I was telling a story about the Cyclops to my five-year-old son. I was driving but I caught his eye in the rear-view mirror.
"Is that true?" he said and I paused before answering.
"Some things are true even if the things that the story says happened didn't actually happen." I said. My son looked confused.
"Like Religion," I said "When people talk about God."
His face lit up right away.
"Oh, OK" he said.
We've had quite a few conversations about baby Jesus and God. I always tell him I don't believe in God, that's it's just another story. Now here I was sticking up for the veracity of myths! Anyway...John Burnside's novel The Summer of Drowning is like that. It's about stories VS rationality - about the relationship between Truth and fiction. It's about the difficulty of believing in other people as real. It's about what you feel like when it's light day and night for months on end, as happens on the edge of the Arctic Circle where this astonishing novel is set. It's about the terror that lurks in the dark, in the corners of eyes and at the edges of understanding. It's about the fragile line between sanity and complete madness.
Why did I choose the song above, that hopefully you have just played, or maybe are playing now? It's a beautiful song. There is a line in the original by Leonard Cohen that goes:
"you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you"
The Summer of Drowning is a novel of great power and insight that creeps beneath your skin to haunt you. It also makes you think deeply about life and art. The narrator, Liv, is as unreliable as perception itself and as sinister as they come.
I loved it!
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