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I was taught little in the way of Scottish history at school, but one thing my primary seven teacher did ensure we knew about was the Massacre of Glencoe. In graphic detail, we learned how 38 members of the Clan MacDonald were murdered, on the morning of February 13, 1692, by the guests who had accepted their hospitality.
The story is so well known that it’s difficult to see how it can be cast in a new light yet Susan Fletcher, in Corrag, succeeds in doing just that. The Corrag of the title is also the book’s narrator. Born in Northumberland, the child of an unmarried mother, she flees north after her mother is hanged as a witch.
She has inherited not just her mother’s reputation in this regard but her skills as a herbalist, and these same skills eventually lead to her being accepted into the lives of the Macdonalds.
As the book opens, however, she is far from the place she has come to love – and lies bloodied, dirty and in chains in a jail in Inveraray where she, too, faces being burned as a witch. Then she has a visitor, the Irish cleric and Jacobite supporter, Charles Leslie, who hopes to extract from her evidence to prove that King William was behind the massacre and whose letters to his wife, reporting on his progress, chart his changing attitude to Corrag. Leslie, the Afterword to the book tells us, was a real historical character.
This is a book not so much about events as about character – specifically the semi-legendary Corrag whose intense and lyrical account of her life is the driving force of the narrative.This is imaginative and poetic writing of the highest quality. Corrag lives not so much surrounded by nature but as part of nature. Early in the narrative her mother’s laugh is described as “many shrieks on a line,
like how a bird does when a fox comes by”, and while she obeys her mother’s instruction to be “good to every living thing”, she cannot quite manage her second injunction – “do not love people”.
Not loving is simply not an option for someone who understands “what powers are in us – in all of us. What we already know, if we choose to spend some time with ourselves”.
Ultimately this isn’t a book about one terrible event in history. It is rather a testimony to the power of the human spirit.
I loved it. |
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