Ashland & Vine

John Burnside

Jonathan Cape, £16.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

In the last year of the last century in small town America, a young film student is going house to house asking people to tell her about their past. This is for her boyfriend’s project, and she does his bidding dutifully, and with a perpetual hangover. Following the death of her father, Kate Lambert has been only partially aware of what she is doing and why. That changes, however, when she encounters the elderly florist Jean Culver, who sees at once that Kate needs help, and offers it in a fashion Hans Christian Andersen might have devised. Jean’s house could be the fairy godmother’s cottage. It sits on the edge of town where, despite her age, she chops logs and bakes cakes and walks in the woods. She tells Kate that if she stays sober for five days, she can come back and hear the story of her life.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that Kate’s rapport with Jean comes in part from the loss of her mother, who walked out on her family, never to be heard of again. The unmarried, lesbian, childless Jean slowly fills that gap, consciously or not, and by the novel’s end has shown herself far more loving, and caring, than many a conventional mother.

Bit by bit, this stern, resilient woman unreels her tale. Its mood is set by the murder of her father in Alabama when she was young, an event witnessed by her brother. Mr Culver was shot at the corner of Ashland and Vine, a phrase that she repeats to herself thereafter “like a curse”. But there is much more to Jean’s life than that, and like a fly fisherman she keeps adding fresh bait onto her hook to hold her listener’s attention. Kate recognises the Scheherazade trick of coaxing her back from the brink by the promise of more revelations to come, but seeing what is happening does not diminish the emotional nourishment this brings.

This, the multi-award-winning poet John Burnside’s tenth novel, takes him into new and far more challenging territory. With his recent fiction, such as Glister and A Summer of Drowning, there has been as sense of retreading the same path, exploring yet again the sinister potential of rural settings and small-town communities and their volatile or dangerous inhabitants. As from the outset of his career, with The Dumb House, tragedy and cruelty underpin, or bide their time in almost every tale. With Ashland & Vine, however, he moves beyond darkness and horror, to something rather more hopeful. The heartbreak his characters have each endured, whether on the home front or in the vanguard of action, ought to make this unbearably dark. In some respects it is. The pointless and savage catalogue of sadistic, merciless violence and death that has traumatised everyone within its pages cannot be redeemed by any philosophical argument or defence of loyalty or patriotism. Yet in the tenderness of the affection that grows between the old woman and the young student, and the loving awareness of the natural world with which this novel is almost incidentally imbued, there is also a fragile optimism.

Ashland & Vine is a novel about stories, those of individuals like Jean Culver, but also the ones a nation tells itself to keep a lid on the truth and insurrection. When it begins, Kate has no belief in the power of a narrative to make sense of a life. “Things just happened, like scenes in a movie. Some scenes were beautiful, some were tragic, or something like it. Some just went wrong, like when somebody gets a boom in the shot, or a car flashes by, drowning out the dialogue. The scenes didn’t connect, though, it was just one thing, then another.”

Jean the raconteur, however, takes a different view. She introduces Kate to the “As If” school of philosophy. “We accept that these fictional ideas of order and meaning are not true as such, but if we are able to will ourselves to live “as if” they were, then we can obtain some semblance of meaningful life.”

The bigger canvas behind Ashland & Vine is not the sorrowful and ordinary curriculum vitae of Jean or Kate or others, but the story of America from the second world war to the 1990s. In that period, wars on foreign land gave way to revolutionary guerillas and campaigners at home. Rebel groups, such as the Black Panthers and The Weather Underground, rejected the official version of history that was spread, like gospel or bromide, to keep folks docile. If such protesters are forgotten, says Jean, “then we lose something that should have been dear to us”.

That, at least, is how she understands the turbulent public events of her lifetime. And she should know better than most, since almost all her family have been caught up either in the century’s wars or those denouncing the government.

Unashamedly using his characters as mouthpieces and mirrors, Burnside’s cast embody the sweep of political and social crises in this era. For Jean’s soldier brother, despite witnessing events that will haunt him to the grave, “he didn’t see that America controls its own people just as assiduously as it bullies others abroad”. It is his children who are wiser, an awareness for which they will pay.

When her nephew, an army deserter, makes a fleeting, eleventh-hour appearance, it is to speak as lyrically as a Gaelic bard in some of the most beautiful, resounding passages of a book filled with passion and belief. Putting aside his preachiness, his monologues drive home Burnside’s point: “It’s not the bad apples who are responsible. They are just instruments. It’s the system. It’s war itself.”

Burnside is an engaging, felicitous writer, but from the outset it is hard to avoid feeling lectured. At times you can almost hear the author rapping the table, demanding your full attention, which this novel certainly requires. This is also a story about appearances, and the delusions and deception and manipulated truths of art, in particular film. Where he describes Kate’s boyfriend’s films, or alludes to others, the difficulty of translating the moving image onto the page becomes apparent. Such scenes are unsatisfactory, not least because they also come perilously close to the kind of stuff that ends up in Pseuds Corner.

Moulding his novel around a suspicious, furious anti-establishment creed, the author’s voice is unrepentantly partisan. Among his walk-on characters is Jean’s sister-in-law Gloria, mercilessly depicted as morally useless, or worse, since she has not tried to understand, or improve, her world. “What had been attractive in her before was the light in her face, a brightness, a sense of expectation. Like she’d been promised all her life that the future would be beautiful, all she had to do was show up...” Burnside’s contempt for someone who remains blind or uncaring about what is going on around her could not be more pronounced.

Wearing its politics as well as its heart on its sleeve, Ashland & Vine is a highly ambitious, partially successful attempt to address perhaps the most intractable issue of any age: how can ordinary people live a good and ethical life when those in power are impelled not by humanitarian concerns, but by the greed for power? For all its misfirings, however, it is powerful and provocative and urgent. By its end, you don’t need to be a literary sleuth to see that this unresolvable tension is as alive today as in the times of Pearl Harbour or Vietnam.

John Burnside will be at Glasgow book festival Aye Write! on Sunday March 19 at 6.30pm. The Herald and Sunday Herald are the event's media partners.