Amy Sackville – Orkney

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Amy Sackville, Book Review, Orkney, Scotland

May and December love story, seen through ancient myths

Amy Sackville is a wonderfully tender, lyrical writer, with a real gift for describing the intensity and precision of emotional experience, the being-present-in-the-world, the here and now, whether that is in descriptions of that world itself (particularly landscapes) or the intensity and precision of what it feels like to properly experience one’s own internal emotional landscape – what does it precisely feel like, what is the physical heft and weave of jealousy, fear, loneliness etc

However, what is her gift, also is her Achilles heel – she can get caught in the lyricism of the moment and lack momentum to gather and drive narrative forward.

This was certainly true in her beautifully written first novel, The Still Point and is true still with Orkney, though to a lesser extent.

Nonetheless, this is a delicate and powerful book, tangling up deep abiding myths; always satisfying, the myths than come from several different cultures and historical times ARE so satisfying because they come from a deep unconscious, collective unconscious, place.

In Orkney, the narrator is a literature professor, Professor – (his name is not given) a 60 year old man who has specialised in those myths, particularly myths of female enchanters with a watery connection – Circe, Undine, Melusine, the selkie myths, mermen and mermaids, the Sirens. He is the December part of the love story, his mysterious ‘May’ is a curious young woman, often referred to by reference to those Undines, Ondines, Sirens, but otherwise described as ‘my wife’. She is one of his students, some 40 years younger. The two have very recently married and the narrative is an account of their 12 day honeymoon on Orkney. Anyone who has any familiarity with any of the selkie myths, from stories or from folk songs, will immediately be aware of the story, and anyone unfamiliar, will pretty quickly become familiar because the versions of the story are liberally referred to in the text.

The delight of the book is NOT ‘what happens’ – we rather know that right from the start, it is rather, how does it feel that this is the story. And more importantly, how can we balance the absolute intensity and possession of overwhelming love, with the fact that love will always end, the beloved will leave, or die, or love itself dim away from that intense and overwhelming place. And then. How do we live then?

I loved the strange story; I loved her evocation of the landscape, but as mentioned earlier, there were times this got a little too drawn out – particularly the verbal games the Professor and ‘my wife’ played, in describing the muted and subtle colours of the landscape. Sackville clearly has an artist’s eye, and paints the world with beautiful words; I could really see the refined shades, the textures in the water and the mist she was describing, but perhaps this occurred 2 or 3 times too often, so that I began to have a snagged sense of ‘here we go again, another high, fine poetic moment – a bit like a set piece’ – when the journey’s end of story really needed steering towards. ‘The story, the narrative drive’ is of course something which traditional myths and faerie stories manage superbly – in many ways, character is broad brush, the journey of the story IS the story – I would have liked a little more of that economy in Orkney.

Nonetheless I will certainly be looking forward to book number 3. Sackville is an interesting, accomplished and absorbing writer.

Here is a sample of her delicate humour (an excerpt describing cookery skills, or their lack)

She has a gift for the contrary, for transforming innate qualities into their opposites: crisp leaves turn to mulch, the most tender meat toughens, what might be moist stales in her keeping to become heavy and dry; even tinned custard, in her custody, somehow becomes lumpen

and, secondly, of that painter’s eye for landscape, describing the moment when a wild, savage storm begins to clear.

And then all at once, a crack appeared in the cloud, the sun at one corner of it like a god’s eye, casting a piercing landscape across the sky, and then one after another, rods of silver broke through to announce his presence. Like some awful ruthless salvation, the sun burned the edge of the cloud-bank magnesium white, and shone brilliant on the still-tender, cleansed world; the rock pools transformed into blinding mirrors and the sea, so lately needled to fury, was lulled and banded with whispering silver as it approached the shore, and there was the terrible argent fire of the cloud’s lining after the storm

Orkney Amazon UK
Orkney Amazon USA

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At the Loch of the Green Corrie

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Andrew Greig, At the Loch of the Green Corrie, Book Review, Scotland, Scottish writer, The Natural World

Shaman of words

Andrew Grieg makes me consider, deeply, how much we need poets. The word poet (like all words) gets over-used and watered down. The poet, like the artist, is someone who should shock us into being awake, into being present. This is absolutely what Greig does, whether in his novels, his factual writings or his poetry.

The poet should be able to penetrate into the heart of darkness, into light which is so bright that it could blind us, and to show us the everyday which we pass by, unseeing, revealed in all its glory and despair. And how Greig does!

What is this factual book about? It’s about friendship between tough men who can be tender about their relationships with their women and with each other. It is about the power and the fragility and the mystery of the world, particularly the wild world, which keeps itself as removed as it can from mankind’s depredations. It is about the poet Norman MacCaig, influential in Greig’s own poetic development (as he himself no doubt is to a younger generation) It is about fishing and climbing mountains, geology and the Highland clearances, about fathers, both actual and father figures, about commitment between lovers, about savouring good whisky, facing death, about good conversations, and about poetry itself, language, and the heart of the mind, the mind of the heart. And more.

I have no interest in fishing, and whilst a keen escaper to the wild places I suffer from vertigo and would never climb a mountain in the way mountaineers do.

Link to Sandy Birrell’s site (photo)

But this, this book. It’s like some divine and mystical text, which suddenly pushes you into reality by its carefully chosen images and thoughts. My copy was slowly and thoughtfully read, as if it were a long poem, rather than quickly raced through (I’m quite a fast reader) Writing this fine, this true, deserves no less attention from the reader, since the writer has been so thoughtful and attentive to his craft.

The structure of the book has a repeating image of the fisherman – the chapters come in pairs, Cast – where the line flies out, lands on the water, and an action is taken – and then Retrieve, where the action, the thought, the conversation is waited with, and then the line drawn in, and the caught fish revealed and examined, before the new line is thrown, and the fish of thought even thrown back into the deep glass of the loch again

Much annotated, much underlined (sorry if this offends, but my best and most remarkable, memorable books are the ones which have the most underlining) this is a book to return to, to re-savour, and to continue to allow to resonate.

Here are some odd snippets of my underlining, which struck home

“We arrive at who we are first by following, then by divergence”

” My predilection has always been, will always be, to sit until I sense the source, the place the wind comes from”

“The age of poetry is not entirely ended. Flecks of it still glitter in the pauses between stories, among the mud and gravel bed of the stream”

“turquoise lakes brim inside burning shores” (sunset over a loch)

And, recounting a small moment, when he and his fishing companions prepare to eat their evening meal, in the quiet of a deserted loch-side, as sunset falls:

“Nothing stops this, I think, the bubbling pan, the slow-oncoming dark, the light more lurid as it dies. Our choice is whether to cherish it, mourn its passing, or feel as little as possible”

Yes. That’s what the poet does. Takes the ordinary and shakes us out of our unawareness, fiercely challenging us `Awake!’ forcing us to see the timeless, the real, what matters, teaching us how to live better.

This joins the library of books which I regard as my teachers. And, like the best of teachers, opens up new vistas – Norman MacCaig The Poems of Norman MacCaig (I was ignorant of this fine poet), and Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (The Canons)

At the Loch of the Green Corrie. Amazon UK
At the Loch of the Green Corrie. Amazon USA

Janice Galloway – This Is Not About Me

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Autobiography, Book Review, Janice Galloway, Scotland, Scottish writer, This Is Not About Me

Playing the hand of cards you have been dealt

I am a sucker for autobiographical books about childhood, because it is a time of such fluidity of response, and I am always captivated when a writer can distill the stuff of their own childhood, recount it as an adult, but still be able to hold the way the child saw the world.

I had never heard of Janice Galloway, and was delighted to get introduced to her writing.

Fascinating though it is to read childhood accounts of foreign lands and different times, there is something particularly interesting, to me, in those which have taken place around my own times, and in the UK. It can be shocking and salutary to read of how very different lives can be, yet in places close to home.

Galloway had a childhood which looked utterly bleak from the point of view of what life handed out – alcoholic father, poverty, drudgery, a school and home environment where ideas of nurturing, encouraging, celebrating the small developing person seem unbearably absent.

Yet, curiously, Galloway is not disconsolate, self-pitying, hate-filled or crushed. She writes with a generosity and even a celebration of her mother who was trapped by Janice’s birth, and let her know that, and her aggressive, bullying, excitingly life filled sister. Lives which on one level could be seen as small, failed, dysfunctional are seen in a way which also acknowledges the unique, precious, loved and affirmed aspects of those lives

It isn’t even that this falls into a `triumph of the human spirit’ genre (though Galloway certainly seems to have climbed out of everything which could have crushed a less generous or frailer spirit) This is neither the story of `a survivor’ nor is it the story of `a victim’, but it is a beautifully written account of one particular child, growing up in a time (1960s) and a place (Saltcoats, West Coast Scotland) told with wryness, humour, compassionate perception and warmth.Galloway neither sweeps the awfulness under the carpet, trying to hide it with a soggy rictus grin of wisecracking sentimentality, nor does she wallow in the pain. Rather there is an acceptance of both her sensitivity and her tough, creative stoicism. She plays the cards she has been dealt, rather than wasting time bemoaning the awfulness of the deal. This is a combination of the pragmatic and the poetic which I found utterly captivating
This is not about Me Amazon UK
This is not about Me Amazon USA