John Burnside
THE DEVIL'S FOOTPRINTS
217pp. Cape. £14.99.
978 0 224 07488 9
In the past ten years the poet John Burnside has been moonlighting, or daylighting, as a novelist. He has published five novels, a collection of stories, and an autobiography which participates in his fiction and has the force and resonance of his fiction. His is a devouring eloquence, unfazed by generic difference and widely admired. Much of what he does could be described as Gothic romance, a form with a long lineage whose specimens of the modern world are sometimes hailed as avant-garde.
His awareness of the tradition is attested by a concern with lies, dreams, doubles, ghosts, secrets, with terror, horror and the hypothesis of another world, with betrayal and denial, with fate and the mysteries of intention, with the diary and delirium of a madman, with the megalomaniac and the autist and the autodidact. Mothers and fathers are fateful, and his new book, The Devil’s Footprints, has a fateful journey of escape and return. In these novels of his, sense and sagacity mingle with what one of their characters deprecates in himself as the “highly personal” and the “absurdly metaphysical”, as a “running wild”. This running wild can now and then seem hippyish. What this man deprecates others are likely to admire.
“Mother would take me out looking for corpses.” This is one of the first statements made in his first published fiction, The Dumb House (1998), and these two romances, the first of his novels and the latest, have a good deal in common. The Dumb House is an elegant, soli-loquizing grisly book in which the investigation of corpses becomes the production of corpses. An introductory note relates that the Persian Emperor Akbar decreed an experiment in language acquisition, tenanting a place with newborns minded by mutes, and the hypnotic first-person narrator shares Akbar the Great’s enthusiasm. He takes up successively with two near-mute females and performs a vivisection, a laryngectomy, on his own twins. The storyteller’s parents – a mild, excluded father and an unappealing star mother – are at the forefront of all this.
Burnside’s tales make frequent use of the generic first-person singular – as favoured in romances of the kind in question. A tale which does without this powerful engine is The Mercy Boys (2000), where there’s a club of desperate male drinkers. It could be read as a piece of realism, which runs “wild” and “personal” – with bloodshed, a sorceress, journeys of escape – as it moves towards its conclusion. Throughout his fiction can be found the confessions of a justified sinner and an affinity of form and content with the work of James Hogg.
Features of the inaugural novel interestingly reappear in this latest one, in which similar parents raise the narrator, Michael Gardiner, on the east coast of Scotland, in a fishing town, Coldhaven, apparently in Fife. The family has to face a cold shoulder reminiscent of George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters. They are seen as exotic, if not English outsiders. Here is an only faintly Scottish, and a very uncharitable, rural Scotland. The father is “something of a solipsist”, his son supposes: “I don’t think he was altogether persuaded of the existence of others”. Like the son himself, at times.
Coldhaven is a homicide alley. Michael drowns a boy who has been bullying him at school, while the boy’s sister, as she appears to be, puts paid to two of her children in a car conflagration, believing her husband to be diabolical. A daughter, Hazel, survives, and the narrator embarks on a pursuit of her, consciously Lolita-like. She may be his daughter, rather than the Devil’s – but then again Michael himself may be the Devil. A new deil is aye lichtsome, as the Scots say. One winter, the Devil is deemed to have left his cloven hoofprints on the streets and roofs of a snowbound Coldhaven.
Hazel escapes vivisection, but the tale is sufficiently harrowing, gloved though it is in a courteous, explanatory prose. You could get to like this assassin. A climax is reached on a journey which seems meant to embody a coming to terms with the narrator’s guilt. Meanwhile, the novel shows Michael Gardiner’s friendship with a wise old reclusive dame, who has taught him how to take revenge, thereby incurring a guilt of her own. The journey is prolonged, and not, perhaps, fully persuasive. That apart, what happens on almost every page is absorbing. The bond with the old woman, and the tactics of the bullying boy, are sure to stir memories and to command sympathy.
Both of these novels depend on suspense, and yet both have their proleptic touches. They don’t mind telling you some of what is going to
happen. Michael’s mother’s eventual murder is signalled at the start, while the Dumb House vivisection is broached on page three of that novel. This contradiction is in accord with other mysteries in both books which may or may not be surplus to their main enigmas. At one point here the narrator’s estranged wife asks him at breakfast why he has called her Katie. He can’t remember any Katie. Can he have forgotten that his mother was called Kate? This may have to do with a marital ploy that belongs to the couple’s estrangement; it may also fit with the phantom Sophie who turns up in a duplicate car wreck. Elsewhere, in the course of his romantic journey, he meets a woman who takes care of a lonely chapel – centrally heated, however. His cold hand touches her warm one. When he leaves, he opens the door and is hit by a draught of chilly air. “Then she turned to her work and I closed the door behind me, to keep in the warm.” Is he in or out of the chapel? A planned uncertainty?
This account of the new book and of its predecessors may carry the suggestion of a certain grand guignol, of some degree of playful uncertainty, of a Humbert Humbert Nabokovian alienation. It is striking that these features are so seldom distracting, or a trouble. It can be said of John Burnside’s novels what was said by this journal at their outset: that they are the work of “an extraordinarily good writer”. His ghosts are ghostly. The sense he likes to evoke of a hovering and observing someone else in the vicinity is invariably catching. There’s the pleasure of what could be called a loner’s gift for landscape, and of a solipsistic botany, and surgery. And there are many other pleasures, by no means all of them grisly or creepy.
The relationship between his fiction and his memoir, A Lie about My Father (2006), though hardly straightforward, is instructive. His father was an orphan of sorts, a liar and a hostile drinker, the terror and crony of Cowdenbeath and Corby. Epiphanies and escapes, birds, beasts and landscape, and the company of an inspiring schoolgirl, are present, as in the fiction. John Burnside is of Catholic stock, and his references to states of grace and to a different world seem indebted to the Church; you might say that his novels are distinctly more papistical than Protestant. In his youth, he writes, acid did for him what the host did not, and LSD is treated as sacramental and as alchemically-related: this was a time when his heroes were self-made orphans with betraying bad fathers.
Lies were stories, and stories lies; and lies were everywhere, he recalls. It was wrong of fathers and politicians to tell them. He came to be haunted by an image of his own father – stood there outside his prefab, in the night and the wet, thinking himself unobserved – which made him “the father I could bring myself to forgive”, rather than the man he wanted to kill. The memoir is richly circumstantial, less romantic, and less metaphysical, than the romances. And it is very impressive. He is one of the many Scots people who saw to it in their youth that they threw their halfpennies into the Firth of Forth, together with a wish, from their railway carriages halfway across the famous bridge. But few have written so well about the rites of passage of the working-class Scotland of the twentieth century. A representation of his life – one of its true stories – is delivered in the romance, stealth and suspense of his fiction. It can also be said that he is among those imaginative writers who have found an equal eloquence and veracity in the act of autobiographical recall.
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Karl Miller's books include Electric Shepherd: A likeness of James Hogg, 2003, Dark Horses: An experience of literary journalism, 1998, and Boswell and Hyde, 1995.
