Books: The Gate of Air

JAMES BUCHAN IS NOT A PROLIFIC novelist – not nearly as prolific as his grandfather John. This is only his seventh novel, and the first, A Parish of Rich Women, was published more than a quarter of a century ago.

The Gate of Air

by James Buchan

Quercus, 224pp, £14.99
He has also been an uneven one. Two of the previous six – Heart's Journey in Winter and A Good Place to Die – have been outstandingly good; the others rather a mixed bunch, but even in his least successful novels there have been brilliant passages.

None of his novels has been easy reading; they're not for the beach or the airport lounge. His prose demands attention. It is rapid, spiky, allusive, and also elusive. Passages often have to be read a couple of times before they begin to make sense. Connections are omitted. His leading characters live mostly in their own minds, and Buchan knows that the expression "a chain of thought" is an inadequate, indeed false, description of our mental processes. I would suppose that the lazy reader gives up on him quite early, concluding that the story doesn't make sense.

Sometimes the lazy reader may even be right. In this new novel, which is sub-titled "A Ghost Story", the account of the main character's early life is full of improbabilities. He is called Jim Smith – another character remarks, surely mistakenly, that "nobody is called Jim Smith" – and we are told that he left school at 13, wandered over Greece and the Middle East, doing odd jobs, engaging in some dubious transactions, was rich by his early twenties, set up a software company in London, made a fortune, saw his company taken (all but stolen) from him, and has now withdrawn to a remote county in rural England where he has bought a house called Paradise Farm. Later, though, we are told that Jim has missed out on education and rarely – never? – reads a book, he seems to pick up Latin and Ancient Greek by way of the internet in only a few weeks.

Again, the county of Brackshire where Jim has settled is, we are told, in the west of England – he has travelled in search of a house to the Atlantic shore. Yet the description of the country, with fields of sugar-beet, and the agricultural practices there, make it much more like East Anglia where Buchan lives. All this is rather odd and unfocused.

In another sort of novel these oddities and discrepancies would matter more, because they would serve to dispel the narrative's credibility. Here they are unimportant, even acceptable, because The Gate of Air (by which you pass from life, from the world above, to the underworld) is never, and in no sense, a realistic novel, despite having scenes set at grand dinner parties and an agricultural show.

Lying in bed in his lonely farmhouse, Jim is visited by a beautiful woman. It's a dream, of course, but it's also more than a dream. His visitor is a girl in a portrait belonging to his neighbour Lord Bolingbroke (elderly, broke, blind and gay). The girl, Jeannie, was a Sixties celebrity model, later the first wife of tycoon Charlie Lampard. They had lived at Paradise Farm until one day she got on her horse and was never seen again. Bolingbroke, with whom Jim has struck up a friendship – the first friendship of Jim's life – has apparently tender memories of Jeannie. John Walker, Jim's handyman, unpopular in the village, is also somehow concerned with her, and when Jim attends the Lampards' uncomfortable dinner party, her figure appears at the window. Is she summoning Jim or threatening someone else?

Other mysterious events follow. Lambs are stillborn, bees die, crops wither; there is a blight on the land. Is Jim right in believing that Jeannie has returned to enrich his life, or are her visits more sinister? Is his distaste for Lampard's second wife well-founded? Or are the two twin souls kept apart by malice?

Life is mostly lived on the surface. That is everyday experience. But in this novel dark forces press up through the surface, causing it to disintegrate.

The old gods of pagan antiquity are rousing themselves from the long sleep to which they were condemned by the triumph of Christianity. The ghost who first seemed so welcome is revealed as an avenging force. At the back of James Buchan's mind, as he embarked on this novel, there may have been a couple of his grandfather's most disturbing short stories in which the old gods are summoned up, and wreak destruction. Will Jim succumb or will he resist?

A strange novel, in which reflections about the aridity of modern life sit strangely but disturbingly beside evocations of an older and perhaps sinister world. The gods are not to be mocked; the dead may resent the living.

In many ways unsatisfactory at first reading, The Gate of Air gains from a second. You may not believe in ghosts or in the power of the old gods, which you may dismiss as a property of outmoded romance. Nevertheless this unusual book is also a curiously haunting one, not easily to be forgotten.