“The trail is laid out before me and I have to put out my hand and pick up the pieces, I try, but the ashes are brittle and crumble between my fingers.” Initially, this is how the reader feels when beginning their journey along, A Trail of Burnt Paper.  As with approaching any text you instinctively feel around to get a reliable foothold before you manoeuvre through it. Though, this time, you’ve been abducted. Blindfolded and driven for what seems like hours, you are then thrown out onto the hard ground.  The blindfold is removed and the offender, Paul Knight, speeds off leaving you disorientated waiting for the dust to settle.

The plot centres around Phillip Bishop who, upon learning of his former lover’s death, is thrown into a labyrinthine world of conspiracy and tangled intertextual investigation. The discovery of an unfinished novel sets him down a trail of a mystery, which he must unravel. The deeper he sinks the more he is convinced that sinister forces are closing in on him.

This novel, Knight’s first, is the latest offering from Norwich based publishers Forbidden Books. It is quite beautifully disjointed. The line of the narrative runs like a fractured spine.  It does not merely jump from one thing to another, it jolts and cracks and slips. At one moment, you are trying to absorb the delicately presented grief of a character who has lost his lover, and at the next, you are struck with the image of a character being, rather biblically, torn apart by invisible tormentors. What is unique is that these transitions seem almost smooth. The themes and styles of writing seem to bleed into one another quite freely. This intrigues the reader and encourages them to read on in hope of uncovering more about the cryptic historical context A Trail of Burnt Paper seems to weave in and out of. 

The novel spans across time, and indeed, all regions of the globe. These sudden leaps across parts of the world and points in history remind me of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It is a device that gives incredible scope to the text and creates a broad hyper-contextualisation of the entire tale. The writing is brutal at times, even grotesque. Yet Knight maintains the poetic depiction of grime and misery, which, for me, echoes the writing style of Irvine Welsh. 

Decay is a recurring theme throughout the text. It acts as a sub-theme that has a constant pulse that resonates throughout giving the novel a slightly gothic edge. Knight’s novel is like a stylistic exercise experimenting with narrative structure, employing techniques similar to the traditional Italian, ‘Cento’ or Oulipian,‘Cut Up.’ It is a bumpy ride at times, though this unusual structure can be so refreshing and liberating to the reader.  If you can endure the jolts as the author changes gear, ripping through the gates of the gearbox in search of a different pace and an even deeper tone from the engine; A Trail of Burnt Paper will lead you to a wider road of beautifully disarranged and silvery ash.

Check it out here.

Words > Ben Wood