Evil lurks in poisoned playground - John Burnside book review

Published on Friday 2 May 2008 17:20

GLISTER

John Burnside

Jonathan Cape, 12.99

NOBODY does eerie quite like John Burnside. His exquisite and haunting new novel, Glister, opens with the ghostly voice of Leonard, "a boy who is quietly disappearing". As he fades into limbo, he muses on Morrison, the town policeman of Innertown, who will "find either hell or salvation" in the course of the story. Then, with an almost cinematic whoosh, we are returned to the beginning, with the full knowledge that things are going to get much darker.

Innertown, a blighted, post-industrial community, is shadowed by the remains of a chemical plant, which poisons the soil and provides a dangerous, forbidden playground for children. And those children are disappearing. Morrison and the sinister owner of the plant, Smith, have covered up five such disappearances.

Leonard is an intellectually precocious loner, with a sexually precocious girlfriend, Elspeth. As they investigate the disappearances, their attention turns towards a man rumoured to be a paedophile. Burnside ratchets up the impending horror with a masterly touch. His previous works, especially The Locust Room and Living Nowhere, have explored how contagious violence is; and the pathology here is every bit as chilling. However, the violence in Glister is shot through with an awful grace.

The atmosphere and tenor are reminiscent of Twin Peaks. Small town nastiness is merged with a contemporary mythology; the limits between dream and reality, the grotesque and the mundane are smudged. It has a cumulative, insistent force, overturning the reader's expectations and building to a truly shocking climax.

At the core is an unanswered question: what is more horrific – the idea that evil is a genuinely supernatural phenomenon, or the idea that it is a banal, all too human one? This fable leaves room for both readings, the ambiguity making it all the more frightening. The unsaid and undescribed are more effective in raising gooseflesh than any explicit or categorical depiction.

As with all of Burnside's work – poetry, novels and memoir – there is a vision of something inexplicable at the heart of things. I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year.

• John Burnside is at the Word Festival, Aberdeen, Saturday, 6.15pm