John Burnside, The Dumb House: A Chamber Novel. Jonathan Cape, 1997. Paperback, 198 pp. L. 9.99. ISBN 0 224 04207 6

Like Wordsworthian children, first novels by established poets are not in utter nakedness born but come trailing clouds of lyric glory. Behind John Burnside’s first novel, The Dumb House, lie six volumes of poetry distinguished by their attention to the unregarded moments in the margins of culture and consciousness: poems which in one memorably sinister image set the "tripwire of being" at the edge of the "suburb’s fastidious/ gardens". It is a body of poetry which shows Burnside to be a master of the haunting narrative fragment and which establishes the poet’s characteristic perspective as a silent observer stealing glimpses into shuttered worlds:

........ I want to see

the darkened rooms, the cups and wireless sets,

the crimson lamps across the playing fields,

the soft men walking home through streets and parks

and quiet women, coming to their doors,

then turning away, their lives gathered around them

Poets’ first novels inevitably beg a host of questions. Can a lyric sensibility be adapted to drive the motor of narrative? Can a lifetime’s habit of linguistic thrift be jettisoned in favour of the spend, spend, spend economy of the compulsive page turner? With its characteristic sense of diffidence and detachment, Burnside’s poetry renders those questions even more pertinent. His would seem to be a poetic vision which must be sacrificed to the exigencies of the novel, an imaginative world which can only be diminished by the common light of prose.

The Dumb House, however, proves otherwise for in his debut as a novelist Burnside betrays none of the edgy lyric intensity that distinguishes his poetry yet he has produced a taught and frighteningly accomplished chiller which is likely to disturb your sleep for nights after you have finally closed its covers. Such is the beauty of Burnside's writing that you will follow it wherever it leads, even, as here, into the mind of one of the creepiest narrators in contemporary fiction.

Meet Luke, who as a child had "problems with language". A late talker, he was nearly three years old before he spoke his first word, and having spoken it, immediately regretted it: "I felt I was being tricked out of something". For the rest of his life he is haunted by the feeling that this "something" lies just at the edge of his vision, just behind the words that mislead us into believing "that we live in sight of a rational space".

His quest to understand "the trick and beauty of language" is given focus when he hears the tale of the Emperor Akbar who, in order to determine whether language is acquired or innate, built a palace — the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House — where new-born children attended only by mutes grew up incarcerated in a world without the sound of human speech.

Can there be a natural language? Would children reared on silence know the world as it was before Adam? Unfortunately Akbar’s investigations proved inconclusive, and all subsequent research on the subject, Luke discovers, has been marred by a signal lack of "control". Thus, as an adult, Luke resolves to repeat the experiment, substituting his basement for Akbar’s palace. The novel is the history of this "unconventional piece of work" and begins with news of its grisly end: "No one could say that it was my choice to kill the twins."

Indeed not. For as Luke explains with the invincible logic of a self-taught psychopath, choice, free will, and logic itself are just so many illusions with which we mask the sovereignty of our "innate" desires and disguise the fact of our destiny: "you choose what you choose and it could not have been otherwise".

As he traces the story of his aborted experiment back to his childhood it becomes clear that the seeds of Luke’s destiny have been sown and carefully nurtured by his mother. After springing the tripwire of being in her own fastidious garden and introducing him to the story of Akbar, she it is who first takes him out "looking for corpses" thus giving his linguistic research its distinctive material bent.

From the investigation of road kills and compiling meticulous chronicles of decay, the young Luke graduates to vivisection, vainly searching in the "wet machine" of animal anatomy for the something that continually evades him. Only after his mother’s death does he finally recognize the folly of pursuing the soul with a scalpel, "It was just what Mother had been telling me all along: a creature without language is a creature without a soul". With this insight he finds his true vocation and realizes that as a modern Akbar he will "have to use a new method, and develop different skills".

To this end he sets up shop as a speech therapist by means of a small-ad placed in the local paper’s personal columns, "a cold, sharp instrument amongst the love hearts and the bad poems". Like finds like and Luke finds Karen Olerud, the mother of Jeremy a mute and unnerving seven-year-old. Jeremy proves of little use in furthering his research, but contributes hugely to the novel’s sense of menace. While the perverse sexual relationship Luke develops with Mrs Olerud -- formal when he enters the front door, sexually compliant when he comes round the back -- reenacts the novel’s thematic insistence on the total divorce of the civilized and the feral in uncomfortably explicit terms.

After the relationship with Mrs Olerud reaches its brutal conclusion, destiny again intervenes to provide Luke with Lillian, a homeless girl of indeterminate age whom he rescues from her alcoholic companions. Together they enact a parody of domesticity, watching late night tv: "We liked American shows, especially the ones where people were spontaneous and natural in a quite unsentimental way .... half-hour situation comedies that centre on clean-living families with clever children in neat, middle-class suburbs."

When Lillian becomes pregnant with twins, Luke in order not to jeopardize his research, opts for a home birth, with predictable consequences. Having laid Lillian’s "thin body in the cold earth" Luke is left alone with the twins — labelled A and B in order to "to avoid any residual possibility of attachment" — and is finally in a position to begin his investigations in earnest.

Guignol this grand clearly requires careful handling and in setting the seductions of style at the service of so repugnant a narrator Burnside inevitably invites comparison with Nabokov. The Dumb House is a novel about language in the same way that Lolita is a novel about sex, and Burnside’s great achievement is to have transformed a poet’s preoccupation with the tension between words and things into a relentless motor for narrative; to have found in the neurotic’s obsession with the signifier a form of perversion far more repulsive than any merely sexual aberration.

But the parallels run deeper. Both novelists are acutely aware of the profound sense of unease that children can arouse in adults. For Nabokov the source of that unease lies in their sexuality, for Burnside it lies in the child’s status as a dweller on the threshold between the socialized world of language and the feral and formless wilderness which lurks behind the names of genera and species, watching, in one of his most persistent images, from the hedgerows:

I had the feeling that someone, some person had moved a moment before I looked, and was now standing among the bushes, hushed, waiting for me to pass. Nothing was visible, but I had that sensation you sometimes get playing hide and seek, when someone gives himself away by trying too hard to stay hidden.

In images such as this Burnside shows his expertise in mining the child’s world for its secret terrors, and much of the power of his novel lies in the fact that Luke himself remains a half-child who never escapes the fantasy world created by his mother’s stories: whose experiments on children are simply an extension of the child’s experiments on flies and frogs and mice: an equal mixture of curiosity and casual cruelty.

By the same token his novel is governed by the child’s sense of scale and is studded with Wordsworthian spots of time where the overgrown and neglected corners of a somnolent English countryside seem, momentarily, to become gateways to another world: "It’s strange how a neighbourhood changes when the people leave. A silence falls; the arrival of a delivery van becomes an event; animals appear and move through the gardens in virtual slow motion. It always seems something has just happened, moments before, but when you look there is nothing."

Far from diluting the mystery of the poetry, The Dumb House shows Burnside’s world to be every bit as haunting and considerably more disturbing when revealed in the cold light of day.

Niall Martin, Amsterdam 1997