The Devil's Footprints

Author John Burnside leads us, the intrigued readers, on an intimate tour of the unaccepting and brutish heart of smalltown coastal Scotland in “The Devil’s Footprints.” But that exploration serves as just the appetizer for the first-person narrator’s – Michael’s – descent into his own low-key, “elective” madness. The devil does indeed leave his footprints all over this story, and in some way, Michael, by turns willfully and unwittingly, follows them. Rather closely.

As Michael grows up his parents are reviled as outsiders. His parents die within a few months of each other during his university years, his mother in negligent homicide, his father in weighted solitude. Michael’s own history includes his victimization by show more a bully for several months when a grade-schooler, an episode in which Michael finds courage and turns fearsome aggressor. However, these just set the stage for Michael's reaction to the horrific suicide by a townswoman, years later, who kills two of her sons along with herself. This precipitates a downward spiral in Michael, mainly because he thinks he may be the father of the victim’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

All this sounds dreary indeed, and I regret that, because Mr. Burnside handles all this with such straightforward earnestness, and the exactly appropriate level of somberness, that Michael’s character generates our sympathies. We’re sympathetic when a prank against an old oppressor turns freakishly fatal, but perhaps less so later when he perpetrates a felonious flight with a minor girl. You’ll not find the stunning, hurtling violence of the internal dialog that so distinguishes Anne Enright’s “The Gathering,” not here. Here we find the contemplative, self-aware, well-meaning man, aware of his ever-loosening grip, yet unable to do anything about it.

The title refers to the town legend that one morning, many years ago, after a night of snow, the early townspeople found footsteps in the snow, deep and burning, sulfuric and discoloring, clear trough the snow to the ground. They are clearly not human, and no known animal could have made them. They hop fences and go right up the side of the church, across the roof, and down the other side. Michael’s misadventure with his purported daughter ultimately results in an impossible trek on foot that nearly kills him, and the ruminations during this walk are worth the price of admission by themselves. Suffice it to say that what possesses people who act like demons becomes far more familiar to us, and is not at all what you think. Step up to this terrific piece and read about the durable fears of priests and landowners.

I recommend this book very, very highly. Here’s why: the language will stun you with its simple effectiveness and the rightness of its diction. The characters will strike you as real, as will their symptoms. And the thematic issues of motivation, secrecy, and near-demonic possession will challenge you and bring you new understanding. You will understand more about human nature, and there is no higher compliment I can give to a piece of fiction. Congratulations to Mr. Burnside for this quiet, shaded triumph.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2011/01/devils-footsteps-by-john-burnside.htm... show less

Sometimes you discover a new author that really excites you, such as this very talented Scotsman. After finishing this book, I ordered all his other publications as I really enjoyed his prose style – a biting, sparse, luminous quality of prose that beautifully interprets the geography, the villager’s lives, family relationships and events such as death and brutality. He powders his plot-driven story with many philosophical reflections.

Burnside dwells heavily on death events through-out this novel, which opens with the suicidal death of a mother and her two children in a car fire. It is set in a sleepy sea-side village in Scotland, where the protagonist, Michael lives unhappily with his wife. Michael has a sarcastic, selfish edge to show more his character, living in an inherited home and passively reflecting on current and past events that touched his life. There is exploration of loneliness, alienation, and even the supernatural. There are streaks of brutality and social dislocation within the fabulous atmosphere of his prose.

Burnside’s prose resembling the atmosphere of a Banville novel, the empty longing of a Coetzee memoir and introduces a Nabokovian sensibility with his relationship to the young girl, Hazel.

He is a good writer, a very good one. show less

This is a well written book, with a strange looping narrative. The narrator seems like a character from a Richard Ford short story, with limited self-knowledge, as he attempts to piece together the elements of his life. He is affected by a strange lassitude, and a matter-of-fact approach to the various horrendous events of the story, which include his "murder" of an older bully in high school.

There are various hints that this will be an updated version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or James Hogg's "The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner", but in the end no such luck. The long final section, as the protagonist walks the 100 miles back home after being duped and dumped by the 14 year old girl who may or may not be his show more daughter, needs editing. And the ending itself is a big fizzle. Where Richard Ford or Raymond Carver could pull this off, Burnside struggles. What does it add up to? Perhaps an extended meditation on place, family, history and destiny .. but no real revelation or resolution. Burnside is, however, worth reading, if for no other reason than his evocative descriptions of light and water.

There is an overarching moodiness to this novel, a disengagement by the protagonist, which reminds me (again) from a line in "Rock Springs", by Richard Ford, where the judgement is this: "Earl, you got a character that leaves something out." Unfortunately, the same can be said of this novel. It needs a little something in the way of plot. .. or perhaps some clear thematic resolution. show less

First person account of a troubled man's life and breakdown – the "mental wallpaper of a resolutely beige spirit". Evocatively written, but occasionally a bit too far the wrong side of creepy.

Rich imagery of Scottish countryside surrounds an introspective story of a character coming to realize who he is. Burnside is also a poet, and you can see it in this book.