A Son of the Rock

Jonathan Cape, 2011, 333 p.

It is not uncommon for Scottish literature to deal with the supernatural (mostly meetings with the Devil) and Burnside himself had a sideways look at the topic in his earlier novel The Devil’s Footprints. What is uncommon is for the story to be set, as this one is, in Norway. The Norwegian Arctic to be precise, where the midnatsol night sky is white. More precisely, the story takes place on Kvaløya, one of a string of islands north of Tromsø to where our narrator Liv’s mother, Angelika Rossdal, has gone in search of the perfect place to compose her paintings.

The pair have an equable existence, no father on hand (by Angelika’s decision,) moreover one whose existence is barely acknowledged, but near neighbour (in as much as they have neighbours) Kyrre Opdahl has acted as a very distant surrogate. Kyrre’s nearby hytte, which he lets out to visitors, plays a significant part in the tale.

This novel is a gem, Burnside draws you in and maps out the circumstances which forged a life with a pin-sharp eye.

The summer of the title is described from the perspective of years later by narrator Liv. Its strangeness began with the drowning of her school contemporary Mats Sigfridsson who had borrowed a boat on a flat calm night and whose body was found washed up in a day or so. His brother Harald, with whom he had formed an inseparable pair until in the recent past Maia, “a dark-eyed, mocking girl with a loose tomboy walk who had always been the outsider,” had begun to hang out with them, suffers a similar fate within a fortnight. Kyrre, who is steeped in local myth, begins to link their deaths to the old beliefs. “It was like one of those tales people in the old days made into legends, stories about wraiths and seal people and mermaids, all of them dark warnings about what the woods or the sea or the mountains can do, if you don’t show them enough respect.” He suspects Maia is a manifestation of the huldra, a phantom who lures men to their doom.

The last portrait Angelika ever painted before she began more abstract work was an unfinished one of Liv, which, with no warning, she eventually hung on the wall outside Liv’s bedroom. The two’s mutual communication is often unspoken, “Some gifts are like that. They are given and received in silence, almost secret and, no matter how inexplicable or strange they may seem, they are never mentioned again.”

Liv likes to observe the world around her. She describes the arrival of Martin Crosbie, the latest tenant of Kyrre’s hytte, and his entanglement with Maia. At the same time she is aware that “this is the first law of the observer: never be a witness. The true observer is permitted to see what no one else sees on one condition, and that is that she never tells.” But of course, Liv, as narrator, is telling us, albeit at a remove.

There is one interpolation into the novel that sits obliquely to it. Liv receives a letter from England from a Kate Thompson who is living with Liv’s father, Arild Frederiksen, whose name up to this point was unknown to her. She is told he is dying and wants to see her. Liv is neither up nor down about this person she’d never seen and had no relationship with but in the end decides to go to see him despite Angelika not pressuring her to. Of course she arrives too late and Kate is confused by her lack of concern.

A Summer of Drowning is also a story about stories, about how we see the world, and the comfort fiction can bring. Another of the island’s inhabitants, Ryvold, tells Liv, “stories are really about time … once, in a place that existed before we were born, something occurred – and we like to hear about that, because we know already that the story is over.”

It is also about disruption, about the world(s) we don’t see, “no matter what form we give it, or how elaborately it is contrived, order is an illusion and, eventually, something will emerge from the background and upset everything we are so determined to believe in. Or that’s how it is in stories – in real life, that something is always there, hidden in plain view, waiting to flower. A turn of phrase, a blemish, an unspoken wish – it doesn’t take much to open the floodgates and let the chaos in.” They are “invention, in the old sense, which is to say: revealing what there is, seen and unseen, positive and negative, shape and shadow, the veiling and the veiled.” Through Ryvold we hear that, “That’s how the stories work. They remind us that anything can happen. Everything changes, anything can become anything else – and there’s nothing supernatural about it.”

The crucial scene of the book, when Martin Crosbie goes off onto the lake watched by Maia and Liv, and they both do nothing (Maia understandably as an incarnation of the huldra but it could just as easily be as a normal human being) is about choice, or about what we wish to tell ourselves. Alternatively, “it wasn’t a dream, it was a story – and that’s different.” Or else, “Maybe everything was already decided, the way it is in fairy tales.”

Perhaps it was why Liv came to have “no career, no husband, no lover, no friends, no children,” but it is what she remembers for us. Then again; “remembering is a choice if it’s done well, and nobody can make you remember what you choose to put out of your mind.”

However, everything might just be a story; with Liv’s narration unreliable. How could it not be when the odd, the weird, the uncanny intrude into her life? On the edge of the world, where the forces of nature are capricious at best, it might be hard to resist the thought that fate is a matter of luck, that demons lie in wait for the unwary.

However interpreted, Liv’s story stands “to try to give a sense of the world beyond our illusory homelands,” what she seems to consider the real world behind the everyday.

Pedant’s corner:- “Struwwlepeter hair” (Struwwelpeter,) “she couldn’t quite leave go of the world” (‘couldn’t quite let go of the world’ is a more natural way to say this.)