Peter Urpeth

Set in Glasgow and The Western Isles, Peter Urpeth’s first novel tells the story of a modern-day shaman, Sorley MacRath. It is beautifully written and intellectually exciting, but also moving and redemptive.

The writing stirs you in the way that northern landscapes and climate can stir you. It is intensely evocative of the wildernesses of north-west Scotland; and not just in the descriptions of weather and sea and mountains. Its language is sonorous and archaic, with "the billowed grandeur of Biblical Gaelic"; it is "ancient in its tone and melancholy", like Gaelic song. (The breathtaking "Ninth Stone" epitomises it.) As such, it is very effective at conveying the idea that island folk carry a legacy of hardship, suffering, and sorrow with them, even in contemporary times, and when they are far from home. Just like the crofters & fishermen who are his ancestors, Sorley's life is shaped by experiences of loss and violent death (often by drowning). The northern-ness of the language reaches beyond Scotland too: the grain of the Arctic north in Sorley and his kin, with their preference for the shielings out on "the moorland wilderness", Sorley's love of the Fir Chlis, and his attachment to the fox-piss-damaged Rasmussen volume underline this connection.

Its themes are intellectually stimulating too. There is much poetic exploration of big ideas like culture, ancestry, and time. On a number of occasions I was reminded of Eliot's line in Burnt Norton that "all time is eternally present" - like when Sorley takes a handful of silt from the pool and holds it "until it was again an ice flow, flowing from a glacier, far inland"; or when he is compared to "a salmon [running] back to its first home, the gravel bed, the river source"; or identified with An Sgarbh's "ruddy sail" as he walks out into the waves cursing Shony. The novel is full of stories-within-stories - most obviously in the Thirteen Stones section; but also in Danny's story, and Danny's story of Davy; and in the story of Sorley's great-grandfather the whaler and his second, Inuit family. The effect is to suggest that the underlying truth and meaning of human selfhood is connectedness to one's culture & ancestry, even when it is characterised by grief & pain: and as with Breabadair Diluain, turning away only defers & magnifies it.

It is also very interesting and moving on the subject of mental illness. Its "great sorrow", and its associated isolation and alienation are powerfully conveyed. But there is a duality as well: for Sorley, it brings "elation", even "ecstasy" and "euphoria"; and through it, he eventually finds himself, Neonach as he is. Fittingly, there is unresolved ambiguity over whether hie second-sight is 'real' or not. On the one hand, there is Sorley's drunken vision lying outside the pub under "woven plastic sacks...flecked with the remains of raw meat", a parody of the shaman’s calf-skin hide; but on the other, there is nothing to contradict the miraculous resurrections of Angus or Callum.… (mere)