Madness or suburbia?

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: CARLO GÉBLERreviews Waking up in Toytownby John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, 262pp, £16.99

THE POET and novelist John Burnside's first memoir, A Lie About My Fatherwas a savage account of his fraught childhood and adolescence with an alcoholic father and a saintly mother. For those who wondered what happened to Burnside in later life we now have the answer: it's in his second memoir, Waking Up in Toytown.

Like his father, Burnside has an addictive personality. During early adulthood, the period about which he’s writing here, while he took lots of drugs, his primary focus was booze. During this period Burnside was also “a full-scale lunatic” who “suffered from a condition called apophenia”. He characterises this condition “as the unmotivated seeing of connections, coupled with the specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness. In other words, seeing things that weren’t there. Hearing voices in the background static. Finding God or the Devil in the last scraping of Pot Noodle”.

For normal (sane) people, seeing connections gives rise to the comforting sense that they are part of a harmonious universe. For the apophenic (and Burnside’s evocation of what it feels like to be one is outstanding), this sense of the connectedness of everything gives rise in the psyche to “a tidal wave of incomprehensible and overwhelming detail: the whole world at once jabbering constantly in a mind that can only find rest in oblivion”.

For Burnside there was only one route to oblivion – narcotics and alcohol – and, by consuming vast amounts of both, he attempted to obliterate his symptoms. It never worked – his psychic pain was so enormous that nothing could destroy it – but of course all this drinking and drug-taking hobbled his intelligence and robbed him of insight, which in turn led to appalling scrapes and misjudged relationships (which is why apophenia and addictive tendencies are such a lethal combination). Burnside’s alcohol-catalysed catastrophes form the core of the narrative here.

The story starts with Burnside in a squalid bedsit. Bottles filled with a shamanic mix of oil, urine and blood are circled around him. A single white feather is balanced on the neck of each bottle. His psychosis is especially bad, but the bottles’ contents will heal him, perhaps. They don’t, but, happily, friends rescue him. Limited sanity is restored, and, in a moment of lucidity, Burnside decides he will go to Surbiton, the London suburb that, in his value system, epitomises normality: here he will stop drinking and become a perfect suburban man, and thereafter he will lead the perfect, productive suburban life.

As it turns out he ends up in Guildford, a few kilometres to the southwest, outside the M25, but it’s quite like Surbiton. He gets a flat. He starts attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He gets a job. But he is still an apophenic. At night the walls of his flat start to talk. The dead follow him around. He stops AA, resumes drinking and, miraculously, becomes a civil servant (he was always a high-functioning alcoholic), at which point the adventures begin.

First there's Greg (all Burnside's people, incidentally, carry pseudonyms), the nerdy cineaste married to the wife he calls "the Millstone". Greg is a fan of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, and Burnside is surprised (though we are not) when Greg asks him to kill his wife and offers, in return, to kill anyone Burnside wants.

The next catastrophe involves Gina, a sensual divorcee who sees nothing wrong with sedating her children with Valium. This is first so she and Burnside can fool around and later so she can hold orgies in her house (while the children sleep), with Burnside present but not participating.

Burnside’s description of going to check on one of the unconscious tranquilised children (whom he adores) and finding Gina on the child’s bedroom floor with a man is perhaps the book’s bleakest moment, though there are many rivals for this top spot.

Further catastrophes include a long relationship with a masochistic ex-girlfriend, now married, that lasts until Burnside makes her pregnant; an affair with a Blackpool junkie with a penchant for cutting who likes to watch Burnside sleeping while holding a large knife; and, finally, an amour fou (unconsummated) with a 15-year-old schoolgirl whom Burnside meets on the beach between Lytham and St Anne’s when she’s in uniform.

Waking Up in Toytownis troubling but not depressing. This has a lot to do with Burnside's literary skills: his language is always clear and his sentences elegant and demotic; he's a brilliant storyteller who knows how to get a reader's attention and how to keep it; and, finally, he's hilarious. However, I think what's most remarkable about this book is its pitilessness; a constant throughout, this is at its most intense at the end.

Most contemporary accounts of addiction finish with the writer’s demons vanquished. We love such stories (and our bookstores are full of them) because they provide, I think, what religious narratives used to provide: hope. They’re also very often a lie. Fortunately, Burnside doesn’t do lies.

Following the collapse of his relationship with the schoolgirl he goes on a 10-day bender, which incites a psychotic breakdown and terrifying hallucinations. He’s atomised, and yet at this, his lowest moment, he realises he is wrong to think he has just two alternatives, either sane suburbanite or mad alcoholic. It can’t be either/or: he has to find a way to exist between these two extremes.

And there the book ends. It’s not the conventional consolation memoirs offer. I was relieved he didn’t try to cheer me up but stuck to the truth (as he remembered it), because that’s what memoirs are supposed to be, an account of what happened, not what we wish had happened. This is an extraordinary book and one so honest it scorches.

Carlo Gébler is writing a play about Charles and Mary Lamb and their classic Tales from Shakespeare.He teaches at Queen's University Belfast