Book review: Ava Anna Ada, by Ali Millar

Set in a recognisable but different reality, where people are obsessed with how they appear on The Screen and have become used to regular visits from the Deportations Bus, this is an unforgettable and unflinching book, writes Stuart Kelly
By Stuart Kelly
Published 16th Jan 2024, 10:14 BST

The very title of Ali Millar’s first novel will send a frisson of delirious vertigo among a certain demographic of readers. It will, as if intoned with bell, book and candle, raise the shadow of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. It is one of Nabokov’s most opaque and unsettling novels, which is quite an achievement when he had already written works such as Pale Fire, Lolita, Bend Sinister and Invitation To A Beheading. For the true aficionado, I’d probably say Ava Anna Ada is as brilliantly queasy as Nabokov’s final novel, Look At The Harlequins!

The title of Nabokov’s book is a kind of pun, with the pronunciations being identical in the accent of a Russian passing as an English-speaker. It is a book full of doubles, charting the affair between Van Veen and his cousin, actually his sister, Ada. It is set on “Antiterra”, where they believe in another double, the alternative world of Terra (although Antiterra may be called Demonia, and the Russian ‘ad’ means hell). The ending has Ada and Veen merging and dying into “Vaniada, Dava or Vada, Vanda and Anda”. It is hallucinatory, nightmarish and obsessive.

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Miller ups the ante, even in the tripling of the title. Ava Anna Ada is also set in a recognisable but different reality, specifically in a kind of interzone called The Spit, a place “where land has passed back and forward so many times no one knows where they are, not England, not Scotland, not Europe, not not Europe”. That double negative is a stylistic watermark throughout: in Ava’s opening chapter she defines herself saying “I am not shy. I am also not not shy”. This is a place where people are obsessed with how they appear on The Screen, suffer from anxiety about their rating on their Value Meter and are acclimatised to the Deportations Bus from the Sorting Centre.

Ava is not Ava. It is a palindrome name she blurts out when she first meets Anna in person, having followed her life and lifestyle on The Screen. It is “a single consonant away” from the name of Anna’s dead daughter, Ada; and Ava allows the deception and ambiguity to stand. It is not a particularly auspicious meeting given Anna is in the process of kicking a dog to death. What is horrible is that it is somehow unsurprising.

Ava works on changing herself from a teenage prostitute in the backwaters to a simulacrum, a doppelganger, an imperfect Xerox of loss. The folie à deux is further complicated by Adam, Anna’s son, a needy child obsessed with moth pupae (a nod to Nabokov’s lepidoptery, which informed the title of Ada). Despite Anna’s marketable online life, Ava is able to see and exploit its faultlines and fissures, especially concerning Anna’s rather judgemental and puritanical husband, Leo. Given the novel’s precision about names, I do not think it is overthinking things to link Leo to the text in the evening service of Compline, “your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”.

There are, of course, three epigraphs, almost stark as warnings. We have Eliot’s The Waste Land, pieces from the theorist Jean Baudrillard and the chilling lines from King Lear, “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport”. Despite the relevance of Baudrillard, the great vivisector of image, appearance and impersonation, Ava Anna Ada reminded me more of the transgressive work of Georges Bataille, and especially Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles (translated once as “The Holy Terrors”). The game-playing becomes increasingly sinister and even psychopathic, leading to a truly chilling ending.

The chapters move between Ava, Anna and “Ava and Anna”, with a few as “We”. This multiple perspective increases the novel’s eeriness. The reader is never certain what actually happened, and each narration of the events renders it more problematic. We are not as others see us, and as Iris Murdoch once noted, we never control how we appear in the dreams of others; a terrifying thought. The novel emerged at the same time as a Cartesian, singular, unified identity, and part of what qualifies this book as postmodern is the manner in which it has imagined a non-sequential, discontinuous, fragmented identity.

Ali Millar PIC: D AdamsAli Millar PIC: D Adams
Ali Millar PIC: D Adams

Although this is Miller’s first novel it is not her first book. She has previously written an excellent memoir, The Last Days, about growing up in and rebelling against the Kingdom Church, also called the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The residents of the Spit are threatened by an impending tsunami, and Miller does not need to make explicit either the apocalyptic overtones or the bathos. Doomsday does seem to be an awfully long time a-coming. But the experience does mean she is more than qualified to write with horrific exactitude about sin, about losing one’s way and one’s self, and the manifold possibilities of harm. This is an unforgettable and unflinching book. Even though there are moments of ghastly comedy – the scene in the vet’s is gruesomely hilarious – it manages to end with a moment of sublimity. But the sublime, as Burke described it, something overwhelming that reminds us of our mortality, of the “terrible uncertainty of the thing”.

Ava Anna Ada, by Ali Millar, White Rabbit, £16.99