Dark Star by Lorna Moon

 

Lorna Moon is famous as one of the earliest women screenwriters in Hollywood, writing for the likes of Greta Garbo and Lionel Barrymore, but she was born in Strichen in Aberdeenshire and her first novel, Dark Star (1929) is a loosely autobiographical story set in a fiction north-eastern town of Pitouie. In fact, Moon left Strichen when she was 24 and never returned but the call of home was strong and, while living in America, she began writing a series of stories based on her memories of Scotland. These stories, collected in Doorways in Drumorty, explored the sometimes stultifying life of small, presbyterian communities in a realistic way far removed from the then popular kailyard style.

Dark Star is an oddity, a novel that is curiously modern in its delivery as it describes a society that is steeped in the past. Even when the novel is set, one feels, the parish of Pitouie must have seemed old-fashioned. In this place, judgemental, uncompromising, Nancy comes of age, a striking and fascinating young woman whose thoughts form the opening line of the novel: “Nancy was glad when her grandmother died.” What a line! What an opening! Who could resist getting to know such a girl?

Nancy has been living with her grandmother since her mother ran away with the travelling fair, and she is fourteen when her grandmother dies. She is thrilled to think she is now going to be in charge of the house, have her own front door, live an adult life. Her dreams are disabused, however, when the minister, now her guardian, takes her to live with him in the manse.

She forms an alliance of sorts with the minister’s elderly mother, Mrs Anderson, their mutual dislike of the minister’s manipulative wife bringing them close. What unfolds is a peculiar form of bildungsroman. In some ways, Nancy is the cousin of Janet in Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, an intelligent, internalised ingenue, naive but somehow knowing. She is a dreamer who craves the certainty of knowing where she comes from: much of the novel revolves around her quest to find whether her father was the no-good Willie Weams or Ramsey Gordon, the young lord of Castle Fassefern.

This mystery sets up one of the central points of the novel, the disconnect between the righteous presbyterian locals and outsiders – travellers, fair people, the marginalised of society. Nancy, very much an outsider herself through her refusal to conform, naturally sides with the latter group, and yet she yearns for her father not to be the philanderer Weams but the lord of the manor. This duality is central to her character as she gradually matures and falls in love.

Dark Star is probably not wholly successful as a novel because it weaves between styles and registers. At times the style is almost irreal, disjointed and dreamy in the manner of Nathanael West (another Hollywood screenwriter) or James Purdy (although Dark Star pre-dates the work of either of these writers so I am not suggesting any causality). It is when it is in this mode the novel works best, giving it a more edgy sensibility. At other times the writing is more mainstream, indeed at times almost melodramatic.

Nonetheless, it is a fascinating read and well worth seeking out. Moon’s collected works were published by Black and White some years ago and second hand copies can be easily found online.