Night Fire by Richard Strachan review: 'subtle and accomplished'

Richard Strachan | Polly Markham

Richard Strachan’s debut novel, The Unrecovered, was an intriguing work of historical gothic. Although it conjured a brooding claustrophobia and eldritch shadows, I personally found the ending a little too blatant. What had seemed comparable to the ghost stories of MR James seemed to veer into the territory of Dennis Wheatley. That said, it did announce a writer to watch, and it is therefore with great pleasure I can say that his new novel, Night Fire, is a far more accomplished, subtle and unheimlich story. I would be disappointed if it did not appear on prize longlists.

It is cunningly structured. We open in August 1943, but the narrative wheels back to May of the same year. This provides an apposite fatalism: the reader knows what the future has in store even if the characters do not. But Strachan conceals which character we are with in the opening, which invests it with the necessary mystery. As openings go, it is striking: “A man is falling from the edge of heaven, a man of air. Through three miles of madness he plummets, end over end, head-first, legs bent; a fylfot cross in a burning breeze. He falls.” It takes some chutzpah to introduce a word as abstruse as “fylfot” so early on – but once I looked it up it was precisely the right term – it’s a kind of truncated swastika. The war concatenates time. It is both cutting edge technology and archaic myth in a single instant. The tumbling, free-falling character has a hint of the opening of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and there are a number of nods and winks to modernist and post-modernist texts. The tone, however, struck me as reminiscent of Second World War writers like David Jones, particularly in the mixture of gallows humour (the packers at the station saying of the parachutes “if it doesn’t work, just bring it back!”; Strachan lists all the euphemisms the crews use to avoid mentioning death directly) alongside poetic invocations on the natural world - “Buried associations – afternoons threading daisy chains as a boy, cutting a slit on the fuse if each green stem. Buttercups and campion, the late sea pinks. Open water and the scrimmage of waves.” (The use of “fuse” also hints at Dylan Thomas’s “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”).

There are three principal characters, all haunted and spooked in different ways. Abby Sallow works in a factory salvaging and cannibalising wrecked planes. This is gruesomely ironic, as the last thing she can do is save or repair herself. She is divorced and her son, Henrik, has been killed at the very outset of the war; no amount of gin can blank out her hallucinations of the mangled child. Her lost child, moreover, was obsessed with Isaac, the lost and spared child in the book of Genesis, the figure whose sacrifice was central to Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, a theological paradox that Henrik tries to unravel. Although AL Kennedy described the lives of bombers in her 2007 novel Day, Abby harks back to the alcoholic Hannah Luckraft in her 2004 book Paradise, and is drawn with similar empathy.

Stanley “Wakey” Wake is in Bomber Command and is counting down the flights – when they reach 30, they are entitled to some respite. Few reach that magical figure. With each tour he becomes more concerned about the people he is nightly incinerating, and starts to wonder about all the men who previously piloted the plane. One of his brothers in arms in Harry Culpepper, who enshrouds himself with talismans: a rabbit’s foot, a bird’s skill, a coin which his father claimed deflected a bullet in the last war, an arrowhead, an icon, Tarot cards. The “magical” thinking is similar to Shirley Jackson’s Merricat in We Have Always Lived In The Castle. Noting these is in no way to detract from Strachan’s own originality, especially since much is made in the book of the necessities of fictions – Abby finds some respite in 19th century classics, some of the airmen have books like No Orchids for Miss Blandish (a book frequently referenced by the late Alasdair Gray) and Thieves Like Us. There is also a very cute reference to a book of poems, Hound Point by Esther Benady – Esther Benady being a character in Strachan’s previous book and Hound Point the island in the Firth of Forth fictionalised therein.

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Night Fire is emotionally affecting and astute in an askance way. War makes strange bedfellows, and the tentative and cautious attempts at affection are done with considerable charm. But the overwhelming atmosphere is one of foreboding. It is not so much the pity of war, but the sense that there is no moral outcome that does not involve pain at some level, and however hard one tries to rationalise the calculus of death and the algebra of suffering, each individual death is the death of an entire universe. Strachan keeps both a firmer and more slippery grip of the narrative: the “reality” of the supernatural is always kept as a matter of willed disbelief, in contrast with, for example, the rural English gothic of a writer like Andrew Michael Hurley. It is always a pleasure to say an author’s new work is better than their last: l fully expect the trajectory to continue.

Night Fire, by Richard Strachan, Raven Books, £18.99

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