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Friday 5 December 2008

The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story

A far cry from Paradise

The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story, by James Buchan

This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a business career, apparently successful, in London, a certain level of worldly experience which has vanished, leaving him without attachments or points of reference. He has, for no apparent reason, bought a house, Paradise Farm, in an unspecified part of the country, and proposes to live there without company, devoting himself to farming his land and tending his animals, his only help that of an almost silent handyman and a cleaner, both of them taciturn and incurious, when not actively hostile.

From time to time he has the sensation of a female presence which he identifies as belonging to a character in a portrait glimpsed in a neighbour’s house. These few facts emerge from a context that is strangely immaterial and also markedly unreal. He is invited to a dinner party, at which the only question he is asked is whether he is in favour of fox hunting. The company is so unsympathetic that at one point he stands up, convinced that he is on the point of death. He then goes back to his house and spends the rest of the night disentangling three dead lambs from their mother. This is how he spends most nights, and how he prefers to spend them. He is no slouch when it comes to working his acres, though these are strangely deserted. There are references to a disco and a supermarket, but these are in a neighbouring village in which he has no interest. Yet in a brisk burst of description he remembers the London he once knew but which he has abandoned without regret. As he describes his life it is a mere chronicle of human labour, worthless and solitary. He purports to feel comfortable with this, rather more so than does the reader.

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