It was Mother who told me the story of Akbar: how he built the Dumb House, not for profit, or even to prove a point, but from pure curiosity.

John Burnside is a jobbing poet with some six collections to his name. The Dumb House is the forty-two year-old’s first novel, and, as befits his reputation, proves to be a not inconsiderable work.

Our nameless narrator’s opening line is terrible indeed:
‘No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins.’
He tells of how his beloved Mother spoke of the Gang Mahal, from where Akbar the Mughal determined to unshroud the mysteries of the human soul. Under the guidance of counsellors, persuaded that in some nebulous way the ability to speak was allied to the possession of a soul, Akbar had the Dumb House built - a place where the newly born, attended by mutes, could be permitted to develop (or not) their innate sense of language.

The narrator is inspired. As a boy he is absorbed by the nature of being, dissecting live animals, enamoured of the fine structuring found in these ‘wet machines’. But only when Mother dies and he ‘saves’ the young homeless woman who bears his children does he see the possibility of staging Akbar’s experiment for himself.

Burnside’s book makes for tough reading. Dreadful things are explained in coldly rationalised prose, unfolded with a terrible clarity of purpose. A dark ruse is being perpetrated on the reader: that through reason all things are excused. ‘The trick and the beauty of language,’ we are told, ‘is that it seems to order the whole universe, misleading us into believing that we live in sight of a rational space, a possible harmony.’

There is an early sense - in the taxonomy of animal corpses unearthed from this burnished countryside - of Peter Greenaway, but the book is resolved in the territory of the twin Patricks: McCabe and McGrath. This is a depiction of insanity from the inside that falls some way between the two: Burnside is better than McCabe, but somehow not as accomplished as the astonishing McGrath. He shares the unfussy prose style favoured by the author of Asylum and Spider, inviting entry to this very particular web, refusing the alienating grammatical, stylistic ploys of a book like McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. He also captures the timeless otherness that makes McGrath so seductive. Undeniably Gothic, The Dumb House has a touch of the fairy tale about it.

As befits a poet, Burnside has an irresistible sense of his own language. Descriptions of the ruin surrounding this charnel house are often exquisite: ‘something beautiful in the stillness of death’; a corpse found ‘decaying under a veil of blowflies’; the blood ‘seaming my fingers and palms...[like] dark electricity.’ The result is one of duplicity rather than disgust.

In the end the book fails where McGrath succeeds most - suffocating the reader while giving them a sense of a world outside of the text. Burnside offers us instead a sombre trick that is prefigured in his opening, but it lacks the chilly authority of, say, the last line of Asylum. All the same, this debut bodes well for his future, and he should perhaps remember that even Patrick McGrath didn’t start out a genius.