A first novel by one of the brightest critics of her generation may be expected to have certain characteristics.
It should, for example, perfectly inhabit any genre on which it touches. ‘The Brainstorm’ takes the novel of journalism and transfers it to the post-Fleet Street era, as well as making it woman-centred in a way that, say, Michael Frayn’s work was about men. Equally, though, it is a splendid piece of intelligent chicklit, in which the need for women to beware of women is caustically laid out for us. Several of its central characters are Scots expatriates; it is also a very Scottish Gothic novel, full of shadow doubles and the selling of souls.
What might not have been expected is how brilliantly Turner makes us see a London whose crumbling modernist architecture is a perfect correlative for the falling apart of human relationships and culture. The protagonist Lorna comes to consciousness on the first page with global amnesia that she decides to hide from those around her, and this transparently literary device enables Turner to show us everything in a new, brightly merciless light as Lorna sees everything around her from white asbestos to sharded glass for what seems like the first time. This is a novel of the transcended ordinary, whole pages of which are vivid poetry; it is also brilliant on context and it shifts, so that community can slide into chaos, and dilettantism be revealed as sickness unto death.
‘The Brainstorm’ is a novel of second chances in which Lorna is forced to think from first principles about her life and what she has made of it. This essential seriousness – in which Hegel and Rilke and Celan are made central concerns rather than merely name-checked – does not prevent its being searingly funny. Many of the characters both are, and are not, vicious portraits of figures in the world of literary and ideas journalism. Seriousness and farce are perfectly balanced in an elegant, thoughtful whole.
