The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Burning Worm by Carl Tighe
Nicholas Birns

Carl Tighe. Burning Worm. IMPress, 2001. 228 pp. Paper: £8.00.

Burning Worm chronicles the near past (the Solidarity years in early 1980s Poland) with wise playfulness. Tighe taught in Poland during this era and is a prominent scholar of Polish literature, but the book does not fictionally bottle his actual experience. S. Mroz, a Polish professor, introduces Eugene Hinks, an Irish writer (Poland and Ireland are both “rebellious, partitioned, poor, rural”). Hinks is no dashing hero, having allegedly no interests beyond “the normal ones of his generation—sex, music, and booze.” Hinks’s hijinks are steeped in the accurately detailed milieu of the “lay Left” of Polish anticommunist resistance, which Tighe has championed in his academic work. Yet this accuracy includes an “incredibly sweet” Pepsi-Coke amalgam, soft drink of choice for Polish intellectuals, along with cameos of octogenarian dentists and slaughtered carp. The cohabitation of centralist bureaucrats and randy literary types gives the effect of a Stanislaw Lem novel taken over virtually in midsentence by Gilbert Sorrentino. Hinks’s observations are so sly that one does not know whether their irreality comes from technique or the situation being described. There is also a spontaneity in the prose, so that the bittersweet letdown that forestalls Hinks’s relationship with his Polish girlfriend, Maria, is not conventional, but jolts the reader’s narrative and political expectations. What happens when a dominated people glimpse freedom, i.e., when a worm burns? Burning Worm, once rejected by dozens of publishers, went on to be deservedly shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award. It is a remarkable work, one that, though unabashedly inventive, is (like the later work of Sebald and Naipaul) ultimately out to capture the truth. [Nicholas Birns]