“It is not easy to cross from your world into this,” said Malebron, “but there are places where they touch. The church, and the castle. They were battered by war, and now all the land around quakes with destruction. They have been shaken loose in their worlds.”

Alan Garner, Elidor

I will have to read John Burnside’s Glister again before I can say very much about it, but wanted to capture some initial thoughts here.

Glister is introduced by a character speaking from a limbo-like beyond, a device used by writers as diverse as Alice Sebold, Douglas Coupland and Michel Houellebecq to frame the story as a speaking-of-the-dead. The book’s “Innertown” is a post-industrial town in mourning, a town fastened to the oozing cadaver of its shut-down chemical plant, and one of the concerns of the story is the possibility of what Quentin Meillassoux calls “essential mourning”: a mourning capable of separating the spectral from the living, prising the mourner and his corpse bride apart.

Separating the spectral from the living, or the living part of the spectre (which is incorporated, made a part of the life of the living) from the dead part (which is let go, forgotten). Like the dying hybrid animal that appears at one point in the story, a chemical freak incapable of sustaining its own life, the spectre inconsists: it wounds, or is the wound of, the present. Afflicted by clusters of rare tumours, variously dying inside, the inhabitants of Innertown are themselves a mixture of living and dead, bereft of social hope or any motivation to leave and seek life elsewhere. There is a permanently-stalled regeneration project, a means for Burnside’s slightly Pratchettian* villain Brian Smith to pocket large sums of public money, from which nobody expects anything. The town’s “lost boys”, vanished teenagers who we are given to believe have been ritually murdered (although this is not all we are given to believe about them), are said to have run away to seek their fortunes; the truth is that no-one can be bothered to investigate.

The narrative of Glister splits in two at key moments, with its teenage protagonist glimpsing himself in another version of the story, a version with a different ending. In fact the narrative depicts a thoroughly hybrid reality: a reality in which the plant produced both fertiliser and chemical weapons (the intended function of its empty kilns and silent machinery remains mysterious throughout), in which the flora and fauna of the peninsula are both blighted and burgeoning. Early on, the narrator refuses the notion that he is “unreliable”, stating that the unreliability is intrinsic to the story itself (another line which reminded me of Meillassoux). This could very easily devolve into tiresome “quantum” silliness, but doesn’t: the point is not that narrative decision points split the world into separate consistent realities, but that reality is such that no consistent narration can be given of it.

* Terry Pratchett, that is. Yes, really.