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Jump to navigationJump to searchAnatomy of a Miracle by Jonathan Miles (view source)
Revision as of 08:58, 24 August 2020
, 08:58, 24 August 2020no edit summary
|reviewer=Rebecca Foster
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A paralyzed, wheelchair-bound veteran stands up and walks. Is it a miracle, or an explainable medical phenomenon? Miles has been rather sly in how he's packaged this. On the title page , he calls it a 'True Story', and the style is reminiscent of journalistic reportage. But he made it all up. Some may feel tricked – which would be a shame, as there are interesting questions of faith and science that would be rewarding for a book club to discuss.
|rating=3.5
|buy=Maybe
}}
Look closely at the cover of Jonathan Miles's third novel and you'll see the central drama depicted: white wheelchair tracks snake up from the bottom and stop three-quarters of the way from the top, where they are replaced by footprints. On 23 August 2014, wheelchair-bound veteran Cameron Harris stands up and walks outside the Biz-E-Bee convenience store in Biloxi, Mississippi. In the rest of the novel , we find out how he got to this point and what others – ranging from his doctor to representatives of the Roman Catholic Church – will make of his recovery. Was it a miracle, or an explainable medical phenomenon?
Cameron was paralyzed from the waist down by a land mine in Afghanistan in 2010. He lives with his older sister, Tanya; their father left early on, and their mother died in a car accident when Cameron was 16. Hurricane Katrina devastated their community. Ninety-one-year-old Eula Dooley only survived it by sheltering in a fridge. She is the first witness of the apparent miracle of Cameron walking, and soon asks him to pray for her troubled grandson – proof that he's already become something of a modern-day saint whom people believe can intercede with God on their behalf.
We learn more about the backstory of most of Miles's characters, including Cameron's war service and how the Vietnamese proprietors of the Biz-E-Bee mart escaped their home country. I especially liked hearing about Dr Janice's upbringing with an eccentric Southern author for a father. Winston Lorimar was a teller of tall tales, whereas Janice is completely dedicated to finding objective truth. Their conversation towards the end of the novel is one of the highlights for me. Winston dismisses the facile contrasts the world sets up between faith and reason, imagination and evidence: 'it's too easy, now, to overstate these as competing aims. It's a common and rather toxic form of glibness. Because what they are, see, they're just parallel routes to the same place … Consolation.'
Miles has been rather sly in how he's packaged this. On the title page , he calls it a 'True Story', but an asterisk qualifies that with the phrase 'a novel'. The style, reminiscent of journalistic reportage, is like what Dave Eggers uses in nonfiction books such as [[Zeitoun by Dave Eggers|Zeitoun]]. The author keeps up the pretence of the whole thing being based on interviews with the key players, all the way through to the acknowledgements. But early on I did an Internet search for information on a war veteran named Cameron Harris and found nothing. He made it all up.
Miles's previous novel, ''Want Not'', is the book I most wish I'd written, so it was perhaps inevitable this one would suffer in comparison. Janice and Winston were my favourite characters; I never particularly warmed to Cameron or Tanya, who never fully outgrow the country bumpkin stereotype. I suspect some will feel tricked by how Miles tells his story, and may resent being tricked. That would be a shame, as there are interesting questions here that would be rewarding for a book club to discuss (admittedly, an American group might be more invested in the religious theme). What is the relationship between science and storytelling? How can we identify 'God's will'? As the truth about Cameron's sexuality emerges, we are also asked to contrast it with paralysis and ask which 'condition' is changeable. An intriguing if troubling read.
Further reading suggestions: [[Zeitoun by Dave Eggers]] and , [[The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers]] and [[Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith]].
{{amazontext|amazon=0553447580}}
