Jenni Fagan’s third novel is a ripely imagined history, spanning 90 years of life in an Edinburgh tenement building, 10 Luckenbooth Close. This structure enables the careful stacking of characters, political eras and social contexts, floor by floor and decade by decade, from 1910 to 1999. The novel unfolds like a set of dark short stories, with a different character narrating or guiding each one. But there’s a twist: Luckenbooth is not just haunted by the realities of time and history, but also by the strong musk of the gothic imagination.
The opening scenes comprise a portentous origins story, in which a young woman rows ashore in a coffin, arrives in Luckenbooth Close and is used as a surrogate by a wealthy couple. According to this traumatised and painfully self-hating founding character, her late father is the devil and she herself carries a diabolical curse, which goes on to permeate the lives of all subsequent residents of the building for the next century.
Throughout, the characters refer to its foundations as being cursed in some way, its cellar somehow connected to catacombs, to death and hell, leading to dark consequences that seep up through the house. The entire city is full of secrets: “Tenements of all heights stand as sentinels on either side. They inspect everyone who passes below… Between the well-dressed and moneyed there are glimpses of the hungry and hunted.”
Luckenbooth can be read as a horror story in the traditional sense, but works far more effectively as a compendium of literal miseries. It is thick with combative dialogue and heavy tension as all its epochs and characters squeeze in together. The protagonists are outcasts, solitaries or leaders of double lives, from a spy to a medium, a brothel-keeper and a poet, and the building itself functions as the locked box of all their secrets. At a clandestine drag ball hosted in one of the flats in 1928, the merriment is at once glamorous and tawdry, beautiful and damned: “Eyes sparkle. People arrive in twos, threes. Some of them go into the bedroom to get changed. There is a long trail of glitter down the hallway.”
Despite being densely populated, the novel adheres rigidly to the tone set by its opening chapters as the exploited, abused and forgotten fill its pages with their suffering. Fagan is clever to step out of the cliches of Victorian gothic and bring the tale up to the 1990s, where even scenes of celebration have a sinister, threatening edge: “Local pubs are jammed. Nightclubs are heaving. Thousands walked these streets with torches burning just a few days ago for the fire festival… Police sealed off the city centre for Hogmanay earlier today.”
Thickly worked and carefully assembled, the novel functions as a claustrophobic chiller and as a testament to lives led beyond the margins and in the shadows.
• Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan is published by William Heinemann (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
