James Robertson's impressive study of grief was inspired by the Lockerbie plane bombing
It is no accident that the two sections of James Robertson's new novel are subtitled "Ice" and "Fire", reminding us of that astonishing terse poem in which Robert Frost considers which of these two elements might bring this world to an end. "From what I've tasted of desire," he says, "I hold with those who favor fire"; but then again, if he had to "perish twice", he thinks he knows "enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice". Worlds end all the time, and some of us do indeed "perish twice", our losses compounded by injustice, our daily routines adapted by degrees to become nothing more than grief management systems: "That was the point: not to think about it. Just to do things, to get through the waking hours and the hours that were supposed to be for sleep, was all."
These words are spoken by Alan Tealing, a lecturer in English literature but, he hopes, a "professor of truth", who is still emotionally and psychologically frozen by grief, more than 20 years after the terrorist bombing – the novel's fictional variant of Lockerbie– that killed his wife and daughter. At one point, Tealing shared that grief with many hundreds of others, but when those others – including his wife's parents and his own family – were offered closure on their loss, they took it, grateful that, while they might never know why, or even how, their loved ones were killed, they can at least give a name to the monster who brokered their ruin.
That monster is an airline operative named Khalil Khazar – except that, as Alan Tealing suspected from the first, Khalil Khazar is innocent. This suspicion and, later, knowledge, is what drives Tealing to go beyond his own loss and, at the risk of driving away everyone he still loves, to devote his life to "The Case", a vast catalogue of evidence and paper trails and dead ends that comes to fill an entire room of his house. For Tealing, grief is not only compounded by injustice, it is also transformed into something universal. Case becomes cause, and eventually he persuades himself that this cause "goes beyond all of us. It even goes beyond Emily and Alice and the other people on that flight. Beyond us all there is something else worth reaching for, greater than any of us."
This is a treacherous path for a professor of truth, however. Robbed of the opportunity to discover "the Truth" for two decades, Tealing has slipped into the death by ice that Frost identifies with hate and, though this is not his intention, surrenders everything he loves, or might love, to The Case. He is frozen, benumbed, until, one bitterly cold morning, a dying American intelligence officer arrives on his doorstep and challenges him to live again. Like the alleged terrorist, Khazar, Ted Nilsen is a man of faith, someone who believes that we are defined, spiritually, by "Extremes. Not daily normality. What is that? It's nothing. What defines us is the edge. Extreme pain. Extreme weather. Floods and fires and hurricanes … Snow and ice." It is a dangerous creed, and Tealing is right to suspect Nilsen's motives, but the man has one thing to offer him, a single snippet of possible truth that is not contained anywhere in the labyrinthine files of The Case, and so, like Mephistopheles, he cannot be turned away.
That shred of information – a name, an address – will take Tealing around the world and into the realm of fire. What he is searching for is not just an end to his grief, but justice: the justice that can only come when the truth is known. What he discovers, however, is something far more complex and, with that discovery, comes the realisation that, wherever a world ends, whether in fire or in ice, another begins. As one character remarks, in the run-up to the forest fire in which some part of what Tealing has become "perishes" for the second time, "blue gums love fire … they grow back very fast". We begin to see the truth in Ted Nilsen's faith in extremes, even while we reject his dismissal of "daily normality".
For there is something essential in that normality that both these men have lost – and the real indicator of this novel's power, and of its vital understanding of the grief that afflicts us all, is that the final stage of Tealing's resurrection not only comes from the most unexpected source, but also in the most unexpected manner. In the face of injustice, it is not enough to profess the truth, or to proclaim one's faith. We must also have the love that informs "daily normality", a love that, as Tealing's real saviour admits, "is never enough, but it is still love".
• John Burnside's latest book is Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape).