With the author highly recommended by family and this novel being on the Booker shortlist, it seemed a promising choice for my birthday book token. A tale of family, secrets, relationships, sexuality, religion, loneliness, tradition, conflict… pretty much the entire human condition to be fair.
Set in a remote, tiny community on a far away Scottish island we follow Cal as he returns from university on the mainland. Back amongst his farming, weaving, and fishing neighbours he is a very much in-the-closet young gay man struggling with an ambition to expand his horizons into the wider world at odds with his sense of responsibility to family, albeit one with a very messy background.
The sense of geography is terrific… there is such a deep feeling of the island, the landscape, and the sea. There is also an other worldly sense of place created by the traditional and harsh religious order that rules the area. Almost every character is riddled with varying degrees of duty, shame and repression; the distance from the “normal” world allows the local elders to rule with bizarre communal authoritarianism, a cultish level of control.
After a third of the book I knew it to be brilliantly written but just as I was starting to wonder where the story was heading the plot started to shift gears and I was hooked. The internal battles within the key characters are built on such deep foundations, with layers and layers of history. Like all great works of fiction, the universe of the book and its internal rules become a living, breathing world inside your head.
Will definitely read more of Douglas Stuart; but first two other Booker prize nominees are waiting on the shelf…
