The Frozen Heart

Andrew Miller was 18 when he read D.H Lawrence's The Rain- bow and made a decision. He would become a writer. Nineteen years later, with one acclaimed novel to his name, two forthcoming and a film script in the pipeline, Miller's 1997 Christmas present was a perfect conclusion to a year of significant literary success. "I was visiting Cyprus and I phoned my mother on Christmas day to hear Ingenious Pain had just won the James Tait Black Memorial Award." That this news is only revealed 40 minutes into our conversation at the New Year, is indicative of this softly spoken Englishman, who takes achievement in his stride. "The fact that my book won over some of my favourite writers - Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Bernard Mac Laverty, Fred d'Aguiar - made this prize all the more special."

Although the competition was stiff, it does not come as any great surprise that Miller's debut novel should receive this prestigious honour. Soon to be published in paperback, Ingenious Pain was a book quick to gather enthusiastic reviews for its deft twists of plot, its intricate attention to period detail and, among other things, its effective use of the present tense throughout a narrative that burns with inventive, fresh prose and a strange imagination. Patrick McGrath in the New York Times has likened the book to the early flamboyancy of Peter Ackroyd or to the more wry intelligence of John Fowles. But, more frequently, critics have found it to be reminiscent of Patrick Suskind's much-praised historical novel, Perfume.

For all the comparisons, Ingenious Pain is entirely successful in its own right. It tells the story of James Dyer, an 18th-century surgeon who is conceived during the great freeze in the reign of King George II, when his mother is raped on a frozen river in the village of Blind Yeo near Bristol. He does not speak until the age of 11, when he falls from a cherry tree and it becomes apparent that a peculiar insensitivity to any form of physical pain powerfully matches his complete absence of emotion.

Much later, having been press-ganged for his majesty's navy, Dyer becomes a surgeon of unrivalled skill. But in a heartless effort to win an "extraordinary race between the doctors", he leaves England, accepting the challenge to become the first English doctor to innoculate the Empress Catherine of Russia against smallpox. The road to St Petersburg becomes the road to Damascus. And in a snowy forest in Riga, something happens which unleashes every unfelt hurt which so far has crippled his life. Dyer, redeemed and diminished, is now fiercely human.

In the light of this plot, it seems entirely fitting that Miller should have chosen the beautiful poem Late Fragment by Raymond Carver as an epigraph to his book. For throughout this extraordinary tale, set at a time when the secret magic of the old world waned before the emerging age of reason, Miller courageously mirrors the metaphysical, almost spiritual thinking of that poem's outlook. Carver's response to life: "To call myself beloved, to feel myself/beloved on the earth", is furthered in Dyer's alter-ego, the Reverend Lestrade, and his unsettling question: "What does the world need most - a good, ordinary man, or one who is outstanding, albeit with a soul of ice?"

As to the origin of the book, Miller feels it all started in Spain around 1987 where he read an article on the Viennese doctor, Anton Mesmer. "There was something about his character that seemed to me to be both tragic and rather comic. Something stuck and though I didn't know quite what to do with the material it had begun - a bit like hanging crystal in a solution. You may forget about it but it's still proliferating away."

If Mesmer was the inspiration for the callous Dyer, his profession as a surgeon could most probably be linked with Miller's own father. "He was a doctor and unlike most other children, I grew up reading copies of The British Medical Journal. The opening autopsy scene for instance, was based on a promotional video for a drugs company which my father had been sent."

Ingenious Pain aside, Miller has also finished a novel on the life of Casanova, which is forthcoming. He is currently working on a film script adaptation of it for Portobello Productions, the company responsible for the Oscar-winning film, Kolya. This year will be one of promotional tours to Australia, Europe and America for Miller. But years of having little money - he took various odd jobs, including driving an ice-cream van and working in a chicken abattoir near Bath - helps him deal with his current success efficiently. Time spent at the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing school and later at that of Lancaster University, also gave him the time to experiment and develop his already controlled style. When, finally, his London based agent held an auction for Ingenious Pain and the publishers Hodder and Stoughton put in a pre-emptive bid, it is understandable that Miller felt "my hard work had paid off. It was a big moment - and there was a sensation that nothing was ever going to be the same."

Having recently moved from Somerset to Dublin, he is careful to structure his day, balancing regular writing patterns with his other love, martial arts. His room is pinned with inspired notes plotting his next novel on Philip of Spain - one of the reasons why he first travelled to Ireland.

"Some of the book will deal with the wreckage of the Armada," Miller explains. "I always wondered what the people on the west coast would have made of this great fleet passing by." To research, he wants to "feel comfortable with the period, hear the music, speak the language - feel as much of that world as possible." He has found Dublin to be "the perfect place to do this in. It's just the right size and, like Paris, it's one of the great literary cities."