In 1990, Alexandra Pringle, then a publisher at Virago, commissioned the novel based on a handful of “wonderful vivid, funny pages.” She says: “When O Caledonia came in it was perfect. It needed no editing. It was simply there in all its dark and glittering glory. And then followed two marvellous years of extraordinary reviews and literary festivals and prizes.” Elspeth herself, Pringle describes as “wild, darkly beautiful, and incredibly funny and clever.”
I first encountered Elspeth at a distance, in the mid-1990s, when I was working as an assistant on the book pages of a newspaper. Elspeth was spoken of in hushed, reverential tones; she was one of the most valued contributors. Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that this exulted reviewer’s work arrived, not by email or fax, but by post, in heavily sticky-taped old envelopes that often had shopping lists scribbled on the back. Inside were folded pages of prose in a flowing, looping script, and it was my job to input them into the computer system, to decipher and type them up.
What she wrote was faultless: always incisive, unfailingly generous, piercingly intelligent. Occasionally, her handwriting would prove elusive and then I would have to phone her up for clarification. These calls were the highlight of my job, an all-too-welcome break from the tedium of office life. If the phone was answered — which was never a given — there would be Elspeth, her voice slightly husky, her vowels from another era, her diction punctuated by regular draws on a cigarette. Before the task in hand, there was always a bit of chat, about life in Norfolk, walks taken, parties attended, her grandchildren, the health of various beloved pets. It was not uncommon for the call to include a recitation of Greek poetry or for it to be truncated by a startled exclamation: “Oh, I must ring off,” she shouted once, “the pig’s got into the kitchen.”
On one level, it’s possible to read O Caledonia as autobiographical fiction: the strict upbringing in a windy castle, the fiercely bright and non-conformist heroine who finds love and companionship only in the animal kingdom. But this would be a reductive take on a skilful and brilliant novel because O Caledonia is a book that at once plays with and defies genre. To give it that most vague and limiting of categories — the coming-of-age novel — is to miss its point and to underestimate the ingenuity and droll subversion Barker is employing here.
In these 200-odd pages of prose, she gives the nod to a number of literary genres while deftly navigating her way around and past them. There are more than a few allusions to the Gothic Novel, to classical myth, to Scottish literary tradition, to nature writing, to Shakespeare and autofiction. If O Caledonia has literary parents, they might be James Hogg and Charlotte Brontë or Walter Scott and Molly Keane. Literary siblings might be I Capture the Castle or the Cazalet Chronicles, and not just because they are books which detail the travails of living in a large and dilapidated house. Janet has much in common with their young anti-heroines — unloved, unlovely, distantly parented, too intelligent for the milieu into which they are born.
So, on the one hand, O Caledonia is about a young girl growing up, but, on the other, it isn’t. Its themes and reach go beyond this. Janet’s struggle is universally that of the individual against the forces of authority: it is the fight to maintain one’s identity against powerful odds. It is the conundrum of how to become the person you need to be while all those around you desire you to be someone else. Janet’s antagonists are first her parents, then her siblings, then her peers; we cheer her on as she resists the pressure to conform, to squash herself down. She learns not to say to her classmates, “I love the subjunctive… It’s subtle, it makes the meaning different… I call my cats subjunctives,” while still maintaining her individuality. “Only at night under the bedclothes did she allow herself the tiny luxury of muttering two expressions favoured by characters in Greek tragedy.”
Towards the end of the novel, it becomes necessary for Janet to grapple with a new opponent: the opposite sex. “A dreadful thing happened. Knobby protrusions appeared on Janet’s chest. They hurt. The boys noticed them… and liked to punch them.” A summer visitor who accosts her more insistently, “twirl[ing] a dreadful dark pink baton out of the front of his shorts,” is summarily shoved into a giant hogweed patch.
O Caledonia is the only novel Barker has ever published. “To have written this dazzling beauty,” says Pringle, “is a fine achievement of a lifetime.” We have the wealth of years of journalism but this is the only fiction of hers in print. This book, then, is the equivalent of a literary phoenix — rare, thrilling, one of a kind. Read it, please, with that knowledge.
I confess that I harbour a frail hope that there might be a secret pile of pages in a certain idiosyncratic handwriting somewhere in a desk drawer in Norfolk. If this is the case, I am more than happy to once again offer my typing services for their transcription.
~~~
Janet
Halfway up the great stone staircase which rises from the dim and vaulting hall of Auchnasaugh, there is a tall stained-glass window. In the height of its Gothic arch is sheltered a circular panel, where a white cockatoo, his breast transfixed by an arrow, is swooning in death. Around the circumference, threaded through sharp green leaves and twisted branches, runs the legend “Moriens sed Invictus,” dying but unconquered. By day little light penetrates this window, but in early winter evenings, when the sun emerges from the backs of the looming hills, only to set immediately in the dying distance far down the glen, it sheds an unearthly glory; shafting drifts of crimson, green, and blue, alive with whirling atoms of dust, spill translucent petals of colour down the cold grey steps. At night, when the moon is high it beams through the dying cockatoo and casts his blood drops in a chain of rubies onto the flagstones of the hall. Here it was that Janet was found, oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted and slumped in bloody, murderous death.
She was buried in the village churchyard, next to a tombstone which read:
Janet’s parents would have preferred a more rarefied situation, but the graveyard was getting full and, as the minister emphasised, no booking had been made. They had long before reserved a plot for their own ultimate use at a tiny church far off on the high moors; there was scarcely room for Janet there either, and under the circumstances they could not feel they wanted her with them. Her restless spirit might wish to engage with theirs in eternal self-justifying conversation or, worse still, accusation. She had blighted their lives; let her not also blight their deaths. 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.
For a while her jackdaw remembered her and he searched for her unceasingly. High above the glen he floated, peering down into the woods where she used to ride. He swooped to the sunken garden below the terrace; there, in the rare warmth of summer, the air perfumed by azaleas, she had fed him with wild strawberries which grew among the ivy at the base of the wall, leaving none for her family. Down the back drive to the derelict stables he flew, then up to the castle again, hurling himself against windows, hopping about the high, hidden chimney pots, bobbing his inquiring head into one after another and provoking furious flusters and punitive forays from the jackdaw colonies within. Each night he returned to her barren room to roost. His house was the only thing in it now. Before, he had always perched on the end of Janet’s bed, but now he crept under cover and slept in loneliness. He lost interest in food and no longer joined the family at the dining table, jabbing his beak in the mustard, rearranging the spoons, guilelessly hopping through mounds of mince and cabbage. At last, in desolation, like a tiny kamikaze pilot, he flew straight into the massive walls of Auchnasaugh and killed himself. Janet’s sisters found him, a bunch of waterlogged feathers in a puddle, and they buried him. They shed bitter tears for him and for Janet too, then, but they knew better than to mention it.