O Caledonia Read online

  Praise for O Caledonia

  “This is an extraordinary novel: original, beautiful yet tough, with a sympathetic outsider of a heroine whose tragic fate is depicted on the very first page.… Barker’s love of the classics, her focus on mothers and daughters, and her remarkable evocation of landscape, should mark her out as one of Scotland’s principal writers.”

  —Financial Times

  “Elspeth Barker’s is a wholly original literary voice.… Steeped in classical allusions, rich in Scottish and natural history, fantastical in its highly wrought characters, this coming-of-age-novella is as passionately intense as it is wittily acerbic.… Propelled by the sheer force of words, the horrors and humours plunge on, observed by an eye both youthful and perspicacious.… The reader feels unalloyed joy, and occasional winces, on every page.”

  —The Independent

  “O Caledonia is like a bunch of flowers. Vivid images are handed to the reader one after the other and the colours are often freakish.”

  —The Guardian

  “O Caledonia is a Gothic coming-of-age story, the Brontës and Poe via Dodie Smith and Edward Gorey. Funny, surprising, exquisitely written—and brilliant on the smelly, absurd, harsh business of growing up.”

  —David Nicholls, author of One Day

  “A sparky, funny work of genius about class, romanticism, social tradition and literary tradition, and one of the best least-known novels of the twentieth century.”

  —Ali Smith

  “A wonderful oddity—brief, vivid, eccentric, written with ferocious zest and black humour.”

  —Penelope Lively

  “Witty, civilized.… With ravishing descriptions of nature which manage to be simultaneously rapturous and precise.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “A poetic and passionate description of adolescence. The words sing in their sentences. A world is evoked that has shades of the Brontë sisters and of Poe.… O Caledonia sets dreams and longing against Scottish righteousness and judgement, and the resolution is the blade of a skinning knife.”

  —The Times (London)

  “An absolute sumptuous treat of a book.”

  —Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory

  “A poetic and blackly comic account of an unhappy childhood in a remote setting, re-created so sensuously it makes you feel the wind on the heath. Exquisite.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  “Beautifully written.… A remarkable debut.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “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

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  O Caledonia! stern and wild,

  Meet nurse for a poetic child!

  Sir Walter Scott

  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.”

  In 1990, Alexandra Pringle, then a publisher at Virago, commissioned the novel based on a handful of “wonderful vivid, funny pages.” She says: “When O Caledonia came in it was perfect. It needed no editing. It was simply there in all its dark and glittering glory. And then followed two marvellous years of extraordinary reviews and literary festivals and prizes.” Elspeth herself, Pringle describes as “wild, darkly beautiful, and incredibly funny and clever.”

  I first encountered Elspeth at a distance, in the mid-1990s, when I was working as an assistant on the book pages of a newspaper. Elspeth was spoken of in hushed, reverential tones; she was one of the most valued contributors. Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that this exulted reviewer’s work arrived, not by e
mail or fax, but by post, in heavily sticky-taped old envelopes that often had shopping lists scribbled on the back. Inside were folded pages of prose in a flowing, looping script, and it was my job to input them into the computer system, to decipher and type them up.

  What she wrote was faultless: always incisive, unfailingly generous, piercingly intelligent. Occasionally, her handwriting would prove elusive and then I would have to phone her up for clarification. These calls were the highlight of my job, an all-too-welcome break from the tedium of office life. If the phone was answered—which was never a given—there would be Elspeth, her voice slightly husky, her vowels from another era, her diction punctuated by regular draws on a cigarette. Before the task in hand, there was always a bit of chat, about life in Norfolk, walks taken, parties attended, her grandchildren, the health of various beloved pets. It was not uncommon for the call to include a recitation of Greek poetry or for it to be truncated by a startled exclamation: “Oh, I must ring off,” she shouted once, “the pig’s got into the kitchen.”

  On one level, it’s possible to read O Caledonia as autobiographical fiction: the strict upbringing in a windy castle, the fiercely bright and non-conformist heroine who finds love and companionship only in the animal kingdom. But this would be a reductive take on a skilful and brilliant novel because O Caledonia is a book that at once plays with and defies genre. To give it that most vague and limiting of categories—the coming-of-age novel—is to miss its point and to underestimate the ingenuity and droll subversion Barker is employing here.

  In these 200-odd pages of prose, she gives the nod to a number of literary genres while deftly navigating her way around and past them. There are more than a few allusions to the Gothic Novel, to classical myth, to Scottish literary tradition, to nature writing, to Shakespeare and autofiction. If O Caledonia has literary parents, they might be James Hogg and Charlotte Brontë or Walter Scott and Molly Keane. Literary siblings might be I Capture the Castle or the Cazalet Chronicles, and not just because they are books which detail the travails of living in a large and dilapidated house. Janet has much in common with their young anti-heroines—unloved, unlovely, distantly parented, too intelligent for the milieu into which they are born.

  So, on the one hand, O Caledonia is about a young girl growing up, but, on the other, it isn’t. Its themes and reach go beyond this. Janet’s struggle is universally that of the individual against the forces of authority: it is the fight to maintain one’s identity against powerful odds. It is the conundrum of how to become the person you need to be while all those around you desire you to be someone else. Janet’s antagonists are first her parents, then her siblings, then her peers; we cheer her on as she resists the pressure to conform, to squash herself down. She learns not to say to her classmates, “I love the subjunctive… It’s subtle, it makes the meaning different… I call my cats subjunctives,” while still maintaining her individuality. “Only at night under the bedclothes did she allow herself the tiny luxury of muttering two expressions favoured by characters in Greek tragedy.”

  Towards the end of the novel, it becomes necessary for Janet to grapple with a new opponent: the opposite sex. “A dreadful thing happened. Knobby protrusions appeared on Janet’s chest. They hurt. The boys noticed them… and liked to punch them.” A summer visitor who accosts her more insistently, “twirl[ing] a dreadful dark pink baton out of the front of his shorts,” is summarily shoved into a giant hogweed patch.

  O Caledonia is the only novel Barker has ever published. “To have written this dazzling beauty,” says Pringle, “is a fine achievement of a lifetime.” We have the wealth of years of journalism but this is the only fiction of hers in print. This book, then, is the equivalent of a literary phoenix—rare, thrilling, one of a kind. Read it, please, with that knowledge.

  I confess that I harbour a frail hope that there might be a secret pile of pages in a certain idiosyncratic handwriting somewhere in a desk drawer in Norfolk. If this is the case, I am more than happy to once again offer my typing services for their transcription.

  —Maggie O’Farrell Edinburgh, 2021

  Janet

  Halfway up the great stone staircase which rises from the dim and vaulting hall of Auchnasaugh, there is a tall stained-glass window. In the height of its Gothic arch is sheltered a circular panel, where a white cockatoo, his breast transfixed by an arrow, is swooning in death. Around the circumference, threaded through sharp green leaves and twisted branches, runs the legend “Moriens sed Invictus,” dying but unconquered. By day little light penetrates this window, but in early winter evenings, when the sun emerges from the backs of the looming hills, only to set immediately in the dying distance far down the glen, it sheds an unearthly glory; shafting drifts of crimson, green, and blue, alive with whirling atoms of dust, spill translucent petals of colour down the cold grey steps. At night, when the moon is high it beams through the dying cockatoo and casts his blood drops in a chain of rubies onto the flagstones of the hall. Here it was that Janet was found, oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted and slumped in bloody, murderous death.

  She was buried in the village churchyard, next to a tombstone which read:

  Chewing gum, chewing gum sent me to my grave.

  My mother told me not to, but I disobeyed.

  Janet’s parents would have preferred a more rarefied situation, but the graveyard was getting full and, as the minister emphasised, no booking had been made. They had long before reserved a plot for their own ultimate use at a tiny church far off on the high moors; there was scarcely room for Janet there either, and under the circumstances they could not feel they wanted her with them. Her restless spirit might wish to engage with theirs in eternal self-justifying conversation or, worse still, accusation. She had blighted their lives; let her not also blight their deaths. And so, after her murderer had been consigned to a place of safety for the rest of his days, and grass had grown over the grave, Janet’s name was no longer mentioned by those who had known her best. She was to be forgotten.

  For a while her jackdaw remembered her and he searched for her unceasingly. High above the glen he floated, peering down into the woods where she used to ride. He swooped to the sunken garden below the terrace; there, in the rare warmth of summer, the air perfumed by azaleas, she had fed him with wild strawberries which grew among the ivy at the base of the wall, leaving none for her family. Down the back drive to the derelict stables he flew, then up to the castle again, hurling himself against windows, hopping about the high, hidden chimney pots, bobbing his inquiring head into one after another and provoking furious flusters and punitive forays from the jackdaw colonies within. Each night he returned to her barren room to roost. His house was the only thing in it now. Before, he had always perched on the end of Janet’s bed, but now he crept under cover and slept in loneliness. He lost interest in food and no longer joined the family at the dining table, jabbing his beak in the mustard, rearranging the spoons, guilelessly hopping through mounds of mince and cabbage. At last, in desolation, like a tiny kamikaze pilot, he flew straight into the massive walls of Auchnasaugh and killed himself. Janet’s sisters found him, a bunch of waterlogged feathers in a puddle, and they buried him. They shed bitter tears for him and for Janet too, then, but they knew better than to mention it.

  After that, only the speywives, the fishwives, the midwives, the ill-wishers spoke of her, endlessly rehearsing a litany of blame; for blame there must be, and no one could blame the murderer. Their voices whined and droned, spiteful as the sleety wind which slashed their headscarves across their faces as they huddled by the village bus stop, dreary as the wind which spat hail down the chimney as they took Sunday afternoon tea in the cold parlours of outlying crofts, where the Bible was open beside a ticking clock and rock buns were assembled on snowy doilies, malignly aglitter with the menace of carbonised currants. So they blamed the mother for giving the child all those books to read: “It’s not natural for a bairn”; they blamed the father for his ideas
about education; they blamed everyone and everything they could think of, but in the end there was grim assent: “The lass had only herself to blame.” The subject lost its appeal and was closed in favour of the living, who offer continuous material for persecution.

  Chapter One

  The sixteen years of Janet’s life began in wartime on a fog-bound winter night in Edinburgh. Her father came home on leave and looked into the blue wicker basket. He strode to the window and stared out at the discreet square of Georgian houses and the snow dripping from the bare trees. “It’s about the size of a cat,” he said.

  He returned to the war, and Janet and her mother went to live with his parents by the sea. The house was a square Edwardian manse, damp, dark, and uncomfortable as Scottish houses are, but set solid against the sea winds, facing inland into a beautiful garden and affording a warren-like sense of safety in its winding, stone-flagged passages, baize doors, and lamplit rooms where Grandpa wrote his sermons, his parrot made proclamations, and the blackout nightly excluded the warring world. The nursery in the attic overlooked the sea and Janet slept to the sound of foghorns booming out in icy waters; the lighthouse swept its beam over her ceiling, a powerful guardian. She woke to the cries of gulls. Someone gave her a purple silk flower, and she watched it growing towards her through the bars of her cot, as it came out of dimness, its petals lapped in all shades of mauve, violet, heliotrope. She did not know then that it was a flower but, as she lay gazing at it and as the days went by, she loved purple with an intensity that remained always. In that first memory she had found entrancement.

  And so the babe grew, among her adoring grandparents, her anxious mother, and Nanny, in her blue print uniform, Nanny who knew best and could control the ceaseless battle for possession which raged between Ningning the grandmother and Vera, the mother. When Janet was fourteen months old, her brother, Francis, was born, and this brought about a change in the balance of power, for now Ningning could have Janet and Vera could have Francis, a baby each and a most satisfactory arrangement. Grandpa emerged beaming from his study, the blue wicker basket contained its rightful occupant. Vera’s pedantic friend Constance wrote to congratulate her: “In the manufacture of human pride, there is no ingredient so potent as the production of a son.” Ningning said it all sounded like something from the grocer’s. Nanny, always ready with a grim bon mot, said that pride came before a fall. None the less, christening photographs show a happy family group, marred only a trifle by Janet’s gaping black mouth; she was yelling because the photographer had plucked her thumb from its comfortable residence in her palate. Nanny’s face lowered in the background.