Elspeth Barker: O Caledonia

'Here it was that Janet was found, oddly attired in her mother's black lace evening dress, twisted and slumped in bloody, murderous death.'

So ends the first paragraph of Elspeth Barker's wonderful novel O Caledonia. Knowing the end at the beginning could, in lesser stories, destroy the impetus to read on. But after Barker's dramatic opening description of 'the vaulting hall of Auchnasaugh' - the remote, dilapidated home of Janet's eccentric, dysfunctional family, a place where eagles fly and hogweed flourishes - we are already hooked.

After starting off in the Edinburgh suburbs, then spending the war years with the grandparents, the family has moved to Auchnasaugh. Janet's father Hector has inherited it from a cousin, and thus solved the problems of her distant mother Vera, who has spent some time bicycling round Scotland looking for a house to call her own. The legacy, however. comes with a catch; Hector's Russian cousin-in-law Lila must be allowed to stay there too. Lila is sad, she has 'had her sorrows'; she and her ancient cat Mouflon inhabit rooms in the far recesses of the house, where Mouflon sleeps on a pile of fur coats draped over a stack of old whisky bottles. For Lila drinks, and also makes potions, collects fungi;

'For thirty-five years she had kept a record of mysterious botanical presences and absences...It was generally supposed she was mad and a sorceress as well'

and is rumoured to have poisoned her late husband (the facts of Fergus's death are even more bizarre.) Vera is determined to get rid of her.

Janet is a lonely, awkward, child with a wild imagination. She lives in an alternative world of myth, legend and poetry, and has;

'taken to reading Edwardian books about isolated, misunderstood young girls whose intelligence and courage were noticed only by one adult friend.'

She is drawn to Lila like a moth to a flame.   

And so life continues at Auchnasaugh, (a place so vividly described, so real, that it becomes another character in this strange menage). If you know the north of Scotland you will recognise this house and all its shabby (and definitely not chic), drafty, inconvenient ways. It jostles for the limelight in a cast of extraordinary, peculiar people, people who are nonetheless totally believable, such is Barker's skill in preserving their humanity and avoiding the grotesque. From Calvinistic, sour-faced Nanny, who retires to bed with a hot water bottle and The People's Friend, to Jim, the hunchbacked, unpleasant gardener, his hands caked with mud and often with blood, and Hector, who deflects Vera's complaints with empty platitudes, avoiding confrontation at all costs, we recognise these characters all too well.

And every so often, as if to highlight the family's isolation and difference, the outside world drops in, in the shape of Vera's awful friends the Dibdins, whose annoying children are all;

'good at sports, but also, something more important. They are good sports.' 

The Dibdins are straight out of Enid Blyton - a loathing for whom being one of the few things that unite Janet and her more conventional brother Francis - they say things like 'Gosh' and 'My word' and in the evening they enjoy 'a good singsong round the piano'. Janet despises them (and eventually gets her revenge on the especially horrid Raymond.)

There are also visits to the outside world; trips to the dentist at Aberdeen followed by tea and cakes at Fuller's, excursions to the zoo, where Janet despairs at the misery of the animals. It is these little outings that remind us that the story is taking place in real time; outside Auchnasaugh 'normal' things are happening, however much the family's home life may start to feel like a fairy tale. Janet is sent away to school, where she is predictably unpopular and lives only for the holidays and return to her beloved Auchnasaugh.

In many such stories the heroine is seen as a sassy, misunderstood, creative type - think of Jo in Little Women, Katy in Susan Coolidge's trilogy, Anne Shirley of Green Gables fame. Janet is nothing like them; she is difficult, bad-tempered, spiteful, badly behaved and sometimes just plain stupid. Contrary to her expectations she does not shine at school, nor become the favourite of the English mistress.

Yet there is definitely something about Janet. In her, Barker has succeeded in creating a young woman with whom we still empathise, even if we might not like her. She is as wild, as untameable, as Auchnasaugh; her sad end at once devastates and satisfies us, for it has come to be inevitable. She is a child out of time.

O Caledonia is the best book I have read so far this year. Barker's lyrical, thoughtful prose, in which every word is carefully chosen and none wasted, tells a haunting, unusual, and sometimes unexpectedly funny, story, and I'm very glad that #projectplaces persuaded me to rescue O Caledonia from my TBR pile.