Following on from yesterday’s post about Anita Brookner who began her career as a novelist at 53, today I’m looking at another late debut writer; Elspeth Barker wrote this gothic novella at the age of 51. It concerns a teenager though: 16-year-old Janet has been found dead at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in her mother’s black lace evening dress, mourned only by her pet jackdaw who then kills itself, and her siblings. The novella then goes back in time over Janet’s life, but this is less a murder mystery and more of a character study.
Janet is an awkward child. She gets angry. She’s socially ill at ease. She has frizzy, unmanageable hair. She gets car sick. She irritates her parents. She reads a lot and is more clever than her classmates ,which causes distance. She is miserable and life is unfair. Her family don’t fit in where they are.
“Anger and outrage welled within her: she would speak the truth. ‘It was because of the witch. I wanted them to see if the witch was there,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t talk such nonsense; you know as well as I do that witches are only in fairy stories; and you read too many of those if you’d like my opinion.’ The mothers exchanged satisfied glances: they all thought Vera went too far in her choice of children’s reading; and she smoked cigarettes and wore slacks.”
Soon, however, they inherit an ancient, crumbling pile in the far north of Scotland, and Janet loves it:
“Auchnasaugh, the field of sighing, took its name from the winds which lamented around it almost all the year, sometimes moaning softly, filtered through swathes of pine groves, more often malign, shrieking over battlements and booming down the chimneys”
“She had no fear of its lofty shadowed rooms, its dim stone passages, its turrets and towers and dank subterranean chambers, dripping with Verdigris and haven to rats.”
It also has her eccentric aunt Lila, who wafts around dressed in black collecting fungi and incurring the wrath of Janet’s mother Vera; Jim, a taciturn odd-job man skulks around the place.
“It was a rigorous life, but for Janet it was softened by the landscape, by reading, and by animals whom she found it possible to love without qualification. People seemed to her flawed and cruel.”
So although Janet finds solace, she is still an outsider. Very much a loner and isolated at her boarding school. We follow her through the years and what emerges is a young life of a deeply awkward, lonely girl.
“What use was it to be racked by pain for animals and the general woes of the world when she was unmoved by the sorrows of people she knew?”
O Caledonia is thoroughly gothic so you need a pretty strong stomach at times – something I don’t have, particularly around animals. But it’s superbly written, startling and atmospheric.
Overall, I was left with a feeling of sadness. Janet has a lonely life and then before she’s had a chance to carve out anything better for herself, she is killed. O Caledonia really gets under your skin.
I’m not sure this one’s for me but I’m intrigued by a jackdaw that kills itself
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It’s certainly very dark. It’s really well written but I’m still not sure I’m glad I read it!
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To begin with Janet sounded a lot like me as a child. I’m not sure if that makes me want to read it or not! But I think I just might 🙂
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When I was summarising Janet for the post I did find myself thinking she sounded familiar 😀 In fact, I’m pretty much like that now!
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Gosh! A new author to me too, and a very odd sounding one too. I’ll certainly give it a look if I come across it… 🙂
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I was surprised not to have heard of her – this is her only novel but she’s written lots of short stories, has been married to two writers and is the mother of Rafaella Barker. She does a lot of teaching and reviewing too – I’ll probably see her everywhere I turn now, but somehow she had passed me by!
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Congrats on your project to date: what a challenge! Do you have any sense that the girl in this story is awkward because of the way that the author has drawn her character (especially if older when she conceived of her), or is she simply awkward because that’s who she is? I’m always curious about how well we remember being young, and how writers capture that state successful (or, not) as they write through other ages.
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Thanks very much! Nearly there now but I still wonder if I’ll make it 🙂
The character is awkward because that’s who she is. In many ways it’s a portrayal of a childhood/adolescence of someone who finds themselves out of place wherever they go. I thought the author captured that awful feeling really well & I’m sure lots of people could relate to it. It’s just then overlaid with the less common gothic circumstances: big castles, pet jackdaws etc. Which are sadly less common!
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For me, the hardest part of a project like this is the nearing-the-finish. Sometimes it feels like all I can think about are the books which are the opposite of my current focus, as I round the final bend. 🙂
There should definitely be more pet jackdaws in stories, willing companions of course! I saw the news recently about the fledgling ravens in the Tower of London — not quite the same thing, but it’s not often one gets “bird news” in the feed!
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Yes, you’re right. I keep thinking about what I’m going to read after the end of May, instead of focussing on what I should be reading now 😀
That’s lovely about the fledging ravens – I’m going to see if I can find the story online – thanks!
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The animal thing would put me off – I’m already devastated at the thought of the jackdaw killing itself! Oddly, reading about awful things happening to people never upsets me nearly so much… 😉
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I was also traumatised at the fate of the jackdaw. People damaging each other aren’t nearly so upsetting as animals!
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