O Caledonia

“Animals, Sir Walter Scott’s ‘alert and wild’ Caledonia, and literature are central to Elspeth Barker’s marvellously worked and wielded first novel. The love of words, the recognition of their power to give a pulse-beat to narrative, made me think of Djuna Barnes as I read, and re-read, for pleasure O Caledonia.”

— The Herald (Glasgow)

“A novel which, like its heroine, is unique. Poetry flows as rich as blood through the veins of this narrative.”

— The Scotsman

“Beautifully lyrical evocations of place and emotion.”

— Kirkus Reviews

Introduction

We begin with a corpse. Sixteen-year-old Janet is sprawled “in bloody, murderous death” beneath the stained-glass window of her Highland home, dressed in her mother’s “black lace evening dress.”

This is murder most foul and, unfortunately, there is no shortage of suspects: Janet, it would appear, was not a popular child. Her family bury her with haste because “she had blighted their lives… She was to be forgotten.” The sole mourner is Janet’s jackdaw: he searches for her “unceasingly” and then “in desolation, like a tiny kamikaze pilot, he flew straight into the massive walls of Auchnasaugh.”

Despite this opening, O Caledonia is not a whodunnit; do not expect a tense search for a criminal. What you are holding in your hands isn’t an investigation of who killed this unfortunate girl: Elspeth Barker is too deft and subtle for that. It’s an account of Janet’s life, from birth to early death, taking in sibling bonds and betrayals, parental intolerance, the horrors and discomforts of adolescence, and the saving grace of books. The world you are about to enter is one of prickly tweed coats, of grimly strict nannies, of irritatingly perfect younger sisters, of eccentric household pets, of enormous freezing castles. It is one where girls are considered to be merely “an inferior form of boy” and Calvinist propriety is thrown into relief by the seductive wildness of the Highland landscape.

The news that the novel was going back into print and into bookshops has been met by those in the know with unadulterated glee. I’m not ashamed to say I clapped my hands. O Caledonia is one of those books you proselytise about; you want to beckon others aboard its glorious train. I have bought numerous copies as presents, pressing them into people’s hands with an exhortation to read without delay. I once decided to become friends with someone on the sole basis that she named O Caledonia

as her favourite book; I’m happy to report that it was a decision I’ve never had cause to regret. When I taught creative writing, I would read aloud the opening chapters to my students and I would constantly break off to say, “Are you hearing this? Do you see how good that image/word choice/sentence construction is? Do you?”

Barker was born Elspeth Langlands in Edinburgh, 1940, to two teacher parents. The eldest of five siblings, she grew up in the neo-Gothic Drumtochty Castle, Aberdeenshire. Her father purchased it from the king of Norway, or so family legend had it, with a view to running it as a prep school. The children lived there during term time, like Janet in the novel, studying alongside the paying pupils; holidays were spent by the sea, in their house in Elie, Fife. Elspeth gained a place at Oxford University, where she read Modern Languages. In her early twenties, she married the poet George Barker; they had five children.

Linguistic skill and deep semantic pleasure are evident in everything she writes. You can open this book at random and within seconds light upon a phrase that is not only elegant but shiveringly exact. A furnace “which throbbed and quivered in the boiler room.” Tragic Cousin Lila, who likes to identify fungi, covering “floor space in great sheets of paper dotted and oozy with deliquescent fruit bodies.” Janet’s hatred of the sea is explained thus: “There was so much of it, flowing, counter-flowing, entering other seas, slyly furthering its interests beyond the mind’s reckoning; no wonder it could pass itself off as sky; it was infinite, a voracious marine confederacy.”