A poet's darkest imagination brings a gripping story of small-town secrets to life..
GLISTERby JOHN BURNSIDE
Jonathan Cape, 258pp, £12.99
DARKNESS DEEPENS, DARKNESS visible, diabolical and sheer. The fictional world of poet John Burnside is not a congenial place to be. His cast of characters – often misfits – c
onsists of the stalked, the haunted and the doomed.
His hallmarks are clear: the ominous bleakness of blasted terrain, the spirit-wasteland, dating back to his searing debut a dozen years ago with The Dumb House, a wrenching examination of language as the keeper of the self.
Whereas in his poetry much is implied, in the fiction explicitness is more frequent. This spelling out takes the words between the lines and strings them together to make the unspeakable palpably present. Instead of compressing states of being, as Burnside's verses do, the novels brilliantly amplify states of mind, states of dreaming.
In Glister the stringing out of language, sometimes knotted, eventually dangles before us a corpse, a tortured torso, its last hours ghastly. It swings in the trees of the "poisoned wood" – the body of a boy, Mark Wilkinson, the first of five teenage lads to disappear from the blighted townscape known as Innertown, a sink estate for the workers who had serviced the now defunct chemical plant.
No other bodies have been found and rumours are rife, theories multiply to explain the disappearances – serial murder, abduction by aliens, and wilful running away by each of the youths, are all popular guesses.
Innertown's policeman, the misfit, Morrison, (moribund marriage, pointless existence) knows the secret of Wilkinson's fate, but fails to act to deal with the crime. He helps to conceal it by referring it to Smith, a misanthrope sadist whose flunky, Jenner, hungry for victims, deals with the corpse.
Thus Hammer horror meets Grand Guignol, in, so the cover tells us, "the terrifying new novel by the prize-winning Scottish author". We may only assume that the blurb-writer's terror-threshold is particularly low. Or maybe the hullabaloo is hype.
For "terror" sells books and it's no surprise that a novel that pierces the heart of evil should be so described. Burnside writes with nuance and poise (overcoming a flaky, opaque beginning pitched in the rambling style of Ben Okri). His tale is dark, pursuing the sickness of Innertown's soul. His grip is sure.
The story begins and ends with Leonard, whose closest mate, Liam, is among the disappeared. Leonard is clever, precocious, articulate. Among other things, this story is the tale of his coming of age. His life, like that of Innertown's populace, is grim. The curse of ill-health, a result of pollution, touches many. Premature deaths, protracted suffering and, in Leonard's case, his mother doing a runner with a lover, are par for the course.
At times the tale resembles a myth, at others a parable, pointing out the wages of sin, not least how the terrible sins of forefathers visit succeeding generations. Burnside's telling is never monochrome. Leonard joins a wayward gang. He consorts with the pawky, spritely, somewhat dangerous Elspeth (her fatal allure); theirs is an abstract sort of attraction.
Leonard loses himself in the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, Scott Fitzgerald, and Joseph Conrad (Burnside somehow makes this believable), while around him the heart of Innertown's myth-sized darkness grows claws and teeth and bad things happen. An old man is murdered. Leonard is present. But guilt is a slippery proposition, it oozes and spreads. Is Leonard to blame?
Leonard is precious and susceptible, falling prey himself to the devious machinations of the Moth Man, a strangely Mephistophelian figure, both arch and angelic, whose father turns out to have been a force in the cursed creation of the chemical works and who holds the key to Leonard's fate.
Morrison too must confront the Moth Man. Will he be punished for his unforgivable sin? A biblical – mostly Old Testament – mood prevails throughout. The Book of Job is evoked, as the cursed and sin-ridden people of Burnside's cosmos proceed at best towards perpetual tedium, while Leonard contemplates "grace" (through which the Bible declares we are saved), as his chief diversion.
Burnside opts for a Michel Faber-style conclusion of shifting dimensions, confirming the novel's fantastic basis. Consume it at night. Turn out the light and watch the walls glow. Ardens sed virens. Something burns but is not consumed. It might even be you.
The full article contains 741 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
