By the end of the Luckenbooth, Jenni Fagan’s wildly gothic new novel, readers will need little convincing of the truth of its inscription: Edinburgh is mad god’s dream.
The book opens with the devil's daughter rowing a coffin into Leith docks, as she makes her way towards Luckenbooth Close, a tenement high on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Here, the author’s sinuous, supernatural story unwinds down nine decades, through all nine floors of the ancient building, embroiling the lives of nine residents.
"Weird” it may seem to some reviewers, but for Fagan, her third novel is “a love letter to Edinburgh”. If love is truth, she says, “it’s the business of writers” to reveal the hidden truths of people’s lives, the terrifying challenges and choices they face because they are trapped by forces they cannot control.
Take Dot. Fagan admits an empathy with her waif-like character who in 1999 squeezes through builders’ hoardings to find a place to live after her benefits have been stopped.
“Dot’s on the fringes of everything in lots of ways, a quiet person who is not obviously a hero,” Fagan says. The question her character poses, she adds, is “Why are some women still unable to have any sense of security?”
That question comes straight from the heart. Fagan, 43, has always been reluctant to talk in public about her past, but the bones of her life story are shocking.
She was placed in care as soon as she was born, and afterwards had more than 30 placements with strangers around Edinburgh before she was 16. She was so often fostered out, by the time she was five her name had been changed four times.
“It’s a lifelong legacy, you know, and its impact will always be there,” she says. “My original name is nothing like my name now. I eventually got hold of my social work files and there's about 17 different variations, because they would spell them wrong.”
As a child she remembers “being told the story about myself all the time”, as she was moved from place to place. “You're listening to people saying ‘This is Jenni and she is …blah, blah, blah. You had a little story book that would travel with you (to explain who you were).”
Even now it feels strange, she says over a Zoom call. “I knew almost nothing about where I came from until I was a lot older. When I was growing up I never saw a photo of a person who looked like me. You'll know somebody who laughs like you - for me, there are not even any little markers like that.”
Poetry and reading saved her. Fagan started writing aged seven. “I was completely voiceless in the system,” she says. “What was so powerful for me about writing a poem was I could see my voice. I could go away, come back three days later, open the book again and it was still there. I started writing and never stopped.”
When she read the Hobbit, she discovered “a huge story, a game changer,” she says. “I used to go to a library van. I read all the books it stocked. I could see there were other worlds and that the world I was living in was not the only one.”
Though obviously bright, she quit Beeslack High School, Penicuik at 15, without qualifications. She lived in homeless accommodation as a young adult and for a while she sang in punk and grunge bands, gradually inching towards higher education.
“It took me a long time to even consider sitting in a classroom,” she says. “One of my biggest achievements was just to sit there, not even to study.” She became an undergraduate at 30, studying at Greenwich University and completed a PhD on Kafka recently at Edinburgh University.
Her understanding of life is woven through Luckenbooth. She would not, for example, scoff at the notion of the supernatural. Her narrative weaves between the real and the spirit world, and in one terrifyingly vivid scene, the ghosts of women slain in a heinous murder are conjured up at a seance.
These days, people only laugh at the idea of a sixth sense because of their own fears, Fagan believes, and because they have become conditioned by their regimented lives.
“We've been trained to kill our instincts,” she says. “We're at a point in the world, a point of crisis, where we need to do the opposite now.
“When, say, someone instinctively knows a parent needs them, and decides to pick up a phone, I think that’s a brilliant thing. My entire life I’ve been in touch with that ability to survive. I have a very deep respect for it.”
Above all, steeped in feeling for the city, Fagan, who lives near Leith with her young son and partner, brings Edinburgh vividly alive. Her heroines drink in the rowdy howffs on Leith Walk, or rendezvous in the old Palais dance hall in Fountainbridge. The gargoyles of St Giles Cathedral stare down on her characters and the beautiful Meadows park conceals the graves of plague victims.
In better times, Fagan could even lead readers to the real site of her imagined Luckenbooth Close, in a cleared space on the North side of the High Street, near, appropriately enough, the Devil’s Advocate bar.
In these more difficult days she has fought off a bout of Covid-19, fearing in her darkness moments that she might die. Her response was to spend the last few months writing her memoirs to ensure, whenever she finally publishes, her own truth is out there.
“There's no one other person in my story, it is a weird thing,” she says. “People say, ‘Who was the one person who saved you?’ I say, ‘It was me, and it took a long time.”
- A shorter version of this article appeared in The Times, Scotland edition on Jan 9 2020
