Personal Blogs

Burnside, John (2017) Ashland and Vine London, Jonathan Cape.

Some writers seem, when you have grown to love their writing, to be continually writing the same novel – a novel that does not exist in the past or present but is ever emergent in the future. Some of the same issues get raised and some iconic landscapes – For Burnside it is deserted snowscapes – but what emerges in each outing is truly new, liberating for its reader and writer because it allows one’s history to resonate in a new place, as if it belonged there. The major theme is of ‘Elsewhere’.

This describes the scene of Burnside’s novels, a place that is hard to locate but exists nevertheless though always as immanent, if on occasion emergent. In this case what has emerged is a truly great novel that absorbs itself in and articulates American experience in ways that very few novels do – whilst keeping its foot ‘elsewhere’ in time and space. It is not only Burnside’s own novels and life -experience (as we have it in his multi-form memoirs) that we have here – in the animal prints in the snow and the patterns they suggest - but also a bricolage of literary traditions that might seem miles from each other in purpose and form. Hence American Road novel can meet up with the thematic and purpose of Iris Murdoch’s search for a temporal solace that might enable us to give up hopes of ‘elsewhere’ as a place outside human time: a false heaven known to be so because all heavens are false. Even a short novel like this can, at this point in Burnside’s career bear a weight of metaphysics (p. 335):

These excerpts necessarily hide the novel you read because generically this novel is impossible to classify: bildungsroman, spy thriller, political novel and war story. All of them make part of the ‘manifold narrative that yet is more, since its patterns are yet to be realised. In this uncertainty, I felt a pressure I have not felt before so strongly in Burnside on the everyday experience of gender and sexual identification (though it is clearly there at the mythic level in A Summer of Drowning (another novel that took me by storm). I think this is perhaps because this novel of rediscovery of the memory of a whole family so clearly charts the mix of the political, the personal and the liberating so clear to us now in the accumulated ‘happenings’ and self-disclosures of the seventies, lead inevitably from the USA, the ‘Forgotten History of America (p. 9).

Hence this story, which sort of hangs around a central theme of love between two women (still tentatively suppressed by other narrative accidents, resonates elsewhere in difficulties in locating together notions of self and gender that make one whole.  I have not (maybe through insensitivity but I don’t think, if so, it was that alone) in Burnside before.

For instance, I had troubled ambivalence about ‘sexing’ the primary narrative voice from the beginning of the novel. I missed something perhaps but there was (for a gay follower like myself of a novelist not usually working anywhere near the arena of gay writing) something like a frisson when I hear the narrative voice speak of having moved on from being ‘with a girl …, a beautiful dark-eyed Minnesotan called Ruth …’ (p. 6) to a ‘an arrangement, mostly tacit, but an arrangement nevertheless’ with the novel’s dark-heart, almost a parodic romantic male lead:

In my eyes the chance that this mirrored my own youthful crushes was a potential about which I was only later let down from (horrible deposition) lightly. Right or wrong about this effect, it is entirely possible a consummate artist like Burnside could have planned it, so much does it shadow the central story of Jean and Lee, a story we only get in full in the novel’s final chapter.

This novel, though short, reads like an epic, like the cult films its characters so often watch. Burnside was on the Booker panel that shortlisted Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (though I wouldn’t dare to blame him for that), an American novel of enormous size and pretension  which was at the time widely mistaken for ‘epic’ qualities, whose outcomes could be more nearly satisfactory in a very short story. Sometimes I wonder, though Burnside began Ashland and Vine well before that point, whether he, a master in my eyes, is showing the novice debut novelist how an apprenticeship to epic value is truly to be won – by locking time and space into a shorter space and working within it. If he was, he has proved himself, as indeed he has if he wasn’t aiming to deliver that lesson.

A novel that can tell the story of My Lai amongst narratives that encapsulate other histories that add up to a notion of the USA and yet totally involve you with its heroine and her break from booze to some sort of apprehension of passing time and history is a very great novel indeed. Burnside’s finer points continue to be missed by Booker panels however, so I can only hope that this time he will be rewarded in that way. A novelist who can write a short novel about so much and yet also attempt to discover within it why and how we tell stories in the ways we do (and sometimes don’t) surely has his reward ‘elsewhere’ but that may be to take metaphysics too far.

But I feel like finishing, since I’m trying to avoid spoilers, with a taste of its grasp of tale-telling, history and the search for personal and communal meaning. Its subtlety is typical – so much so that it might still go unnoticed how narrative and historic space and time coincide as a form of looking back to the forgotten and forward to its potential yet to come. I know Burnside continues a prophet of the left – however defeated we may seem.

I hope you find that as rich and impressive as I do.

All the best

Steve