Scotland

Queen Hereafter: A Novel of Margaret of Scotland

mandy — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:00:00 +0000

In days of yore, the bards were a respected and integral part of the English and Scottish courts because of their ability to recount tales of recent and past glories through their gift for musical storytelling. In Queen Hereafter, Susan Fraser King tells the grand and sweeping story of a young English princess who found refuge alongside her family—including her brother the rebel prince Edgar who was fighting for the crown of England—under the protection of Warrior-King Malcolm Canmore of Scotland. Princess Margaret was pious, willful, educated, and raised to be a queen, but wanted nothing more than to become a nun and worship God in a monastery. However, this was not to be her fate.

King Malcolm had lost his first wife and, looking for a wife of royal blood, asks for Margaret’s hand in marriage. Margaret reluctantly agrees to the arrangement to ensure protection of her brother, mother, and sister. Eventually, the reluctant young queen wins over the hearts and minds of the Scots because of her piety, intelligence, charity, and the kindness she bestows upon her adopted people and land. To this day, Margaret, whose reign ended in the eleventh century, is honored as Scotland’s only royal saint who brought Scotland into the medieval age.

In this fascinating and impeccably researched re-imagining of the early years of Margaret’s marriage to Malcolm, Margaret begins to put her stamp on the royal court almost immediately. She brings Malcolm’s castles up to her cosmopolitan standards with his grudging approval; she advocates for giving alms in the form of food and coinage for the poor in the kingdom, including her dispossessed and homeless Saxon countrymen who are streaming into Scotland after numerous skirmishes with the Norman supporters of King William. She also talks her husband into providing daily meals for young orphans who she sometimes feeds with her own hand.

The novel is narrated through the voice of the young Queen Margaret and Eva, a beautiful and gifted bard (and granddaughter of Lady Macbeth) who refuses to relinquish control of the Northern territories of Scotland to King Malcolm. The illegitimate daughter of the deposed King Lulach, Eva is sent to Malcolm’s court as a royal hostage and spy for Lady Macbeth. Margaret asks Eva to accompany her as she devoutly prays and asks for forgiveness for her sins at all hours of the day and night. Eva becomes friends with Margaret and has a bird’s eye view of the young queen’s challenges and triumphs in this captivating and somewhat forbidding land. She eventually comes to love and respect the earnest, young, and beautiful queen, but is conflicted by her dual loyalties to Lady Macbeth and Queen Margaret.

In her author’s notes, Fraser King admits to taking some liberties with her recounting of this story, including the character of Eva, but she says that Margaret’s life is well documented by Margaret’s personal confessor, Bishop Turgot, prior of Durham, who wrote about Queen Margaret in a laudatory manner that is typical of the era, but also because the process for Margaret’s sainthood had already been initiated. In contrast, Fraser King’s Margaret is both saintly and flawed. In an interview, the author describes Margaret as “charitable and compassionate and loving, but strict with her own children who became strong land influential leaders. Yet she was terribly hard on herself, starving her body into what was probably anorexia, while praying constantly and always finding herself wanting no matter her accomplishments.”

If you’re a lover of riveting stories and historical fiction from this era, as I am, Queen Hereafter will not disappoint.

Written by: Gita Tewari, December 20th 2010

Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place

caitlin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Clare Cooper Marcus

Red Wheel Weiser

I felt deeply uncomfortable while reading Clare Cooper Marcus’ Iona Dreaming. Too uncomfortable, I thought—like eavesdropping on a stranger’s conversation with a long-lost friend.

Clare Cooper Marcus writes about a six-month, mostly solitary retreat spent on the small Scottish island of Iona. Twice a survivor of cancer, semi-retired academic professor, avid gardener, single mother of two, and author of several books, Marcus removes herself to Iona to focus on healing. In this book, she reflects on that experience and connects it to her wartime childhood spent in the English countryside, her experiences as a young wife and mother, and her cancer diagnoses and treatments. Throughout, Marcus crafts little vignettes and narratives from her adventures on the island, taking us through her brief stint as a waitress in a hotel café, long walks around the entire island, a run-in with bird-watchers, laundry day, and an encounter with the fairies.

If my brief description of the scope of Iona Dreaming leads you to believe it is incoherent, then the fault is my own, not Marcus’ prose. Even though the content of the book spans nearly her entire lifetime, Marcus’ writing conveys quiet and solitude. While reading, I often had the strange feeling that I was inhabiting Marcus’ innermost thoughts.

The intimacy of Marcus’ writing made me very uncomfortable when I first began the book, but by the time I finished it, I was grateful for it. First, I was delighted by the way she writes the island of Iona. Marcus’ academic work focuses on sense of place, and she writes about particular places with sensitivity and conviction. Second, Marcus writes herself with as much openness and sensitivity as she writes about Iona. I thought this an incredible connection and analogy: to think of oneself as a location or as a place.

While reading Iona Dreaming, it occurred to me that it could be very enlightening to consider how one conceives relationships to the external world in light of how one considers relationships to oneself: is the world (or oneself) an undisciplined thing to be mastered, or a natural thing to be appreciated? Feminists have written about the self and feminists have written about nature, but feminist work on place and on self with place could be quite fruitful. Though Marcus doesn’t say much about her relationship to feminism or to feminist thought, her lovely memoir may certainly provoke important feminist work in that area.

Written by: kristina grob, October 21st 2010

Seducing a Scottish Bride

admin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:11:00 +0000

By Sue-Ellen Welfonder

Forever

Divorced from reality, romance novels are fantasy novels by definition. Gorgeous, strong women with quirks instead of flaws and hunky, sensitive yet manly men hiding six-packs under nerdy glasses and three piece suits attract, repel, and then attract again in a frenzy of beautiful and expensive things and very detailed sex scenes. When I discovered Seducing a Scottish Bride had an explicit fantasy element, I was intrigued to see how the two similar genres might inform each other. I was also hoping for a good read. Neither hope was fulfilled. The story was simple: a young, headstrong woman from a Scottish highland tribe named Gelis McKenzie is brought to Castle Dare, a cursed castle owned by the Dare family, to marry the twice-widowed Ronan Dare, who is nicknamed the Raven. The death of his most recent wife in an accident Raven believes he caused, makes him reluctant to remarry. Attacks by the supernatural elements within the Castle and threats from the outside push the would-be lovers together until they admit their love and defeat the curse. Happy endings ensue.

Welfonder’s lack of knowledge about fantasy tropes, even those in the folklore she loves, is immediately apparent. Gelis possess a second sight that is ill-defined to an almost comical degree. She announces she inherited it from her mother just moments before she leaves for her marriage, and it reappears as only one other vision throughout the entire book. All of the characters seem to understand this, but she never gives the reader any explanation. The castle is a creepy, dark place, but Welfonder seems content to leave it at that. She never explores any of the potential supernatural aspects beyond the simple, giving the book the feeling of a Sci-Fi Channel movie. She gives the characters Scottish accents, but the phonetic spellings are poorly done, and detract more than inform the characters.

Welfonder’s love of Scotland shines through. She succeeds in instilling her vision of a place that is more of her imagination than fact, full of mystery and without flaw, into the novel. While I can’t recommend this novel without reservation, I commend Welfonder’s enthusiasm. Seducing a Scottish Bride is not an unpleasant read, but ultimately, it is not worth the time.

Written by: Taylor Rhodes, June 12th 2009

The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes

admin — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 13:41:00 +0000

By Tess Uriza Holthe

Crown Publishers

No point beating about the bush. Might as well get the finale over with right now at the top, instead of coyly building to it with flourishes of logic and neat exempla. Here goes.

This is one terrific book Tess Uriza Holthe has written. It's tough, slapstick, delicate, witty, bawdy, rueful and superbly crafted. One minute she throws her head back in laughter; the next she whips out a blade and knifes you in the ribs. Can't trust her at all, meaning she's the best sort of writer. There are lots of good characters, too, women and men: a Scots enforcer, three widows all once married to the same man, a band of gypsy pickpockets, a hard ex-con who finds happiness with a street urchin and vice versa, a Jewish mother and son, a master lace maker, a snoopy wife who suffers migraines, a young French woman who marries a rich good-hearted American only to discover that he's mentally ill and drug-addicted. These characters are unusual and engrossing, including the not-so-likable ones. In fact, now I think of it, most of the good ones aren't so good all the way around, and the bad ones aren't so bad all the way around - which is to say that they have dimension and are recognizably human.

However hard the surfaces are sometimes, and they do get hard, there are knots of love in these stories. But this ain't chick lit. No way. Rakish heroes and heaving bosoms do not abound in Holthe's worlds. She's too Annie Oakley smart. Miss Sure Shot, you know. Can throw a dozen glass balls in the air and get 'em all before they hit the ground. That good. A champ. And the dust jacket design is very nice, too, by the bye, and useful to see the locations, which are mostly the Italian and French Rivieras, the Côte d'Azur. So, to put the conclusion before the facts: I highly suggest you pedal your Schwinn to an independent bookstore and buy this collection of interrelated short fictions by Holthe. Read it. Savor it. Dig it. You'll be glad you plunked down your bucks. You'll be advising your friends to do the same.

So now that's clear, time for some convincing details. How about this fine, calm image of the exterior of a wealthy château in Cannes that the protagonist, Claudette, comes back to after a few years' absence in the U.S.:

The château is heartbreakingly beautiful in the soft twilight. Mauve and rose light upon the clay-colored exterior and black wrought-iron railing...Blue cornflowers and red poppies rustling in the warm breeze. Cypress and plane trees leaning in to shade the house. Ivy climbing alongside magenta bougainvillea. Two small red birds flutter and hop on the faded red-tiled roof, craning necks down, small jerks of their heads as they listen to her fumble for the copper skeleton key…

And those two birds!

Or how about this, a nice contrast, in which Clara thinks Alberto, the man she has just intentionally knocked into the bushes, is a thief, and confronts him. He will become her husband, of course.

[S]ince she was certain Alberto was a thief, albeit a good-looking one, ...she said, "You can stuff your hand up a pig's behind, you pig!" He blinked. "A pig's behind?" But she had called him a pig. Did she then mean for him to stick his hand up his own behind?

The superbly crafted aspect of these stories turns up in their interrelations, not only in the excellent, concise writing. A character who is the protagonist in one story will turn up as a minor character in the next. Three typical, young, American male tourists pass through a couple of stories. That street urchin links the Scots heavy to the ex-con. The gypsy pickpockets have two stories, but figure prominently in a third, the one in which the rich American meets his unkind fate. And so on.

A different facet of Holthe's craft is on display in the bashing but comic story "The Bruiser." She takes a big chance in this story with her Scots protagonist, Colin Fergusen. He's not exactly your typical enforcer: He likes yoga and aromatherapy, can't get a Ricky Nelson tune out of his head and admires American advertising. But even more, when he speaks or thinks, it's in the brogue of his country. Like this:

In America ye couldnay smoke in certain public places. That's what he heard telt. Nay joke. Imagine that. People claiming the air around ye. He'd never make it there. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke oot through his nostrils. Worked like a charm in calming yer nerves. If he couldnay had a smoke at will he'd be a goner.

Hoot mon, dialects are tricky. Some readers will turn off if it's not done perfectly. Well, Holthe not only pulls it off for Colin's speech and his interior monologues, she also has some fun by making the omniscient narrator's voice in brogue as well. Note above, for example, "He inhaled deeply and let the smoke oot through his nostrils." A sight quibble in this matter, though: To me, "yin" does not equal Scots for "one," and so every time this word appears it's a minor distraction.

Is every story equally good, then? Almost, but not quite. "Weightless," about a young American woman who steps into an affair with an Italian fisherman who is having an affair with his brother's wife, goes on too long. And it also seems not very well borrowed from a Henry James American-innocent-abroad-in-Europe narrative.

Nonetheless, she's a sly, funny coyote, Holthe is, when she tells her tales. And most of them, BTW, do not have little, pink bows at the end. Whew. Thank goodness. Just like life.

Okay, that's it. Enough. End of review. Go to your independent bookstore; buy a copy of The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes. You'll be glad you did, but I already said that, didn't I?

Written by: Neil Flowers, July 29th 2007

Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World

admin — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:11:00 +0000

By Kathleen Jamie

Graywolf Press

Jamie writes with sobriety, sensitivity and grace about the natural world and our human place within it. Her book is sparsely illustrated with delicate black-and-white photographs that picture many of her topics. She chronicles visits to places ranging from her own backyard to the Orkney Islands to Edinburgh and beyond, with a marked preference for those wilder spots where the human imprint may still be seen, but nature prevails.

In the Central Highlands she explores a glen scattered with “abandoned shielings,” small stone huts used by villagers for thousands of years as summer homes while they pastured their cattle on the fresh upland grass, and she reflects on a by-gone way of life. “Up here they made milk, butter and cheese, and it was women’s work. What a loss that seems now: a time when women were guaranteed a place in the wider landscape, our own place in the hills.” Living on and with the land is important to her; she pays attention to the seasons, the birds and fish, the trees and other plants, going about in all kinds of weather, walking, biking or sailing. At times she is with her children or friends; often she is alone. Always she strives to be alert, to catch that moment of revelation, “to glance up from my own everyday business, to see the osprey or the peregrine going about hers.”

The book opens with a chapter called “Darkness and Light” about the winter solstice, magical scenes of the half light of northern Scotland, her own desire “to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy,” and her pilgrimage to Maes Howe, a Neolithic stone cairn built with a long passageway arranged so that each evening, for a few days around the solstice, a ray from the setting midwinter sun shines through to light the chambered vault, like a promise, like a kiss. Nearly a dozen chapters later Jamie’s book closes with a joyous dolphin sighting off the coast of Tobermory, a celebration of life. Along the way she helps us see the value and vulnerability of an ancient, yet ever new, world now threatened by contemporary technology and human carelessness.

Buy this book, read it, scribble down lines you want to share with others, talk about them, reflect on them, enjoy a renewed connection with nature as well as a heightened awareness of our need to protect it.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, July 28th 2007