A narrative sustained by unease

FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews A Summer of DrowningBy John Burnside, Cape, 329pp, £16.99

LIV IS a watcher. She is haunted by what she has seen but is even more disturbed by things she has imagined but which may have indeed happened. Her world is closed, living as she does with her detached artist mother in a remote Arctic island, yet that same physical world is also as wide as the sky. The intensity of Liv’s narrative, inspired by specific events recalled at a distance of 10 years is so precise that she emerges as unusually intelligent, lonely and possibly insane. “I have remained . . . where I have always been, and I have done nothing at all: or nothing other than to choose the life I am living now, a life someone else would think of as close to non-existent. No career, no husband, no lover, no friends, no children.”

That hint of insanity is vital, not only to this elegantly menacing novel but to the extraordinary body of fiction created by the gifted Scots poet and writer John Burnside. The dark side of the imagination is his preferred terrain and his understanding of bruised minds as in The Devil's Footprints(2007) and the recent Glister(2009) makes Burnside an intriguing and frequently terrifying, visionary. Winner of the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award with his seventh collection, The Asylum Dance, he is an accomplished poet while his two volumes of memoirs to date, A Lie About My Father(2006) and Waking Up in Toytown(2010) – with its candid exploration of personal addiction – are superb. The most defining aspect of Burnside's work aside from its linguistic exactness is the beauty of his prose. Quite simply, he is a wonderful writer. Whatever he is writing always seems real and, considering much of the content of this new novel, that is a considerable asset for any storyteller.

The Nordic setting of A Summer of Drowningis convincingly evoked. Liv is recalling a particular summer of multiple tragedy but she never loses sight of the harsh winters. She is aware that visitors experience the summer season. For them, the scenic island is a place in which day and night strike an unsettling balance because of the relentless midnight sun.

As one unhappy newcomer, Martin Crosbie, admits: “It’s so odd. This light. It wasn’t that I didn’t know. I was even expecting it. Only . . . something different . . . Strange, isn’t it, how you can read a description in a book, or see a film, and still be surprised by everything?”

Crosbie is keen on Lewis Carroll and has various secrets as well as the habit of taking furtive photographs of young girls. Yet ultimately he is harmless, intent on teaching himself Norwegian through reading Ibsen in the original with a dictionary. He seeks company and his search entangles him in a folk tale with a sinister twist.

While her chilly mother, Angelika Rossdal, inhabits a private world divided between her studio and her garden, keeping the international art community interested if also at arm’s length through well-timed exhibitions and enigmatic newspaper interviews, Liv looks to their neighbour, Kyrre Opdahl, an elderly local immersed in literary myth, for company. He is the patriarch she has never known. Late in the novel she acknowledges how central he has been to her and that everything that had come to happen “belonged to Kyrre’s world, the world of stories and fatal magic”.

It is Kyrre who has no doubt that the deaths of two young brothers are directly linked to the presence of a misfit, a sexually predatory girl named Maia.

BURNSIDE INTRODUCES quite an assortment of edgy characters, all of whom have their preoccupations. Liv remains the heart of the book, her unease sustains the narrative. Everything we learn is gathered through her ceaseless observations. At one stage she refers to herself as a spy. Burnside conveys the way in which Liv has been diminished by her perfect, beautiful mother yet he suggests her love for Angelika and the admiration she feels for her as an artist. Liv recalls the moment that she realised that one day her mother will die. It is a remarkable insight and all the more moving for Liv’s neutral tone. Burnside conceives a plot that looks to the thriller genre and the European fairy tale yet is a powerful mediation, all the more so because the narrator is so passive, save for one daring act involving a computer.

The literary motif that drives the plot is that of the siren, one of the oldest in literature, and rendered here in its Nordic form as a huldra, a bewitched young woman who lures men to their doom. Maia, the misfit may well do that, yet Burnside offers a variation of this theme in his presentation of Liv’s mother. Angelika the artist also attracts men, but she rejects them as she did years earlier with Liv’s father. A mysterious letter arrives from England, written by her father’s companion.

It requests Liv to attend his deathbed. Burnside takes many risks in the pursuit of a subplot that sways slightly towards digression but is salvaged by the characterisation of the unhappy, accusatory woman who has lived and waited in the shadow of Liv’s mother.

Burnside, a most literary writer, enjoys textual allusion and cross references. The artist mother is an ice queen, albeit one with a heart. There is no sentiment but there is feeling. Most of all there is Liv’s perceptive response to life and to information. “People used to believe that someone, or something, was watching them. Some thought it was the gods or angels, others pictured their dead ancestors, watching from beyond the grave . . . Perhaps they were being judged, but they were also being forgiven . . . They wanted to think of themselves as witnessed from some unknown vantage point: it made them feel more real . . . They were wrong, of course. Nobody watches us. We are not witnessed – or not, at least, by anyone who might be inclined to forgiveness.”

EILEEN BATTERSBYis Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times