At the start of Belonging Jack McCall is a janitor come handy-man at a remote set of luxury flats in the Swiss Alps. One day in the middle of winter a middle aged male resident arrives with a young woman called Thérèse. The next morning the man is dead, having slipped on the balcony during a snowstorm which has cut the site off. Jack has to help deal with the body and he and his girlfriend Anna look after Thérèse till the police arrive.

Due to a disturbed childhood and regular psychoanalysis Anna over-interprets things and constantly questions Jack about the reasons for his actions. She also desires to settle down. Three months after the incident she persuades him to go back home to Edinburgh to get married. En route, at the Gare Du Nord in Paris, Jack has cold feet, slips off the train – and seeks out Thérèse. He takes up with her and finds she is a child of divorce. The dead man was in fact her estranged father whom she had only just sought out. She blames herself, through her revelation of their true relationship, for her father’s death. Jack and Thérèse subsequently travel to a remote location in Spain where a small group of people live a very basic life in not much more than huts. At this point the novel loses its way a little as the motivations of the various characters are obscure.

All of this is played out to an occasional backdrop of overheard news of the Iraq War and the July 7th and Madrid bombings which is not germane to the plot and does no more than locate the story in time.

Unlike Butlin’s earlier The Sound of my Voice or Night Visits, both of which employed second person narration - wholly or in part - Belonging is a thoroughly conventional first person tale, narrated from Jack’s viewpoint. Both of those earlier novels were more tightly focused, with fewer characters. Though Anna is displayed in all her annoying smugness, Thérèse’s motivations remain opaque - her parents’ divorce and mother’s remarriage aren’t really sufficient to explain her malaises - and some of the bit players are not as well delineated as might be hoped for. The climactic event was certainly unexpected but the novel seems to dribble away afterwards, taking what felt to me to be a wrong turning as Jack's life reassembles.

Belonging is nevertheless finely written, just not as satisfying and meaty as Butlin’s previous novels. ( )

I don't get this book.

The stories of the women and their disastrous time with the narrator do read like fully-contained episodes, so there's a bit of a feeling of traipsing through serial works. Yes, there's the thin mystery holding things together, but I think most readers will know, or at least believe they know, all they need to about the resolution fairly early on.

The characters are *annoying*. None of the women are likeable, and the narrator is so powerless and morose that it's hard to have any sympathy for him.

The first section, on the Mont Blanc, is lovely. Leaving that setting was jarring. I couldn't help thinking that it detracted to move on to another time and place. I almost felt as though this was several books that had unfortunately been lumped together into one.

The narrator's backstory (dead father, music, remote mother) felt like something I had to lug around, saying to myself, "I guess this will all tie in eventually" but it was unwieldy.

RB uses, liberally, the literary device of foreshadowing. Many times he says stuff like "if I'd known then what I know now" or "as it turned out later, it was the wrong decision" or so forth. I don't like that device in general, and in this book I especially don't like it. From what we already know of the narrator (his ineffectualness, his bad luck, his attraction to broken people) we already know the story will end badly. Anything more, I believe, is distraction.

(If foreshadowing *must* be used, once or twice is plenty - more just dilutes its effect.)

The title (and presumptive theme): two thirds of the way into the book, RB hands it over. He describes a walk with a friend through nature, having recently discovered his girlfriend's infidelity, and then: "there came an unexpected sense of belonging, of being part of everything I could see around me..." This comes right before the act that constitutes the destruction of the story world and I thought it was confusing and heavy handed. Was it just there to provide a false calm to heighten the impact of the devastation? Is it implied that the narrator can only be content when he has lost control of everything around him, and surrendered to that loss of control?

Not to keep beating a struggling horse, but I also found the cover odd (though this is certainly not RB's fault): it looks exactly like a YA cover. (at least the edition I have). The title, too, is quite YA-ish. Nothing about it hints at crime - but frankly it doesn't say "I'm literary" either. I think RB has had a hard time getting publishers to take a chance on him; with his last 2 books at Serpents Tail and Five Star it seems clear he's in the small-press quagmire - still, small presses can and do provide apt, compelling covers. Not in this case though.

All of the above said - RB is a great *scene*-writer. Read just a page or two and you'll feel you're onto something big. A terrible thing to say, perhaps, but if RB had applied his talents to a more-conventional story arc, i think he could write a truly big-time smash. ( )