Revolutions of the Night

by Alan Burns

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Genres: Novels

160 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1986

About the author

Alan Burns published eight novels, two essay collections, a play, and a short story collection. Major works include Europe After the Rain, Celebrations, Babel, and Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy. From the 1960s on, he was associated with the loosely-constituted circle of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall that included Stefan Themerson, Eva Figes, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

In 1982 he co-edited (with Charles Sugnet) The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, which the Washington Post "Book World" called "diverting, iconoclastic, and compulsively readable". The book included interviews with 11 authors (as well as Burns himself): J. G. Ballard, Eva Figes, John Gardner, Wilson Harris, John Hawkes, B. S. Johnson, Tom Mallin, Michael Moorcock, Grace Paley, Ishmael Reed, and Alan Sillitoe.

Angus Wilson called Burns "one of the two or three most interesting new novelists working in England."

Reviews

[Nate D]

The twelve steps that curved up and over the fireplace ended in a landing. From there, a further flight of stairs led up to the attics. At 2 a.m. Martha went upstairs to kiss the kids good night. She found Hazel hunched on her bed, head down, pale hair spread over her knees, hands clasped at the back of her neck. When Martha approached, the girl did not look up. From the room's bare boards a small orchard grew, apple trees in full leaf and heavy with fruit. A child's rocking-horse stood by the wall. Floating like a wraith through the doorway, Martha left in a shower of leaves, her spiking fingers tangled with twigs and boughs.

Alcoholic mother dead and father rapidly remarried, a teenage brother and sister go into revolt against family, home, even seemingly rationally ordered narrative. Initial flirtation with revolutionary acts at and against the home (incest, for one) eventually give way to each's social education in the outside world, preparing them for nation-wide conflagration to come (perhaps making this, especially seeing as each is titled with an Ernst painting, the prequel to Europe After the Rain).

This was Burns' last novel, thus one of the only ones that can be reasonably purchased. Though the amorphous generality of the wartime confusion presumably to come has been replaced with a kind of specificity here, there's a similar technique of unsettling fairly direct description with seemingly irrelevant (and thus disorienting) details, or fragmentary and unexplained occurrences that pass through the mundane concrete without explanation or (literarily) batted eye. These initially being harnessed to demonstrate the unsettlement of the family after its form has changed, later turned to more drastic ends.

He did not find Alec's body, but he came upon a six-foot sewage pipe that led from the river bank underwater. There were people stuffed into the pipe, lined up against its sides. They were gelled. They had a loony look in their eyes. The further into the pipe he went, the more integrity the bodies had. Some were still whole, but all had that bleary look on their faces, their heads bobbing in the water.

There's an overriding sign of surrealism here, which I suspect informs the more bizarre-yet-matter-of-fact descriptions quite directly. Unlike the actual surrealists, attempting to plumb their own subconscious imagery, Burns opts, at least in two paragraphs I've placed so far, to simply describe the contents of existing surrealist works, specifically immediately evident Magritte painting The Murderer Threatened, and a particular collage of Ernst's, displaying a Jaguar-headed pedlar with a lantern (from Une Semaine de Bonté). Fortunately, I had both of these in books on hand, so could rapidly confirm them. The Magritte turns up in Alain Robbe-Grillet's marvelous La Belle Captive, but there, with the paintings explicitly displayed beside his text, the content becomes no transcription but a play of interactions, tensions, and contradictions between word and image. I'm not entirely sure how I feel, on the other hand, about Burns' appropriations. In some ways, he's simply recollaging found materials into novel form, but since he borrows not just parts and symbols but entire works, there's some danger that what would otherwise exist for its own meaning can be reduced to a game of reference-spotting for the familiar reader. Which seems a loss since his insertions are otherwise quite well engaged with the rest of the narrative and seem like they should be evaluated on their own terms. I hope that this high-wire act of appropriation-with-reinterpretation has been pulled off, because it's much more interesting that way, but the nature of this symbology, found or self-created, is inherently cryptic, making it hard to completely judge. Regardless, it's obviously of enough interest to pull quite a bit of analysis out of at least one reader (the only reader, it seems) so there's that at least.

In any event, a strange and disconcerting book, dipping rapidly from unsettled start to a roiling deep disorder.

The stars were so bright, and shooting stars so plentiful, it seemed to be snowing stars. Harry counted thirty comets. A meteor shot to earth and hit a patch of waste ground north of the town. Then it became apparent. They were not meteors but children, naked babies with chubby limbs. They had been propelled into space by a terrible explosion. On their return to earth, their velocity had made them phosphorescent. A urning child flew into a tree. The tree became its funeral pyre.

[MJ Nicholls]

The last novel from Burns, who ceased fiction writing after 1986, or at least ceased publishing thereafter, is a surreal harking back to Europe After the Rain mingled with the happenings of an odious family, who reside in a nameless nation where revolution is in progress, and become embroiled in the antics, or rather, attempt to have nothing to do with the antics, and continue their own privileged lives as the place falls apart. The prose is a mix of matter-of-fact description that pertains to the bland, surreal comic dialogue, and limnings of paintings in the manner of the Ernst from which the novel takes its name. A humble farewell.