ARTISTIC merit suspends our moral judgment or does it? Should its It appears that it has become an accepted element of criticism that readers/reviewers are not expected to react to, or assess, the behaviour of characters. It is the work and its literary and technical qualities which are under scrutiny, not the morality or amorality of the protagonists.
Many novels have challenged, even offended the moral values of the society of their day, but mainly by their sexual content. Violence, however, has experienced far less censure. Even when censorship was operating at its most vigorous, sexual behaviour was always more frowned upon than mere violence. Murder, even in its more depraved forms, is apparently more acceptable than adultery - or, as in Lolita (1955), corrupting sex with a consenting minor.
The publication of Bret Easton Ellis's grotesque, but funny, American Psycho (1990) - a far better work than many would concede - revived reactions of oldstyle moral outrage. The horrific acts of murder committed in that book appear to be enacted within the depraved narrator's sick imagination. Even so, reviewers rejected that novel's surreal violence and its fantastical killings.
The Scots poet John Burnside's fiction debut The Dumb House (Cape, £9.99 in UK) initially appears to be yet another of those clever, poised, elegant British novels invariably favoured by British reviewers enamoured of cynical, articulate clearly insane narrators who spin out tidy little accounts of ghastly events. Last year John Lancaster's The Debt to Pleasure, an amusing, if overrated, caper was Booker shortlisted an overeducated, insane foodie told his story in a narrative which showcased his love of language while also revealing his homocidal tendencies.
The Dumb House is probably as clever, and perhaps even matches Lancaster's superficial stylishness, but is far more stylised. It is also offensive. "No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins, any more than it was my decision to bring them into the world," begins Luke, the narrator. By the third page, he announces of his mother: "She was always working, like an architect, building a house of stones, treating her life and mine as a piece of fiction." She is, of course, suitably weird, as her boy recalls. "Mother would take me out looking for corpses. To begin with, it was her idea: she wanted me to see how things looked when they were dead." Dad is but an insignificant provider of unwanted presents.
One of Mom's stories has remained in his mind. Akbar the Great, a character from Persian myth, is believed to have built a palace in which he placed newborn children. Denying them the right to learn language, he then observed these children growing up in a silent world. It is a vicious and cruel tale, as is Burnside's lifeless, predictable novel.
From watching the death throes of a poisoned mouse and wanting "to open up a living creature . . . to feel the pulse in the organs, to watch the life seep away in the eyes of my chosen subject" Luke, having lain naked and perfumed with the body of his dead mother, moves on to break the fingers of a mute child with whose alcoholic mother he has impersonal sex sessions while she feigns trances.
The narration marches coldly and unconvincingly on, engaging in frequent asides designed to convey some element of abstract intellectual preoccupation. Luke's aimless intellectualising leads him to the local library where he finds a mute, vagrant girl. A handy device, this it certainly dispenses with dialogue. Once won from her thuggish vagrant beau, she provides him with passive sex and soon becomes pregnant. Meanwhile Luke, suspecting their secret life is being spied on, sets off to end the former boyfriend's voyeuristic visitations.
Having set his rival's battered body on fire, he muses upon the beauty of music he overhears from a house and notes the Japanese carp inhabiting a stone pool. "They seemed to me utterly amazing: miraculous, absurd presences, suspended in black water." Our killer has a such a sensitive soul; he also enjoys gardening.
The babies born to his sexual partner - who conveniently dies from complications - are regarded as "laboratory animals" and he treats them accordingly. Intent on exploring the mystery of language, he imitates the mythic emperor. By singing to each other, the babies defy the silence he is attempting to impose on them. The narrator lovingly describes how he severs their larynx, "that beautiful mechanism, almost birdlike in its delicacy".
Having poisoned them, he is then delighted when his previous lover - who has killed her son arrives at his house. Efficiently written, The Dumb House is an exercise in designer amorality. Far from being mesmerically repulsive, it is merely a cautionary lesson in how low we have sunk if we accept a contrived, bogus book such as this on any level.
