My aim here is the analysis of the uncanny element in Alice Thompson’s Burnt Island (2013). This modern gothic novel (which uses conventions of different genres) relies heavily on the unbalanced personality of frustrated writer Max Long, who has run out of inspiration and tries to recover it on a solitary island off the north of Scotland. Spectrality offers an appropriate framework to approach its study, not only in as much as it reflects the protagonist’s mental confusion but also in order to convey Thompson’s essential discomfort about an increasingly dehumanized world, since the trope of haunting is useful as “a metaphor for a fundamentally unliveable modern condition” (Vidler x).
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok developed Sigmund Freud’s ideas in The Uncanny (1919), coining the tropes of the “phantom” (as the return of a repressed element), and the “crypt” (as a space which keeps a hidden secret). Thus, the gothic space in Burnt Island takes a double form: the psychological crypt of the protagonist’s mind, on the one hand, and the island as a topographical crypt, full of weird relationships and secrets, on the other. The lurking sense of unease in the novel is related both to the evil that the island holds, impersonated by the enigmatic and seemingly demonic character of James Fairfax, and to Long’s poorly psychological condition, whose steady collapse the reader helplessly follows (a clear contrast is immediately established between the two of them). The other source of spectrality comes from Jaques Derrida, whose trope of the “ghost” may be useful in that it provides the blurring of the distinction between “art” and “life”, two elements which overlap in Burnt Island, since Long’s story develops as he writes the novel (and simultaneously we read it) –the novel indirectly offering Thompson’s satirical vision of the literary market, too.
