; Maud is “a hermit in her floating cell, a pilgrim, an exile.” I loved the way the fascinating monotony of the journey was broken by incidents of varying degrees of strangeness—most strikingly, an encounter with a floating suitcase, presumably the debris from an air crash, with the owner’s possessions stacked neatly inside it, memorials and metonyms for his vanished body and life.

After this stunning seaborne passage, Maud fishes up in the third and oddest of the three narrative segments, on the coast of Brazil—odd enough to have reminded some readers of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, of which there are echoes elsewhere in the novel. I liked this peculiar, edgy, dream-like sequence, and even the inconclusive ending, though I can see why some have found it annoying.

In an interesting article on the genesis on this novel in the Guardian (see link below), Miller states of this novel that his one ambition for it is “that it should be hard to close down on, hard to precis.” He certainly achieves that end. I finished it a little while ago, and haven’t by any means “closed it down” in my mind. I think that is something to do with the way in which the novel “crosses” half-way through from a realist key to something more lyrical and symbolic, closer to Miller’s usual fabulist mode. Combined with the use of an uncannily affectless, almost Mersault-like focalizing character, this transition has the effect—to follow the governing metaphor of the novel—of loosening us from our moorings as readers, setting us adrift on a crossing of our own.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful writing,as usual with Miller,but really not much else.

[Joan Kerr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Miller set himself an enormous challenge in having as his central character, Maud, a young woman who appears at first to have no inner life at all. She shows no curiosity about others, treats conversation as a kind of polite game, and maddens those who are attracted to her, like her partner Tim, by her cool unreachability. Asked in an interview what she’d be if she were a drink, she replies, “Water.” (As always with Maud, there’s more to that than meets the eye). Miller specialises in the black box of the human emotions and in characters who live on the fringe of what we take for normal behaviour. In Ingenious Pain his main character was born without the capacity to feel pain; in Oxygen a central character is writing a play about miners trapped in a mine with their air supply steadily running out. Maud is another of these not-quite-human presences: the first time we see her she miraculously survives a fall from the deck of a yacht, a fall that should have killed her, a fall that is described in terms that make you think of angels:
…there is a movement through the air, a blink of feathered shadow, that is also a movement across the surface of his eye like a thorn scratch. There must have been a noise too – no such thing as silent impact – but whatever it was, it was lost in the hissing of his own blood and left no trace of itself.
… Maud herself is further off, face up, her arms flung above her head, her head tilted to the side, her eyes shut. It takes an immense effort to keep looking at her, this girl newly dead on the rubbled brick, one shoe on, one shoe off. He is very afraid of her. (5-6)

Maud does survive the fall and goes on to have a relationship with Tim, a career as a scientist (researching pain-killers) and a child, Zoe. But she continues to be an unsettling enigma in the lives of everyone: Tim constantly strives for emotional response from her: What has he found? Who has he found? Is this a wise love? (27); Tim’s family is critical of her unmaternal attitude to her daughter; she is the odd-one-out in the cosy middle-England group of friends (white, university-educated, and with money in the bank) that she and Tim accumulate in their three-bedroom semi-detached cottage, paid for by Tim’s wealthy family. She’s like a rare animal that everyone notices, from whom everyone hopes for a sign of favour or a moment of connection, but who remains apart, with that same rooted calm, that same uncanny stillness….A switching off or a switching in She’s a benevolent but absent-minded observer in Zoe’s life. She gets into the habit of going out alone on their yacht Lodestar, which she and Tim have bought (Tim’s share paid by his mother) and restored before Zoe’s birth.

But we always know that something’s got to give, and it does. The book plumbs enormous emotional depths, and we come to share Maud’s inner world, a world of acute sensibility to the now, to the visceral experience of emotion rather than to its left-brain lucidity. It’s Miller’s particular achievement to make us see how narrow and hackneyed our judgment of human emotion is. We should, if we reflect just for a moment, realise just how little we know about ourselves, just how much deep dark water there is beneath the surface of our emotions. Water, of course, sailing, and storms are the guiding metaphors of the book: Maud sets out alone in Lodestar with no idea where she might end up and no idea if she’ll even survive, and efficient sailor as she is, she very nearly dies in a ferocious storm. At that point the book takes a very surprising turn, about which I’m still not sure. But Miller is the kind of writer you’re prepared to hand yourself over to lock, stock and barrel, master of all registers:

The boat’s shadow like black silk hauled just beneath the water’s surface…

There are tears on his cheeks as thick as varnish. He has given way to something, or something has given way inside him

For several minutes the women pair off and Mrs Rathbone speaks to Mrs Stamp like the prime minister’s wife to the consort of an African president, a prime minister’s wife who has started the day with some Qi Gong exercises and then a few drinks, or one particularly strong one

[she] looks back to see a wave bigger than any she has ever seen, a grey wall with a grey crest tumbling down its face like masonry, the whole thing apparently at right angles to the wind. She turns from it, flings her arms around the boom, locks her hands to her wrists. Three seconds later it comes aboard (this thing that carries its own, unanswerable truth), smashes the air from her lungs, breaks her grip, lifts her, accelerates her, whips her against the wires of the starboard shroud and flings her into the sea.

Always interesting, always rewarding, an unusually gifted, original and daring writer. Very highly recommended.

[Maya Panika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another highly literary page-turner from Andrew Miller, whose ‘Pure’ was my favourite book in 2011 so I was mad with anticipation over The Crossing, his first book since Pure, and… it’s good, of course – not as wonderful as Pure, but then, Pure is such a very hard act to follow.
This is the story of Maud. Maud is an extremely odd creature. Is she autistic (autism is definitely flavour of the month it seems; I read The Crossing at the self-same time as The Life and Death of Sophie Stark which is also about a cold and un-empathic, semi-psychopathic young woman)? It’s never stated as such, but she’s definitely somewhere on that spectrum. Maud only really comes at home on boats; something about them seems to resonate with the only moments of connection and warmth in her childhood, the times she spent sailing on the local lake with her grandfather, and she doesn’t let things like home, husband and child get in the way of her need to be on the water. After a family tragedy, she becomes intensely drawn to her boat, the Lodestar, which seems to take the place of her family in her heart. She has a far warmer relationship with the Lodestar than any of the humans in her life.
Any book by Andrew Miller is going to be extraordinary; the writing sublime, the tale enigmatic. The Crossing doesn’t disappoint in any of this, and yet I couldn’t love it as I’ve loved other books by him. Perhaps it was the lack of heart; the subject, Maud, is such a cold fish and so hard to empathise with or to love, that (this being always her story) maybe some of that lack of empathy and feeling rubs off in the prose? The hints of the supernatural felt oddly misplaced too, since they didn’t seem to go anywhere, but I still found that part of the story easier to accept, more in keeping with the dreamlike state of Maud’s world, than what came later. The last section of this (decidedly peculiar) book seemed so weak after what had gone before. It didn’t seem to fit with the rest somehow, and the end was not an end but merely a place to stop, something I found deeply unsatisfying. Which is why I’m so sure I’m missing something profound here – I’m sure someone will enlighten me if I am – but I really couldn’t judge the point of the last few chapters, unless it was simply the plain and obvious one of ice-queen Maud being made to care, to be a mother, almost against her will (and was it the ghost that drew her there with this lesson in mind)? If so, it felt unusually heavy-handed, with a sledge-hammer lack of subtlety that I’ve never come across before in a work by this author, and why I feel I may be missing something, because other than that, I admit I’m at a loss.
These reservations and disappointments aside, I enjoyed every second I spent reading it; it drew me in, as Andrew Miller always draws me in, and held me spellbound from the start until the wreck of the Lodestar. But from the moment Maud stepped ashore, I have to confess, I was lost, and not a little bored. I still recommend it though; it is a brilliant character study and gorgeously, gloriously well-written.

[Mary Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maud is a detached girl, difficult to get the measure of, and with no apparently close relationship with either her parents or her partner. Having suffered a tragedy she embarks upon a journey – both literally and emotionally.
Andrew Miller often provides only the bare bones of what is happening, but at the same time uses the most beautiful, clear and lyrical language. This is challenging for a reader who needs to know exactly where, when, why and how and who has no knowledge at all of sailing. And yet he keeps this reader with him all the while gripped by this atmospheric novel.

[Leonie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim falls for Maud. The problem with this is that Tim is both a little pretentious and a feelings person; the kind of person who makes elaborate meals and considers writing concertos, while Maud is an uncommunicative scientist who, when asked in a job interview to describe herself as a drink, decides she is a glass of water. Much is made of the fact that she has a tattoo which says “Every man for himself” in Latin. She doesn’t display much personality but nothing will stop her from fulfilling the aims she does have. Miller is doing a thing with Maud. She’s a mysterious absence at the heart of the novel. Is her interiority withheld from us or is she so much like a glass of water that there is nothing more going on inside than there is outside? Is she on the spectrum or cold or just astonishingly straightforward? Fittingly enough, perhaps, I felt pretty neutral about the interestingness of Maud and what Miller is doing with her. For Tim to carry on a relationship with Maud is for him to do all the voices, the I love yous and I love you toos, essentially. He’s partly aware of this, and fascinated by her otherness, and partly not aware that he’s talking for her. For both of these reactions we probably think a little less of him.

After the relationship finally falls apart following a tragedy, we go sailing. Maud and Tim are both into sailing and bought a boat together, though Maud was more into it than Tim. She takes the boat and sets off without an aim, right across the Atlantic. As I found the boat talk beforehand pretty hard-going and the rest of the novel only so-so I was surprised by how genuinely exhilarating I found this episode. First there is the sense of freedom brought by being so absolutely alone at sea, with nothing to do and nowhere to be, nothing to prevent Maud from sailing on and on. Then there is a battering storm which goes on and on and demands the full use of Maud’s capacities. This is also satisfying, not because it’s all that dramatic exactly but because Miller makes the subjection of self to physical exigency fulfilling. Like in The African Queen, where the characters are happier than they ever have been or will be precisely because of the awful time they’re having with that boat. Then Maud washes up amid a community of children who’ve been abandoned wherever it is by snake-handling religious maniacs. This section felt like a misstep; the community is both clichéd and too odd to be introduced so late in a novel. Most of all, it deprives Maud of her straight man out function. There’s nothing really particular about her relationship to the children. So overall, meh but that one bit did wake me up.

[Alysha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Getting through this book was a struggle. Plot was boring and odd. Characters were lifeless and uninteresting. Maybe I missed something but I really disliked this novel

[Flora Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hypnotic, spare, compelling and wonderfully strange.

[Huw Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

You get the sense on reading this novel that the author is playing with you in some way. There are contrasts, there are divisions, there are comparisons and juxtapositions going on throughout the novel – both on the page, between and within the characters and in some way beyond the base substance of the book. But what makes this novel ultimately unsatisfying is that as a reader you never really quite get to understand how or why you’re being played…
If ever there was a “something of two halves” - this is it. In the first half of the book we have what appears at first site an at times gritty contemporary novel addressing an imperfect relationship. Within the first couple of pages, our main protagonist, Maud, is literally dumped upon us – from 20 foot, as she falls from a boat. She gets up and walks away, seemingly untouched – yet as she’s exiting stage left, she suddenly collapses. And this can be seen as a metaphor for how she travels through the book – things just don’t seem to touch her at first sight, and yet just beyond what we can see easily, things do seem to have a very big effect on her. Ironically, for someone who apparently is so lacking in any feelings, physical or emotional, she works for a pharmaceutical company testing painkillers….
In the first half of the book the author delights in contrasting the backgrounds of Maud, the studious, unfeeling scientist bought up by salt of the earth if slightly uninspired and uninspiring parents in Swindon, and dilettante musician Tim and his hypocritical and pretentious family , with their “gorgeous” house, clothes, food and manners, their unrevealed streams of money, their troves of furniture, tousled children, their alcoholism, foppishness, lack of purpose and deeply ingrained misogyny, snobbery and general air of aggressive superiority. Tim’s need to be defined and Maud’s need to remain undefined, characterized by the tattoo she sports on her arm reading “sauve qui peut” – every man for himself or, more literally, “save yourself if you can” – is also a compelling theme in the first half of the book – what happens to both is almost inevitable, and just as it starts getting really interesting….
The book changes direction completely. It almost becomes a completely different novel, the one common theme being Maud. But is her behaviour in the first half of the book merely set her up for her part in the latter half? Or does the second part of the book try to justify the first?
It is the lack of resolution to this conundrum which will intrigue some – and completely frustrate others.
Something else which I personally found completely frustrating was the almost encyclopaedic rolling off of nautical terms and descriptions in the latter, “crossing”, part of the novel. Indulge me please by reading the following and tell me how much of this you understand? Or how much you felt compelled to find out more about? Or were you, just like me, simply flummoxed by a load of highly technical terminology which you couldn’t understand, and had no desire to learn about? Don’t say you weren’t warned….
“She shackles the tack to the base of the spare stay then hanks on until she reaches the head...She uncleats the halyard, slithers back to the jib, undoes the halyard shackle with the marlinspike she once gave to Tim as a present but which later, somehow, became her marlinspike, attaches the head of the jib, frees the sheets from the furling jib, reties the bowlines through the clew of the storm jib, hoists the jib from the mast, regains the cockpit, sheets in the jib, cleats it, and sits on the grid of the cockpit sole, her chest heaving, her clothes soaked through.”
If anyone can explain that to me in simple plain English please…. it adds no clarity to an already completely opaque part of the book.
And then there’s the ending – or lack of it, despite a slightly dystopian visit to less than slightly credible community…..
The plot develops in odd ways in the second half of the book…
There aren’t really that many “nice” characters in the book either – none that are easy to warm to anyway. Nor do we really get to the root to any of the characters – we are left with more questions than answers. Maybe this is intended – or maybe it takes diffidence a step too far from the perspective of enjoying the novel.
But having said all of this – it’s not a bad read, certainly the first half of the novel. Would it have been better just to have drawn things to a close around that? Possibly. But then would the whole have ended up asking as many questions as it does? And if the purpose of “Art” in the broader sense is to get us to question – maybe this book really is a lot more effective than I appear to be giving it credit for. So “intriguing” is probably not a bad summary.

[Penney · Rating 4 out of 5]

The quality of the writing got me from the get-go, even (or especially) because I couldn't tell where the author was going. In my opinion, this is a highly original and masterful novel. The author is very cagey in the way that he manipulates third-person limited point of view to build the readers' curiosity and shape our assumptions and expectations.

The five-part format allows the author to morph the narrative from contemporary realistic fiction to a deeper kind of story telling that slips the bonds of credibility to access other realities. Midway through the novel, you may wonder how you managed to wander from a fairly conventional domestic drama to a narrative that more closely resembles Old Man and the Sea, Robinson Crusoe, or Swiss Family Robinson. Somehow, it works. The intensity evoked by the enigmatic female protagonist leads us, despite ourselves, into increasingly mysterious territory, where biblical allusions are, for a time, the only signposts.

In the end, this novel was, for me, a cautionary tale about the cruelties, unintentional as well as deliberate, that all too often result from the superficial judgments we make about one another. Everyone--including people who, for any number of reasons, are emotionally shut down--deserve attention, respect, and compassion. It is a poignant irony that strangers are sometimes able to offer that recognition/validation more readily than family or friends.

Initially, I felt gypped by the ending. But, on further reflection, I decided it was perfect, as it allows the story, and its meanings, to escape the boundaries of the novel, overflowing into our imaginations and beyond.

[Suze · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maud is strange, detached, hardworking, calm and seemingly without inner turmoil while Tim is passionate, musical and lazy. Sailing brings them together and they buy their own boat. Soon they start a family. Maud goes to work every day while Tim stays at home to take care of their little girl. Slowly Tim starts to resent what he first liked so much about Maud. When something tragic happens it's the end of their relationship. Will Maud be able to feel something then or is she really so cold as everyone things she is?

I love that Andrew Miller leaves it up to the reader to decide if Maud is really unaffected by anything or not. Is Tim wrong or is there something not right with Maud? When tragedy strikes Tim and his family immediately judge Maud and from that point she needs to start her journey alone. I couldn’t help defending her in my mind. I kept reading faster and faster to find out if I was correct or not.

For me Maud’s curious personality in combination with the aloof way of writing made this story utterly fascinating. Writing a story based on someone who doesn’t seem emotional at all is bold and fortunately Andrew Miller manages to pull it off. It could have failed miserably, but it doesn’t, instead it works and it works really, really well. The lack of emotion on the surface increased my awareness of deeper layers. The story made me feel, it made me wonder, it made me wish and it made me curious. I absolutely loved this book.

[Sue Chaplin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't think I was ever going to rate this book particularly highly but I found the ending very frustrating and that finished me off completely. The subject of the novel is Maud who gets a job working as a scientist researching into new treatments and loves sailing. She marries a man who is from a wealthy family and has a child. There is an incident which causes a split with her husband to which she responds by taking their boat and sailing away. There is a terrible storm at sea which she and her boat only just survive with the boat finally limping into land she knows not where. After a life threatening walk across country she is found by a group of isolated children who manage to look after her and bring her back from the brink. The children are on their own as their mother has died and their father has gone off to find help. She stays with them for sometime but then realises that a noise she hears is a train that goes near the property on a regular basis and on which she can escape back to "civilisation." Once she is fit and healthy and provides some improvements for the children's situation this is what she does leaving the children to their own devices and going we know not where or to what.

[Dawn Murray · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may be my first one-star book, despite all of the rave reviews from other readers. I did not enjoy this book at all, and kept wondering while reading it why I was even bothering to continue. I found the relationship difficult to understand (from both sides), the parts at sea long on detail, and the ending just bizarre - one of those endings that leave me feeling quite stupid really... did I miss something? Is this a dream or reality or a metaphor or something else entirely? I didn't like any of the characters, could not fathom why anyone would be drawn to Maud, and skimmed a lot of the book in the end. A very strange read for me.

[carelessdestiny · Rating 1 out of 5]

A very frustrating thing to read. The main character is so without personality and lacking in any kind of response to anyone around her that it's difficult to work up any interest in her destiny especially when there seems to be no reason for everyone blaming her for the tragedy (which is never described) that sets her off. The central part of the novel involves endless nautical terms (a bit like reading a yachting catalogue) which the writer can't seriously expect us to spend time looking up in order to follow a journey which turns into a unreal fable-like ending.

[Ruth P · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written book...haunting and mesmerising in places.Not an easy read....every word needed to be read in case something slipped past unnoticed...yet still things were not fully explained and at the end of the book I accepted that this mirrored Maud,a reserved,distant and utterly self contained woman ( who people found hard to like) so she came into her own in the second part of the book where she is alone on her boat.Lots of detail in this section but all boat related...A.M seems to know his halyards!

[Rod MacLeod · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant for about 80% but I really didn't understand the context of the final chapters. Perhaps I'm a bit dim but I couldn't work it all out. I'm glad I read it but would find it hard to recommend as I couldn't really work it all out

[MaryAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - 4. Quite a different read for me. Beautifully written, sparse even, with a memorable and likely misunderstood main character. The more I consider it the more I appreciate it.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Loved Pure by Miller but The Crossing was disappointing - a novel of two halves which didn’t quite work and which, for me, lost its way in the second half.

[Plumedelies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prachtig geschreven. Ik weet niks van zeilen, en toch ploegde ik me net als Mauds boot door de terminologie heen.
Niet zeker wat ik van hoofdstuk 5 vond.
Ik las in heel wat reviews dat ze het moeilijk vonden om zich met Maud te identificeren vanwege haar ietwat kille, zielloze houding. Maar dat maakte net deel uit van het verhaal en van Maud an sich. Ik vond wel een ziel terug. Met plezier en in drie sessies uitgelezen. Aan zee 😉

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable and well written -- just a little slow. Wish I understood the mechanics of sailing - I think it would have helped during those sections.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story about a woman who doesn't fit society's expectations; a story about relationships, families, work/life balance and how different people deal with disappointment and grief. Miller's writing is beautifully restrained yet it pulls you through Maud's story as effectively as the tidal waters she sails in: at times, you'll feel becalmed, during others, you'll be cruising, then flying along, and occasionally buffeted and bruised when the storms hit. Now that I've finished reading, I can admire how he structured the story, as well, and feel that Maud's story works well within that.*

I enjoyed meeting the unusual central character of Maud, a woman who seems self-contained and unaware or unwilling to conform to social norms. Some readers may see her as emotionless or unfeeling but I don't believe she is. She just doesn't behave the way society conditions us to believe a woman should or would, (perhaps you could say she's behaving more like a man?) but I liked her all the more for that, and for doing her own thing. It's interesting to see the dynamic between her and Tim, and other men she comes into contact with, and the contrasts between her own family and Tim's. I really enjoyed the scenes in the shipyard and Maud's sailing section of the book. When a person pushes themselves to their limits, you get to understand them a bit better and see what their character is really like, so it helped this reader to better understand Maud. As for the final section of the book, I think you can take it a couple of different ways, depending on what you want or hope for as an outcome for Maud. I thought the ending was fitting for her and the novel. It's a book which I know is going to haunt me and one which I will have to revisit and re-read.

* I think I initially struggled with the fact that The Crossing of the title doesn't begin until around page 200 (getting on for two-thirds of the way through the book). We seemed to be landlocked and not getting anywhere near making a Crossing of any kind for ages. I think I'd expected more of the book to be about sailing from the back cover blurb and quote when in fact it only accounts for about 50 pages in the book. So I guess what I'm saying is that I had to adjust my expectations for the book. Once I did this, I was sucked into the book and totally immersed in its world.

[Tripfiction]

Novel set in the Atlantic (and the West Country) ... Sauve qui peut

Who is Maud? What does she stand for? Inimitable, self sufficient, enigmatic, perhaps on the autistic spectrum….. She threads her way through story, yet she is unknowable. Tim, who is drawn to her early in the book – after she falls from a boat on which they are both working – embarks on a relationship with her; they go on to have a child together. But Maud continues – prefers even – to pursue her career. She is in a bubble of disconnect. Those around, including the reader, have no inkling as to what she might be feeling, or the drives that really lie at the heart of some of her actions and responses. But that is ok. There is a sweeping narrative that mirrors the ebb and flow of water, which is central to the story; whether Maud is drinking water insatiably throughout, feeding her soul with liquid gold or letting the tantrums of the seas influence her trajectory.

I came to this book consciously choosing not to read the synopsis, which I felt was a boon to the experience of the story. I had little sense where the words were taking me, much like the seas in the book.

There is a critical event in the storyline that is the pivotal point for change – and even then we learn little more about Maud and her inner self and workings. She is tossed and turned like flotsam and jetsam, and this is very unnerving for those around her, because she is never really thrown off course, and never revealing of her inner core – what do people do with someone like that? Maud is shunned by many of those around, reviled and rejected, willingly, it seems, taken advantage of, yet even this does not throw her off course; nevertheless, there is a sneaking admiration for her strength and determination to plough on through the most adverse circumstances.

There are long passages of sea-faring description which lapped at my tolerance levels for life on the high seas – having only been on a yacht twice in my life. But for a reader who loves yachting adventures, this will be an absolute feast of experience; it seems really well researched, the jibs pop up at pertinent points, and maps and masts punctuate the narrative. And I really wanted to know how things pan out for Maud.

An unusual and readable book.

This review first appeared on our blog: http://www.tripfiction.com/novel-set-...

[Lisa Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to be given an advance copy of this back in May and as I'm a huge Miller fan, I read it immediately in one weekend. It's not up there with Ingenious Pain, Casanova or Pure for me, but his trademark lyricism and exploration of human emotion is as brilliant as ever. At the time I described it as 'literary Gone Girl' in that there is a woman at the heart of the story that is seemingly heartless and to some extent inhuman. As someone who often feels the 'lure of the sea' her story resonated with me.

I can't make out if the second half was a dream or reality, but it is a really pacy read with some incredibly thrilling passages at sea. If you're into sailing, this book is for you! For me, it was about motherhood and the maternal instinct, and maybe more about how humans deal with grief in different ways and how we back away from those who find it difficult to show any emotion at those times.

Out 27 August.