Pining for the West

I’m grateful to Judith at readerinthewilderness who is planning on doing a personal modern Scottish fiction challenge. In the course of her research she came up with the writer Margaret Elphinstone. It is just typical that I had to find out about her from someone in northern New York. Judith has a lovely eclectic book blog.

Anyway, there were only two of Elphinstone’s books in the library and I chose Light. It is one of those large format paperbacks which have very large clear print so the 421 pages don’t take long to read. The book cover is from a painting by Francis Danby (1793-1861) titled Boat by a Lighthouse and I must admit that it was the lighthouse that made me borrow the book.

The story is set in 1831 on a very small island off the Isle of Man called Ellan Bride, which is only inhabited by two women and their three children. One of the women, Lucy, is the sister of the man who had been the lighthouse keeper before he was swept into the sea during a gale, and she has taken over his duties. The other woman is the late lighthouse keeper’s widow, Diya.

Their world is about to be turned upside down as the owner of the lighthouse had died and a more modern lighthouse was going to be built and a male lighthouse keeper employed, making the two families homeless.

However, when Mr. Stevenson of the Northern Lighthouse Company sends two surveyors to Ellan Bride to measure and study the land, Lucy and Diya have to give them hospitality until their work is finished.

I enjoyed this book and will definitely read more of Margaret Elphinstone’s work. She uses quite a lot of Scottish words and some Manx ones but I think it would be obvious from the context what they mean if you didn’t know them. A glossary might have been useful for some people. The ending was quite abrupt and leaves things hanging, which I don’t mind. I just imagine that whatever I want the outcome to be actually takes place. But maybe a sequel is planned for the future.

Some people have been wondering if there is such a thing as Scottish literature, as distinct from English and I think that there are definite differences. Although Elphinstone was born in Kent, she has lived all of her adult life in Scotland. Obviously she threw herself into the Scottish experience as I would say that her writing is Scottish, she even manages the different ways of speaking for the various characters from far-flung parts of Scotland.

For me though, it is the fact that Scottish writers always seem to give a much stronger sense of place and environment than English writers do; so making the setting and landscape just as important as any of the characters. In Light we have the surveyors Archie and Ben measuring and charting the whole island with their chains, but it doesn’t feel like info dumping, as it might have in another writers hands.

Light doesn’t really have that inner darkness (no pun intended) which is prevalent in so much of the older Scottish fiction which I am more used to reading. I don’t know if that is because the author is from England originally and so hasn’t been brought up in an atmosphere of Calvinism which I think influences Scottish writers, even if they are Catholic.

I’ve been wondering if Margaret Elphinstone got the idea to write Light from Bella Bathurst’s book The Lighthouse Stevensons, which I reviewed here.