Living Nowhere by John Burnside

Carnage in Corby leaves Andrew Cowan cold

Known locally as Little Scotland, and built to service a vast steelworks, the new town of Corby has few roots in the farmlands of Northamptonshire. "People here were always talking about home," writes John Burnside in this, his fourth novel, "and they always meant some other place ... a place they had come from, a place they were going to." Principally, they meant Glasgow, though most other regional accents could be heard there. So, too, the accents of Eastern Europe: after the war Corby gave refuge to many "Displaced Persons" for whom home meant the towns of Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Poland ...

Burnside himself arrived from Cowdenbeath aged 11, and it's from Cowdenbeath that Tommy and Lizzie Cameron are drawn in this novel, hoping for "steady work, a better house, a fresh start". Set in the Seventies, Living Nowhere gives them an address just two streets from where I was born and grew up. Conceivably, I might once have delivered papers to the Camerons. Conceivably, on any of these pages, a Cameron might glance up and see me.

For the novel's other principal family, the Ruckerts, home means Latvia, and understandably neither family is happy in this "smoky, poisoned town" with "a taint on the air you could taste, a corruption you couldn't help breathing".

The places they left behind are myths now, the inventions of nostalgia, as Burnside makes clear. But then his own apocalyptic vision of Corby as a place where "everything was dirt" and "everything was marked, even the people" is no less of a lie.

Except in the immediate vicinity of the Works, Corby did not suffer a constant rain of red dust. Nor was there a permanent "stink of coke and ammonia". In Corby, the smells were of cut grass and creosote, the smells of any provincial town. But Burnside's myth-making requires the hokum of a population "steeped" in "a miasma of contamination", breathing an air so foul it taints the very marrow of their bones. This then "explains" the violence which apparently "hangs in the Corby air like the ash and the stench from the steelworks".

The Corby of Living Nowhere is a town of comically arbitrary axings and stabbings and kickings. One victim is Jan Ruckert, who, for two-thirds of this long book, is barely present.

Poor Jan. He is, as even his sister recognises, "more of a rumour" than real person. But it seems he must be beaten to death so that Burnside can at last abandon this "suburb of hell" and, in the guise of Francis Cameron, Jan's schoolfriend and "soul brother", embark on a 17-year odyssey that takes in gardening in Cambridge, acid-tripping in a cult commune in Scotland, minting money in Silicon Valley, and painting pictures in Fife.

Francis's quest is not to find himself, but to lose himself, to become one with the stars and the tides and the deer in the woods, to slip the ties of "home", identity and history, to live precisely "nowhere". Having achieved this "erasure", he is then able to return to a post-industrial, cleaned-up Corby, if only to make clear he doesn't mean to stick around.

John Burnside has explored similar territory in his poetry: "the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape". Perhaps poetry is a finer instrument for teasing at notions of presence and absence, being and not being. Certainly his prose, rhetorically overblown and repetitious, feels far too unwieldy a device, lacking the precision or truthfulness to depict not only Francis Cameron's "nowhere", but the "somewhere" he and I once actually inhabited.

Andrew Cowan's novel 'Crustaceans' is published by Sceptre