Book Reviews and Recommendations
By Brian Toal
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
Kathleen Jamie is Scotland’s Makar, our national poet. ‘Surfacing’ and ‘Sightlines’ made her name and their groundbreaking style and blending of prose beautifully evoke our natural world, giving us insights and new perspectives to things which we perhaps often overlook or at least tend to take for granted. In ‘Cairn’, Jamie combines poems, personal notes, mini essays and fragments of writing accumulated over the years to mark her 60th birthday. It’s a retrospective of sorts, but also takes the pulse of where we are now, as well as where we might be headed. She reminisces on her own childhood whilst considering the childhood her children had and her grandchildren will have in our state of permacrisis.
One of my favourite extracts is ‘The Handover’, a clever piece which recalls her marching in a climate protest during COP 26 with her son and his friends. This sparks a memory of earlier protests against the poll tax and the Iraq war. She feels that the younger generation don’t understand the history of struggle, don’t have context or really understand politics – but maybe their passion is enough? ‘The Summit’ is Jamie at her best. It seems to be a poem about someone sitting on a hill recounting what they see but is a clever metaphysical exploration of humanity. ‘Erratic’ uses the conceit of glaciation to consider change and loss. This is a beautiful, thought-provoking collection which will encourage you to look at the seemingly everyday with a fresh perspective.
Kala by Colin Walsh
Three friends get together for the first time in years, the remaining members of a group which was inseparable in their teens. A chance to catch up, to reminisce, to chew the fat? None of that, thanks very much. The disappearance of Kala in the summer of 2003 is a spectre which haunts the group, a presence in the corner of every conversation, a shadow which casts shade on the present. The remaining members of the group are all complex in their own particular way: Joe has hit the big time with his music career but is clearly struggling with fame; Helen is a writer in Canada, but desperately miserable with her existence; Mush is still coming to terms with his facial disfigurement and the fact that he still lives with his mum.
At first, the novel feels a bit like Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’. This impressive debut novel has also been compared to Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’, one of my favourite books of all time. I can see why. The complex interpersonal relationships are there, the slow unravelling of a murky past, culminating in fast-paced drama and suspense.
Walsh’s Approach
There is a quote from Margaret Atwood at the beginning of the book which neatly sums up Walsh’s approach to the novel: “You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing.” This holistic way of looking at time – all events are happening right now because they’re in your head at the present time – give the past events in the novel more immediacy.
What happened to Kala in 2003? Why have her remains just appeared on a local building site when a huge search at the time revealed nothing? What really happened in her final hours? Who was there and who knows the truth? Helen is determined to get to the bottom of things. But her difficult relationship with her family and with Mush and Joe makes this task even more difficult. The fact that the Gardai are closing ranks and hindering her enquiries makes her even more suspicious of a cover-up.
Walsh forces us to consider how people are remembered. All three of the remaining friends have different memories of Kala. All true to them, none of them true to her. How is Kala remembered by the general public? “Everything reduced to persona. Social media was like plunging into sewage. I scrolled through the comments. The ones that claimed to speak for Kala were the worst. Her name, reduced to a rhetorical device, fresh meat for likes and Retweets. So much noise, and Kala is nowhere to be found inside any of it.”
The King’s Witches by Kate Foster
You may remember Kate Foster from ‘The Maiden’, a book I reviewed in The Westender recently. That historical novel reimagined a real legal case of a woman accused of murder, condemned to death by guillotine. In this new novel, Foster again bases her plot on a true story, that of Anna of Denmark, betrothed to James VI, in order to form an alliance between the countries and to provide an heir to James.
Much of the reign of James has been well documented. In particular his obsession with witchcraft and the persecution of women which followed, which is why Foster chooses to focus on Anna and her connection to two other women: Kirsten, her lady-in-waiting, and Jura, a young housemaid. How their stories align, intersect and influence each other is interesting. Foster employs the same technique as last time – each chapter devoted to a different character. This helps the book to tick along quickly. And helps to give perspective but can be annoying as a style if employed too often.
What Foster does achieve, though, is the same as she achieved in ‘The Maiden’: highlighting the power which men (had / have) over women, and the lack of power even the most exalted of women were able to wield. Ultimately, ‘The King’s Witches is an absorbing and enjoyable novel as the reader can feel smug guessing before the big reveal, or surprised if you didn’t guess. Either way, it’s a perfectly entertaining historical romp.
Books available from all good bookshops including Waterstones, Byres Road
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