A Summer of Drowning by John Burnside

 

John Burnside's eighth novel is both an evolution of his previous work and an entirely self-contained fable. It is set in the Norwegian Arctic Circle; a place where extreme beauty and terror of nature hold the story of Liv and the summer of drowning. Living with her mother, the celebrated and supposedly reclusive painter Angelika Rossdal, twenty-eight year old Liv recalls the deaths and disappearances of four fellow islanders a decade before. Like Burnside's previous novel, the celebrated Glister (2008), this is an exploration of murder, but it's a world away from being a sensationalist genre piece. Again the author is working with the magical, but on this occasion it's in a more heavily mythological way. The beguiling, yet deadly huldra is invoked as the killer; a Siren of Scandinavian folklore that the author has us speculate upon, without ever affirming either its culpability, or even its existence. Like much of Burnside's work, the book is about subjective realities, and he has achieved a new poeticism and measure in his prose here which helps bring this forth. It is a work of stunning beauty and control, by one of our very best, and should be regarded as such. [Ryan Rushton]