1. What was your initial reaction to the disappearance of the boys? Were you expecting the story to go in a different direction?
2. The story is set in what was once an area of natural beauty, now defiled by pollution and neglect. IsThe Glisteran “environmental” novel? Who does the author imply is responsible for the environment's decay? Who suffers from its effects?
3. The novel is told from multiple perspectives, but Leonard is the only character whose thoughts are told in the first person. Why do you think this is? From where might he be telling the story?
4. Leonard remarks, “I can't help thinking that, if you want to stay alive, you have to love something.” How does Leonard maintain a sense of optimism among his bleak surroundings? When and why does his attitude later shift?
5. How does Leonard feel about his mother? Is his attitude justified?
6. What do you think of the way sex is portrayed in the book? Did you find it shocking? What is the significance of the strangling game that Leonard plays with Elspeth?
7. Who is The Moth Man? Did you view him as a positive or a negative presence? Did your feelings about him change as the book progressed?
8. What happens when Alice encounters “the angel”? Is she redeemed? Saved?
9. What part does grace play in the book? What part does guilt play?
10. How did you read the book's final chapter? What is “The Glister”? Does the author set up a Schrödinger's Cat scenario, in which two possible but apparently contradictory endings happen simultaneously? Did the author mean to be ambiguous, or is there a definite interpretation?
John Burnside is the author of the novelThe Devil's Footprints, the memoirA Lie About My Father, as well as five additional works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry published in the United Kingdom.The Asylum Dancewon the Whitbread Poetry Award,The Light Trapwas short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize, andA Lie About My Fatherwon the two biggest Scottish literary prizes: the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award.
HOMELAND
In the beginning, John Morrison is working in his garden. Not the garden at the police house, which he has long neglected, and not the allotment he rented when he was first married, but the real garden, the only garden, the one he likes to think of as a shrine. A sacred place, like the garden in a medieval Resurrection. To anyone else, it would look like nothing more than a patch of flowers and baubles, set out in a clearing amid the poison wood, just above the old freight line; but then nobody else could ever see its significance. Morrison created this garden himself and he has maintained it for seven years: a neat square of poppies and carnations, dotted here and there with the knuckles of polished glass and stone that he collects on his long walks around the Innertown and the wasteland beyond, filling the pockets of his police uniform with worthless treasure as he pretends to go about his duties. Of course, these days, he has no real duties, or none he could ever believe in. Brian Smith saw to that, years ago, when Morrison made the one big mistake of his career--the one big mistake of his life, other than marriage.
That was the day when Smith talked him into concealing the first of the Innertown disappearances. Now, with five boys missing, Morrison is almost ashamed to show his face on the street. Not that anybody knows about the lie, the confidence trick, that he has perpetrated upon them all. People want to know where the Innertown children have gone, but aside from the families of the missing boys, nobody expects anything much from him. They know he doesn't have the training or the resources to track the boys down, and they also know that nobody beyond their poisoned tract of industrial ru
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