A review by hollydunndesign
The Dumb House by John Burnside

4.0

After my forays into fantasy, sci-fi and historical fiction, it seemed about time to return to my go-to categorisation, literary fiction. The Dumb House is a book that has recently been re-released by Vintage in a collection of Scottish classics. It’s a book that was first published in 1997, but it has recently been getting a lot of attention on the Internet, thanks to Jen Campbell’s mention of it on her YouTube channel. It has even resulted in a new term and subsequent Twitter hashtag: #Burnsided. That should give some indication of how impactful this book is. It’s about a man who is perhaps the least reliable narrator I have ever encountered. He decides to do an experiment with children to see if language is inherent or acquired. This is based on the story of Akbar the Great, who reportedly raised children in isolation to see if they would develop language on their own. It is a very unsettling book, but morbidly fascinating. It raises a lot of questions about language and humanity, and also calls the reader’s morality into question. This isn’t a book for the faint of heart, but it is thoroughly engrossing.