The brown-eyed actor, Ivanhoe’s ancestor, Fair Helen and a compromised narrator
Oh blessings on Andrew Greig! He never disappoints this reader.
In Fair Helen he has gone for an old, or I should say, Auld Ballad, and expanded it. It is the tale of the borders, reivers, a couple of student friends in ‘Embra’ in the 1590’s, during the time ‘Jamie Saxt’ is King of Scotland and the ‘Auld Hag’ is dying on the throne of England. Meanwhile there are dark conflicts a-brewing between the Auld Religion and the Reformers. We are set for a fine tangle between politics, Church, State, Ancient Enmities and Loyalties – and incandescent loves.
Adam Fleming, a heidsman’s son, falls hard for Fair Helen, an Irvine, who is betrothed (against her wishes) to the powerful son of another clan. These are lawless times (when were they not). Fair Helen is the cousin of Harry Langton, the narrator, a poor scrivener and friend of the Fleming son, who becomes embroiled and a pawn in a deeper game than just that of taking care of his friend and his cousin.
What is new in this piece of writing from Grieg is that it is right in his heritage as a Scottish writer, and there is much which is in the vernacular. And a pretty muscular and rich vernacular it is too.
I made a big mistake in getting this on the Kindle, as the glossary is much less accessible than it would be in the paper book.
So I gave up and surrendered to working out the meanings and hoped I was not making too many mistakes!
But don’t think Greig is just a folksy folky writer. He digs a rich seam of love requited and unrequited, filial duty, violence, and his central narrator, our poor scrivener, is deliciously dry, and wry, particularly in his footnotes (reasonably easily found on the Kindle without too much distraction). Not to mention battling with where loyalties lie and who can and who cannot be trusted
Greig, as ever, provides a treasure chest to ponder. And then there is his writing, layered, textured, snaggled with new-minted images.
There were so many places where I got caught by images, and fiddled with underlining passages of beauty and contemplation
So, here, on memory:
Yet the dead return to us, no doubt, by night or by day, rising up from the rotted mulch of the years. Up from black oblivion they rise, catch fire and play across the surface of our minds, insubstantial, unignorable
And this, following a bloody raid and ambush, with a final image which raised hairs on my neck, that poet’s way of making images serve double purpose
I had seen the gathering of a gang, now I witnessed its sundering. Many went their own way at Tinnis. It was dawn of the day by the old standing stone, cold and red-pink as lifeblood carried downriver
I like the sonorous weight of Greig’s prose, its economy, its variety, the darkness always waiting:
She died around Candlemas on a quiet afternoon, her sister Ann and I present. Her breaths spaced wider. Her chest rose and fell minutely. Her jaw dropped. I heard that last breath go. Then there was but a shell and an open mouth, and within it darkness without end
Fair Helen Amazon UK
Fair Helen Amazon USA
being Scottish I would be interested in knowing which Scottish words you were faltering over and what were your definitions. I have to admit to having never heard Andrew Grieg. I found out via Google he lives barely 20 miles from where I live. Small world and all that.
Most I could get – jalouse was one i missed (jealousy rather than suspect) and wabbit (fearful rather than exhausted – I was thihking of the behaviour of rabbits, who might indeed get exhausted because they are so fearful. There were a couple of landscape words like cleuch for ravine, that I sort-of got as some sort of ambushy-type landscape but, generally, because Greig is incredibly precise and not at all self-=indulgent or overblown, you do rather ‘get’ the vernacular because of context. My favourite which i instantly knew, despite never having come across it before was forky galoch, earwig and houghmagandie, coyly translated as ‘sexual shenanigans’
I recently started (and abandoned) Amitav Ghosh’s Sea Of Poppies – in part because he just pours out vernacular in a huge pile, to such an extent that you are constantly having to stop and search dictionaries and google, as the words are not on the Kindle dictionary, and TBH it feels a bit like drowning in language. Greig is just so disciplined in his writing, rather than verbose