As a child, Michael Gardiner, the protagonist of John Burnside’s new novel, “The Devil’s Footprints” (Nan A. Talese, 224 pages, $23.95), moved with his mother and father, a celebrated photographer, to the quaint village of Coldhaven, on the coast of Scotland. His father came, we are told, “for the light.” He took pictures mainly of birds, marveling at the flocks “waving and turning in the air like a single fabric of awareness.” Birds flit and flutter throughout this tale, and Michael, now in his mid-30s and paralyzingly confused, desperately seeks some swatch of that “fabric of awareness.” Like his father, he needs some light.

Mr. Burnside, born in Scotland, achieved prominence as a poet — he won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2002 — but “The Devil’s Footprints” marks his fifth novel, and it is stunning: majestically written, with a piercing intelligence and a razor-sharp sense of the human predicament. Michael finds little, if any, insight into his life’s troubles. But the harrowing psychological investigation he embarks upon is told seemingly without effort, through words that intoxicate, scenes that enrapture, and ideas that ensnare. Mr. Burnside has said that he hoped to explore notions of evil, grief, and love. He succeeds; “The Devil’s Footprints” is a remarkable marriage of thought to form.

Coldhaven is a mean town, full of “internal exiles.” Its lifeblood is rumor, fear, suspicion, and misconception. A century ago, the story goes, the devil arose from the North Sea one wintry night and walked the length of town, ascending its walls and traversing its roofs, marking his cloven-hoofed prints in the snow. The prints dissipated with the coming of spring, but, even today, a sense of foreboding haunts Coldhaven.

Michael maintains a casual interest in such folklore. Living off the royalties from his father’s work, he has sequestered himself in the family home, alone but for an unloving (and unloved) wife and a gossip-mongering housekeeper. In fact, Michael admits, gossip is the reason he employs Mrs. K., who fulfills her role by bringing news that Moira Birnie — Michael’s high school love — recently drugged her two sons, put in them in the car with her, and set the automobile aflame. She did so, rumors have it, because she believed her husband to be the devil. When Mrs. K. later mentions that Moira’s 14-year-old daughter, Hazel, was spared, Michael becomes obsessed with the idea that Hazel is his child. (“The sums I had done in my head,” he says, “the same piece of arithmetic, over and over.”) The situation is compounded by Michael’s admission that he was responsible, decades earlier, for the death of Moira’s brother, the town bully.

“The Devil’s Footprints” is an intricate story, imbued with an intense moral relativity. Residents of Coldhaven have never questioned Michael for his role in the killing of Moira’s brother, and he has shoved it to the back of his mind. “I have never understood why people confess their sins,” he comments. “My folly, my mistake … remains mine, and though I may choose whether or not to take responsibility for it, it’s still nobody else’s business.” Indeed, Michael is a selfish and unloving man, weak in every way. But the recent tragedy stirs what feelings of guilt do lie dormant within — “Every story is an infection,” he realizes — and soon he is plunged into what he will blithely call his “temporary insanity.”

Though he is canny enough to recognize the problems in his life, Michael steadfastly refuses to face them. He may suddenly be curious about the parentage of Hazel Kennedy, but of himself, he can only say, “I was a man … Just a man; which was to say: a set of wants, a collection of impulses, a huddle of needs, only half of them visible to his own sorry gaze.” Michael has fashioned a life philosophy that relies, paradoxically, on both chance and destiny, and nothing more. In this way, he has deftly rigged the game: No one can ever hold him responsible, he feels, and no one can ever demand that he make a decision. “Things begin deep below the surface,” he says, in one of his many rarefied excuses. “By the time they are visible, they have a life and direction of their own. We don’t see that, so we call it destiny, or fate, or chance.” Michael’s conscience never calls him on this doctrinal delusion, but the reader does.

It is to Mr. Burnside’s credit that Michael’s story is only the predominant thread of a much vaster tapestry. Michael’s parents considered themselves “defeated souls,” and for reasons that remain unknowable, the town’s ruling families once castigated them. An ambiguous neighbor, who mysteriously befriends Michael, is full of her own guilt and secrets. Other Coldhaven residents are bathed in insecurity or abiding pain or mere apathy.

Michael’s mother, we learn, was a painter, and unlike his father, she cared not for light but for shadow. “She would find paintings in her library of art books and she would give me them to look at,” he explains, “showing me what to look for in the shadows, how some were deep and dark, others faint, or indistinct.” The shadows also concern Mr. Burnside. That, he seems to be saying, is where our lives are defined.

Mr. Peed is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker. He last wrote for these pages on the novelist Roddy Doyle.