There is a short passage, two thirds of the way through Benjamin Wood’s elegant and disturbing novel, in which Fran Hardesty, a man described as being perennially of “two weathers”, finally becomes his true self. This transformation is vital to the success of the book, and it is accomplished beautifully:
I understood that he had finished being my father, as he had finished being a husband, and a stage carpenter, and painter-decorator, and a council maintenance worker, and a labourer, and a tomato picker, and a student, and a sheep farmer, and a son. He was so serene it chilled me, as though this was his resting state, his factory setting, to be unburdened of the people he was meant to care about, each slow-grown relationship, each held aspiration, each great and small responsibility that makes a life worth living.
Up to this point, Fran has been one of those ruthless, charming men who know what they want, moment to moment, but have no big picture. They fly by the seat of their pants until they crash, squandering such native intelligence as they possess on the pursuit of instant gratification and endless self-aggrandisement. They can be amusing, resourceful when the need arises, but they are painfully susceptible to perceived insult and injury and, when the pressure is too great, they turn.
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better brilliantly reveals the process that leads up to that turn. When we meet Fran it is 1995 and he has come to fetch his son, Daniel, for a planned excursion to the television studio near Leeds where the boy’s favourite sci-fi series is filmed. His ex-wife, Kath, all too aware of Fran’s fecklessness, is wary about this trip, but Daniel, a lonely child who needs more in life than she can provide, is obsessed with the series and persuades her to let him go. Throughout the novel that series, The Artifex, unfolds in fragments, via passing allusions and shared and private memories, with the audiobook playing constantly in the car tapedeck. Ironically it offers a parallel world of mutual care, adult wisdom and humanity that, even though he works on the show, is entirely alien to Fran.
The journey is randomly and farcically picaresque, plunging the boy into a world of uncertainty, deception, sexual predation and, as the book moves on, extreme violence. As we focus more and more on Fran, he emerges as a highly complex and frightening figure: good-looking, persuasive and larger than life. He is also a pathological liar, not to mention something of a sadist. Driven by an implacable self-righteousness, he is ill equipped to deal with the least sign of failure and, as his best-laid plans go seriously awry, he ends up being transfigured into a full-on sociopath, while his increasingly desperate son watches. Having achieved this transmogrification, Fran is now utterly free – and, to the reader’s horror, his emergence, like that of a fully formed butterfly from its chrysalis, does seem to be a kind of achievement, the fulfilment of some dark potential that has been building for decades. Meanwhile, the horror is heightened by the fact that we see all this through a child’s eyes: as if in some terrifying pantomime, we want to scream at Daniel to do something, anything – and then remember that he is only a boy.
It would be unfair to expose too much of the highly suspenseful journey. Suffice to say that this is a novel of expertly woven tension and frightening glimpses into the mind of the deranged other; a worthy successor to Wood’s excellent second novel, 2015’s The Ecliptic. At the same time, it is an inquiry into how men might learn to live with their shadow selves. Towards the end, all grown up and contemplating fatherhood, Daniel unearths a motto from Sophocles passed on from his mother: “The small man lives his life outside disaster.” This appears to suggest that the only way to avoid catastrophe is to endure a narrow, self-limiting existence, to keep one’s head down and play safe. Which might well be a recipe for something his mother might have approved of, but it has no basis in Greek drama. What Sophocles actually says is: “When a god drives a man, and deceives him, he will decide that what is bad is good and live only a brief while outside disaster.” As the novel ends, the implication is that the real achievement is to learn how to live with inevitable failure – as father, as husband, as man – and have the strength of character to try again, to fail again, to fail better.
• John Burnside’s latest novel is Ashland & Vine (Vintage). A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is published by Simon & Schuster. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
