A Son of the Rock

Vintage, 2014, 253 p.

Like all Burnside’s prose this collection is exquisitely written. The best word to describe the effect he produces is, perhaps, liminal. The places where his stories are set are familiar, recognisable as the real world, but also strange, somewhat askew.

Something Like Happy is the tale of two siblings, Stan and Arthur McKechnie, as told by Fiona the sister of Stan’s girl-friend, Marie. The McKechnies are infamous in the town (a source of friction between Marie and her parents) but Arthur, whom Fiona only knows of through her work at the bank, is the quiet one of the family with his own strange ways. Occasionally he borrows stuff from Stan without permission.

Slut’s Hair is apparently the name for the stuff which gathers in dark corners where nobody has cleaned. Here a woman with an overbearing husband who has just removed one of her teeth with pliers since the dentist will be too expensive discovers some when she thinks it is a mouse. Her husband will not be pleased either way.

Peach Melba is the delicacy prepared for the narrator in his youth by the mysterious female owner of the House of Ice-Cream on the day that has haunted him for the rest of his life.

Sunburn is narrated by a man who, possibly due to an incident in his adolescence, cannot help every year on the first day of summer going out into the sun and falling asleep.

The title of Perfect and Private Things is taken from a poem ‘The Smiles of the Bathers’ by Walden Kees. The tale is of a not happily married woman lecturer, “She had learned long ago that matrimony was not so much the occasion of romantic desire as its final, and inescapable, cure,” whose annual ritual of sending flowers anonymously to one of her students is, this year, tainted by the presence in the pub where she has a drink after visiting the florist of a group of students.

Godwit relates how Jamie’s mate Fat Stan, goes off the rails after Jamie prefers to spend time with a girl rather than him, which is an extremely reductive description of a thoughtful, finely wrought story.

The Bell-Ringer is narrated by another woman in a becalmed marriage. From a Slovakian background (with family in unmarked graves, presumably Holocaust victims) she lives in her husband’s family home and finds it unsettling, imagining the ears of listeners from times past. Her unease with life is assuaged a little by taking up bell-ringing at the local church but crystallises when her sister-in-law reveals she is having an affair.

The Deer Larder updates the ghost/fairy story for the internet age. The narrator suffers from iritis and after a day of treatment receives an email – apparently by mistake – from someone called Martin trying to entice a former lover back. Its mention of Maupassant bypasses him at first but subsequent emails draw him into wondering if he is being tantalised by an author relating Martin’s experiences. The emails stop but the story doesn’t.

The Cold Outside is what a man who has just had a diagnosis of terminal cancer and regretting the distance (physical and emotional) between his wife and his daughter feels he has more in common with than his everyday life.

In A Winter’s Tale a young lad left in temporary charge of a junk shop one afternoon brightens the place up with Christmas decorations before being rudely interrupted.

Lost Someone describes an incident from earlier story Godwit from another viewpoint. The incident, when it comes, is bewildering to the narrator but not the reader.

In Roccolo a woman on the Amalfi coast makes it her project every year to initiate a young boy holidaying in her Father’s villa complex into her strange activities with birds in the roccolo.

The Future of Snow features a policeman looking out for a wandering man whose wife died in the snow a couple of Christmases ago. She apparently mistook the day of a clandestine meeting with the policeman and slipped and fell off the path.

Pedant’s corner:- Mathers’ (Mathers’s,) semester (the British usage is term,) staunch (stanch.)