Under a Spell

In those brief, highly-charged moments when one finally puts down an unputdownable book, one can believe one has a new favourite writer. 

Thom Gunn's letters earlier this year did him no favours in my estimation. Last year I pronounced Proust as the greatest novelist, even if not ahead of James Joyce's Dubliners. A.N. Wilson contuines to be hugely impressive in whatever of his I pick up. Elizabeth Bishop and Rosemary Tonks head up a list of favourite poets with unforgettable bits of August Kleinzahler, Sean O'Brien, Larkin and Auden pressing their respective cases. It's hard to know how many tremendous writers there are that I haven't read although I wouldn't agree with John Peel that the music he hadn't heard was more interesting than what he had.

But the feeling that one has just read something entirely worthwhile and there was nothing one would rather have been doing is surely what one is in search of in a life spent, for better or worse, much of it with books.

I Put on Spell on You is possibly 'confessional' in a way that Burnside's less specifically personal poetry is not but, then again, any memoir is likely to be so except that not all of them escape the events they describe in search of something 'beyond' quite so insistently. The unprepossessing origins in Cowdenbeath and Corby are jettisoned as Burnside vividly broods upon a life of itinerant infatuation, 'glamour', madness and some danger seemingly, as in his poems, aware of something 'other', more and unattainable, glimpsed in moments in which he sees 'happiness' but knows that the hyperbole of popular music lyrics is nothing like the real thing.

It is in the isolation of sub-Arctic Norway that he thinks he might find release but his friend explains that there one is more dependent on the trust of others and community than anywhere else. As in the stories, there is a persistent awareness of violence and a need for protection from it. It might be the same pre-disposition that makes him a drug user and prone to amour fou that leads him to this edge of what 'the System' would regard as sane, that suburban, domestic 'sanity' represented more innocently by R4Extra's current series of repeats of Not in Front of the Children in which Wendy Craig developed her specialist line in crisis-stricken housewife.

Towards the end, Burnside refers in passing to Dante and Beatrice and how the poet there never mentions Mrs. Aligheri, which is the difference between the 'thrawn' of what might have been possible and the less poetic version of what really happened. There is something wild and uncontrollable beyond but Burnside, in finding himself unable to commit to Christina, turns away from it, which might have been for the best because otherwise she might have become 'real'.

I like it when one book links into the next and how Dante came into the story like that because it will be Wilson on Dante next and then we'll see. But, for however long it lasts - and it may have been a glimpse of impossible happiness - John Burnside seemed like my favourite writer. Maybe he still will be but, as becomes clear with any of them, it is only a form of words. It's not to be regarded as scripture or gospel as some aberrant believers would take texts to be. A talented writer is only someone who convinces through the illusion of the words they put together and conjures something wonderful from them but it's worth it while it's happening.