‘The Dumb House’ by John Burnside

I finished ‘The Dumb House’ by John Burnside last night. I feel a bit in awe of his writing ability and imagination, but also somewhat spooked by the dark eeriness that Burnside conjures up in this bleak novel about scientific curiosity meets the serial killer.

The central character (the first person narrator) reminds me of Camus’ Meursault: he’s a cold, unemotional cipher of a human being, but unlike the French writer’s classic existentialist ‘Outsider’ he has a mission, or calling – he’s fascinated by the philosophical and social root and development of language acquisition and its relationship to the soul.

After the death of his mother and having the house to himself at last, the narrator finally has the opportunity to repeat an ‘experiment’ he had been fascinated by for most of his life. It was his mother herself who told him as a child the tale of the dyslexic Mughal emperor who found himself one day arguing with his counsellors that language was learned and the soul was innate, because otherwise why are there so many different languages?

And surely, the soul cannot belong to any one perceptual faculty?

His counsellors cited examples of children who had been raised by animals or survived and often thrived in harsh isolated environments, without any linguistic stimulation, but had, never the less, developed an idiosyncratic language of their own, often totally unintelligible to others.

As emperors tend to do, having unlimited funds and armies of ‘can-doers’ at their disposal, Akbar the Mughal built a lavish room with mute attendants and populated it with a group of new born babies to test his hypothesis in style.

The old tale ends with the children growing up and never uttering a word, lost and isolated in their surreal, soundless world.

The children’s home ever after becomes something of a tourist attraction, a stationary freak show, known as the Gang Mahal, or ‘The Dumb House’.

After Akbar’s example, Burnsides character embarks on a mission to procure a child or children to create a modern Dumb House, to satisfy his clinically scientific cravings, his insatiable (and inhuman) curiosity.

He meets a couple of women, one of whom has a strange autistic child (and is somewhat odd and dissociated herself), the other is a childless, disturbed young mute girl he first spots in the library. Both women are vulnerable and lonely.

As the narrative unfolds, Burnside’s ‘scientist’ betrays a totally cold and dispassionate violence towards anyone or anything that frustrates the purity of his experiment. The autistic child has his fingers broken when he irritates the ‘emperor’; the boyfriend of the mute girl is slashed, then later kicked to death because he threatens to steal her back.

Finally, the young girl begins sharing the scientist’s bed, and he begins constructing his lab or Gang Mahal in the basement. She becomes pregnant of course, and the narrator has two perfect test subjects. Conveniently, the woman dies soon after from complications from the birth.

As the story unwinds we learn more about the narrators life story, his fascination with animal dissection when still a child, his distant parents, his loneliness and isolation. Burnside gives him all the classic developmental attributes of the classic psychopath.

The central characters search for the soul, for voice and language in his experiment, is also the search to find the soul within himself, the ontology of real being in the world, to make sense of the terrifying nothingness and seemingly disordered nature of his own existence.

Burnside puts us inside the psychopaths head so perfectly by creating a floating poetic stillness to the narrative – the matter-of-factness is chilling in its banality.

The author knows his philosophy of language and perception. The story touches on Plato’s idea of the Logos: is there some kind of transcendent truth? The purity of the soul emitted by the spoken word over the artifice of writing?

Structuralism: is language transparent, can its grasp the essence of things in themselves? Or is it opaque, a system of crude algebraic shorthand, to help us navigate the ultimate senselessness of the world?

And Burnside himself references and deconstructs the genre of serial killers, existential literature and cinema by creating his own Hitchcockian ‘Psycho’, his own very British and very dark Meursault on a mission.

As his two angelic guinea pigs develop in the lab (male and female, Adam and Eve?) they begin…to sing. A strange unintelligible noise, that the experimenter is unable to decipher: is it communication or just an epiphenomenona - a side effect of their isolation – biological white noise emitted by a confused larynx? Or is it the ghost in the machine attempting speak?

The twins certainly have a bond, and the scientist decides the experiment has been contaminated – he should have had a single test subject – so he decides he can save the study somewhat by giving one twin a laryngotomy - the severing of the vocal chords.

Yeah, it’s not a tale for the squeamish.

I won’t tell you the ending, its pretty bleak as you can imagine. Overall, what comes out of the book is how the narrator, the ‘psychotic-scientist’ has been inhabiting his own psychic Dumb House, a lonely alienated existence, without any real meaningful communication or love. He can only have ‘relationships’ with women who are as emotionally crippled and as disorientated by the seemingly weird ordering of reality as he is.

In the end it seems that the twins themselves are secretly mocking him, they at least have each other, and he is once again excluded, an outsider.

I found the book in a second-hand shop, and knew that Burnside was a poet, so thought I’d give it a go, not realising he’d written other novels which I am going to procure as soon as possible.

A very disturbing, but rewarding philosophical and poetic read.