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Of Stone and Sky is a hard novel to classify. One
hundred years of highland living are the canvas on which Merryn Glover shapes
her story of a tenured family of sheep farmers facing the constant threat of poverty
and worse. There’s a mystery at the heart of the story – the opening scene is a
eulogy for the life of Colvin Munro, the most recent of forty generations of
shepherds who have worked this Scottish landscape. Colvin went missing seven
years before but his possessions turn up regularly and inexplicably over the
years following.
From here, we are introduced to the wider Munro family, Colvin’s
alcoholic and bankrupt brother Sorley, named after the great poet Sorley MacLean,
the boys’ indomitable mother Agnes, their father Gid, Mo, a kind of half-sister
cum mother figure, Colvin’s Bolivian wife Liana, their children Alex and Tess
and a startling array of secondary characters. An entire glen, a Scottish
estate with its tenant farmers, gamekeepers, serving staff, travelling folk and
sundry locals is painstakingly brought to life. The characters who populate the
book are rich and alive, the story mysterious, the history sad and affecting.
So the novel is a family history, then, but it is more than
that. These people are rooted in their landscape, and that landscape – the Scottish
highlands that once was the home of clans living and working in unity but was
cleared after the Jacobite rebellion and fell into the hands of estate lairds
whose husbandry and motivations were questionable – is a difficult place, as
harsh as it is beautiful.
This is a land that is steeped in history. Forty generations
have come and gone. Life is different now but the memories of the past remain,
echoing through the glens into eternity. It is no coincidence that Sorley is
named after Sorley MacLean, nor is it a coincidence that the book ends with a
quote from MacLean’s masterpiece, Hallaig. The opening of that work might
serve to give a sense of the thematic direction Glover’s impressive novel: “Time,
the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig.”
In times past, these glens were cleared. Families were
replaced by more lucrative sheep. When the trade in wool began to weaken, the sheep
were replaced by hunting, estates becoming home to fashionable shooting parties
attended by the rich and famous. The Travellers who for generations had crossed
the country selling their wares stopped travelling and a whole way of life died
out within a single generation. Life was never easy but it grew harder. Yet, through
it all, these communities held to the thread that bound them together. The
ghosts of the past – time the deer – revolved and recycled. Old connections
cannot be broken. Memories are passed on, father to son, mother to daughter,
generation to generation, the old to the new. Communities persist. Nature
endures. And so does love, because it is the most perfect emotion of them all.
Perhaps, after all, Of Stone and Sky really is quite
easy to classify. It is a love story. Love of land, love of community, love of
family, love of life.
