Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan

 

Given that among the characters in Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth we have the devil, the beautifully horned daughter of the devil (who just happens to have killed her father), an intersex actor, Chinese triads and Scottish hitmen (and woman), the real-life William Burroughs and a man who – the devil notwithstanding – is surely the epitome of evil, then it is something to say that the most striking character of Luckenbooth is the building in which all the action is set, 10 Luckenbooth Close, Edinburgh. But it seems entirely meet to describe this tenement as a character because it lives and breathes and weaves itself inextricably around the lives of ninety years’ worth of tenants in a way that is wholly tangible. And surely this is as fine a piece of characterisation as you could ever hope to read:

No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is arthritic. It creaks often. Groans wretchedly when it rains. Its elbows are knobby. Knees buckled. It is old. How old, nobody on the street seems to know for sure... The dark wee close leading down to No. 10 Luckenbooth – has been here as long as any of them. Nobody sees it. No matter how many times they walk by. It’s unseen... It’s an ootlin. 

Luckenbooth is a striking novel about outsiders, the marginalised or the criminal or the ill or the down-at-heel. Spanning the years from 1910 to the millenium and told in three parts, each covering three characters who are given three chapters each, it’s a series of sometimes savage, sometimes scabrous, sometimes deeply moving stories. Although the stories are individual, all of the central characters are connected by their residence in Luckenbooth Close and some of their lives become fatally interlinked as time becomes fluid and the past pulses into the present, history brought to life and exacting a bloody revenge. Lives comes and go, sometimes in terrible circumstances, and still No. 10 Luckenbooth soaks up the pain that endures within its walls, groaning under its burden until gradually, inevitably, it begins to subside. 

The novel begins in 1910, when the devil is killed by his daughter and she – Jessie MacRae, possessed of a conscience as striking and as beautiful as the horns growing from her head – arrives at Luckenbooth to fulfil an arrangement made for her by her father – to provide a surrogate child for Mr Udnam, a man of the establishment, an Edinburgh worthy and, we come to discover, a man with terrible propensities. From this beginning, the novel slides inexorably towards millenium eve and a reckoning as painful as it is inevitable. 

The locus of Luckenbooth – the building and the novel – is that bifurcation between reality and nightmare, good and evil, life and the beyond. It is a borderland, a place where Otherness exists and where the battle between reality and the Other must take place. Often in literature, borderlands are chosen as a place to explore the role of suffering (think of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing), and so it is with Luckenbooth. The novel is a study of suffering, and of consequence and cessation. It is eschatology without theodicy, the end of things made secular. 

Luckenbooth is a deeply impressive work, thought-provoking, moving, violent and at times very, very funny. It is a brilliant piece of imagination.