When a book is finished it's surface seals over. This can be a relief, a kind of freeing up, but it makes the day-to-day experience of writing the book hard to hold on to. The Crossing

is my seventh novel (the difficult seventh?). When I had finished the sixth, Pure, my intention was to "look up" and spend some time reflecting on what it was I was doing or trying

to do. I was 50-and-a-bit, and had been writing fiction since I was 17. Did I want to go on? I had signed no contract in blood to say that I would write until I dropped, and though it was

not obvious to me what else I might do – gardener? short-order chef? – I wanted there to be a reason for going on that was more and better than simply doing what I was used to doing, what

a society with no interest in reading serious fiction (serious meaning done with care, with love) was in some way damaged or on its way to being so. None of that, I realised, had really

changed. What I had believed at 17 I still, by and large, thought true. But now there was something else going on, a chilly countercurrent, a hard-to-pin-down sense of frustration that

seemed to organise itself around the idea that fiction – in novels, in films, on television – had become more competent than interesting, more decorative than urgent, more conventional than

otherwise. I picked up novels and put them down again. They were not badly written, not at all, but after a page or two I felt I knew them, knew what, at the deeper level, they were up to. I

slid off their surfaces. I struggled to care. I had precisely the same difficulty with my own work. Projects started; projects abandoned. Was this writer's block? Or was it a hazy

recognition that there might be some problem with "traditional narrative"? A set of assumptions that had become almost invisible but that shaped what we wrote? I was aware, of

course, that all this might just be some new symptom of middle age but I decided to trust the restlessness it brought. I looked, as one does, for helpful voices. The first I found was Walter

Benjamin's, in his essay The Storyteller, particularly his questioning of the deployment of psychology: "It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation

as one reproduces it." Then Iris Murdoch's 1961 essay Against Dryness, where she calls for a renewed sense of "the opacity of persons", and the need for fiction – art in

general – to resist offering consolation based on inadequate models of personality and society. A more contemporary voice belonged to Tim Parks who, in his collection Where I'm Reading

From, makes the following point: > So many writers now are able to produce passable imitations of our > much-celebrated 19th century novels. Their very facility becomes an > 

obstacle to exploring some more satisfactory form … Is there a way > forward in words that would explore a quite different vision of self > and narrative? None of this, however,

offered me a recipe for getting myself to work again. What might this "more satisfactory form" be? I began to imagine myself in a landscape deeply grooved with paths. How would it

be if I tried to make a new path in the ground between them or, failing that, walked from path to path in a process of continual self-interruption? I could become, perhaps, that awkward

tourist who wanders off the trail and becomes lost among the tenements, around the industrial zone, only finding the cathedral by accident, at midnight, the far end of an empty square. There

are, doubtless, many objections to such an ambition. The landscape I imagined was culture itself. To be free of the assumptions I sensed shaping narrative was to attempt a kind of leap out

of culture – which is to say, a leap out of my habitual mind and into something else. And who does that? Picasso? Or Andrew Miller sitting in his pyjamas in an attic in Somerset? I'm

not sure what I ended up with, although I know it was an exciting and rather anxious ride. I suppose my one ambition for The Crossing that survives its completion is that it should be hard

to close down on, hard to precis. Again and again while writing, I fell back on something explained to me by a painter friend I once shared a flat with in Bath – the idea of a line that goes

out across the paper and which, for as long as possible, remains simply that, a line with all its potential intact before, the moment no longer deferrable, it becomes, at last, _something:_

a head, a tree, umbrellas in the rain. In the visual arts, that experience of the line's potential belongs principally (exclusively?) to the artist. In The Crossing, I hoped it might

also belong to the reader, and that even at the very end of the book the line would still be travelling, still be, in some way, undeclared. It is, I think, in the moment before we can say,

"it's this", that we are in the more interesting place. As we settle on a thing we often miss it. EXTRACT > Six weeks before Christmas, seven months into the relationship, 

Maud > and Tim begin to live together. Tim finds a first-floor flat in a > small, half-hidden crescent on the hill above his old place. It's > hidden from the main road by 

three plane trees that have grown as > tall as the buildings. The houses (that must once have belonged to > wealthy and perhaps fashionable families) have been converted into > 

flats by someone more interested in rent than architecture, but the > big sash windows are unspoilt and admit a tree-filtered light that > shimmers when the sun is low and throws 

shadows of branches onto the > back walls of the rooms. Tim puts down the deposit, rents a van. The > van is almost entirely taken up with his own stuff; Maud's few boxes > are

 squeezed in by the rear doors. All of it – the relationship, > the move – feels inevitable to Tim and several times, as they > carry their things up the common stairs he says, 

"Doesn't this feel > inevitable?" After the first time, she's quick enough to agree with > him. MORE ABOUT THE CROSSING The story of Tim's narcissism,

self-deception and deception, and of the chiming treacheries of his friends and family, is rich and delicate enough to have sufficed for most contemporary novels. Miller, though, is more

ambitious. About halfway through the novel, he chooses to wrench the marriage short with a – tremendously well done – tragic accident, and sends Maud out into the world alone: a character in

her own right rather than a screen for other's foibles. - KATE CLANCHY Read the full review