Mrs Ritchie by Willa Muir

 

Willa and Edwin Muir escaped parochial Scotland in the 1920s, living and working in Germany and enjoying the culture of that nation and the importance the arts played in the development of its unique weltanschauung. They were true internationalists, part of the Scottish renaissance that included Hugh McDiarmid, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Like others of the renaissance, left-leaning and forward-looking, the Muirs had to reconcile the inherent tension between nationalism and internationalism. These viewpoints are not, as might at first be supposed, antithetical, but rather can be combined harmoniously. This may only happen, however, if the nationalism is an open and affirmative one, optimistic, bold, aspirational.

And this was not the aesthetic the Muirs left behind in cold, Calvinist Scotland. Where Germany was devoted to new ideas and new life, Scottish society seemed premised on keeping everyone in their places, on abjuring ambition, developing almost a blockade of progress. This, of course, was particularly the case when it came to the role of women in contemporary life, and this subject was a passion of Willa Muir’s.

It is an all too predictable injustice that Willa Muir is now less well-remembered than her husband, but Mrs Ritchie, her first novel, has an absolutely savage intensity and offers a searing critique of the stultifying, unfulfilling lives of women in the 1920s and 1930s. It is somewhat old-fashioned in its approach, with its intense psychological analyses of the characters and their actions, but it remains an astonishing novel.

It follows the progress of Annie Rattray’s life, from a bright, if intense child growing up in the fictional town of Calderwick (based on Montrose) at the back end of the nineteenth century, to a broken harridan furiously awaiting judgement day in the years following the Great War. Annie, someone prone to taking any idea to its logical conclusion and then much, much further, becomes obsessed by her presbyterian fears of judgement and sin and eternal damnation. At one point, we are told:

[Annie’s] God frowned upon all other demonstrations of feeling [than indignation], for to open one’s heart in joy to the world was to invite the devil; but righteous indignation was an emotion to which no blame could possibly be attached.

What emerges is the self-fulfilling consequence of such a tyrannical imposition of social mores and religious beliefs. Young Annie Rattray grows into Mrs Ritchie and a child downtrodden and repressed becomes a woman whose sole mission is to inflict the same injustice on her own children, in the name of God and in the hope of everlasting salvation. It is an obscenity that has been wrought on generations of Scots.

However, Muir is critiquing more than Scotland’s baleful Calvinist instincts. She was deeply concerned by the dangers of patriarchy, and the wounds it inflicted on women and on society in general. While Mrs Ritchie is truly a monstrous woman, she was made so by the male-dominated society in which she lived. A clever child, she was offered the glittering bounty of a grammar school education, only for it to be snatched from her. Poor, working class girls didn’t do that. One of Annie’s earliest influences, Miss Julia, sums up what her future should be:

To wish to become a domestic [help] in some Christian family, what a proper ambition for a young, unprotected female!

The novel also offers a savage critique of war, in particular the Great War. The experiences of Mrs Ritchie’s son, John Samuel, and the psychological trauma it wreaks on him, are beautifully but harrowingly written. At one stage, John Samuel writes of his experiences to his sister, Sarah Annie, and it scars her, too:

Sarah Annie kept that letter under lock and key. But she could not keep it out of her mind, especially whenever she saw a detachment of soldiers marching through the streets to entrain for the Front. The tears would come into her eyes, a hysterical lump would rise in her throat; there went Everyman, marching to his death; there went Everyman, having shed his individuality, his spiritual values, become merely a numbered animal whose vitality and courage were doomed to mechanical extinction.

This, then, is the inevitable concomitant of a society which seeks to repress individual thought, to make hollow the hopes and aspirations of its young, to ensure that nothing changes. Because, ultimately, everything changes, for good or ill.

Mrs Ritchie is not a flawless book. Kirsty Allen, in her doctoral thesis on Muir, writes that:

the novel moves remorselessly towards its relentless conclusion and the three-dimensional complexity of human nature is sacrificed to the pursuit of a psychological absolute.

There is truth in this, and the novel becomes somewhat unbalanced by the end, something which Muir herself acknowledged many years later, when she said: “I lost control of it in the second half, although the first half is quite good.” Contemporary criticism, though, was decidedly mixed. The Scotsman wrote of it:

Mrs Ritchie is Greek drama in the kail-yard. Psychology takes the place of the gods, but is no less ruthless and long of memory than they were. . . . [T]he result is a novel more admirable than likeable. It rouses fear but not pity, and makes one wonder if ever a woman was quite so mad inwardly and so sane outwardly as Mrs Ritchie, whether in life there is not always some breaking up and blending together of that madness and that sanity.

The casual connection of Mrs Ritchie to the kailyard is inappropriate and wrong. This novel is as far from JM Barrie’s Thrums or JJ Bell’s Wee McGreegor as it’s possible to be. What it puts me in mind of most, oddly enough, is a writer for whom I suspect Willa Muir would have held no sympathy, Flannery O’Connor.

Like the distorted presbyterian lens through which Scots Calvinists viewed the world, O’Connor held a Roman Catholic worldview that was extreme in its fundamentalism. The Old Testament wasn’t enough for O’Connor: the Douay-Rhiems translation, dense and polemical, formed the basis of her thought and was the blueprint for her fiction. When I see Mrs Ritchie, systematically destroying her family in the name of God, I hear the laughter of Flannery O’Connor as she enjoyed the privations of her characters in the name of redemption, the buggery of Tarwater by the devil, the death of Haze Motes, the grandmother killed by The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.

People who see only a purity of purpose lose sight of the humanity that lies shattered in its wake.

Scottish Book Week

I'm very excited to be speaking with fellow Ringwood Publishing authors, Simon McLean and Tom Wood at a Scottish Book Trust Book Week Scotland event on 16 November. We will be discussing the future of policing.

My forthcoming novel, Cuddies Strip, although set in 1935, has much we can learn from today.

Tom Wood is an ex-Deputy Chief Constable (Lothian and Borders) and has written a superb account of the Ruxton Murders, dubbed the first modern murder case.

Simon McLean is a former detective and the author of the forthcoming The Ten Percent.

Pre-order a signed copy of my new novel

My new novel, Cuddies Strip, will be published by Ringwood Press later this year.

You can pre-order a signed copy and have guaranteed delivery by publication date.

I am available for any blog spots or interviews. Just leave a message here and I'll get back to you.

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimar McBride

 

In a fairly short space of time, I have read Eimar McBride’s first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. Consequently, I had the queasiest feeling of familiarity as I read The Lesser Bohemians. All feature Irish protagonists, of course, while in The Lesser Bohemians there’s the stream-of-consciousness writing style of A Girl, and the obsessively detailed analysis of a relationship between a young woman and a much older man from Conversations. I think I need something completely different next.

The Lesser Bohemians is an odd novel. Sometimes brilliant, it nonetheless never quite pulls me in the way the superb A Girl is a Half-formed Thing did. That novel was simply breathtaking, and I felt deeply about the main character in a way I never did in The Lesser Bohemians. I’m not sure why. The main characters, Eily and Stephen, are superbly realised, real, three-dimensional human beings with massive flaws and fragile hopes and a need to connect they cannot themselves quite recognise or reconcile. But... But...

Basically, there is something structurally strange in the novel. Written in the first person, from Eily’s perspective, the scenes where she recounts her horrible and confusing coming of age and maturation are superbly written, but there are two extremely lengthy passage where we are taken out of her immediate consciousness. In the first, lasting some seventy pages – which is far, far too long – Stephen relates to her the bizarre and traumatic nature of his childhood. It is certainly powerful, and clearly explains how Stephen came to be such a troubled and troubling individual, but as a result of Eily relating his words, the novel loses the immediacy, the urgency of those passages where Eily is telling her own story her own way. And the second passage, near the end, is even more distancing. In it, Eily tells us of the conversation Stephen had with her, in which he is relating the conversation his ex-wife had with him, in which she relates further conversations with different people. It’s almost Shakespearian in its nested histories, and it makes for unsatisfying reading. I had to constantly remind myself who was speaking to whom.

This is especially problematic because it is the culmination of the novel, and it is the climax of their relationship, and yet it is told in this – let’s be honest – clumsy way. McBride is clearly a remarkably talented writer, so I am certain this is not just bad writing. She must have intended it to be written this way, and she must have her reasons for doing so. I am not sure what they are.

McBride has developed a unique voice. She is most commonly compared to compatriot James Joyce, although there is something of Jose Saramago about her style, or Malcolm Lowry, perhaps, in the almost hallucinatory way she can describe things. William Golding, in his Pincher Martin mode, would have found her writing intoxicating (although intoxication was perhaps something Golding was too familiar with). This beautifully fragmented style was so perfectly matched to the story in A Girl, I think many readers of Bohemians would have approached the follow-up novel with trepidation. McBride herself wrote of her style transferring into the new novel:

I was always a little surprised by the opinion that the style couldn’t work in other contexts. It seemed perfectly adaptable to me and that whatever uniqueness it possessed related to its symbiosis with the subject matter.

I don’t know. I think it was a legitimate fear. In A Girl, the narrator was the voice and the voice was the narrator. As a reader you got this extraordinary sense that you were in her head, looking through her eyes, understanding with her brain. Could the almost visceral immediacyh of that be transplanted into another character?

Yes, I think it can, and it does. I did worry that the stream-of-consciousness would sound false second time around but it doesn’t. McBride is a master of her style and it works absolutely. By eschewing grammar and riding roughshod over language, inventing, eliding, toying, she has an uncanny ability to evoke senses through the merest fragments of language. “The anger though,” she writes at one point, after having had sex with Stephen. Three words. A mountain of meaning.

Eimar McBride is clearly a wonderful writer. Her next novel, she says, is going to be “smaller and quieter”. Well, perhaps, but I suspect it is still going to make us think and wonder and worry. And what could be better than that?

Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth

Normally, I’m not a fan of invented places in fiction. I much prefer the Stuart MacBride approach of setting novels in recognisable locations, rather than making them up (in MacBride’s case it helps that I lived in Aberdeen for three years so am very familiar with his locations. Cathi Unsworth’s Weirdo, however, has such an extraordinary sense of place it doesn’t matter that her Norfolk seaside town of Ernemouth is not a real place because Cathi describes it so vividly it comes to life.

What she also does in this novel is get inside the heads of troubled teenagers and see the world – big, unfriendly, aggressive – from their solipsistic point of view. It’s quite a feat, describing the fractured views of genuinely confused young people with such acuity that you believe, entirely, in them and their several crises. Make no mistake, Weirdo is an excellent book.

The drama alternates betwen 1984, when a young boy was horrifically – possibly satanically – murdered in an old pillbox on the Norfolk coastline, and 2003, when Sean Ward, a private detective is reinvestigating the case after new DNA evidence comes to light casting doubt on the verdict in the original court case. In that, Corinne Woodrow, a damaged 15-year-old girl, was alone convicted of the murder but this new evidence suggests there may have been someone else present when the crime was committed. We see the gradual unfurling of the original crime, the coming together of a group of disconnected and disaffected young people, their orbits colliding catastrophically until disaster becomes inevitable; and, simultaneously, we follow Sean as he and a friendly local journalist try to unpick those same events from across the divide of two decades of silence and cover-up. As with most of Cathi Unsworth’s novels, there is a large and rich cast of characters, and each possesses their own foibles and concerns. It quickly becomes apparent that all is not as it seems and that Corinne Woodrow may be an innocent wronged.

There is a crime here, and a mystery to be resolved (and very effectively it is, too), but in some regards Weirdo isn’t a crime novel. I’m not sure any of Cathi’s books are. She’s on record as saying: “It is not the investigators, but the victims of crime to whom I want to give the main voices in my novels.” And that is the key to her writing. This is not a solve-it-by-numbers kind of novel, where things happen because they have to in order to develop the plot. Cathi Unsworth creates believable characters and you can tell she cares about them and, in so doing, she makes us care about them. Corinne is a fragile soul, and there is an inevitability about the way she is damaged, over and again, by a cold and calculating universe.

Thus, we are taken deep into the world of these teenage misfits, much more densely than we would had the novel been written by someone else, because for Cathi it’s character that matters, not plot. Sure, the central action is shocking and you want to have the solution revealed, but the novel explores the danse macabre of these various young participants, seeing in each of them the failures and triumphs, fears, humiliations, anger and love, hope and despair that helped shape them as human beings, helped each one to play their part in the tragedy that unfolded. It’s beautifully done.