The Mercy Boys. By John Burnside. Jonathan Cape, 265pp, £10 in UK
The four central characters in John Burnside's second novel, The Mercy Boys, prefer marathon drinking sessions at their local to the respective horrors of their empty lives. One of Britain's most established youngish poets, Burnside left no doubts about his interest in the darker side of human nature with his first foray into fiction, The Dumb House (1997), the gruesome story of a serial killer which unfolded with a chillingly elegant, if ultimately repulsive, confidence. This new book is slightly more rooted in the real world, albeit a grim one of hangovers, unemployment, loneliness, dark obsessions and resentments. Each of the men has serious difficulties with women. Junior pretends his bed-ridden wife is dead, while violent Rob, who hates the dogs next door, has become increasingly estranged from the woman he lives with, through her frustrated ambition and his failures. Constantly asking her and his drinking buddies for money, Rob is caught up in dreams of a revenge which becomes reality.
Poor old Sconnie backs horses, tells stories and remains damaged by memories of his father, an anxious man who had lived to please and "took a mild interest in everything from the migratory patterns of terns to his son's school report or his wife's gum problems". On discovering his father's past included romances in Egypt, Sconnie feels he has "broken into the life of a perfect stranger". Meanwhile Alan, the thinker of the quartet, lives from one drinking session to the next by barely existing in between, and ponders death. The arrival of young Jennifer alerts him to new problems.
Burnside's prose is sharp and exact, sensations are vivid, and he brings some subtle nuances to an intelligent narrative that's gradually drawn into an improbable excess - which, while avoiding the designer violence of his first book, is obvious and predictable, leaving the novel and the reader somewhere in a twilight zone.
