The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside

This book was a great disappointment. Some books can be tedious, banal and incoherent without being disappointing. If you expect a book to be those things - if, say it is written by Wilbur Smith - then you won't be disappointed. You'll get all that in spades.

But I expected a lot of The Devil's Footprints. I was vastly looking forward to it. Everything boded well. A menacing title, a nice cover (black and white, embossed, with the author's name and title in blue - very stylish), an intruiging setting, and an intruiging blurb which suggested a lot about the malignant lingering nature of evil and how the land itself can be imbued with wickedness. And all I get is an interminable account of a middleaged plonker ruminating about stuff. Very, very dull reading and thoroughly inconsequential.

There is a plot, of sorts, or at least a haphazard collection of half plots, but which don't really seem to come together into anything much. An an old folk memory is recalled, about the night the Devil walked through Cold haven; a family tragedy is described; the narrator, an ostentatiously self absorbed nonentity, describes his links to the family hit by tragedy; his relationship from some years before with the suicidal mother who immolates herself and two of her children because she has become convinced her husband is the devil; his earlier, less pleasant role as target of her brother's bullying; and his suspicion that he might be the father of the surviving child of the conflagration. All of which sounds like it might amount to something; none of which does.

No star