I Put A Spell On You - John Burnside

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2011 - Books of the Year

Yes, you may have already noticed that 2011's end of year post is just about books rather than also including my favourite music, films and other cultural highlights. The reason for this is quite simple: I've barely listened/watched/been to any as any regular readers will have noticed over the year. It has in fact been all I could manage to maintain a steady stream of book reviews this year and I have my fingers crossed about being able to do the same next year. It hasn't been easy. But every time I think I'm about to throw in the towel something comes along to make me persevere and I'm always glad that I do. The books below are all brilliant for different reasons and a couple of them are so good that they're worth writing the blog for alone. And then of course there's you and your comments.....

Many thanks to every single one of you who has read my blog this year and a seasonal hug and kiss to everyone who's left a comment. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.


A Taste of Chlorine by Bastien Vives

It may be at the bottom of the pile in the photo above but this graphic novel is right at the top of my books of the year. If you want to read a graphic novel that truly uses pictures to tell a story that words wouldn't have been able to then this book is perfect. The story of a boy using swimming to help treat curvature of the spine is all about body-language, gesture and movement. There's hardly any text and yet volumes are spoken in Vives' exquisitely drawn panels, with the underwater environment particularly well presented, you can almost smell the chlorine. Like reading a perfect short story it is enigmatic, moving and left me with a warm glow in my heart.

The Death Of The Adversary by Hans Keilson

A genuine masterpiece about tyranny and control from a writer who may only have produced two novels in his long lifetime but who made sure they were both in their own ways completely brilliant. This novel examines the symbiotic relationship between a man who is clearly Jewish (though never named as such) in 1930's Germany (though this is never made explicit) and the leader, or adversary, (clearly Hitler though again he is not named) who tyrannises him. Brave in its hypotheses, brutal in its psychological insights and honesty, this novel is a classic because it manages to be about all situations in which one group makes a pariah of another. Indispensable.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

This novel is by no means perfect but its failings come from ambition rather than lack of talent which Krauss seems to have in spades. There is a feeling that comes from reading the work of a mature writer, an ease that you are in the hands of someone who has something to say. This usually comes from writers far more experienced than Krauss but her maturity is just one of the attractive features in this novel about a desk and the various hands it passes through, characters created with such detail that they cease to feel like characters at all, and the novel as a whole written with a complexity that forces the reader to slow down and appreciate the thought, intelligence and humanity that has gone into creating it.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

A collection of stories so unique, so specific, so perfect as to need little more than that from me to send you straight out to buy a copy. Pancake died without ever really knowing just how good a writer he was and too young for us to know just how good and influential he might have become. As it stands several writers cite him as an influence and the warmth and reverence with which they do this is worth noting. His stories embody the area of West Virginia in which Pancake grew up, with authentic details and voices but these aren't simply stories rooted in a particular geography so that we can indulge in a kind of literary tourism, he also shows with a couple of stories just how formally inventive he might have been. Just buy the damn book, ok?

The Summer Of Drowning by John Burnside

I have no shame in admitting that I am a fan of Burnside and take a small amount of pride in being one of the voices that has helped convince John Self over at Asylum to read more of him and realise just how good he is (although in his own end of the year round-up he mentions that he did so in order to shut people like me up). This latest novel shows a writer at the height of his powers returning to a story he failed to complete a decade ago and delivering a novel filled with atmosphere, unease, myth, storytelling, artistry and writing so good it sometimes make you want to take a moment and nod your head in appreciation. Set in the Arctic Circle and drawing on the folk myths of the area this is a book infused with the spectral light of the midnight sun; deeply unsettling, wonderfully complex, another weapon in my arsenal to make sure that you all make the effort to pick up one of his books. Soon.

The Rules Of Civility by Amor Towles

An unalloyed pleasure from first page to last, Towles debut is a perfectly mixed dry Martini. Set in 1920's New York it tells the story of a life-changing year for Katherine Kontent, the only fictional character I have ever fallen in love with. Taking inspiration from Walker Evans' candid subway photographs Towles effortlessly recreates an era and peoples it with characters in which I believed totally and couldn't hope to forget. It's the kind of novel where you genuinely care about what happens to them and can't help but wonder what happens to them after the final page. Witty, funny, smart and beautiful: that's just Katey Kontent, but also a good description of the novel as a whole.

Lazarus Is Dead by Richard Beard

One of the most exciting reads of the year for the way in which its form was hard to pin down, Beard's 'novel' is a re-examination of the story behind one of Jesus' miracles. By taking an almost forensic approach Beard manages to tell the story more fully than ever before, bravely hypothesising about the childhoods of both men, drawing inspiration and evidence from other artistic sources, research into the period and of course the invention of the author. Structured around the number seven the chapters count down to Lazarus' death and then back up again after his resurrection, where Beard is brave enough not just to imagine what happens to the story of Lazarus after its usefulness in the Bible ends but to posit an even greater significance for the man who came back from the dead. If you want to know why fiction can still be exciting then pick this book up.

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani

If I had a pound for every novel that takes a male protagonist, wipes his memory and then starts from there then I'd have a load more money to spend on books, but this novel from linguist Marani is ingenious and far smarter than most. A man is found badly beaten on the quay in Trieste in 1943. When he comes to he has no memory of who he is or even which language he speaks. The Finnish doctor on a German hospital ship that treats him presumes that he is also Finnish after spotting a name inside his coat and an initialled handkerchief and so begins to re-teach him his language in the hope it will unlock memories and lead him to recover his identity. This relatively slim novel covers huge themes around memory, identity and truth and manages to intrigue even further with the perspective from which it is written. Exactly the kind of novel I would hope to unearth on this blog (although Nicholas Lezard gets the credit on this one).

I Am A Chechen by German Sadulaev

A book that melds memoir with fiction, folk tale with fantasy, Sadulaev's account of the conflict in Chechnya doesn't fit into any easy categories and is all the more exciting for it. It may not be consistent but the early sections in particular are stunning in the way they weave Chechen myth with personal testimony to create something that manages to be grand and specific at the same time. Infused with the guilt of a man who wasn't there when things were at their worst, Sadulaev uses his creativity instead to speak on behalf of a people and give voice to a conflict the like of  which all too easily passes us by on the ticker tape of rolling news.

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

This is hardly news to anyone as the book was already well regarded by the time I came to read it at the very beginning of this year but it has remained very strong in my mind, a perfect example of why we should all read more literature in translation. Bakker's novel is written with the kind of quiet confidence that let's the reader relax in the knowledge that they are in safe hands. Reserved to the point of repression, the prose mimics the flat landscape of rural Holland but gives little hints along the way of the power that lurks beneath the surface. A farmer and his father inhabit a lonely farmhouse and the son's appalling treatment of his father leads us to wonder what might have happened in the past. Bakker expertly releases fragments from the past in his examination of love, loss and the special bond between twin brothers.

The Horseman's Word by Roger Garfitt

I don't tend to read an awful lot of non-fiction but I'm lucky that when I do it tends to be first rate. This memoir was literally forced into my hand by an excited publicist and her enthusiasm wasn't misplaced. The prose is beautiful as you might expect from a poet and its evocations of childhood innocence are heart-warming and comforting. When it follows Garfitt's misadventures at university and beyond it becomes a fascinating portrait of a mind unravelling and the writing shows the tissue-thin barriers between lunatic, lover and poet. A book that took many years to write and hone, and the passion of one publisher in particular to finally bring to print, this is a labour of love and madness that rewards the effort.

Disgrace by J M Coetzee

Over a decade after it was originally published and won the Booker Prize I finally get over my Coetzee hoodoo and discover just why this book, and writer, are so well regarded. A Cape Town university professor is forced to leave in disgrace after an affair with a student and goes to stay with his daughter on her smallholding. When the two of them are subjected to a brutal assault by three black men South Africa's fragile new politics are laid bare for examination. A brave and uncomfortable read that retains its ability to shock, this is a novel filled with anger and love, containing so many ideas and themes that you could happily discuss it for hours and hours. It has also of course made me want to read more Coetzee. Ah well, there's always next year....


And a few books that came close and deserve honourable mentions: At Last by Edward St Aubyn, A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, From The Mouth Of The Whale by Sjón and Today by David Miller.

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'the keeper of the illusion'

...a small house at the edge of the sea, an isolated white hytte, glimpsed through pine woods, its windows illumined with a soft, golden light, its roof almost black, like the pines and the dark water beyond. Had it been done by anyone else, this would have been taken for a night scene, but Sohlberg had painted the sky - a distant seeming sky, far beyond the inky reach of the Sound - in a pale, eerie blue, an almost powder blue, like the gloaming of summer's end, and the little white house, with its faint gold lights, looked like it was part of a theatre set, impermanent, provisional and only temporarily inhabited.

A Summer Of Drowning 
by John Burnside

With his last couple of novels Burnside has been moving into some interesting territory, using folk tale and fable to infuse his narratives with the very essence of storytelling. Before the written word there was oral storytelling, the means by which cultures could pass down their knowledge and lessons from one generation to the next. Burnside has managed to embrace something of that essence (whilst always rooting his stories in reality, leaving it to the reader to decide just how much to take the narrative voice at face value) with the tales of cloven hooves and two-headed babies in The Devil's Footprints and the poisoned wood and disappearing children in his last novel Glister. His latest is even more obviously immersed in that tradition, located on the small Norwegian island of Kvaløya, deep in the Arctic Circle, a landscape of mountains, forests and fjords, populated by tales of trolls, mermaids and spirits. It is to here that renowned painter Angelika Rossdal escaped several years ago with her daughter Liv, a place where she could pursue her craft in isolation, the kind of self-imposed exile that might be familiar to any other regular readers of Burnside.

It is Liv who narrates the novel, ten years after the titular summer of her eighteenth year, a summer illuminated as ever by the midnattsol, or midnight sun of these northern latitudes but marked out as special initially by the separate drownings of two brothers in calm water, events both uncharacteristic and unexplainable. Liv wasn't particularly close to either of the boys, she isn't particularly close to anyone apart from her mother and their elderly neighbour Kyree Opdahl, but in such a small community she cannot help but be interested in the stories that begin to circulate and when these combine with the old folk tales and her own active thoughts they build into a crescendo that has taken ten years for her to be able to relate to us.

Kvaløya is the perfect environment for blurring the distinctions between myth and reality, even Angelika's remoteness is a 'mythic seclusion' cultivated by those that wish to portray her as an artistic recluse, and there is no doubt that this fiction has become 'central to her artistic success'. Amongst the other inhabitants she has a mythic status also, her home receiving a regular group of 'suitors' each weekend, men who know they stand no chance in capturing this beauty but 'like those men in the Greek myth, come to beguile, or charm, or just outwait Penelope while her lost husband wandered the wine-dark sea trying to find his way home.' In another form of isolation, Liv has never met her father, never been able to draw her mother on anything about him, even his name. That isolated upbringing is total, an environment of limited stimulus, a single parent who is often lost to her work, and few friends to speak of. She may not believe in God 'or not in the usual way, but I do find that I am here for a reason, and that is to keep watch. To pay attention' and that is why she thinks of her self as 'one of God's spies' (which also takes the rather more worldly form of snooping with binoculars). The influences on Liv have been minimal, with the stories and fancies of Kyrre Opdahl assuming a larger significance than she may even realise in shaping her view of the world. Whether they come from his illustrated children's books, or straight from the horse's mouth, his tales have helped Liv to open her mind to the thought that the world might be stranger than we give it credit for - 'Stranger - and more dangerous.'

People from the town didn't believe in such things, of course they didn't, so they made fun of the old stories, not realising that, for a true believer like Kyrre, nothing was ever that crude. But I realise; I know. In Kyrre's house, there were shadows in the folds of every blanket, imperceptible tremors in every glass of water or bowl of cream set out on the table, infinitesimal loopholes of havoc in the fabric of reality that could spill loose and find you, as the first hint of a storm finds a rower out on the open sea. In Kyrre's house, there were memories of real events, of long-dead farm lads and schoolgirls who went out at first light fifty years ago and came home touched - touched for the rest of their lives - by something unnameable, a wingbeat or a gust of wind in their heads, where thought should have been.

It is in the tale of the huldra that Kyrre sees a possible explanation for the boys drowning. The huldra is a beautiful woman who leads young men to their doom - 'Seen from the front, she is perfectly beautiful, perfectly desirable, but if he could only look past this beautiful mask, he would see that, at her back, there is a startling vacancy, a tiny rip in the fabric of the world where everything falls away into emptiness.' Could Maia, a local girl living an almost vagrant existence be involved in the drownings, or the disappearance of a British man using Kyrre's hytte, or cottage, as a retreat? Whilst Liv wrestles with events at home she receives a letter from abroad that brings that unknown father crashing into her consciousness. When she eventually leaves her home to confront that she visits an art gallery where she sees the painting by Harald Sohlberg that adorns the cover of this book and that is described in the extract at the top of this review. The slightly odd experience of viewing such a familiar image whilst in a provincial English gallery provides an almost spiritual experience for Liv which gives us a small clue to her fragile mental state just before returning home where it will unravel still further.

I was home. Not just home, on Kvaløya, but home in my own head, in the place where dreams happened. I was in a place that nobody else could ever see, and I was completely alone there.

Painting is naturally a major theme and inexorably linked to the novel's examination of reality. Angelika has moved away from portraiture to landscapes, not as you might expect because her location demands it, but because she had tried and failed to capture something in that aspect of her work, and in a portrait of her daughter in particular. Her interest is rekindled by the spectre of the huldra and by Maia as a subject, something that naturally causes huge conflict for Liv. Burnside also manages to work in Leon Battista Alberti's theory that Narcissus invented painting. If we accept that Narcissus didn't realise at first that the reflection was of himself then perhaps this was because he had thought of himself as apart from the world, merely an observer of those other people and objects within it. The reflection in the pool showed not only himself but the sky and trees that surrounded him and suddenly made him a part of the world he had observed, 'for the first time, he is part of the world, and art is his way of confirming that. A way of saying that he is in the world, in the world and of it.' This novel of disappearances is also one of realisation, of people struggling to acknowledge the presence of others. Each of the characters could be accused of having regarded themselves as 'an island entire of itself,' content in their isolation but forced over this summer towards 'the difficult realisation that someone other than oneself is real' (Iris Murdoch's definition of love).

A final word about atmosphere, something that Burnside has always excelled at. Not only is the landscape well-suited but that otherworldly light, so brilliantly depicted in Sohlberg's painting and described in Burnside's prose (and even evoked in Radiohead's The Gloaming), is the perfect illumination for such a dreamlike narrative. We can never entirely be sure of our narrator's reliability. Liv may be looking back with hindsight (and almost exhaustively so, the text littered with 'it seemed to me...', ' I can see now...' etc etc) and from a place of happiness, but she has always struggled to reconcile what she witnessed with what others might accept as possible. What we have to remember, going back to what I was saying earlier about the very nature of early storytelling, is that we shouldn't be fooled by something that is merely dream-like.

...it wasn't a dream, it was a story - and that's different. A story stands in for everything that cannot be explained and, though there are many stories, there's really only one and we can tell the difference because the many stories have a beginning and an end, but the one story doesn't work like that. Ryvold used to say that stories are really about time. They tell us that once, in a place that existed before we were born, something occurred -  and we like to hear about that, because we know already that the story is over. We know that we are living in the happily ever after, which means that nothing will happen ever again - and this is the key to a happy life. To live in the ever-after of the present moment: no past, no future.

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'learning how to vanish'

Waking Up In Toytown

by John Burnside

In his first memoir, A Lie About My Father, Burnside focused on his foundling father, a hard-drinking, tough-love kind of man, but also charted his own drink and drug fuelled descent into the abyss and the painful realisation that he couldn't help but see that man he hated so much at times staring back at him when he looked in the mirror. His second memoir puts himself at the centre of the picture but once again he chooses to filter his revelations through portraits of those around him, in this case the many misfits and failed relationships that peppered the past that was 'Not so long ago when I was still mad'. This is no misery-memoir though, fear not, Burnside not only has little sympathy for himself but is able to employ the dark humour of his fiction and an unflinching honesty to illuminate what he admits is a fairly tawdry and shameful period in his life. The madness in this case is the result of a condition called apophenia, described by the schizophrenia specialist Klaus Conrad as 'the unmotivated seeing of connections' coupled with the 'specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.' Or as Burnside more pithily puts it 'seeing things that weren't there.' But let's not go too deep, too soon.

Readers of the LRB may have come across one chapter of this book already, entitled Losing Helen (If you're a subscriber and missed it you can view it here, if you're not a subscriber you can buy it!) . Burnside uses the sudden death of a work colleague to achieve many things simultaneously. Firstly a vivid portrait of a working community, but most importantly he provides an honest account of losing somebody he wasn't really that close to, a death that still looms large in his memory, assuming its own importance. It teaches him something about memory which is crucial to the book.

She is a story, nothing more - but then maybe this is why we tell ourselves stories, in order to work out why we remember some things more than others, why some events live on in the mind, why some faces and voices persist for decades, to be resurrected in the dark by an insomniac who wakes knowing he has certainly lost something on the way, but has no idea what it is. Which means, of course, that the story I am telling is not about this dead girl after all: it isn't about her, it's about me. It's not about her life or her death: it's about what I lost and how, whatever that lost thing might be, it resembles her in some way.

In a way the book as a whole is an attempt to piece together or reclaim what was lost. As in his first memoir he examines the veracity of memory and experience, the fictionalisation of remembrance, describing it at one point thus:

My memory of that time is more than a little confused, and I can't fully account for how I got clear. What I do recall is a room that I can picture so precisely, it doesn't feel like a memory at all. It's more like the film I saw last night, or a photograph from a magazine where the central figure is strangely familiar, even if he isn't quite the person whose name first comes to mind. This central character - the one vague spot in a memory that is otherwise extremely vivid - is familiar in the way that an actor in an old black-and-white film noir would be familiar if I saw him out of context, crossing the road in my home town, maybe, or paying his bill at the cafe on the high street...Now that this is a story I am telling - and it's me telling it, not him - I can accept that the central figure in this scene is a version of myself, or at least someone I used to be; but when I say as much, it seems wrong, because what I recall is so obviously an actor or an impostor playing a role, and even that role, even the character he is pretending to be, is not the person I think of now when I try to summon up the image of myself then.

He is on his bed surrounded by bottles filled with a sweet smelling dark gold liquid, 'a mixture of blood, honey, alcohol, olive oil and urine'. On the top of each open bottle is a feather 'balanced precariously...If one feather falls, then the spell fails.' The spell is to protect the naked man on the bed, pinned there for two days after witnessing a terrifying incident (in all probability only in his mind) that he cannot begin to recall today.

This is the nadir from which he is lifted, seeking solace and making an attempt towards normality by moving to his version of Surbiton - 'Shorthand for a place that almost existed' - in his case, the suburbs outside Guildford. Anyone who has lived in suburbia will know that the veil of normality can hide some pretty strange goings on and Burnside finds many other routes to dysfunction. As he says, 'all craziness is kin.' It isn't just the intake of alcohol and drugs that drives that journey but the faltering connections between people.

Friendship, or at least drinking companionship, is soured when his buddy attempts to enlist him in the murder of his wife, inspired by Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train. A relationship turns out to be based on love for the woman's children rather than her herself (Burnside describes brilliantly the way that the daughter 'chooses' him, her love and attention impossible to resist). When love really does come along it is in a form that makes it unacceptable. Each chapter describes another instance in which he attempted to be normal, to disappear into the everyday world and was found wanting. I always wondered where he got the ability to make the mundane into something beautiful in his fiction. Now having read more about his own battles to silence voices and find rest, his search for what the Japanese call 'wabi-sabi: the state of quotidian grace in which everyday objects and events become sacraments', I've come a little closer to understanding.

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John Burnside Interview

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have often championed the work of John Burnside. His last novel Glister was one of my favourite books of last year and his memoir A Lie About My Father remains one of the best memoirs I've read. Like many of my favourite writers he excels in several areas including poetry and journalism. All of which means that I was as pleased as punch when he found time amongst his full-time teaching at St Andrew's and the rigours of being a father to two boys (something I will share with him come October) to answer a few questions for me. If you haven't read any of his work already then I sincerely hope you will do after reading this.

You worked as a computer programmer at the same time as writing your first poems. Did any of your colleagues have a clue that there was a poet amongst them?

Not to begin with. I soon got caught out, though – and much leg-pulling ensued, though mostly about my author photo. When I finally came to leave the job and walked into the Technical Director’s office and handed him my company car key, announcing that I was quitting, he smiled and asked if I was off to write a novel. I think the general feeling was that I was having one of those midlife crisis deals and would be back, somewhat chastened, in six months. I think I did too, to begin with.

That said, many of my colleagues were interested and supportive of my writing. I think they thought I was crazy to think of it as anything other than a hobby – though I did receive some kind messages after The Dumb House came out.

I read The Dumb House shortly after seeing a production of Marivaux's The Dispute in which four children, two of each sex are raised in isolation and then placed together to see which sex will be unfaithful first. It is a comedy whereas your novel, which shares the premise of children raised in isolation, is about as far from comedy as I can imagine. Can you say a bit about where that novel came from?

The original ‘hero’ of The Dumb house was language. I was interested in language and I wanted to dwell for a while on some stories about language acquisition and the relationship between language and the soul. I especially liked that story about Akbar’s keeping children in a silent palace, outside the city, to see whether they would speak if they didn’t hear language used. That would have been a horrifying thing to those of his court who believed that language and the soul are closely related – to think that they – the court – had doomed so many to a soulless existence, which would have been confirmed by the silence of the children in the ‘dumb house’.

Of course, that wasn’t enough of a starting point for a first novel – not enough narrative. That was when Luke arrived – one day, he just appeared, and became the central character (though not, of course, the ‘hero’). In many ways, he was a version of me, though he was a negative image, as it were, of my concerns and interests.


As a writer of poetry, memoir, fiction, and journalism, what are main differences for you personally between those disciplines, and when you have an idea do you know immediately what it will become?

I do know, now, what an idea wants to be (as it were) though there have been times, in the past, when I didn’t. A poem always knows it’s going to be a poem, of course, but there have been occasions when I thought a nascent short story was on the way to novel-hood – maybe because the short story is a very difficult form, (and much undervalued in commercial terms, too). It takes a while to get a strong sense of that.

There are also grey areas that are interesting – between memoir and fiction, essay and memoir, travel piece and memoir, etc. Maybe that’s why I like the memoir as a genre (if you can call it that). It’s very flexible – you can close in and become intimate, then open out and talk about ideas.

Do you have a preferred medium?

They all have their attractions, (I suppose that is to state the obvious, since I keep going back to them all). I’ve just finished a second memoir – it’s called Waking Up in Toytown, and it’s due early next year. It differs from its predecessor (A Lie about my Father) to a fair extent – but the next one, which is already suggesting itself to me, will be different again – using the essay form as a way in, to reflect on time and memory. For me, everything is about time. How we see time determines everything: how happy we are, how directed, how we think of such things as ‘success’ and failure’, how decent we manage to be as people. It all depends on an understanding of time.

I guess, to begin with, I would have said poetry was my first love – because I mostly wrote poetry then. I still do write poetry, but I have an equal fondness for the short story and the essay. I love the essay. It offers so many possibilities to a writer. As for the novel – well that’s love, too, but it’s more like unrequited love. You give it your all and then you can’t bear to think how badly you failed that gorgeous initial idea. Because it was as perfect as jewel to begin with but – not surprisingly, given that it is worked on over years during short breaks from the everyday demands of work and domestic life – it ends up being a piece of knitting, with plains where there should be purls, and vice versa. I carry around a lingering fondness for a couple of my books – the Dumb House, The Devil’s Footprints, Glister, say - but now they make me think of children who looked so wonderful and clean in their christening shawls, but quickly turned delinquent.

Going back to what you were saying about time and how we view it, what do you mean about the differing ways of seeing time?

The time question presents itself in two ways. First, a commonplace piece of mystic thinking – put briefly, the idea that the now is eternal. Which is the case, but hardly new – as a thought. As an experience, however, it is astonishing. This moment is everything – though if you try to stop and think about what ‘this moment’ I, it’s gone, and another, equally fleeting moment is there, or there and gone, in its place. So the only way to live in this eternal now is to forget about it, and let it roll, so to speak.

The other way the time question presents itself is when we thinking of it on the larger scale. Time passes, or we pass in it – and pass on too, as the cliché goes. The now is eternal, but we, as we are in it, are not. We pass away. The odd thing is that, when experiments were done on how to help people become happier, one of the steps was to spend a little time each day in a cemetery – and it did help people, the awareness of death made them feel more aware of, and so value, the present. It drew them back into the now.

On a larger scale, there is the matter of dialectic (one name for a universal idea), viz the idea that the wheel turns, yin and yang seek balance, etc. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, new thesis, forever and ever amen. Seeing that this is a universal principle – that things are always in flux – helps us to overcome our local attachments – by which I don’t mean that we lose interest in, or passion for, anything, but we do see that things pass, and this moment’s pleasure or pain is clarified by the knowledge that it will pass.

There’s a tradition in Spanish poetry that I like – where the poet is in his garden, looking around, listening to the birds, enjoying the warmth and the scents, when it comes to him that one day this garden will still be there, but he will be gone, and someone else will be experiencing these things. Someone he doesn’t even know. This is a cause for celebration, though, not elegy or regret. The game continues. James P. Carse talks about this as ‘infinite play’ – there are times when we cease to play the game of being for finite ends, and play for the sake of the game itself, a game that will go on without us.

I know, I know. New age-y mysticism and such have made all these ideas into clichés. I was a sub-hippie myself once. But as experiences, these things remain true, and cannot be diminished. Except, perhaps, in rambling on about them – which I’ve just done!


Can you give an idea of your writing process? Do you start by planning a story out or begin with a character and see where they go?

It varies, depending on what I am doing. The essential thing is to have an origin, a core if you like, of the non-directed, spontaneous, organic. It’s important to wait the right length of time before pen is applied to paper – this can be a matter of hours, or years. For the novel I am working on now, it has been almost a decade – I started in 2000, but had to stop and wait because something was missing. I didn’t know what, so I had to wait.

In a few of your novels the main character seems to be a man living in ‘self-imposed exile’. Why do you think this type of character keeps recurring?

I suppose, if I’m honest, I have to admit that this character is a variant of me. I don’t mean that any of my characters resemble me at all (though one person did say I was John the Librarian from Glister…) but I do stand at an angle to the world. I just start from a different premise than the society I find myself in – though I don’t think I’m unique in that. On the contrary, we all know – ‘in ourselves’ as they say (which is an interesting phrase) – that public events, i.e. everything from what politicians talk about to who gets the prizes at the Oscars and the Brit Awards is a giant lie. We all know that politicians are put in place by commercial concerns and have to pay the piper in all kinds of ways (from GM crops to buying vast quantities of antiviral drugs that probably won’t even work when needed to building warships nobody will ever need) just as we know that there are all kinds of musicians, writers, film-makers, artists, etc who are doing imaginative, interesting and moving work that, for whatever reason, has to stay outside the mainstream.

Why do you think society has become so divorced from the reality of most people’s inner lives?

Oh, God, don’t invite me to take out the soap box. Seriously, though, the problem has been well analysed and we pretty much know what has gone wrong – we lost organic connection with the world around us, everything was commoditised, our politicians and business folk became hopelessly self-serving (as they have often done, through history, but recently it’s been so blatant it saps the spirit just to watch them get away with it), we have a neo-medieval culture of celebrity, excellence became embarrassing, we began to think in soundbites, we published more and more books about ‘complexity’ but schooled ourselves to think in simpler and simpler terms. I could go on. The central thing, maybe, is that we were the first society to know – actually to see and hear – the misery that was being endured in faraway places, by people our appetites had impoverished, while we enjoyed our bland and joyless feasts at home. What a burden of guilt that is – and along with that guilt comes a feeling of helplessness, a sense that there is nothing we can do about it.


In the industrial landscapes of Living Nowhere and Glister there doesn’t seem to be much hope or optimism, does that reflect something that you feel personally about industry and urban living?

Yes and no. I think cities could be wonderful places, if the planners, commercial interests and politicos put people first. And the only real problem I saw when I worked in factories and (briefly) British Steel was a lack of respect for the men and women who did the work. Most of the people I encountered took pride in doing what they did, or if not, wanted to do so. The problem was that this pride was eroded by daily insults of the most basic kind – a lack of participation, a sense that someone else made all the decisions, even the most basic ones.

I thought of both Living Nowhere and Glister with the recent 'toxic soup' liability case in Corby. How did you react to that victory?

I think it's great that the families won - though of course it's the Council who pick up the liability and not the companies who created the problem in the first place. So I can't help thinking that it's a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul, while the guys in the good suits just walk away. The Council are culpable - but the list doesn't end there as anyone who knows Corby (and many other industrial towns) can testify. (As it happens, the initial 'inspiration' - in part, at least - for the toxic landscape in Glister was Weston, near Runcorn, and the land in that area poisoned by ICI).

You asked for A Lie About My Father to be treated as a work of fiction, is there something essentially unreliable about personal history?

There is, inevitably. I tried to be as accurate, in purely actual terms, as I could in that book. But I was – am – partisan. Did I do my father justice? Did I do myself justice? I hope so. But I was telling a story, and the governing factor in making that book was the wish to tell that story – which is not documentary, but narrative. Every story is as much about what is not told as what is told – say I leave something out because I don’t think it is essential to the story but somebody else reads the book and thinks that what I left out was the most important detail of all?

The other thing I would say here may sound merely contentious, but I feel it is a valid point and that is that fiction is more ‘true’ than fact. You can take ten thousand photographs of a bamboo plant, say, from every possible angle and it still will not capture the essence of bamboo as a drawing by Hokusai does. I think that is what fiction is after, that essence. Not fact. Truth.

After reading A Lie About My Father I felt that I could see some of the crossover from fact into your fiction (the stunning description of an LSD trip for example). Do you find it easier when writing from personal experience?

I’m not sure. I have to reimagine everything that is drawn from personal experience anyhow, because it has to be the experience of this character, rather than my own. I did acid on a very regular basis for a number of years, but the trip that opens Living Nowhere, though it is informed by my memories, is not my trip. It’s Alina’s (I hope).

The writer Paul Abbot has said that a good character is often a composite of three people you know, would you agree with that?

It’s an interesting notion. I wonder if Melville would have said as much about Ahab? I used to think that there’s a little piece of the author’s father in the villain of any story – now that I’m a father myself, though, I’m not so sure.

Speaking of that, would you say that fatherhood has altered anything in your writing? When I compare the objectivity of the children in The Dumb House with the concern for them in Glister I wonder if there is an element of care coming through subconsciously. I know that I see the world differently since becoming a father.

Fatherhood has altered my entire life – in many more ways than I expected. I don’t think, though, it changed my writing in a moral sense. The Dumb House was an angry book – a very angry book – to begin with. The coolness was necessary to keep that anger from undermining the argument. Cruelty appalled me, then, when I wrote that book, as much as it does now – but I had to write from Luke’s point of view in that book because I didn’t want to be shouting from the rooftops, I wanted to insinuate. How different, say, is much of the animal experimentation that goes on, from the crude ‘science’ that Luke engages in with the twins? That was a question for me, but I didn’t want to ask it in those words – as I say, it had to be insinuation.

There is often a moment of catharsis in your fiction. Do you find the process of writing cathartic in itself?

I’m not altogether sure about catharsis. The etymology bothers me. Purification, cleansing, etc. I’d prefer to think in terms of revelation. I like to work with alienated male characters who have become denatured for some reason. Hopefully, something happens which reveals to them that they have been wrapped in a lie, or self-deceit, or social conditioning – that they have been blinded to their true natures. Writing is also a process of this kind of revelation. I renew my sense of the world as I write. Maybe that is a cleansing. If it is, though, it’s not a one-off thing – it’s an iterative process. Catharsis can sound a bit final.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve returned to that novel I mentioned earlier, begun in 2000. It’s called A Summer of Drowning, it’s set in the Arctic circle in an island in north Norway. It’s about belief, superstition and storytelling. That’s all I dare say right at the moment.

Could you recommend an under-appreciated book to readers of this blog?

Hundreds, I fear. How about Lancelot by Walker Percy, for starters? Or Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful novel, Wise Blood, (she’s not just a story writer…)?

One thing that bothers me is how little we translate in this country. We’re missing some great French novelists, for example: Jean Echenoz, Regis Jauffret and Stéphane Audeguy to pick just three favourites of mine. We need good translations of these and so many others.

I always ask my interviewees if they would do a Hemingway and compose a story in six words. Would you give it a go too?

Afterwards, we had coffee and pie.



John Burnside's latest poetry collection, The Hunt in the Forest, is published today
His other works can be found here.

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A grim fairy tale

Glister
by John Burnside

In his novel Living Nowhere John Burnside managed to find great beauty in the new town of Corby (or perhaps more accurately he manage to write with great beauty). His ability to find wonder in the mundane made his tale of violence in an industrial town a fascinating read. His next setting was Coldhaven, a coastal landscape with history and legend, and with the same beautiful prose he created a modern folktale with violence again at its heart in The Devil's Footprints. With his latest novel Burnside has managed to combine the strongest elements from those two books and in doing so has created his most unsettling work since his debut The Dumb House.

We are in an industrial landscape once again and Innertown, '...now nothing more than a ghetto for poisoned, cast-off workers', where an abandoned chemical plant is slowly decaying, is a landscape poisoned and dying . For its inhabitants 'the ghosts and ruffians of Innertown' it is a living hell; strange illnesses, aggressive cancers and rumours of mutant animals are just the beginning for those unfortunate enough to be close to the plant. Burnside creates an eerie atmosphere; this a place that nobody ever seems to leave, like a sinister version of The Truman Show. It has a fable like quality, the name Innertown (with the salubrious Outertown that surrounds it) the 'poisoned wood' where children dare not play and mysterious characters that hover around the edges. Layered on top of this is the terror that everyone is trying to ignore. For the last few years boys have been disappearing. The authorities claim that they have simply run away but no one knows for sure where they are or whether they are alive or not. Although that isn't strictly true. The town's one permanent policeman, Morrison, does know something, but it is a secret he's forced into keeping.

For the children there is little to do but amuse themselves with casual acts of violence and sex. Tooled up with improvised weapons they hunt the rubbish strewn landscape for prey, always under the heavy cloak of fear that they may be the next one to disappear. Amongst them is Leonard, marked out as different by his intelligence and sensitivity and in no small part by his avid reading of the classics of literature. On the back of a friendship with his librarian he seems to have covered them all from Moby Dick to Anna Karenina (he is currently working his way through Proust) and whilst this is far from impossible there is something that doesn't quite ring true. There is no definite time setting in the novel but with some modern references seeming to locate it near the present day Leonard's choices of Elizabeth Taylor and Dorothy Lamour when describing beautiful or glamorous women show the author's age and character coming through a little to clearly. But this is a minor quibble, Leonard is a beautifully realised character, his near silent relationship with his ill father encouraging first his friendship with the librarian and then the Moth Man, a visiting ecologist who offers Leonard conversation, confidence and a hallucinogenic tea and who, with his fairytale name, will become an increasingly important presence in his life.

There is so much I could say about this extraordinary novel but I don't want to spoil it for you, I want you to read it. In her novel The Secret History Donna Tartt, quoting the Greeks, said 'Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.' In this book Burnside creates an atmosphere of such unease that I felt terrified in a way I haven't been by a book since reading House of Leaves. If you have already come across Burnside then hopefully you too have been impressed in some way by his writing. If you haven't then you are in for a treat. Burnside is a writer at the height of his powers. A total writer who, with a poet's skill, fills every page with a striking image, an arresting phrase, something that might just take your breath away.

I'd always felt something out at the chemical plant, no matter where I went. You could call it a spirit, or a genius loci - why not? ...It was there pointing to something I should know about, something I should have seen beyond the things I was seeing but it wasn't concerned with what you could say in words. You get a huge moon in an indigo sky, floating over the dusty water by the docks, over the rusty cranes and the old boat eaten away by rust, you get that big moon over the harbour and you can hear owls calling from the woods above - what words are you going to have for that?...Sometimes the whole world points to something you can't see...sometimes, it's just that things are beautiful, only what you mean by beautiful is different from what people usually mean when they say that word.. It's beautiful and it's terrible too. It takes your breath away, but you don't know if that comes from awe or terror.

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