It's hard to know how to categorise this. It's historical fiction,
certainly, and it's a murder mystery complete with investigating
detective, and there's enough paranormal flavour to make it (I suppose)
fantasy, so take your pick. The setting is Stornoway, in the Outer
Hebrides, and the dialogue is littered with plausible Scottish dialect
and Gaelic, but don't let that put you off, because it's all very easy
to read.
The plot is simple. It's 1882, and policeman Edmund
Forrester is asked to investigate the disappearance of a young man from a
fishing boat. The boat owner swears he fell overboard during a storm,
but the victim's parents think there's more to it and the incident
occurred in the Sound of Shiant, a mysterious body of water near the
Shiant Islands hedged about with rumour and myth. Naturally, as soon as
the hero begins to investigate, he's faced with opposition and downright
obstruction from most of the locals, with a few more helpful souls and
even just a teaspoonful of romance (sort of). Oh, and there’s a comic
relief sidekick, as well.
My biggest problem with the book is the
historical details. I don't know what Stornoway was like in 1882, so
I'll assume the author's done his research there (although I did wonder a
bit at the idea of pubs with booths), and London's Metropolitan Police
did indeed have a Criminal Investigation Department and a small number
of Detective Inspectors at that time (although only just). And all the
characters seemed to smoke cigarettes constantly which seemed a bit
unlikely. It was the divorce that got me. Forrester is divorced from his
wife, yet he attends her second wedding, which takes place in church
with the bride wearing a white dress amidst the usual celebrations. Why
did they divorce? Because he devoted too much attention to his job.
Now
divorce in 1882 was a very rare business indeed (a few hundred cases a
year), and involved proving in court adultery, cruelty, desertion,
bigamy or something equally major (and no, being obsessive about your
work was not one of the allowable causes). There was always blame (one
spouse had to sue the other for divorce), and even a hundred years later
it was incredibly unusual and stigmatising for both parties. To this
day it remains difficult to remarry in church (in England, anyway;
Scotland is a little different). As for the white dress - you had to be
rich to wear anything so impractical (even for a first wedding). It's
not that any of this was actually impossible, I don't suppose, but the
implausibility of it grated on me, and I almost gave up at that point.
What
kept me going was the setting, the beautifully described Western Isles
(or Outer Hebrides, or nowadays Na h-Eileanan Siar) and the waters round
about. There was Gaelic and dialect scattered about everywhere, which
seemed to my inexpert ears to sound exactly right. My Gaelic is
negligible, but even so I recognised a few phrases and even spotted the
odd occasion where a character mistranslated for the non-Gaelic-speaking
main character.
Unfortunately, a nice way with language isn’t
enough, and the book was a disappointment to me on almost every other
level. The murder mystery wasn’t any mystery at all, the supernatural
aspects were revealed in the prologue and the ‘hero’ is one of the most
uninteresting and unlikeable I’ve ever come across. Determination to get
to the bottom of things is a fine quality in a detective, but in this
case it manifests as an aggressive refusal to give up, wilful disregard
for his own or anyone else’s safety and some breathtakingly stupid
decisions. Plus he decided at an early stage that the supernatural
element was involved, even when he was told repeatedly that such things
belonged to mythology. It’s an odd thing when the sophisticated English
detective is more superstitious than the traditional islanders. A
strange book. I couldn’t get past the improbabilities, but for those
with a better developed ability to suspend disbelief this is a perfectly
readable little story. Two stars for the atmospheric setting and the
Gaelic.
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