Callum Og is, like so many of ACM's young heroes, fatherless. He is being brought up by his strict Kirk Elder uncle and his strict, humourless mother, his elder sister is a maid in the Factor's Lodge. The folk of this Skye village live on the seashore after being evicted from their glen which the Factor turned over to sheep. So their life is poor and hard. This is the context for a story of magic and transformation.
Half-way through the book a poor tinker is strapped to heavy yoke in the crucifix position and sent out of the village. Callum finds him dead in the quarry. But when he takes the adults to the scene, the tinker has disappeared, leaving his cross. Shortly after this, ACM gives us the image of a boat beached on the sand: "It always came fresh to me the sight of the old schooner lying beached on her side, her black, dripping flanks exposed, helpless as a stranded whale. And I always got the foolish notion that she was slowly dying as the sea left her. Not that it was all that foolish a notion, because you could see her coming back to life as the sea returned, her timbers groaning loud as she shifted with the incoming tide; and it was as if she breathed again as she finally came clear of the shore and floated free." (C 11) This is a beautiful metaphor for death and rebirth, tangled with the sea and the ebb and flow of life, and promising freedom at the end.
Immediately after crucifixion, death and resurrection, a stranger comes to the village with a musical pipe (is he the pied piper?) and a monkey. He charms the children of the town and uses them to build a fish trap on the shore. A heavy harvest of fish are taken. Very biblical. But when the stranger invites the local tinkers to share the feast, the townsfolk refuse and throw stones at the tinkers.
This is a story of a call, a refusal of the call, and the bitter retribution that it brings.
It is wonderful.
I adore the way that ACM makes you hear the Gaelic speech patterns:
- "I am telling you, boy, you should be down on your knees quaking and trembling at the thought of the everlasting fire that awaits the the wicked. What a bed is theirs to lie on; no straw to ease their bones, but fire; no friends, but furies; no sun to mark the passage o' time, but darkness - fire eternal, always burning, never dying away. Who can endure everlasting flame, boy?" (C 3)
- "You would need to chain him to a wall - and a strong wall at that - to keep him away from the kirk on the Sabbath." (C 3)
- "Mr Ferguson's heavy studded shoes and Mata's bare feet, unprotected among the clattering tackets of the well shod, padding silent as the tread of a cat." (C 3)
- "She was sleeping, the same one, sleeping like a dead thing." (C 5)
- "There were more than Mata with ears fit to hear the grass growing." (C 5)
- "He had questions ... that would have drawn sweat through the thick hide of a donkey." (C 6)
- "That was the way it was with us after the night of the storm ... I mind well when we first saw the sun again." (C 10)
- "He would say that there is always a place for the right shaped stone, and that you had to build that way, not taking the first stone that came to hand, and trying to make it fit - that would put the wall out of true, and it would not endure." (C 13)
- "It seemed to me that we were not just building a fish trap. With every stone that went into the wall of the cairidh, we seemed to be weaving a web that bound us ever closer to the living world" (C 14)
- "We will have a great fishing, I know it." (C 14) This echoes the great catch that the disciples had when fishing on the Sea of Galilee
- "The turf dyke at the bottom of the crofts was the boundary between the believers and the unbelievers, although, in truth, my own belief was ebbing as fast as the tide." (C 14)
- "It is great how old men do not like to be beat, always making out that nothing can compare to the great days of their youth." (C 14)
- "But the moment I was into the water, the flood was greedy for my legs." (C 16)
Beautifully written. June 2020; 192 pages
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