This is a guest post by Jennie Gillions, who writes about mental illness in art and history at the excellent The Inspired Madman blog
And what on earth is this? ‘It was a sensual experience of the highest order eating that ham sandwich: the conflicting textures of the soft bread, with the resistant ham in the creamy mustard.’
It’s hammy, that’s what it is. But, fortunately, it’s also deliberate. Thompson knows exactly what she’s doing, which is creating an intelligent, entertaining satire on the process of writing and the mental state of the writer.
Her main character is Max Long, author of seven high-brow novels that have gained him neither a readership nor wealth, but have lost him his wife and teenage son. Awarded a three-month sabbatical on Burnt Island, Max plans to abandon his literary pretensions and write a bestseller. He ends up staying in the house of fellow author James Fairfax, whose only novel so far, Lifeblood, was a runaway critical and commercial success. James is suave, sophisticated and charming; his daughter Rose is beautiful and willing. James’s wife Natalie is missing presumed dead, as is his previous lodger, writer Daniel Levy, who went missing on the same day as Natalie.
If this sounds portentous, it’s meant to be. Thompson’s aim is not to shock the reader with a twist ending. Her intention, it feels, is to conjure up a dream, and make you question reality in the same way that Max soon begins to.
Events and characters progress without logic or much explanation, which lends weight to the argument that the novel is unfolding inside Max’s head. For example, at one point Max discovers, while rooting through James’s desk hoping for something to unclog his writer’s block, that James is constructing his next novel from other people’s: 'And then a bizarre thought struck Max. Was it possible that James was not the author of Lifeblood?’ This is a conclusion jump worthy of Murder She Wrote. It’s not going to ruin the plot if I tell you that it is, however, true.
The further implication of this sentence is, of course, that literature is stolen - there are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. As Max’s inability to write that bestseller drives him closer to despair, he is looking for his fellow island residents to provide him with inspiration. He is a vampire, he thinks, feeding off people’s lives to further his own career, which James also seems to be doing - Max finds a notebook of James’s in which Max is the ‘possible protagonist’. James takes the metaphor further, accusing his (and Max’s, though Max is a far less treasured client) agent of vampirism in trying to feed off James’s imagination and success.
It’s a comparison that most writers will recognise, whether they’re proud of it or not. Thompson might not be one of those authors who always has a pen and a bit of paper, ready to scribble down her friends’ conversations or interesting tidbits of gossip, but she definitely knows some of them. Your writing is never solely yours, even without the Faustian pact Max suspects James is guilty of.
Luckily Max doesn’t believe in the devil, though its existence proves harder to deny as the story progresses. James says all the island’s women are ‘demons’. Esther tells Max that the island changes people. When Rose and her mute little sister Esther use a ouija board to communicate with their mother, it tells them that ‘James is lo diablo.’
Max’s emotional health understandably starts to suffer, much as Daniel Levy’s apparently had when he was staying with James. Ah-ha, we think, so James is the catalyst? Bit of a coincidence otherwise, isn’t it, that both lodgers become paranoid and start having visions? Max sees shadows in the garden, and the beach starts to undulate after he has sex with Rose on the dunes. Whether his visions are real or not is unclear to both Max and the reader, though the island becomes increasingly creepier.
It’s impossible to go any further into the plot without giving away the whole thing, so suffice to say it becomes apparent that the majority of people on this island are soulless and devilish; after one particularly horrific encounter Max is finally inspired to write: he ‘found solace once again in the integrity of his imagination’ which was ‘more powerful than he, more instinctive and brave...reckless and feckless and sometimes fey.’
But is it imagination? What he writes about is Burnt Island. He writes about Rose, and James, and the weirdness that he’s encountering, and his fears about his own sanity. This adds yet another layer onto the novel: is what we’re reading Max’s book? The explicit literary credentials and esoteric references certainly sound as though they belong in Max’s previous books. If Max is actually awake, which we’re not sure about, is he sane? His writer’s block is gone, but at what cost?
Reality continues to screw with Max and with us until the very last sentence, which superficially ties things up neatly. Though it doesn’t.
Thompson clearly had fun writing this book, peppering it with literary references, classical allusions and tropes from films that observant readers will delight in. The Wicker Man and The Lost Boys are in here, Max is the victim of a gull attack that’s highly reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Burnt Island itself has echoes of Dante, and the whole thing feels like the love-child of a Hammer Horror film and a Victorian Gothic romance. Max thinks to himself how like a Greek play the situation on Burnt Island is.
‘James looked at him strangely, as if he had forgotten he had written Lifeblood.’
James says of Natalie and Rose, ‘...it would be easy to mistake them for the same woman.’
These sections are gloriously enjoyable in their melodrama, but is this book as a whole an enjoyable read? Despite its obvious intelligence and smart structuring, personally speaking no it isn’t. There are delicious passages, but generally Burnt Island’s awkward, jerky style makes it difficult to find a reading flow. If what we are reading is Max’s imagination (where conscious or otherwise) the illogical leaps and literary pretentions make perfect sense, but they grate nonetheless.
Still, Thompson has managed to give us a thoughtful treatise on the writing process, a literary critique on popular horror and a commentary on what it can feel like to descend into mental illness, which is quite an achievement in barely more than 200 pages.
Follow Jennie on Twitter: @JenGillions
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