A Son of the Rock

a romance. Vintage, 2008, 221 p.

This is an exquisitely written novel whose title implies that it is going to be another in that long list of Scottish works of fiction which feature an encounter with the Devil, and in one sense it is, but it is also something entirely modern. I would submit, however, that it is not, as its description on the title page states, a romance – at least not in the usual sense of that word in a novelistic context – despite the narrator’s later claim.

Michael Gardiner lives with his wife Amanda just outside the seaside town of Coldhaven, where local legend has it that the Devil one night had stalked the town in the aftermath of a great snowfall, leaving his odd footprints behind. Not that the town is unused to strange events. It is also said that once a woman had given birth to a baby with two heads, one normal, the other mis-shapen and stunted. The baby had quickly died and the woman went mad.

Michael’s unravelling begins when his cleaner, Mrs K, who brings to him the town’s gossip (but only when she has verified it) tells him the details of the incident where Moira Birnie – née Gregory – and incidentally Michael’s first proper girlfriend, had dropped her fourteen year-old daughter, Hazel, off on a back road out of town before driving away and then, convinced her husband Tom was the devil, had killed herself and their two sons. The car they were found in was deliberately burned-out. This tragedy sets Michael off to wondering if Hazel is in fact his daughter, since the dates fit. It also reminds him of the bullying he had received in school at the hands of Moira’s brother Malcolm, and the secret he has kept all those years about Malcolm’s death.

Michael explains his subsequent actions with thoughts like “mostly we are creatures of chance” and that we “see ourselves from inside as we never appear to others.” He ruminates on the vagaries of marriage. “I had to wonder why anyone got married, when they had the evidence of their own parents’ lives right there in front of them.” He says marriage is a story, it needs some new event every so often, but “there is a moment when a husband begins to suspect his wife, or a wife her husband, of having another story altogether, a separate, private story, that remains, and perhaps always will remain, untold.” On the possible reasons for why his own marriage broke down he reflects that, “Things begin deep below the surface; by the time they are visible, they have a life and direction of their own. We don’t see that, so we call it destiny, or fate, or chance, when something unexpected happens.”

Coldhaven is well named, the inhabitants had never made Michael’s parents (mother a painter, father a photographer, both from down south) welcome. Such was the townsfolks’ antipathy towards the incomers that gifts of dogshit through the letterbox, anonymous letters, threatening encounters on the street, nasty phone calls were the least of it. Hence Michael is convinced his mother’s death in a road accident was a deliberate act. Most of Amanda’s friends – mainly local – had gone to college, but once back in Coldhaven, “their local accents were more pronounced than they had ever been, and you could tell they had been unhappy in their absence.” His father put up with all the harassment but Michael says, “People think tolerance is a virtue, but there are some things that shouldn’t be tolerated.”

While he acknowledges he did go, at least mildly, insane, on insanity in general Michael thinks, “Only the insane listen when the angel speaks, only the insane make wild-eyed denials and so confirm their guilt.” He also astutely remarks that, “when the devil has work to do, he makes it look like an accident …. in order to lure us into his trap, protesting mildly, if at all, but willing accomplices at the last,” which has undertones of Banquo’s speech in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. On the historical pursuit of supposed evil-doers Michael recognises that people who drowned or burned simpletons and scapegoats as witches were themselves really the ones who were afraid of being possessed, that they would find the devil touching their shoulder, that they were his chosen. In these passages Burnside is touching on the tradition of brushes with the Devil but not explicitly, since Michael’s devil is internal. (Arguably, I suppose, all the meetings with the Devil in Scottish fiction are internal.)

As to restitution, for Michael, penance “should be an everyday matter, a deliberate return from the glamour of sin.” He makes his own via a strange anabatic hundred-mile walk home to Coldhaven after his madness abates.

Through Michael, Burnside tells us a story is “not meant to be true, but it has to be real, it has to run.” In that respect The Devil’s Footprints runs, delightfully.

Pedant’s corner:- Mrs Collings’ cottage (Collings’s,) rowboat (rowing boat,) Vesalius’ (Vesalius’s,) Burntturk