Everyone's experience of a city is different. As an outsider, I've only ever seen Edinburgh through the limited perspective of a tourist who has visited it numerous times for the famous late-Summer festivals. So it was fascinating to read Jenni Fagan's new novel “Luckenbooth” to see this great, historic city through the perspectives of nine very diverse and intriguing characters who inhabit the same tenement building at different points of the past century. They include a spy, a powerful medium, a hermaphrodite, a coal miner, the madam of a brothel and the beat poet William Burroughs. Though they are individually unique, they collectively embody an economically and socially marginalized side to the city not often seen or represented. Also, threaded through their individual tales is a curse placed upon this tenement building by a woman that was taken here to be the surrogate mother for a wealthy couple who want a child. We follow the compelling tales of all these individuals and, as time goes forward, there's an accumulations of ghosts in this steadily decaying building. Time becomes porous in this place: “It is entirely possible to slip through the decades in between these floors.” There's a creepy gothic atmosphere to this novel as well as sharp social commentary testifying for the disenfranchised citizens of Edinburgh.
The novel is composed of three parts and each part revolves between the stories of three residents who inhabit the tenement building at different times. Once I figured out the structure I was better able to settle into the stories of these characters because without a rigid structure all these tales would have felt too unwieldy. However, there are nine different plots in this novel. Though they all centre around the same physical location and we occasionally glimpse characters from other parts of the book, each story is more or less self-contained. This felt frustrating at times because naturally I felt more engaged by a particular character or storyline over another – yet each tale is only allocated the same amount of fleeting page space. Most sections are intriguing and well written but I wanted to know more. For instance, I wanted more details about Levi, a black man from the American south engaged in the scientific study of bones. I also wished I could have stayed with Agnes who is a true psychic intent on preventing charlatans from practicing because they give her profession a bad name. There's the beguiling secret drag parties in Flora's section and the eccentric musings and theories of writer Burroughs lounging around with his recent lover. I'd have gladly spent more time with these characters rather than switching to the more generic spy-thriller plot in Ivy Proudfoot's section or the crime-thriller plot in Queen Bee's section.
All this meant that by the end of the book I felt like I'd consumed a series of amuse-bouches rather than a fully satisfying meal. Fagan is a talented writer and the more concentrated story of her novel “The Sunlight Pilgrims” made it all the more moving. There is a connecting message between the stories in “Luckenbooth” which is a burning anger on behalf of those who have been marginalized by the dominant society and erased not only from the history of the city but from literally being able to inhabit Edinburgh. A character named Morag comments: “One day nobody will be able to afford to live here but rich people.” I fully sympathised with the overall sentiment of this book and Fagan brings to light many tantalizing historical facts as well as creating many engaging storylines. But sometimes it felt like the author was coming through the narrative too strongly in order to preach rather than let her message be organically told by the characters. This detracted from the building suspense of the resurrected fury of the murdered women at the beginning of the novel who emerge to rattle the walls and seek justice. Fagan refers to the spooky unease she evokes in each section of this book when she writes “On every floor, something is just out of sight.” But the brevity and perhaps overly-ambitious nature of this novel means that the actual reveal is never quite as satisfying as the build-up.
