Hag, Whore, Witch; Historian, Novelist, Witch.

Historical fiction is a kind of resurrection, a breed of reanimation.  It is also a form of remembering.  This last, I think, is what distinguishes it (in the broadest sense) from history proper.  History is a process of reconstruction, of sifting and analysing, of weighing and measuring evidence; historical fiction, on the other hand, is an act of willful imagining. But more than that: it is about trying to know something that you cannot know, by intuition or empathy. It is an emotional bypass, around the facts, to the heart of the matter.  It is trying to get somewhere that historians cannot truly go, except in the rarest of cases.  To fill in the gaps left by time, with characters that speak and act and feel truly.  It is a delicate operation, requiring a deft hand.  One way or another I have said all of this before. And this too: it is difficult to get right; it is easy to get wrong, and the two - the good and the bad - are generally clear-cut in my mind.  Corrag by Susan Fletcher - her third novel, but the first that I have read - is a strange beast, then.  Because it isn't particularly good at being historical fiction, but it is certainly good at something.

It is set in Scotland in the late seventeenth century, and takes as its central narrative the massacre of the Macdonald clan at Glencoe in 1692.  Really the book has just two characters: the eponymous Corrag, who lived in Glencoe and witnessed the violence, barely escaping with her life, and is now condemned to die as a witch; and an exiled Irish Jacobite minister, Charles Leslie, who has travelled to the Highlands to investigate and expose the killings.  The unlikely pair are thrown together in the snow-bound settlement of Inverary.  Unable to travel to Glencoe himself because of the weather, Leslie chooses instead to stay and use Corrag as key informant for a pamphlet he intends to write against William of Orange.  She is sitting in a dank prison, dirty and still bloody from the wound she took at the massacre, looking for all the world like a story-book witch, and desperate to tell her story.  Their lives intersect very neatly, and the story spools out from them - first in the form of Corrag's first person testimony, and then in letters Leslie writes home to his wife in Ireland.

But all this is beside the point.  The novel is only about the massacre at Glencoe insofar as it has to have a narrative arc to justify its central character and poetic style.  Its real subject, as the title suggests, is Corrag herself.  The massacre simply gives her an excuse to recount the history of her life, from childhood all the way to Glencoe and beyond that to her prison cell. So we learn that she was born near Hexham in England, the illegtimate daughter of Cora, a woman of dubious and confused morality who has determined never to love any living thing for her own protection:

Do not feel it, she told me.  She took my wrist, or my chin in her hands and said never feel it.  For if you love, then you can be hurt very sorely and be worse than before.  So don't love, she said. Do you hear me? She made me repeat what she said.

Neither Cora nor Corrag is a good fit for her time.  They are both too wild and instinctive by far, at the end of a century when acting intuitively was a sure-fire way to draw suspicion on yourself.  Conformity and the subjugation of the will to authority were the order of the day, and Susan Fletcher captures the narrow way of the late seventeenth century world very well (much better, incidentally, than Maria McCann in The Wilding).  There is a sort of inevitability to the persecution that mother and daughter suffer, first in the form of low-grade everyday insults, and then as life-threatening violence.  No wonder Corrag claims they were 'for places' rather than people:

I was always for places.  I was made for the places where people did not go - like forests, or the soft marshy ground where feet sank down and to walk there made a suck suck sound.  Me as a child was often in bogs.  She [Cora] was for places too.  She trawled her skirts over mud, and wet sand.  She was brambled, and fruit-stained, and once she lived in an old waterwheel, upon its soft, green wood... Some people cannot have a peopled life.  We try for it.  We go to markets and say hello. We help to bring the hay in, and pick the cider apples from their bee-noisy trees, but it takes very little - a hare, or a strange moon - for hag to come. Whore. They raise an eyebrow, then. They call for ropes to bind us, so that we grow so sad and afraid for our small lives that we turn to empty places - and that makes them say hag even more.  She lives on her own.  Walks in shadows, I hear... But where else is safe? No towns are.  All that was left for Cora was high-up parts, or sunken ones.  Places of such wind that trees were bent over, and had no leaves. Normal folk did not go there, so we did - her, and I.

When Corrag is sixteen years old her mother is taken for a witch and hanged, but not before she has thrown her daughter onto a horse and sent her (rather cryptically) north-and-west to safety, repeating her instruction to never love.  Thus begins Corrag's life of wandering, with nothing but her grey mare, vagabonds and vagrants for company - one of the many homeless and directionless strays on many road.  (You see them in the parish registers for this period, in extraordinary numbers: burials of nameless strangers and wanderers found dead by the wayside. The flotsam of any society.)  She meets others along her way, but keeps company with no-one for long, drawn onwards by her mother's instruction to go north-and-west up as far as the Scottish Highlands.  It is only when she stumbles onto Rannoch Moor, looking for all the world like a waif from beyond the fairy hill, that she finally reaches a place which feels like a home:

I was twenty days on Rannoch Moor... I came to know bogs, in the dark.  I used stones to cross them.  I ate roots... But my cloak picked up branches and thorns, as I walked, and my body felt so tired from a year of north-and-west.  I stood very still in high places.  I crouched by lochs which were dimpled with rain, and heard their dimpling, felt it on the backs of my hands, and I thought I am meant to be here. I am meant to see this rain.  I was done with roaming.  By a rock with lichen on it I said I will walk for one more day.  And where I am in one day's time, I'll stay.  This was not a spell.  It was just a tired soul speaking.  I told this to the moor, but the moor already knew.

The place is Glencoe. At first it is the wild lonely beauty of the place that sooths her wandering, motherless heart.  It is difficult to imagine anyone so friendless as she is: there is perhaps not a single living soul who knows her name, and she owns nothing.  No wonder she finds as much solace and meaning in a moment of connection with a stag as we would with another human being; her sense of self is an incredibly fragile but determined thing.  She is dogged and unbending, her desire to live as strong as that of any animal struggling for a future, and almost inhuman because of it. 

It is not long though before Corrag meets and befriends the infamous clan of Glencoe Macdonalds who so enraged the Orange King with their inveterate loyalty to the Stuart Kings.  They become curious about this wild, otherworldly creature in their valley, and the MacIain, the clan chief, understands at once that she is like them, an outsider:

...he gave a wry smile - a knowing one.  Witch? he said.  Ha. Witches and Scots.... We have both had our hammers, have we not?

That was all he said to me.

Ostracised, spat at but tenacious, she is looking for a place to be herself beyond the strictures of society just as they are.  Glencoe is a refuge; a place where the surge and throttle of history is weakened by geography. It is a world beyond the world, beyond even time itself.  A place where even an oddball stray like Corrag can find a home, and perhaps a man to love in exactly the way her mother counselled against. 

Which is why Corrag is not really a historical novel.  The massacre, the interview with Leslie, the political machinations - all this is just setting and trappings to Corrag's emotional odyssey and her intense feelings about the natural world.  Events are window dressing; Fletcher's story doesn't live in them - they aren't necessary. It could conceivably have been set at any time, in any place, in Britain's chequered past.  Rather it is a fantasy about removing oneself from reality, and cutting out a space for the dispossessed of history to shelter.  In this sense, and in others too, it is really a romance.  Undeniably, it is sentimental.

Still, historical fiction or not, I thought it was beautiful. I saw the book as much as I read it; it was a visual experience, a kind of conjuring.  You can see from the passages that I've quoted that Fletcher writes in an affected, poetic mode, and I imagine it is a little like marmite.  If you like it, you really like it.  If you don't like it, it spoils everything else.  It so happens that I do enjoy it, despite its obvious manipulative streak.  I like the hyper-sensitive, melodramatic pitch, and the way Fletcher uses the repetition of simple words and phrases, with off-key tenses, to build voice, momentum and meaning.  For me it is Susan Fletcher who is the witch.  Corrag is only her seeming.  By which I mean that I read this book, and enjoyed it, as much if not more for the word-smithing than for the story.  The story, I think, is ordinary.  Beneath the smooth sweep of narrative this is really a book about what words are, and their power. More than that, it is about a writer flexing her considerable muscle for effect.  To see the reader twitch and sigh; it is about bewitching. It is an incantation, a lesson in seduction. Good novel?  I couldn't possibly say with any objectivity, since I'm under the spell.

~~Victoria~~

Comments

[Teresa]

Oh, I agree, and I love your point about the story-telling itself being a sort of spell-casting. The language is so stunning that I found it nearly impossible to look at the rather ordinary story with any objectivity.

I think the story was reasonably interesting, and there were enough hints and subtle foreshadowing that I was curious about some events (like Corrag's relationship with Alistair) without being absolutely certain of what would happen, but there were also no huge surprises or highly original or thought-provoking ideas. The pleasure is not in the story itself, but in the telling of it.

[Danielle]

I read a lot of historical fiction--probably a lot of it is the 'bad'(or maybe should say unsuccessful) kind, and I was wondering what makes it really good? The fact that you can't separate the story from the setting? And of course all the other things--good writing and storytelling... So often historical fiction is belittled as not really literary and easily dismissed, so I like reading your posts on it and am curious to know who you think, or which books have been really successful at what they're trying to accomplish. I'm glad to hear that even though this might not be the best example of really good historical fiction it still succeeds as a good story on some other level. Now I need to add this to my list of books I want!

[fliss]

I haven't read this one, but I will keep my eye out for it now.
I do think there is something very powerful about Susan Fletcher's prose; I read 'Eve Green' a few years back, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Annabel]

I was hoping for more history, but eventually I was beguiled by the beauty of the thing, even though it was a little long for me.

[Liz F]

Just came across this review - rather late I'm afraid, but I'm glad I did as I know just what you mean.
i have just started reading Corrag, having read both of Susan Fletcher's other books, and I am utterly captivated by it and the world it creates around the reader.
I imagine that this will become, like Eve Green, one of those books I buy for friends but only those I know will appreciate it!

[Laura]

A really interesting review. I personally didn't enjoy this book very much (I've reviewed it on Amazon so won't repeat myself here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R83SIA2YYAV2T/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0007321597&nodeID) but I did love Susan Fletcher's first two novels, so am definitely not averse to her prose style in general. The Marmite point is very apt :)