A Summer of Drowning [Hardcover]

John Burnside (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 25, 2011

A terrifying and dream-like new novel from one of our greatest contemporary writers.
 
At a critical point in her career, painter Angelika Rossdal suddenly moves to Kvaloya, a small island deep in the Arctic Circle, to dedicate herself to the solitary pursuit of her craft. With her, she brings her young daughter, Liv, who grows up isolated and unable or unwilling to make friends her own age, spending much of her time alone, or with an elderly neighbour, Kyrre Jonsson, who beguiles her with old folk tales and stories about trolls, mermaids and -- crucially for the events that unfold in the summer of her eighteenth year -- about the huldra, a wild spirit who appears in the form of an irresistibly beautiful girl, to lure young men to their doom.
 
Now twenty-eight, Liv looks back on her life and particularly to that summer when two boys drowned under mysterious circumstances in the still moonlit waters off the shores of Kvaloya. Were the deaths accidental, or were the boys, as Kyrre believes, lured to their deaths by a malevolent spirit? To begin with, Liv dismisses the old man's stories as fantasy, but as the summer continues and events take an even darker turn, she comes to believe that something supernatural is happening on the island. But is it? Or is Liv, a lonely girl who has spent her entire life in the shadow of her beautiful, gifted mother, slowly beginning to lose touch with reality?
 
Set in the white nights of an Arctic summer, the novel has the heightened, hallucinogenic atmosphere of a dream, but culminates in a moment of profound horror. Intensely imagined and exquisitely written, A Summer of Drowning is a play of dark and light, of looking and seeing, that will hold and haunt every reader.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

JOHN BURNSIDE has published five works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry, including The Asylum Dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award. His Selected Poems was published in 2006, alongside his memoir, A Lie About My Father, which was the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The second volume of his memoir, Waking Up In Toytown, has just been published.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape (July 25, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 022406178X
• ISBN-13: 978-0224061780
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,794,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Spooky and tense but I never really connected with it, December 9, 2011

By 

Ripple (uk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Summer of Drowning (Hardcover)

"A Summer of Drowning" is a book in which for much of the time not a lot happens - but always spookily. Set on the Norwegian island of Kvaløya in the Arctic Circle, the story is narrated by Liv who is now 28 but who recalls events of a summer when she was 18. Liv resides with her artist mother in, if not isolation, then certainly seclusion. The book makes much of the midsummer madness that 24 hour daylight induces and in that respect it is wholly successful. It aims for a dream-like and timeless quality which it

Part of the problem for me was Liv herself. She's an odd character and I never really warmed to her. It occurred to me very early on in the book that there's something not right about her - but what? And did that deserve sympathy or just plain irritation? She makes out that her location is part of her reason for avoiding people, but it seems more than that. She has just finished school but has no friends, apart from an old man, Kyrre Opdahl, who regales her with mythical stories. She repeats herself, well, repeatedly. Partly this is down to the fact that she is exploring her feelings a decade ago so often almost argues with herself about how she felt. The problem I had with this is that it slows down any action and makes it all one-paced.

Yet, while this is a little irritating, what it effectively does very well is to create a level of tension and spookiness to the whole thing. The cover blurb identifies that two brothers died that summer, one was in Liv's class at school and one was his younger brother, but if this leads to you expect a mystery type novel, it's far from that. It's much more mysterious which is part of its charm and it is oddly compelling, but also part of what I found slightly irritating about it.

Burnside sets up a series of mysterious events in Liv's nightmare summer. The two brothers drown, and other characters disappear. Liv is never a direct witness to these events although she comes close. Indeed, she is constantly on the edge of any action that does happen, either by chance or by choice.

The book is split into just three chapters which effectively mirrors the seemingly unending white nights of an Arctic summer and timelessness is a theme throughout the book. So too is observation, either direct as in Liv's habit of spying on the temporary inhabitants of the neighboring lodge or in terms of interpretation through her mother's art. This is where the notion of Kyrre Opdahl's fables and myths, which Liv gets caught up in, comes in - to what extent are they are to be taken literally or are just ways of explaining the unexplained?

It's certainly not a comfortable read, but I suspect that is largely the author's intention. There's no doubt that it's beautifully constructed and it has a haunting feel to it but ultimately I found it to be less satisfying than I wanted it to be. For all Liv's retrospection, she doesn't really come up with anything concrete or indeed convincing.

If Liv draws you into her story and her character, then I suspect you would enjoy this book rather more than I did. But the dreamlike effect where you feel that reality and events are just a touch away but unobtainable ran though to Liv herself for me. I wanted to like her and find her interesting, but I didn't. I found her to be strangely naive and immature even allowing for her remote upbringing. The influence of Kyrre Opdahl on her is suggested and yet she doesn't spend much time with him. And in a world where there is television, computers, schools and a nearby airport, the death of two young boys and disappearance of several others seems to spark no interest in either the community or the police. But then, perhaps I'm trying to force reality onto Burnside's dream world. Yet I cannot deny that it is compellingly told and evocative. My sense was a story that wanted to speed up at times but Liv's narration wouldn't let it.