LIVING NOWHERE
by John Burnside
Cape £10.99 pp384
The mystery of continuity and change between generations is given substance in this subtle and morally complex novel. It centres on two boyhood friends from the poisonously smoky town of Corby — Jan, who dies young, and Francis, who travels the world to find a myth he can live by. Burnside exploits many of the possibilities of language, combining a precise sense of person, place and thing with a range of lyrical and poignant imagery. He describes ordinary industrial work — its time, process and feeling — in a way that’s rare in fiction, and recounts LSD trips with stately fervour. Dreams, ghosts, disappointment and violence all form a plausible part of the unending search for authenticity. Jan’s parents are described as “dense with the weight of their unspoken history”. This solicitous, unpatronising phrase is characteristic of a death-haunted but life-affirming book.
STUMP
by Niall Griffiths
Cape £10 pp240
This book has five voices. One describes its owner hiding out in Wales after a bungled gangland scam in Liverpool. He engagingly describes rabbits, foxes, snakes and crows, but tends towards rancid, egotistic tirades. This voice occasionally morphs into a pretentious self-commentator, uttering pseudo-lyrical paeans to drugs and drink and flaunting a sentimental nihilism. He is sought by two villains, whose brutally repellent idiom often modulates into another kind of narrative exposition. This is desperately overwritten and self-important. It wrenches syntax into vacuous rhetoric about history and landscape — “some city, oneiric and liminal” — or collapses into kitsch. A fifth voice injects an extra fix of spurious grandiloquence. Its cheap invocations of God and mystery suggest — alas — that it might be the author’s own.