Guest review by Graeme Fife: A TELLING OF STONES by Neil Rackham

"Fireside lure ... the heady smell of peat, the slight shifts on the chair by the hearth, the storyteller’s enhanced view through the refining aperture of the stone..."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

A legend told on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides talks of a storm and a shipwreck – no rarity in those gale-lashed waters – and a princess drowned in a pool below Baile na Cille on the island’s windswept west coast. A princess by her clothes but, strung round her neck, a seeing stone, destined one day to come into the possession of the Brahan Seer.

The story triggered a devouring curiosity in Rackham, who was drawn to the island through lifelong friendship with Catriona Nicholson, in whose cottage near Baile na Cille, where ‘a peat-brown river frets at the edge of the sea’, much of the book was written.

A seeing stone has one or more natural holes piercing it. A small aperture focuses the vision to close definition of distant objects – think the pinhole in a camera obscura – so it’s not surprising that these stones acquired a certain mystique. Not only could an early sailor use one as a sort of proto-telescope, but those with that other sight, the power of divination and prophesy, might associate their powers of foretelling with privileged touch and use of the stone. For, as Rackham tells us, where ‘all stones hold a remembrance of the past, Seeing Stones, or stones of vision, hold memories within them of things yet to come’. This reference to the fluidity of memory – proleptic and analeptic - is central. We dwell in the continuum of memory, whose eddies and currents tug our imagination through the enchantments, the bewitchments, of both light and shadow. The Latin for story, fabula, gives us fabulous, remember, and Rackham’s narrative is charged with the interweave of time and the magic of the stones, the constants of the sea, its everlasting presence and the unpredictability of its moods, of storm-knots and calms, of the troublesome gift of the sight…

The legends grew and the seeing stones acquired a potent force in the island’s saga which extends far across the flint-backed ocean to the other islands and the old kingdoms of Norway and Iceland. The introduction to this fascinating delve into the lore and the Hebridean spinning of magic and metamorphosis – young women into creatures of the briny flood - tells us ‘princes, pedlars, crofters, selkies and the Lewis Chessmen all encounter the awesome power of the Seeing Stone. Even the Blue Men of the Minch who drag folk and ships to a watery death cannot defeat it’.

You know about selkies…? Find them here.

The Brahan Seer, the Lewis Chessmen, The Blue Men of the Minch, that treacherous northern Charybdis, the choppy maw ready to engulf any unwary vessel and its crew…ah, but it’s tempting to reel off the stories recounted in this most absorbing, fascinating book, but this is a review, not the Reader's Digest version.

I begin with the scope and range of its telling. Rackham is a good companion. He tells the stories in an unaffected style, allowing the seduction of their fireside lure to entice without any need to embellish. The heady smell of the peat, the slight shifts on the chair by the hearth, the storyteller’s enhanced view through the refining aperture of the stone. As all good stories begin, there is that moment when the story-teller says, or gestures, behold…The tale of the Seeing Stone leads us into a fine mesh of myth and the importance of myth, for there is no tale without some hinterland of mortal disquiet or rapture, tragedy or wonderment. How else do we make sense of the perplexing riddles of our life but in the fabric of story? Stranger than fiction? You betcha.

Laced through the rich lore which accompanies the stories per se, here, too, are animadversions ‘on the nature of: Foretelling with Stones…Second Sight…Celtic Knots… Ravens…the Penalties of Foretelling…’ this last springing from the moving story of Brahan the Seer, himself.

As in other ancient cultures, a dangerous confrontation may be averted by the challenge of riddles – the Blue men of the Minch fling a cryptic rhyme at the Princess aboard the threatened boat. Undeterred she answers and they, knowing they’re beaten, ‘uttered loud curses and, slipping from the bow, disappeared beneath the waves’.

'It has been said of chance,’ Rackham writes, ‘that although it may be too intricate to understand, it is never without its own purpose.’ Wow. And, my word, what a concluding sequence...when 'all was caught in an eternity of stillness'.

My highest praise of this book, illustrated with superb line drawings by Alisdair Wiseman? It took me, last week, to Lewis.

A Telling of Stones is published by Acair

See also: Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown, reviewed by Graeme Fife

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, reviewed by Paula Knight

Moby Dick by Herman Melville, reviewed by Graeme Fife

Photographs by Graeme Fife

Guest review by Caroline Pitcher: THE NORTH WATER by Ian McGuire

"Sometimes I had to snap the book shut to keep Drax and the savagery inside, but not for long. The suspense was too much to bear."

Caroline Pitcher loves writing stories. It’s like living lots of lives, not just one. 

Her books include The Winter Dragon, Lord of the Forest, The Littlest Owl, Please Don’t eat my Sister, Diamond (Kathleen Fidler Award), Kevin the Blue (Independent Story of the Year),The Shaman Boy (East Midlands Arts Award for Cloud Cat),The Gods are Watching, Eleven o’clock Chocolate Cake, Mine, Silkscreen (Arts Council Award), and short stories such as Tam the Eldest, The Dolphin Bracelet and Our Lady of the Iguanas. 

Caroline has just ordered expensive new glasses ready to begin that novel that’s been in her mind all summer. See also her website.

Behold the man. Henry Drax, harpooner, smelling and sucking his fingers after readjusting his crotch, murdering a stranger and raping a boy in the very first chapter. You have been warned.

Drax is the wild, unholy engineer of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations. Even when he disappears into the vast indifference of the Arctic Circle, you’ll sense him out there, waiting. He’ll burst back into the story like an acid attack. No unhappy childhood or abuse excuse for Henry Drax. He is beyond reason, a morally null thing.

In the port of Hull in the eighteen fifties, Drax joins the crew of the Volunteer, a whaling ship owned by the rich and ruthless Baxter, who now has other plans for it. Baxter has hired Brownlee as captain, an odd appointment seeing as Brownlee’s last vessel was crushed to matchwood by a berg. Brownlee must appoint a ship’s doctor, and he thinks that Patrick Sumner, a shortarse hopalong, will do, because he is cheap and seems easy-going. Unlikely as it may seem, it is the Homer-reading Sumner who will stand up to Henry Drax. When first they meet, Drax stares at him for a moment as if deciding who he is and what he might be good for.

Sumner boards the claustrophobic, faintly faecal-smelling Volunteer. He is a disgraced army surgeon with a reputation in tatters, no explanation given yet. Every evening he takes twenty-one grains of opium to blur his past and after a concoction mixed with rum he dreams of wandering over the ice fields, seeing unicorn, sea-leopards, walrus, storm petrels, albatross - and polar bears.

Sumner is isolated from the crew as the ship slumps and pitches amid the seething hillocks of an adamantine sea. This is a world of harsh beauty and horror. Think mythic Melville, but also Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness, and the Old Testament fierceness of Cormac McCarthy. Any women writers here?

Sometimes I had to snap the book shut to keep Drax and the savagery inside, but not for long. The suspense was too much to bear. The story gripped me. It was a while before I noticed it’s told in the present tense, which can irritate. Not here.

The scenes of seal-killing and whale-hunting are inevitably violent, almost too much for a veggie Greenpeace reader. I wonder if there’ll be co-editions in Japan, Norway and Iceland... There’s shock after cruel shock, blood, pus, shit, rape, murder, odd sex and non-stop swearing, but there are rare rays of beauty to light the desolation; the sky is dense with stars and upon its speckled blank, the borealis unfurls, bends back, reopens again like a vast and multi-coloured murmuration. There’s also sly humour. When a priest woos the Esquimaux with crucifix, candles and Jesus, they find it secretly amusing, a form of exotic entertainment in the otherwise dull expanses of winter.

This is McGuire’s second novel and it won the RSL Encore award. He has recreated a lost world. He grew up near Hull, my distant hometown. My father worked in High Street, a few doors up from William Wilberforce House, so I loved the Hull setting with the cobblestones, Queen’s Dock, Bowlalley Lane, the Turkish Baths, the De La Pole Tavern and the Tabernacle, Charterhouse Lane, and yes! Caroline Street, but my favourite street, the Land of Green Ginger, is much too magical to feature here.

The narrative plunges like a roller-coaster built on ice. Sumner the surgeon sinks lower, even lower than you could imagine. There is some kind of redemption, and the ending has a scene of profound loneliness which has haunted me since I first read The North Water last year.