In Coldhaven, anything’s possible

“Outside, it was a perfectly calm autumn day, the kind of day that makes for a good funeral: falling leaves, no wind, and the occasional bird flitting through great swathes of stillness. The world seemed suddenly small and intimate. There was no doubt in my mind that I would get caught.”

These lines might make a good opener for a gothic thriller, with their shades of Edward Gorey. Nature’s deck is cleared for action, the ominous simile planted, as is the trap-door allusion to a crime in the offing. So much the better if the setting is a small fishing village on the Scottish coast, evocatively named Coldhaven, where the sea is both nurturing element and enemy, and where the beastly, back-biting locals give the word dour a repellent new dimension.

Actually, these particular portentous lines do not appear until more than midway into John Burnside’s opulently textured new novel, “The Devil’s Footprints.” And because this story is being told by a man who for most of his life has suffered difficulty distinguishing good from evil, reality from dream and foul misdeed from pathetic misstep, the reader knows better than to take his predictions, no matter how assured, at face value. Anything is possible.

In this world, people do terrible things; the novel opens with gossip about a mother who recently set herself and her two small sons ablaze in the family car, leaving a 14-year-old daughter behind. But there are a few welcome reprieves, sudden rescues from what look like agonizing and rather cliched dire situations. The narrator has his own take on the frailty of expectations: “Things begin deep below the surface; by the time they are visible, they have a life and direction of their own. We don’t see that, so we call it destiny, or fate, or chance, when something unexpected happens; yet we were preparing ourselves all along, in secret, to participate in the moment that, on the surface, we thought so surprising.”

Our narrator: Michael Gardiner, whose parents -- Dad a photographer, Mummy a painter, both charming and self-absorbed in an F. Scott Fitzgerald sort of way -- leave their bright life in London and Paris for dark Coldhaven when Mikey is in grade school. Ostensibly they are simply following their muses (and in Dad’s case, a passion for bird-watching). But a mystery lies buried under the calm surface of the present, just as there is something inexplicable, at least to a child, driving the implacable hostility of the townspeople toward these three hopeful outsiders.

While his parents conceal from him their various troubles with the neighbors, Mikey protects them from a secret of his own: He’s been singled out as the special friend of Malcolm, a bully from hell. “He could see in my eyes what I was going to do before I did it; he could see, at that very moment, that I was thinking of running, and his tongue flickered between his lips in soft appraisal, as if he too were working out the odds that were going through my head.” But Malcolm is not all-powerful. The unforeseeable steps Mikey eventually takes to break the grip of his tormentor culminate in a moment of terminal payback. The consequences will quietly cascade forward into Michael’s adult life, to surface in uncontrollable ways.

The novel opens with Michael in his 30s, living a passive, comfortable life in the ocean-front house inherited from his parents. He is the king of denial, the sort of sarcastic, selfish protagonist British writers excel at making us like. Willing his wife to drift away, he muses on failed marriage: “Sometimes it fades in a fond way, like the warmth leaching from folded clothes in a linen cupboard. . . . Sometimes, it takes years to go, then, all at once, there’s nothing. . . . “ But it is not the marital dry rot driving him to tell his story. Something devastating has just happened, something unspeakable connected with that 14-year old girl, and he needs to confess, to find out what it really was -- and why.

In a village once marked according to local lore by the devil’s footprints, mysteries are everywhere. As soon as one is solved another rises up; they open and close like fans; they veil and deepen the novel the way scene-screens give depth to a stage. But Burnside wants to do more than scare, honorable as that goal is. The jacket copy sells him as kin to Stephen King, but it’s a distant cousinage at best. Burnside’s fiction (he is also a Whitbread Prize-winning poet) is closer to John Banville in its exploration of loneliness and the kiss of the supernatural. In this novel he doffs his hat to Nabokov: Michael refers at one point to his “Humbert Humbert” routine and (for die-hard “Lolita” fans) this girl’s name is Hazel, a variant of Lolita’s surname, Haze.

The best novels, while entertaining, offer the promise of teaching something crucial, ineffable about life and how to live it. We read them to survive. “The Devil’s Footprints” partakes of that quality. It falls short perhaps only by having been rushed -- there are the too-convenient coincidences (a chance dinner guest spilling the hidden past) and under-motivated decisions (e.g., why wouldn’t the parents’ move?) and a more severe disappointment, passages that fall from high-wire insight into metaphysical bombast. Faith thus lost is hard to restore. That said, Burnside is a luminous writer and muscular thinker. Following “The Devil’s Footprints,” one wonders: What next?

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Kai Maristed is the author of several books, including the novels “Broken Ground” and “Belong to Me.”