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.

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

It isn’t a spoiler to say that the main protagonist of Elspeth Barker’s wonderfully unclassifiable masterpiece O Caledonia dies on the final page, because we are advised of this death on the first page. What unfolds between initial declaration and final explication is the creation of a character utterly unique. In real life, Janet would probably be unbearable but as a character on the page she is mesmerising. The novel recounts her life from birth through to her untimely death at the age of sixteen and is one of the funniest but most thought-provoking works I’ve read in some time. 

In a family of eccentrics, Janet stands out for her oddness. Living in Achnasaugh (“the field of sighing”) in the north of Scotland, amidst Calvinism and its associated dourness, the family eschew the moroseness of life around them. The family motto is Moriens Sed Invictus – Dying But Unconquered – and they mean to live up to it. Janet’s mother, Vera, is a harridan waging perpetual war against everything. Cousin Lila is a drunkard gradually reducing her life to squalor. And Janet – brilliantly clever, totally introverted, heroically unsociable – lives inside her own head, enjoying her dreams, enduring her nightmares, deprecating the horrible reality around her. 

Read any review of O Caledonia and you will see it variously described as bildungsroman, nature writing, gothic drama or tragicomedy. In her introduction to the current edition, Maggie O’Farrell notes: 

In these 200-odd pages of prose [Barker] gives the nod to a number of literary genres while deftly navigating her way around and past them. There are more than a few allusions to the Gothic Novel, to classical myth, to Scottish literary tradition, to nature writing, to Shakespeare and autofiction. 

However, she continues, trying to fit it into any category is reductive because O Caledonia “at once plays with and defies genres”. She’s undoubtedly right about that, but one category in which I think it does naturally fit is “Scottish writing”. There’s the imagination and sheer love of words of Alistair Gray; there’s the gothic dread of Stevenson; the mordant wit of Muriel Spark; the stunning evocation of landscape and place of our great poets, Sorley Maclean, Kathleen Jamie, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown et al; in Janet, a spiky free spirit, there’s a resonance with the wonderful Dinah and Dorinda in Eric Linklater’s neglected children’s classic The Wind on the Moon – truly, here are three girls ready to take on the world; and above all, there’s the classic Scottish binary of Calvinism and liberalism John Knox and Robert Burns. 

All of this is told from the perspective of oddball Janet, determined to go her own way, do her own thing, gripped by learning and a passion for every living thing except human beings, especially her family. She is clumsy, distracted, probably dyspraxic, unwilling to participate in any activity which doesn’t meet her approval. And, of course, like all outsiders and nonconformists, she gets a reputation for being strange. Even her mother is disappointed in her. After her death, “Janet’s name was no longer mentioned by those who had known her best. She was to be forgotten.”

Gloriously, she isn’t forgotten because every reader of this novel will remember Janet forever, the girl who either didn’t care or cared too much, depending on your perspective, the girl who simply wanted to live on her own terms.

And, in Scotland, depending on which side of that Scottish binary you’re on, that approach is either maleficent or magnificent.

To this Scottish reviewer, Janet is and always will be magnificent.