Burnside's latest novel, The Glister, shares many of these aspects with his poetry. However, unlike the Burnside poems I've read, this book has a desolate and despairing tone that I never encountered in his poetry.. This is a dreary tale set in a dreary, name-less place. It is rightfully name-less place, a place nobody cares for and in which the citizens live in a kind of fearfully complete isolation from each other. Being buried alive is a central obsession of one of the novel's characters and serves as a nicely descriptive metaphor for the lives of the folks living in this town; they are trapped within themselves, their natures.
The town's parts bear a name. Their is the part of town where the wealthy live, outertown; the bulk and inner portion, innertown; their is the headland upon which sits a vast, derelict chemical plant that has poisoned the city and its surroundings. Nobody knows for certain how or with what the plant poisoned the city, but
"for as long as the plant 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 untreateable illnesses, a sudden and huge increase in depression, a blossoming of what, in the old days, would have been called madness"(7).
Yet a worse malady afflicts this name-less town. Several years prior to the story's start, an adolescent boy goes missing. Constable John Morrison finds him murdered in the woods, in what looks like a ritualistic way. However, Morrison's ordered to keep the murder quiet by the town's bigwig who didn't want any undue attention from the outside world out of fear that outside eyes might detect his misappropriation of public funds dedicated to cleaning up the site of the chemical plant and rejuvenating the city. So, the weak Morrison, owing his job to this bigwig, keeps mum and slowly lets his guilt and well-earned self-hatred eat away at him.
Meanwhile, every year or so, another boy goes missing. Unable to locate any bodies, The police tell the public that the boys must have simply decided to pick up and seek greener pastures. This lame explanation actually seems to suffice for the town. The young boys in the town are more than a little suspicious and angry. Whenever a new boy goes missing, they engage in random acts of petty vandalism: "[wandering] around the town or the wastelands, stealing anything that looks valuable and breaking everything else. It is a mark of the authorities' shame that, no matter what we do, there are no reprecussions. They are guilty, because they know they have failed us"(116-117).
So says the preternaturally wise and poetic Leonard Wilson, the central voice of this novel. Aspects of Leonard are a bit implausible. He is presented as a juvenile delinquent, an adolescent product of the innertown slums. Yet, when we're given the privilege of his thoughts, we encounter an old, wise and poetic soul prone to philosophize in an existentialist vein. Early on in his narrative, Leonard argues, "if you want to stay alive, you have to love something"(51). Leonard once loved his friend Liam Nugent, one of the missing boys. He loved his father, till his father fell into some kind of physical/psychological/spiritual funk rendering him silent. Although he has at one point two girlfriends, he doesn't seem to achieve a loving bond with either. When it comes to finding something to love, Leonard is seeking bigger game.
A searching sort, Leonard reads voraciously. He also develops a mentor type of relationship with the Moth Man, a mysterious and mystical person who visits the headland every couple of months, ostensibly to catch moths. It is Leonard's "impression that he hasn't got a proper home, [but]...just seems to drive from place to place in his van, camping in fields and setting up his nets, his only companions the moths he catches then releases or curious kids like me that he attracts along the way"(107).
The Moth Man also comes to finish what his father started. His father was an engineer who helped build the chemical plant and also assisted when it was 'decommissioned.' Leonard also is led to believe that the Moth Man's father was working on a machine, deep in the unexplored, locked-away recess of the plant, that has abilities to radically transform ... It's a mystery as to what exactly this machine is capable of, but the Moth Man's here to finish it and make it available.
The Moth Man is a father figure to Leonard who is in search of human connection. He calls him by his full name, asks after his welfare, introduces him to nature. He also makes Leonard's more aware of his alienation. With the help of a mysterious, natural tea, Leonard experiences moments of absolute connection, not to those around him, but to the entire universe. Under the influence of this tea, Leonard
"can see everything around me in perfect, almost dizzying detail, but I can also feel how one thing is connected to the next...or not connected, so much, but all one thing. Everything's one thing. It's not a matter of connections, it's an indivisibility.....It's all continuous and I'm alive with everything that lives."(113)
Of course, the downside to this moment of transcendence is the first non-transcendent moment after, when Leonard is again forced to confront his limited and isolated self.
It is this scared, little, alone self that seeks out a gang of delinquents led by Jimmy Van Doren. The wise and sweet Leonard is a little too wise and sweet to ever fall entirely into the bond uniting this group of disaffected numbskulls. Still, when Jimmy's cousin goes missing, Leonard goes along when the group decides a local outcast, Andrew Rivers, is responsible for the abductions and seeks revenge.
River's end is gruesome. However, he's the most affecting character in the book, albeit his moment is limited. Rivers is not the sicko the kids take him for. Instead, he's a bit of a sad-sack. Shy and alienated, he lived as his beloved father's caretaker for many, many years. Now that his father has passed, he's lost all human connection to the world. Painfully shy but in search of connection, he desperately seeks to start a communication with a celebrity mass-murderer.
It is Rivers who most clearly articulates the thematic thrust of the novel: in a world without community, our selves grow too large and monstrous to bear, to the point where death comes to seem a viable relief. River's believes "we tire of the self, of the shape of it, and its slightly exaggerated colors; most of all, we tire of its constant noise and just long for a little quiet"(146). Although he's too meek to seek it, Rivers cooperates quite nicely when death comes for him.
Unfortunately, while "The Glister" intrigues as a novel, it fails as a mystery. Although one gathers that Burnside wishes to not say for certain, it's pretty hard not to conclude that the Moth Man is the child abductor/killer. Burnside doesn't quit trying to throw out decoys in the hopes of distracting the reader, but to little effect. In the end, he never really creates an effective whodunit. Worse, the novel fails to adequately address the more important question: why?
Our wise-beyond-his-years narrator is conflicted when it comes to the general possibility and precise utility or benefit of explanation. Speaking of the town's lost boys, he claims, "It's unforgivable not to know where they are, even if it's impossible to know"(223). Yet, he pooh-poohs explanation as well; speaking of the Moth Man, Leonard says "He didn't sit me down and run through the plot....He didn't explain the mystery because he was the mystery"(220). I find all of this frustrating and murky.
Of course, Leonard believes he has discovered something more about the Moth Man. He comes to suspect he is a supernatural being, in part the angel of death sent down to punish, in part a summoner/gatekeeper who absolves/punishes and delivers his charges to a higher plane. Of course, Leonard is presenting this conception after what appears to be his death at the hands of the Moth Man, and Leonard's story/conception seems a creation/explanation designed to block the horror of his end.
His conception/story seems every bit as facile as the town's official explanation for all the preceding disappearances. Of course, it might be Burnside who is re-imagining this child-killer as the angel of death. One can only hope not. Such a misconception is perhaps excusable in a child and something one is willing to grant a victim. Adults should know better than this. Leonard eloquently argues for proper cognizance. He comes to condemn his town for "the sin of omission, the sin of averting our gaze and not seeing what was going on right in front of our eyes. The sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. The sin of knowing things on paper but refusing to know them in our heart"(223).
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