Phantom Limb by Chris Kohler review: 'a promisingly eldritch imagination'

The central character is Gillis, a once promising athlete who, having been injured, has slunk back to his former hometown of Kirkmouth and become the parish minister. Any vestigial religious belief has vanished with his self-belief, and the down-at-heel town is a suitable example of pathetic (or self-pitying) fallacy. Returned from a bibulous wake, Gillis falls into the crater left from the removal of an old elm, and discovers a hand. It might be severed, but it also might not be entirely dead.

Phantom Limb situates itself in a very particular Scottish tradition; the novel of the conflicted minister. It comprises work like Lockhart’s Adam Blair, Buchan’s Witch Wood, JM Barrie’s Farewell Miss Julie Logan and The Little Minister, Grassic Gibbon’s Cloud Howe and of course James Robertson. (Hogg’s Justified Sinner, though related, is something of a special case). The hand, sealed away in a tartan shortbread tin which might as well have “McMetaphor” written on it, draws and scribbles, but resists meaning or explanation. Gillis, who wonders if the supernatural hand might indicate some calling, is counterpoised with the local businessman Nichol, who sees in the hand some advantage – its touch seems to heal him, an employee and even miraculously transform the ailing fish farm. So is it a sign of prophet or profit? The narrative’s other main character is Rachel, the former girlfriend of Gillis, now a single mother and whose late husband was employed by Nichol. Nichol has his own analogues in figures like the tyrannical, sly Gourlay in The House with the Green Shutters.

Parallel to the contemporary narrative is the story of Jan, a manuscript illuminator some four centuries beforehand, tasked with taking a new work to the Laird of Hamilton in Kirkmouth. Unfortunately, the boat he is on founders, and he and the bedraggled manuscript are pitched into a local conflict between monks and reforming “black jackets”. “Ask God to hide you”, he is warned, “And dull these paints, and cloud your mind and break your fingers. There’s an illness in this country”. Neither side seems overly orthodox, but the Reformers are certainly Philistine iconoclasts, the monks indulgent and the aristocracy venal. The present day section is set just after the independence referendum, and it seems as if the history of Scotland is relentless apathy, internecine fights and self-immiseration. It is, quite evidently, in need of a miracle.

All the pieces are in play, and I can see why certain names were invoked – although the illustrations in the book seem far more like David Shrigley or Jim Moir than Alasdair Gray. The problem is, as the Irish bishop supposedly said of Gulliver’s Travels, I don’t believe a word of it.

I am, I assure you, well aware that this is fiction, and am acquainted with the willing suspension of disbelief. But the corollary of that is the necessity of trust. The great Walter Scott, in his perceptive review of Frankenstein, described “un-realism” as being like taking out an overdraft with the reader. The poetic license is conditional and will require repayment.

Gillis is minister of a church which “had no congregation” and has “been given a rolling contract, to deliver funerals and visit the sick on a freelance basis”. The previous minister is “practically Gnostic” but “the punters won’t notice”. So Gillis “felt God calling him to a job with a decent salary, and a free house and car” after “a year of training”. Er, no. There is simply no way that this would happen: no discernment process, no placement, no supervisor, no probationary period, no vacancy committee, no sole nomination by Kirk Session, no Presbytery approval… you cannot just “get a church” on a nod and a wink from a retiring heretic. Gillis opens the Bible at random during funerals and doesn’t recognise the Book of Isaiah, which I’m fairly sure he would have had to read. When the shenanigans with the hand are compounded by various other misdemeanours, an “Elder” is sent who boasts he “didn’t study the Bible” but “came up through the private sector”. I’m not labouring the point, but since none of the realistic stuff is accurate or convincing or real, forgive me if I give no credit to the moving finger. No-one, incidentally, speaks Scots in this Scotland.

This is a real shame, and the final pages of the book show a sensitivity and plangent note that are more than creditable. The book bemoans a lack of faith, yet is symptomatic of exactly that.

Phantom Limb by Chris Kohler, Atlantic, £17.99