The Glister - Couverture rigide

HOMELAND

In the beginning, John Morrison is working in his garden. Not the garden at the police house, which he has long neglected, and not the allotment he rented when he was first married, but the real garden, the only garden, the one he likes to think of as a shrine. A sacred place, like the garden in a medieval Resurrection. To anyone else, it would look like nothing more than a patch of flowers and baubles, set out in a clearing amid the poison wood, just above the old freight line; but then nobody else could ever see its significance. Morrison created this garden himself and he has maintained it for seven years: a neat square of poppies and carnations, dotted here and there with the knuckles of polished glass and stone that he collects on his long walks around the Innertown and the wasteland beyond, filling the pockets of his police uniform with worthless treasure as he pretends to go about his duties. Of course, these days, he has no real duties, or none he could ever believe in. Brian Smith saw to that, years ago, when Morrison made the one big mistake of his career--the one big mistake of his life, other than marriage.

That was the day when Smith talked him into concealing the first of the Innertown disappearances. Now, with five boys missing, Morrison is almost ashamed to show his face on the street. Not that anybody knows about the lie, the confidence trick, that he has perpetrated upon them all. People want to know where the Innertown children have gone, but aside from the families of the missing boys, nobody expects anything much from him. They know he doesn't have the training or the resources to track the boys down, and they also know that nobody beyond their poisoned tract of industrial ruin and coastal scrub cares a whit about what happens to the Innertown's children. Even the families give up after a while, sinking into mute bewilderment, or some sad regime of apathy and British sherry. After more than a decade of dwindling hopes for their town and for their children, people have become fatalistic, trying to find, in indifference, the refuge they once sought in the modest and mostly rather vague expectation of ordinary happiness that they were brought up to expect. Some choose to believe, or to say they believe, the official line--the line Morrison himself puts out, with more than a little help from Brian Smith. In this version of events, a story full of convenient and improbable coincidences, each of the boys left the Innertown of his own accord, independently and without speaking a word to anyone, to try his luck in the big wide world. Some say this story is credible, boys being boys. Others say it is far-fetched, that it seems most unlikely that all five of these bright children, boys in their mid-teens with families and friends, would wander off suddenly, and without warning. Among this group, there are those who say that the boys have, in fact, been murdered, and that they are probably buried somewhere in the ruins of the old chemical plant between the Innertown and the sea, where their mutilated bodies will decay quickly, leaving no trace that could be distinguished from the dead animals and anonymous offal that people find out there all the time. This latter group gets restless on occasion, usually just after a new disappearance. They demand a full investigation, they want independent outsiders to come in and conduct an official inquiry. They write letters; they make phone calls. Nothing happens.

Mostly, however, the town goes about its business; though, these days, it would seem that its sole business is slow decay. Of course, Morrison's business is to walk his beat, make himself visible, try to suggest that law and order means something in the Innertown. This is his function, to be seen--but Morrison hates to be seen, he wants to be invisible, he wants, more than anything, to disappear, and on this warm Saturday afternoon in late July, he is out at his secret garden, weeding and clearing so the few flowers he planted in the spring might not be smothered by grass and nettles. To begin with, this makeshift shrine had been dedicated to Mark Wilkinson, the first boy to disappear--the one that Morrison had, in fact, found. Later, though, it became more generic, a memorial to all the lost boys, wherever they might be. Nobody else knows about this garden, and Morrison always feels nervous coming out here, afraid of being caught out, afraid someone will guess what all this means. The shrine is fairly well concealed, because the event it commemorates happened, as such things must, in this hidden place, or somewhere nearby at least. Once, he found the little garden kicked apart and trampled, the flowers uprooted, the glass and stones scattered far and wide, but he guessed right away that this was nothing more than the usual vandalism. Some kids from the Innertown had come across his handiwork and smashed it without even thinking, in the routine way that kids from the Innertown have in everything they do, but Morrison is fairly sure that they hadn't realized what the shrine meant, and he simply built it up again, plant by plant, pebble by pebble, till it was, if anything, better than before. Whenever he can, he comes out here to maintain it. When yet another boy vanishes into the night, he extends it a little, adding new plants, new heaps of sand-polished glass and stone.

He finds the best stones on Stargell's Point, his favorite place nowadays, because nobody else ever goes there. Even the kids avoid it. Everybody understands, by now, that the entire land under their feet is irredeemably soured, poisoned by years of runoff and soakaway from the plant, but in most areas nobody quite knows the extent of that souring--whereas Stargell's Point was always recognized as a black spot, even back in the good old days, when the people believed, through sheer force of will, that the chemical plant was essentially safe. They believed, of course, because they had to believe: the Innertown's economy depended almost entirely upon the chemical industry. More to the point, there were people in the Outertown, up in the big houses, who had an interest in ensuring that things ticked over without too much fuss. The Innertown folk, the ones who actually worked at the plant, had from the outset been made aware of the appropriate precautions to be taken while going about their duties, but they had always been told--by the Consortium, by the safety people, by all the powers that be--that the danger was minimal. They had wanted to believe they were safe because there was nowhere else for them to go, and they had wanted to trust the managers and politicians because there was nobody else for them to trust. Naturally, they worked hard on being convinced. In the early days, some of them even smuggled home bags of the stuff they were making out at the plant so they could spread it on their gardens. It was an act of faith, utterly perverse and so, they hoped, all the more powerful.

Later, when it was too late, they began to see what was really going on. They heard the rumors about bribery in high places and anonymous death threats against potential whistle-blowers, they heard how the Consortium had influential contacts within the supposedly independent firms charged with the care and safety of the plant's workforce, but they hadn't known what to do about it. A few years after Morrison left school, the plant had finally been shut down, but its ruins were still standing out on the headland, all around the east side of the Innertown, acres and acres of dead real estate, running from the gutted administration buildings at the junction of East Road and Charity Street, through a series of vast, echoey kilns, warehouses, waste-processing units, and derelict production blocks, all the way to the loading docks on the shore, where great tankers rusted beside the slick, greasy waters of the firth. You could see evidence wherever you looked of the plant's effects on the land: avenues of dead trees, black and skeletal along the old rail tracks and access roads; great piles of sulfurous rocks where pools of effluent had been left to evaporate in the sun. A few keen fishermen found mutant sea creatures washed up on the shore, where those great boats had once been loaded with thousands and thousands of drums of who knew what, and some people claimed that they had seen bizarre animals out in the remaining tracts of woodland, not sick, or dying, but not right either, with their enlarged faces and swollen, twisted bodies.

The most convincing evidence that some evil was being perpetrated on the headland, however, was the fact that, for as long as the plant had existed, the people themselves had not been right. Suddenly, there were unexplained clusters of rare cancers. Children contracted terrible diseases, or they developed mysterious behavioral problems. There was more than the usual share of exotic or untreatable illnesses, a sudden and huge increase in depression, a blossoming of what, in the old days, would have been called madness. Morrison's own wife had got sick in the head and, even now, nobody was able to say what was wrong with her. She drank, was the cruelest explanation, but she had been a drinker in her younger days and she had been fit as a fiddle back then.

Now, everybody blames these problems on the plant, but they don't have the energy to do anything about it. The plant had been their livelihood; it had been their best hope. Everyone knew its history, in the official version at least. People could tell you how, thirty years ago, a consortium--it had a fancy name, but it was always referred to, simply, as the Consortium--a local and international consortium of agricultural and other companies, started making various products there, but nobody remembers, now, and it seems that nobody really knew back then exactly what chemicals were manufactured, or what they were used for. Morrison's father, James, had worked at the plant, and he would insist that it was all harmless agricultural material: fertilizers and pesticides, fungicides, growth accelerants or growth retardants, complicated chains of molecules that got into ...

“Burnside's writing conveys an almost palpable thrill of discovery, a delight in the play of his imagination over this bleak terrain, an irrepressible joy in cultivating metaphor after metaphor and seeing them all, improbably, bloom.... The narrative has the quick urgency of a threatened creature: it moves like a cockroach streaking from light to the safer dark.... The emotion this brilliant and disturbing novel leaves you with is like the spooked feeling Leonard experiences at the sudden intimation of 'some essence, some hidden principle' in the world: 'It takes your breath away, but you don't know if that comes from awe or terror.' The Glister is that kind of story. It's terrifying, and it feels like a gift.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A dark morality tale, hauntingly told.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“John Burnside can make even the most mundane scene feel threatening. Oddly tender, for all the terror it evokes, his prose has a seductive depth and clarity that's impossible to resist. His novel, The Glister, is a delight–a scary, fascinating exploration of innocence and evil, and the thin margin that often separates the two.”
—Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan and The Ruins

“I love John Burnside's writing–one fresh perception, one unexpected observation, driving again and again through to the next, until some entirely unforeseen point or insight can shine forth. You have to be brilliant, wide awake, and wide open to write this way, and Burnside is all three. The Glister proves John Burnside is also a master at the creation of dread, tension and mystery. What a dazzling book this is.”
—Peter Straub
 
"John Burnside's The Glister masquerades as an enthralling murder mystery but his greater, subtle purpose is to investigate the mysteries of evil, death and eternity, and so provide a work of astounding moral clarity and transcendence."
—Jim Crace, author of The Pesthouse

“The Glister is wickedly good.  Burnside writes with a dark and beautiful splendor, navigating the space between despair and redemption in a simply brilliant story that will linger long after the last, haunting images.”
—Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child

"In his bleakly beautiful seventh novel, Scottish author Burnside delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life... Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the 'expectation of failure' is rampant... Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind."
—Publishers Weekly

“What begins as a spooky tale of serial murder evolves into something much stranger and riskier-an eschatological fable about innocence, evil and personal responsibility... Burnside uses plot, character and mystery only as gambits to launch his spiritual exploration of the horrifyingly thin line between childhood innocence and sociopathic amorality, and ultimately between sins of commission like serial murder and sins of omission like serial cowardice. A truly unusual experience awaits readers willing to forgo the obvious pleasures of the genre.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“There is something consistently oneiric about John Burnside’s work; not just in the hallucinatory qualities of his prose but also in the original sense of the word as referring to a vision divinely sent. See his novels as the planet's dreaming; as the symbolic working-through and analogue of its emotional problems, inspired by its past. Fiction, and what it can do, matters to Burnside; it can add something to the world that the word needs.... Burnside doesn't really do dialogue, but his skill is such that his characters breathe through other means. Beckett didn't do dialogue either, in his novels, but both writers communicate the sense that being alive is a terrible but necessary business of endurance.... Burnside has given us a work that is baffling, haunting, terrifying, moving, and compulsively readable. The title refers to the town’s disused chemical plant that lies rotting and leaking toxins on the shore, its fittings bearing the name of its engineer, George Lister; but it's also an archaic word that means ‘to sparkle.’ Apt, in a thousand ways.”
—Niall Griffiths, The Daily Telegraph

“What makes Glister most astonishing is that poet-novelists, such as Burnside, seldom succeed. Yet he has shown it can be done gloriously.... Glister is a powerful, mesmerising experience.”
—Euan Ferguson, Observer
 
“John Burnside explores with a delicious feathery touch the infectious nature of violence and its capacity to seduce, in ways that are almost beautiful. This tantalising, horrific novel is steeped in a terrible sense of wonder.”
—Claire Allfree, Metro
 
“Burnside can turn from luminous verse to prose that keeps you awake at night. Glister is such a novel....In the end we are left with the resonance of a book whose centre is nowhere but whose circumference is extraordinarily large.”
—Andrew Crumey, Financial Times
 
“[O]ne of the most original and exhilarating reads of the year.... A work begging a second reading, it is an exceptionally rich treasure which goes beyond telling a disconcerting and disorienting story to illuminate the infinite possibilities of the novel.”
—Irvine Welsh, The Guardian 
 
“Nobody does eerie quite like John Burnside. His exquisite and haunting new novel Glister...has an insistent force, overturning the reader’s expectations and building to a truly shocking climax.... I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year.”
—Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

“Burnside brings his powers of pared-down narration to bear on a tale of dereliction, loss and possible redemption.... Burnside’s story employs suggestion and ambiguity rather than explicit statement, but it has the power that comes from leaving plenty of space in which the reader’s own imagination can go to work.”
—The Sunday Times