Book review: A summer of drowning by John Burnside

JOHN Burnside's uncanny, unforgettable new novel, A Summer Of Drowning, reads like the third part of a thematic trilogy alongside his previous works, Glister and The Devil's Footprints.

All three novels are concerned with sudden disappearances from this world and strange intrusions into it; they examine – indeed, they almost fret at – notions of sin, redemption and the unspeakable. Like Robert Browning, Burnside's interest is in "the dangerous edge of things".

Perhaps more so even than in the previous books, he interrogates moral states both precise and frighteningly vague: how near to wickedness can you draw before becoming irreparably wicked? To prevent cruel things happening, how much violence can a good person allow themselves? Set against the stark beauty of a remote Arctic island, illuminated by the paradoxical light of the midnattsol – the midnight sun – Burnside's novel is one where moral boundaries definitively exist; but where they are and when you cross them is a rather more ambivalent proposition.

A Summer Of Drowning is narrated by Liv Rossdal, a teenage girl who lives alone with her mother, Angelika. A noted painter, Angelika has forgone both the metropolis and portraiture to pursue her craft with single-minded dedication. She is in the business of looking, but it is her daughter who has the gift for seeing things, a phrase Burnside deploys with every possible meaning blazing at the same time.

Liv is also a spy, a quiet observer of the other islanders. She is close to their old neighbour, Kyrre Opdahl, who lives with boxes of "beautiful junk" he tinkers with and fixes, and who beguiles Liv with stories of traditional Norse folklore: trolls, mermaids and, most importantly, the huldra, a water spirit like the nyx or the lorelei which appears as a beautiful girl and lures men to their deaths.

She is also watching – with an ungraspable sense of dread – a man called Martin Crosbie who has hired out Opdahl's boat-house for the entire summer. He tells odd little lies, seems distracted as if drunk and Liv has the sense that he is watching her as much as she is watching him. The ignition for the maelstrom that follows is the death, by drowning, of one of Liv's school friends. Shortly afterwards his brother dies, in a similar manner, on a similarly clear and still night. Liv is perturbed that both boys were hanging around with a girl called Maia, a "dark-eyed, mocking girl with a loose tomboy walk who had always been an outsider". Kyrre's stories about the huldra become more frequent.

Since Burnside narrates the novel in retrospect, the reader learns, in the first seven pages that not just the two boys, but Martin, Kyrre and Maia will disappear by the end of the book. It is not a "whodunit", nor is it "whydunit" – if anything, it's a "what-happened?" This does not dissipate the book's tension; rather, it gives a shadow of foreboding to the entire story, a claustrophobic, leery sense of impending horror.

Burnside's prose has been frequently praised for its clarity, poetic sonority and fine cadences. It is certainly so here; for example, in the haunting, dream-like description of Liv imagining "Maia floating in the Sound somewhere downshore, and a stolen boat drifting on the tide, miles away, empty, barely moving, on water that, to all appearances, was as still and unbroken as the surface of an empty mirror" (all those long vowels and the eerie contrasts between the sibilant sounds and the murmuring "m"s!). But the very serenity and limpid quality of his prose here adds to the menace. It is almost as if the prose itself is the crystal-clear, unstirred water through which the huldra sneaks into our reality. Even the title has that fearful combination of precision and ambiguity. The indefinite article suggests this is not the one and only summer of drowning, and hints at a ritualistic, totemic, perhaps recurring phenomenon.

The subplot, involving the father Liv has never known, struck me at first as disjointed. On reflection, however, it seems to get to the heart of Burnside's method. The possibility of meeting her father raises the idea that Liv could finally define herself, that there are "answers" out there. But the explanations are frustrated; the truth remains a quicksilver, fleeting thing.

At its pinnacles, A Summer Of Drowning marries philosophical meditation with the gooseflesh verve of a thriller: "People used to believe someone, or something, was watching them," he writes, "that divine gaze was meant to stand in opposition to the looks they were subjected to every day, looks that made them feel less real. They knew that they were diminished by the way other people saw them, but it didn't matter because, every day and moment by moment, they were magnified by heaven. They were wrong, of course. Nobody watches us. We are not witnessed – or not, at least, by anyone who might be inclined to forgiveness."

This article was originally published in Scotland on Sunday on June 5th 2011