The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central event of David Miller’s debut novel. A reimagining of Conrad’s final days, Today explores the nature of bereavement. Within the novel’s confines, Conrad exists simply as a character — a dying man whose profession has been that of a writer and whose working life has necessitated the presence of a secretary, Lillian Hallowes, who, up to a point, offers the reader a commentary on the novel’s happenings. Miller attempts no assessment of Conrad’s work, his literary status or psychology. In this, Today resembles a television drama: it exploits verifiable events as a backdrop to universal human responses, namely those of Conrad’s friends, colleagues and family to his death.
This is a sparse, taut novel. It is not overly ‘Conradian’ in the sense that that adjective is usually understood, denoting an engagement with motive, moral choice and human frailty. The novel’s principal characters — Conrad’s wife and two sons, Miss Hallowes, a journalist, Richard Curle, and a gaggle of domestic staff who occasionally behave in a surprisingly familiar fashion with their employers — are overwhelmingly passive, responding to events over which they have no control. At the beginning of the novel, E. M. Forster is repeatedly conjured: A Passage to India was published in the year of Conrad’s death, 1924. Miss Hallowes initially resembles a Forsterian spinster of the Charlotte Bartlett variety, but subsequently reveals herself to be anything but. More often there are echoes of Virginia Woolf — a concern with fine weather for a picnic, which suggests the opening of To the Lighthouse, and a consistent, tactile engagement with the minutiae of living and being. If Today’s sense of period mostly fails to convince, the novel does succeed in repeatedly recalling aspects of early-20th-century English novel-writing.
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