Bonnie Prince Charlie has escaped the killing grounds of the Battle of Culloden, fled across mainland Scotland, and is now hiding among the Hebridean islands, hungry, dirty and frequently sodden, with a few loyal companions, ever alert for a hint of a redcoated soldier.
This short novel describes, in visceral detail, his tribulations. In the first chapter, we watch as he vomits, defecates and urinates. Warner deploys remarkable powers of description as we endure, with the Prince, the infamous West Highland midges, we tramp with him across then landscape, losing our shoes in sucking bogs. To start off with I wondered if, perhaps, the descriptions had gone overboard, foregrounding the language to the extent that the narrative was disrupted. for example, the end of the second paragraph states that "a blunt phalanx of fumes manouevred from the outcrops of the low island snuffing its colours down to a bulk." The third paragraph then begins: "A shore emerged from the briny effluvium ..." Words such as 'phalanx' and 'effluvium' seemed to me to shout for attention, as if the author was showing off. But then I thought that this sort of language would be routine if this was poetry. That's when I realised that this is wildly, wonderfully, impressively poetic prose. And, once we have reached the second chapter, the balance between description and dialogue, between observation and action, somewhat settles down, leaving the reader with a story that is nevertheless rendered in language so lyrical as to become a thing of beauty in itself.
Then we learn about the characters, focusing on that of the Young Pretender. He is portrayed as "a chancer who brought havoc" as the author himself says in an afterword. He's a chameleon of a man, stoic and terrified, charming and petulant, selfish and repeatedly self-deluding as he describes the latest roofless byre as a palace and assures his followers that he will return with a French army, at times courageous and at others, such as when he is hysterically frightened of being captured and hanged, drawn and quartered, a frightened rabbit.
This is a remarkable picture of a human being in all his moods and aspects and it combines with the rapturously expressive and passionate descriptions of the landscape, a character in its own right, to make an outstanding work of literature.
Selected quotes:
- "Rising and dipping oars sounding like the slap of linen shirts on riverside stones." (Ch 1) What a metaphor! And so in period!
- "A terrible frown cracked along the brow, showing some tender pink in a single serration, like the glistening raw streak against the charcoal of barbecued mutton, skewered fresh and smoking from fire." (Ch 2)
- "The hems of her sacking shroud were a sodden mash that dragged over heather clumps, so the creature's means of phantom locomotion beneath were invisibled." (Ch 2) I loved this sentence from the alliteration at the start of the sentence to the anthimeria of 'invisibled' at the end.
- "Herring gulls passed over low, curiously silent like possible informers." (Ch 5)
- "The way to have peace on earth: blindness for all. For sightless men could make no war. ... The cannon? Are you certain our cannon face them, and not us?" (Ch 6)
- "The magnitude of these cliffs, no so close and huge above them, was a nauseating thing, putting far away the comforting notions that among houses, formed fields, tracks and hedgeways, as we walk to church, we move in a world God fitted for us with snug accommodation, adapted to the size and shape of humankind and rightly appointed." (Ch 8)
- "It walked like an adrift coo with a deid stillborn hanging out the hole in its arse." (Ch 9)
- "The mountainsides were reflected in those waters below, faithful and absolute, so every dimple and dapple of the braes became imitated and inverted on the dark water surface - it was as if the world was unsure which way up it actually stood, for the steady and gorgeous birdsong was unaffected by inversion, the sound had no top and no bottom." (Ch 11)
May 2024; 136 pages
Warner also wrote Morvern Callar.
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