For example, I find Gunter Von Hagens 'skinned' cadavers terrifyingly beautiful because they reflect my own mortality and the taboo of death in our culture, while simultaneously exposing the inner workings of that baroque architecture that is our fragile anatomy.
To see what was once a living, loving, laughing human being 'peeled' and displayed to the world, is to some, perverse and voyeuristic - and I know that there's an element of voyeurism and 'rubber-necking' in my fascination with Von Hagens' work - but there is also that shocking beauty too, a poetry in the dark tangles of arteries, the blooming fractals of veins and glistening organs.
It is probably the only opportunity I and others will have, to see the ego/personality stripped creature (Me) behind the mask in all its animal, visceral glory.
Burnside is an anatomist too, like Von Hagens.
All the characters in his novels are somehow mere ghosts in their respective anatomical machines, subject to the attractions and repulsions of history and place. In his novel the 'Dumb House' he explored the anatomist riff in detail; the main characters self-taught surgical interventions were chilling in their matter-of-fact reasoning and performance - and all for one man's insatiable and perverse curiosity.
In Glister, Leonard and the other inhabitants of 'innertown' are the diseased casualties of a small, post-industrial Scottish coastal town. They have been used, infected and discarded when a large chemical plant (the towns main employer) finally closes down. Leonard, via his fathers illness and the general apathy and hopelessness that surrounds the town and its people, becomes another fallout victim of the plant, another mutant creature scurrying through the factory ruins on the headland.
Burnside's central character in the book ruminates on what the Roman's called the Genius Loci or the spirit of place. This is a feature in most of the Scottish writers work. The specific locale is the driver for emotion and experience, like there is an amoral, invisible force, a spectral gravity pressing and shaping the characters destinies, an inevitability of place from which they can never escape. (From reading his autobiography though, its seems like Burnside never really got over his spell in that other 'innertown' Corby in the north Midlands!)
The innertown and outertown of Glister though, are also literary microcosms of the very real and much larger social divisions within our society at the moment. The sickly, apathetic and discarded inhabitants of the innertown can be contrasted with the British 'underclass', depicted via the tabloid media as a benefit dependent, over-breeding, sickly, alien species, malnourished and malformed (obese) by their diet of processed food and telly watching lifestyles.
The 'outertowners' don't fair too well either in Burnside's estimation; a bunch of immoral, conniving opportunists with very cruel and black hearts.
But the genius of Burnside is that, despite the cruel vindictiveness, small mindedness, hate and huge physical violence that the inhabitants of innertown perpetrate upon each other, Burnside puts this in context, he makes their behaviour comprehensible in the quagmire of despair and deprivation they live through day by day.
The only glimmers of light in the writers bleak narratives are the small acts of tenderness that surface here and their - often between parents and offspring, or the pining of some lovelorn character over the kitchen sink at midnight, the thankless caring for some ill or elderly person by some tortured, sad loner.
That's another theme that I often see in Burnside's work, being a carer, looking after a loved one (or unloved one) through a sense of loyalty, habit, apathy, or just the terror of having no one else in the world. Its dark stuff, but at the risk of sounding pretentious, I think its important stuff and Burnside is an 'important writer'...as the literary critics often say about the wrong writers.
Burnside meticulously strips the skin off us all, and makes the terrible beauty of our innermost fears, compulsions and desires comprehensible and readable like a fantastic, medieval map.
Most of all he shows how we are all the same underneath.
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