Belonging by Ron Butlin

Part of Scottish Literature week.

Belonging by Ron Butlin is an intense and challenging novel about Jack, a Scotsman who’s stuck in a life that he seems to have drifted upon.

At the start of the novel Jack and his girlfriend, Anna, are working in the French Alps, where they are spending the winter season as handyman and housekeeper of an exclusive apartment block. The apartments are empty and life is one long champagne Jacuzzi until Thérèse, a girl with “firework hair” appears on the scene.

At first it seems that Thérèse is everything that Anna is not: chic, exotic, uncomplicated, a teenager:

…the girl seemed a good bit younger: chestnut hair streaked blue, orange and green, long leather coat and Doc Martens. Sexy looking too. Firework hair and Gucci luggage - that was my first sight of Thérèse.

Thérèse is accompanied by an older, Ferrari-driving man - her father, Jack hopes, but whose “unfatherly” demeanour soon quashes that hope. Jack lies to Anna about even seeing the girl, as he fears she’ll subject him to a psychobabble lecture about his subconscious fancying every woman who crosses his path. Within a few hours Jack is called by Thérèse to her apartment, where he finds Thérèse sobbing over Monsieur Ferrari’s corpse. Accidental death or murder? When the police arrive, despite the rumpled sheets and the ‘atmosphere of illicit sex’ there is some suggestion that the man might be Thérèse’s father, after all…

Anna is an unsympathetic portrayal of a needy woman. Ever gallant, Jack dumps her by pretending he’s seen someone he knows, walking off their train and leaving her to return to Edinburgh alone. Inevitably, Jack shacks up with Thérèse, a seemingly less complex (although an equally disturbed) woman. After mooching around Paris for a while, they go for a hideously awkward visit to Thérèse’s mother and soon afterwards leave for a tiny hippy commune in the Spanish wilderness.

One might say this is a novel of symbolism then. Jack’s two women are fire and ice. Anna is Scottish, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, disturbed - emotionally she is as fiercely chilly as the alpine tempest which kick-starts the novel. Thérèse is French, dark-eyed and fiery as the sun that beats down relentlessly on the hippy commune.

The representations of women here are not exactly charming, as we see these loony women through Jack’s eyes, and the reader might ask, what judge is he? He’s a twenty-nine-year-old baby, a drifter who goes along with things until he decides he’s had enough and then walks away with hardly a glance over his shoulder. As a study of the kind of man I’ve always avoided, I found him (and his view of women) interesting - at times he exhibits a kind of bewildered misogyny, but he’s not overtly mental either. He’s your average Joe, plus a wibbly spine and a chip on his shoulder.

The novel is bleak, disturbing, violent, and yet the imagery is singularly beautiful. Beautiful but dangerous - just like the women, one might say. The prose itself is a bit like that, often gorgeous enough to stop me in my tracks, it also has an eerie and unsettling quality.

Apart from extremes of landscape and temperature, there are extremes of socioeconomics, from the lavish French apartments to rural Spanish life in a flea-bitten, mosquito-ridden shack. The imagery is more vivid because of these contrasts and at times I felt as if the settings were imprinted onto my retinas.

Sexuality and violence go hand in hand in Belonging, and there is a troubling rape scene, which is slightly ambiguous, as if the author was not sure if he wanted our Jack as a fully-fledged rapist. As soon as the ‘victim’ is entered, she decides she wants sex.

Bitch! You fucking bitch!

She caught her breath.

I tugged again.

She cried out. I clamped my hand over her mouth.

That’s when I realised I was getting hard and, for the first time in weeks, felt charged and really alive…

A few moments later, we hear:

I had just entered her when between half-sobs, she managed a breathless whisper: ‘Yes, Jack…Yes… Take me, take me… TAKE ME!’

I was unsure about this scene and wasn’t convinced of Thérèse’s instant acquiescence, and I’m sure there is a reading whereby Thérèse does not welcome Jack’s advances at all. Perhaps there is a bit of Tess and Alec in this scene.

The only part of the novel I skimmed was a gruesome scene in which a pregnant snake looking for somewhere to lay her eggs, is hacked to pieces by Jack. Those few pages made me feel physically queasy, so I’m afraid I couldn’t read them properly.

I might not have done Belonging justice here. I found it disturbing but thought-provoking and impressive. The writing is brave, accomplished and full of tension. One has the sense that this book has been polished extensively, every sentence considered and reconsidered over a long period of time. There is nothing haphazard in the writing, it is measured and controlled, leaving the reader to feel that they are in the hands of an unusually gifted writer.

Ron Butlin is an Edinburgh novelist and Belonging is his third novel since 1987. Irvine Welsh hailed Butlin’s first novel, The Sound of My Voice, as “one of the greatest pieces of fiction to come out of Britain in the 80s”.

Belonging is reviewed on ReadySteadyBook here.

In The Guardian here. The Scarborough Evening News here.

Robmack blogspot here.

Belonging is published by Serpent’s Tail. ISBN-13: 978-1852429157. 256 pages.

The Rest of Scottish Literature Week:

Reviews
Maggie Haggith’s “The Last Bear”
J.A. Henderson’s “Crash”
Alan Warner’s “Morvern Callar”
Interview: Doug Johnstone, author of “Tombstoning” and “The Ossians”