A study of three novels - first published in Mslexia Magazine

Kathryn Harrison: Seal Wife (4th Estate)  Buy now from Amazon
Alice Thompson: Pharos (Virago)  Buy now from Amazon
Janice Galloway: Clara (Jonathan Cape)  Buy now from Amazon

These three novels are historical in that the writers have used historical scholarship and insight to drive their narratives and to call up historical and psychological sensitivities in their readers. As well as this, each of them, in a different way, demonstrates an unique vision and a use of language in creating a novel which will stand outside any crude categorisation.

Kathryn Harrison, author of THE SEAL WIFE, said in a recent interview: ‘Historical novels aren’t history any more than novels set in the future are accurate predictions… it’s just a way of projecting contemporary concerns onto another screen. I get sick of my own context and long to explore others.’

THE SEAL WIFE is set in 1915. Meteorologist Bigelow is posted to the makeshift Alaskan township of Anchorage. He logs and telegraphs the weather conditions with meticulous and obsessive accuracy. Harrison evokes Bigelow’s life with luminous insight as he sets about his job and his life in raw isolation among railwaymen and miners, fur traders and prostitutes. The arc of this fine novel maps Bigelow’s obsession with, and seduction by, a silent Aleut woman, a skin stretcher who lives in a tar-paper hut outside of town. The woman is a perfect metaphor for this un-giving, yet intoxicating land. 

Harrison’s immaculate research underpins this study of the cycle of the year, the dominance of the weather, the dogged survival of this obsessive and lonely man. The white weather kite that Bigelow builds and flies above Anchorage is an equally perfect metaphor for the need of the human spirit to rise above its cold dark environment.

Isolation and survival are also the core themes of Alice Thompson’s PHAROS, set on lighthouse twenty-seven miles from the West Coast of Scotland in 1826. The lighthouse keeper, Cameron, like Bigelow in Harrison’s novel, watches the sea and the weather. He too is meticulous, obsessive, setting about his lighthouse keeping like a priest attending to his office. In time he is joined by an assistant keeper, Simon, and later, his sister Charlotte. A woman – well it seems she is a woman – is swept ashore and the island becomes invested by ghosts, spirits and metaphysical happenings.

PHAROS is beautifully written, moves along swiftly in short chapters. Though there are nods here and there at historical facts (lighthouses and keepers in those times; the slave trade; voodoo) the novel is rendered as fantasy with some touches of magic realism. I did feel that the slavery sub-plot was rather worryingly under-imagined. The most engaging character is Simon, the assistant keeper who turns cartwheels of fire and carves dolls which speak. It is he who brings the woman-spirit to life. Yet in this very short novel, there seems to be no space to expand the characterisation, nor to explore the potential for myth and magic which would cultivate in the reader a proper suspension of disbelief.

I am torn between appreciating the careful lyrical style of this writer and concern for the structural problems of her novel. Perhaps there is a really big novel here, struggling to get out.

The central structural drama in PHAROS is the decay into madness of Cameron, the lighthouse keeper. The process of becoming mad is also evoked brilliantly by another Scottish writer, Janice Galloway in her novel, CLARA. In this novel, based on true lives, Clara Schumann watches as her husband, Robert, descends into madness and ends up in an asylum. 

It is six years since Janice Galloway’s last novel and with this tour de force she moves away from Scotland to Germany to explore universal insights about creative symbiosis in a male-female relationship, about madness, about cruelty and forbearance between those who claim love.

Composer Robert Schumann and young piano prodigy, Clara Weick, fall in love, escape from Clara’s dominant, controlling father and embark on marriage. Clara’s ambition, appropriate for the times, was to be a Good Wife and support Robert’s creative endeavours. In a scene shocking to Twenty-First Century eyes, Robert instructs Clara not to practice at her piano as it disturbs his composing. Clara teaches herself to run the household and eventually gives birth to eight children. At the same time, to support them all, she performs in the greatest concert halls in Europe and is an object of adulation and respect in musical circles which include Liszt, Mendelsohn, Brahms and Chopin. 

Always, Clara loves and respects Robert and handles his bouts of paranoia and growing madness with what seems like blind patience. This process is traced with a psychological insight and scrupulous imagination which could only have been evoked in the late Twentieth Century.

Galloway has structured the novel as a song cycle, thereby solving the problem of the leaden certainties inimical to the in writing of a novel based on a real lives. The looping rhythms of the text sweep the reader along effortlessly in this very long novel. Galloway uses typefaces and musical notation to remind the reader that words are not the only language she is offering.

Musical knowledge and extensive research pin this novel to very sure foundations. But Galloway’s particular gift is to render Clara and Robert with astonishing transparency, allowing us to empathise from our Twenty-First Century distance with this outstanding Nineteenth Century woman. A perfect historical novel, perhaps?

© Wendy Robertson