Undoubtedly one of the best overlooked novels that should be read by everyone, ‘O Caledonia’ is republished today by W&N in their ESSENTIALS collection.
It gave me such joy to read it, every page filled with emotion and colour, recognition and admiration, that I want to give a copy to every bookish person I know, and if they dare not to like it, I would stop talking to them for a long time, possibly forever. It also made me want to write reviews again.
From the outset we know that Janet is going to die. We feel universal pity extended to young lives lost, but we are also told that her parents won’t mourn her. In fact, nobody will. Except her jackdaw, who ‘like a tiny kamikaze pilot’ will ‘fly straight into the massive walls of Auchnasaugh’ and kill himself.
Auchnasaugh, the field of sighing, is a dilapidated castle where Janet lived most of her life, but it did not belong to her. Her father Hector, who always believed that ‘a girl was an inferior form of boy’, a condition which could be improved with education, set up a school for boys in the castle, which his girls attended. So Janet grew up among the school boys, first bored by their sporting games, then defending herself against the persecution of hormonal, sexually charged good sports.
Anyhow, the card of death is on the table, and only then are we allowed to enter Janet’s short life, to get to know her, and against all logic of not emotionally investing in a character that is going to perish, to fall in love with her.
Which is impossible not to do for several reasons. One is that she is absolutely brilliant, witty, perceptive, funny. She is a child whom parenting books might categorise as sensitive. Her feelings are strong and take her whole being – she lets pain and compassion pass through her heart, take over. She loves nature and animals and books. And yet she is so lonely.
Janet is like no one I’ve ever met, yet everyone will recognise themselves in her because of the mastery with which Elspeth Barker captured the pain of growing up. Even if you were so unbelievably lucky to be born in a family which adored you and supported you no matter what, still the memories of adolescence make you cringe. Then most are not unbelievably lucky.
We have to love Janet because no one will. Not her parents, ordinary people not knowing what to do with an extraordinary child, not her siblings, preoccupied with growing up themselves, not even the lonely exile from Russia, her aunt Lila, whose own destiny is more heartbreaking than that of Anna Karenina. She is growing up like her favourite plant, hogweed, or Heracleum giganteum as she would call it, with no care from a tender gardener, disdained and ignored. She too can cause blisters and burns if handled harshly. Yet there’s no toxic poison flowing through her veins, just pure longing to be noticed.
We would be weeping over Janet’s fate if it weren’t for the sparkling humour with which Elspeth Barker writes the novel – the drearier the scene, the more comical it becomes. Aunt Lila’s quick trip to Edinburgh to resettle as an old lady’s companion is deliciously black-humoured, I read it again and again, and laughed shamelessly.
As you reluctantly approach the final pages of the book – if only it lasted longer! – the tension is unbearable, despite or rather because of the fact that you know what is going to happen.
‘And so, after her murderer had been consigned to a place of safety for the rest of his days, and grass had grown over the grave, Janet’s name was no longer mentioned by those who had known her best. She was to be forgotten.’
Defying this miserable destiny, ‘O Caledonia’ is reprinted again and again, making sure there is always someone out there who will remember Janet.