Jeff Bursey’s two novels, Verbatim and Mirrors on which dust has fallen, feel busy, even noisy. Bursey relies on dialogue, as recorded and shaped in Hansard in Verbatim, and as uttered by the many characters in Mirrors, to show his storylines, reveal his characters, and explore his ideas. The dialogue in Mirrors in exquisite: not just good, in my subjective view, or in the view of what constitutes ‘realism’ in fiction, but painful as it forces uncomfortable and often unwanted recognitions of how people behave. Kate surrendering — surrendering far too much, in my view — to Loyola and the pleasure he brings her, or at least pretending to; Starlene abusing Loyola at work; Jules abusing anyone and everyone unlucky enough to fall within the sound of his voice; the CCII radio station management outlining plans that will upset and rewrite other peoples’ lives: these scenes leave me scowling in a mix of sympathy and disgust for the characters. The characters, too, often feel disgust. Duncan Lonegin might be the best example of this, a man forced into retirement and then cut adrift from his understanding of faith by the pedophilic scandals in the Catholic Church. Duncan is lost. His entire sense of self lies at his feet, and the stale and repellent priests who come to visit are no balm. Nor do the priests even try to understand why a man who fit a definition of ‘good Catholic’ — including obedience — is no longer attending mass.

The priests, self-appointed moral shepherds,  are, like many of the characters in Mirrors, distracted by, or even hypnotized by, the material: a much-needed paycheque in a brutal and tyrannical workplace; the precise dietary makeup of one’s lunch; the next lay.

Yet this is not a hopeless novel. A key, perhaps, waits not in expectations of character arc and plot development, techniques Bursey often eschews — you’re hard-pressed to find a traditional hero-protagonist here, someone to ‘root for’ — but in the ideas behind the novel.

One big idea being that perhaps something else, something more, surrounds  us, some alternative to deathly materialism and faithless institutions.By ‘institutions’ I mean more than churches, and more than the Church. Loyola and Mare work for companies that set themselves up as some sort of high road of sacrificial quest, some conduit to higher purpose and communion — communion in the end with what George Orwell’s often irritating but sometimes perceptive character Gordon Comstock would call the Money-God. This thinking is a deception, a sham. Clothing company Moscati-Mann and radio station CCII exist solely to provide profit and benefit to those who control them. Moneylenders in the temple? The physical labour performed by Loyola, and the emotional labour performed by Mare, make me think of the workers on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, wielding the ever heavier and heavier hands of time on mysterious clocks.

Take the title, Mirrors on which dust has fallen. The phrasing seems unusually clunky for Bursey, whose prose often displays elegant concision. Why not Dusty Mirrors? Because the dust here is just as important as the mirrors. The dust has importance and purpose, if not agency, however mysterious. An idea in the Baha’i Faith (for clarity: Bursey is not a Baha’i; I am) is how the human heart can function as a mirror, reflecting back that which is divine, which is good: ‘A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God …’ (The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys). So if these characters are mirrors on which dust has fallen — the dust sometimes being troubles beyond their control, like illness, or well within their control, like their own behaviour — then they have the potential at least for pure hearts, or at least to become something better than what they are. They can reach. Similarly when a much-derided and much-patronized restaurant burns down, Ivy catches a scent of something different, something enticing, on the wind.

Which is not to say Bursey is suggesting his characters, or his readers, Get Religion or Find God and then everything will be all right. Such a simplistic view of human struggles, and of the intimate difficulties of faith, would collapse beneath the weight of its own condescension. What Bursey may be suggesting is how we need to make some difficult recognitions: for one, the repressive and depressing nature of the prison of self. This, too, is an idea central to the Baha’i Faith,  and one which I’ve explored in my own novels Sky Waves and deluded your sailors. From the collection ‘Abdu’l-Baha in London: “Freedom is not a matter of place. It is a condition. … Unless one accepts dire vicissitudes, he will not attain.”