Elspeth Barker: O Caledonia!
Dec. 10th, 2024 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThis is a long overdue post in invisible conversation with a friend's locked posts about a book we had both been reading. They had come to it through a recommendation from someone on DW; I had picked it off a charity shelf, knowing nothing about it but intrigued by the title. They were enthusiastic about it, and inspired to creativity; I was ambivalent, but inspired to read out great chunk of it to anyone who would listen.
It's a novel, I suppose, an odd sort of novel, but a beautifully written one: hence both the ambivalence and the urge to quote, at length. Maybe it's the very beauty of the writing that holds me at arm's length: instead of being drawn in to the narrative, I'm standing back, admiring the narration. The opening, too, discourages emotional involvement. The book opens with the heroine lying dead at the foot of a stone staircase, in some lofty Scottish baronial hall, under a stained glass window whose top panel depicts a cockatoo, "oddly attired" in her mother's black lace evening dress... So far, so gothic, but other passages describing a realistic small-town upbringing in post-war Scotland are, Maggie O'Farrell's introduction assures me, autobiographical. I think of it as A Portrait of the Artist as a young Titus Groan.
So I didn't at any point feel sad that Janet was going to die: I read that opening passage as a bravura piece of description and a statement that what Barker wants to write about is childhood and adolescence (which makes even more sense if she is looking back on her own childhood and adolescence). Once Janet is poised to leave the nest, the book is over: as much metamorphosis as death. But on the way there, there are many wonderful things, a heap of disconnected jewels. And here is one of them:
It's a novel, I suppose, an odd sort of novel, but a beautifully written one: hence both the ambivalence and the urge to quote, at length. Maybe it's the very beauty of the writing that holds me at arm's length: instead of being drawn in to the narrative, I'm standing back, admiring the narration. The opening, too, discourages emotional involvement. The book opens with the heroine lying dead at the foot of a stone staircase, in some lofty Scottish baronial hall, under a stained glass window whose top panel depicts a cockatoo, "oddly attired" in her mother's black lace evening dress... So far, so gothic, but other passages describing a realistic small-town upbringing in post-war Scotland are, Maggie O'Farrell's introduction assures me, autobiographical. I think of it as A Portrait of the Artist as a young Titus Groan.
So I didn't at any point feel sad that Janet was going to die: I read that opening passage as a bravura piece of description and a statement that what Barker wants to write about is childhood and adolescence (which makes even more sense if she is looking back on her own childhood and adolescence). Once Janet is poised to leave the nest, the book is over: as much metamorphosis as death. But on the way there, there are many wonderful things, a heap of disconnected jewels. And here is one of them:
Now that Janet and Francis were older, Grandpa would let them visit him in his study, where the parrot lived. Grandpa came from a long line of parrot-keeping men, and Polly's predecessor, a white cockatoo, had fought with Wellington's armies in the Napoleonic Wars. Janet's father's earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed Scotland there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in - even perhaps in England - and it would be a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally an elderly lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be feted and cultivated as true archivists.
