Gillis is searching for a higher purpose. That’s why, at the age of 31, he has become the minister of a crumbling Scottish kirk with a nonexistent congregation in a sleepy coastal town. Also, he needs work. It was this or the supermarket. “It’s not a bad job,” the outgoing minister confides. “The wages aren’t much, but you get the manse guaranteed, and a motor, and you’ll have your mornings and evenings. Mostly, it’s just hospital, funeral, home by five.”
Not a bad deal. But Gillis, it seems, is destined for greater things. And in Phantom Limb, Chris Kohler’s wonderfully farcical and apocalyptic debut novel, we soon find him performing miracles and taking on the mantle of messiah. It is a story of failure and desperation that links Scotland’s past to its present in twinned narratives that alternate between Gillis’s doomed venture and the travails of an apprentice painter named Jan in pre-Reformation Scotland.
The story proper begins when, late one night, a little the worse for wear after a funeral service, Gillis falls into a pit in the grounds of the kirk and discovers a disembodied hand. To his horror, it begins to move: “It curled and uncurled its fingers, then turned to find him and pointed ominously. The sharp fingernail seemed to be accusing him of something.”
And Gillis certainly has things to feel guilty about. A once-promising athlete who dropped his friends and family – as well as his longtime girlfriend Rachel – to compete south of the border, he has recently returned under a cloud of failure, shame and misery. The hand, which turns out to have healing powers, offers the possibility of redemption. Soon, Gillis is rushing around curing ills and contentedly daydreaming about the adoration of a grateful nation: “‘Who is it?’ the gathered crowds will ask. It’s the young minister, his sad eyes and slight smile illuminated flatteringly by the moonlight; next to him, his miraculous severed hand. Thank God, a beacon of light still shines in the darkness of this world.”
Needless to say, it doesn’t work out quite like this. Gillis is an endearingly pathetic figure. He is enjoyably cynical about his vocation and sympathetically dazed by his shattered dreams (“All that failure, and he wasn’t going to admit to the job-seeking, the redundancy, the unfair dismissal, and the year or so spent living in his dad’s front room”). His increasingly deranged attempts to heal the world – or at least the town – provide some fine comic moments, while his tender but uncertain relationship with Rachel and her young son offers a sliver of hope for a more anchored existence.
Kohler lays out a bleakly comical vision of modern life. The kirk is empty; the local industry dried up. The salmon farms that constitute the main form of employment are rife with disease. Consequently, the town stinks of rotten fish. The church is made up of either irreligious timeservers like Gillis or bland corporate bean counters like his boss (“Going forward, we need to be looking at expansion. Growth”). Even Rachel, a strikingly patient and sympathetic figure, is content to abandon her clearly troubled son to the television (“They were showing a documentary about rice”) and ignore his artistic talent. The dominant mood is one of extreme indifference.
Eventually, we come to discover the importance of Jan, whose own sorry story has trailed Gillis’s throughout. These chapters provide a certain amount of backstory (the bloody origins of the Church of Scotland) and a neat mirror image of Gillis’s cynical quest (Jan ekes out a living as a fraudulent faith healer). It turns out that opportunistic churchmen have always been with us. While it is true that this storyline is less developed and engrossing than that of Gillis, it does much to establish the oppressive weight of history that hangs over the book and so bedevils poor Gillis. It is testament to this novel’s considerable charm and energy, summoning a mad world that resembles our own, that such a fraud as Gillis elicits our sympathy. But he does.
• Phantom Limb by Chris Kohler is published by Atlantic (£17.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
