Brendan Mac Evilly’s Deep Burn opens with catastrophe in the life of its heroine, Martha Knox. In her late thirties, she is abruptly abandoned by her husband, and the promise of a comfortable middle-class future is suddenly revoked.
Her response is to disappear: she vanishes from Dublin without a phone, hitchhiking aimlessly until she stumbles into a derelict artist’s studio in rural Ireland. There she encounters Vinny, a washed-up, weed-smoking painter whose moderate early success left him jaded. He recognises in Martha the frustrated spark of creative potential, the yearning for an unlived life. What follows is a dangerous, heady unfurling of joint artistic ambition.
Martha, a lifelong rule-follower, moves into Vinny’s spare room and begins to imagine herself otherwise. The novel’s central image of fire appears on her first drunken night away from home: a vision of destructive rage that is also the creative impulse that will grow into her first artwork. With Vinny’s sardonic guidance and knowledge of the art world, she improbably ascends into the global market, hailed as the next big thing.
Though Martha suspects her success is undeserved, the novel’s running gag is that everyone in this world is a fraud, that authenticity has little value in a cynical contemporary economy. Mac Evilly interweaves Martha’s fictional projects with riffs on Robert Smithson and Damien Hirst, blurring parody and homage. Alongside an appreciation for these works, there’s a deep knowledge of the mechanics of the art world, a feeling for its absurdity. Vinny’s proposed works grow ever more farcical and are a pleasure to read precisely because they feel almost plausible. Vinny dreams up a piece in which a tree, confined in a biodegradable box, dies unless locals intervene: “I suppose you’d call it participatory art. I’m calling it The Death of Rural Ireland.”
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Yet Deep Burn is not quite a comedy. The book tilts, sometimes uneasily, between the hysterical and the sincere, sometimes reaching towards a tone that’s closer to the elegiac. Martha’s hunger for expression, long smothered by fear of ridicule, gives the novel its emotional ballast. You witness her rise conscious that behind the art-world lampooning lies a portrait of the creative mind itself: compulsive, selfish, delusional, luminous and destined for disappointment. At once absorbing and askew, Deep Burn is a rare thing: a rural Irish thriller doubled as an art-world satire.
