Q & A: Màiri Kidd on her new novel THE SPECIMENS

 

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"Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal."

Màiri Kidd is Director at the Saltire Society and was formerly Head of Literature, Languages and Publishing at Creative Scotland and Managing Director of Barrington Stoke, a prize-winning publisher. A fluent Gaelic speaker, she has an MA in Celtic Studies from Edinburgh University. As CEO of Stòrlann, the National Gaelic Education Resource Agency, she worked with Scottish Government, Bòrd na Gàidhlig and local authorities. Mairi is a contributor to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal’s books coverage and writes for broadcast, including Gaelic comedy series FUNC. The Specimens is her first novel for adults.

Up the close and down the stair, meet the women of Burke and Hare ...

Edinburgh, 1828. Two women - one rich, one poor - must navigate life against a frenzied backdrop of medical discovery, mob mayhem, and murder.

The home Helen shares in the slums of the Old Town with her lover William Burke could hardly be more different from Susan's dreams of an affluent existence as the wife of Robert Knox, one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But as people begin disappearing, these two very different women face an impossible choice. Should they protect what lives they have or tell the truth about what they know?

This is the story of the notorious serial killings of Burke and Hare, told for the first time through the eyes of two very different women, whose stories explore the depths of the human heart in a perilous, vulnerable world.

WR: Firstly, congratulations - this is a compelling read which I finished within three days. And the book is very handsomely produced by Black & White Publishing, with its striking cover. I certainly learned more about the exploits of Burke and Hare than I'd known previously, and looked up more details after finishing. You've written widely on folklore and feminism but I believe this is your first novel for adults. What was the impulsion behind it - was this something you'd been thinking about for some while?

Màiri: Thank you!

The motivation for writing about the Burke and Hare case was originally to give (fictional) voice to the voiceless. I have previously sought to do this by writing non-fiction and short fiction about Scotland’s ‘witches’, who have a lot in common with the Burke and Hare victims - mostly women, generally poor and powerless, and their bodies were destroyed after death. In both cases, also, there’s a general perception that the facts are well known and well understood whereas in truth, many people hold serious misconceptions about the witches and about Burke and Hare, and so there’s a lot to explore. I did flirt with the idea of working in short format and with non-fiction but Black and White encouraged me to write it as a novel and I’m glad they did.

WR: I was astonished to read in the Acknowledgments that you drafted the novel in just a few months, alongside your full-time job and a position on the board of MG Alba (the BBC's partner in delivering media services through Gaelic). Had you already done much of the plotting and research before that?

Màiri: First off, I should perhaps say I don’t recommend this as a way of working - there were various reasons behind the short turnaround, but of course it wasn’t ideal. Needs must, though, and I had to find a way to make it work to my benefit. I told myself if would be as though I were living the plot in real time – the killings happened over about a year – and the fact I was often working at night certainly helped with the dark atmosphere I wanted.

I hadn’t plotted the book at all before I began – all I had written was one of the victims’ narratives as a short story. I knew the basics of the story because I grew up here and it is very widely known, and I plotted it very strictly to help make best use of the writing time (I did deviate a bit from my outline in the end, but not much). In terms of research, I was lucky in that I wanted to know the facts but thereafter rather to avoid reading other people’s analyses of the whys and wherefores so I could make up my own mind. That saved some time…

WR: Your novel covers a span of nine years, not including the prologue and epilogue, and is told from the viewpoints of several characters - mainly Helen, the lover of William Burke, and Susan, the wife of anatomist Robert Knox. How did you decide on this structure? Was it difficult to contain so much information within the frame of the novel?

Màiri: I am a big fan of Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and wished that a treatment of that sort might be possible for the Burke and Hare crimes, but it just isn’t. The killings happened around sixty years earlier, before universal registration, the victims were often itinerant, and their remains were destroyed. It’s unlikely that we will ever know more than we do, and it’s not enough for a book. I hit, then, on the idea of writing about the women in Burke and Hare’s lives as a means of telling the story. Helen MacDougall immediately presented as a medium for the ‘action’, and as I began to read more about the case, I discovered that Knox the anatomist – Burke and Hare’s ‘client’ – had a wife no one knew existed because (as one of the few who knew her understood) she wasn’t of an appropriate social standing. From this I began to think in terms of a two-hander with victims’ stories interwoven throughout.

The greatest challenge I found I faced wasn’t the volume of information – the women don’t have all the information at any point in the book – but rather creating a twin plot. That took some tweaking of timelines so that the set pieces of Helen’s and Susan’s stories could work as one novel, and there were times I struggled with that. I had a lot of pieces of paper on my desk with dates and times for different happenings and I scratched my head a great deal.

WR: The selling of dead bodies will come as no surprise to the majority of readers, who will know what's going on behind the scenes at Tanners Close and Dr Knox's surgical theatre for some while before either of the women, Helen or Susan, begins to suspect. Yet there's still plenty of tension as events unfold - was this something you felt you needed to address?

Màiri: I think that was my greatest concern as I worked – how can one sustain tension when the ‘end’ is known to almost every reader? My ‘solution’ was to try to use that foreknowledge to create a sense of dread in Susan and Helen’s stories as the reader knows more than they do. In the stories of the victims, I wanted to focus on their lives, so their ends arrive very quickly and aren’t really the point at all. That was my tribute to The Five.

WR: As we enter into the relationship between Helen MacDougal and William Burke, Helen having been treated with horrible brutality by her late husband, we see that William can be kind, tender, considerate and even conscience-stricken, and sense that his fate could have turned out very differently. Did this come from your research, or was it your wish to differentiate between him and the apparently far more callous William Hare?

Màiri: This is something a lot of readers have asked me about – they struggle with the idea that Burke might have been likeable at times. I think he must have been, because he was able to earn the trust of some of the victims, and indeed one poor woman was handed into his care by a policeman, presumably on the understanding she’d sleep off the alcohol she’d drunk in the lodging house. His relationship with Helen was of long standing and seems to have held some level of genuine affection.

Fundamentally, I understood Burke as weak, uncontrolled, violent, self-pitying but broadly ‘normal’ – he wasn’t a psychopath, he felt remorse as far as we can tell, being dependent on alcohol and opium to sleep during the killings. The motivations of people without empathy don’t interest me, but the actions of people who should know better do.

Perhaps, too, there is some bias in me – when we learned the story as children, of course we learned that Hare turned on Burke in the end, and got off Scot free. That has rankled ever after in the Scottish mind, I think!

WR: The reader is encouraged to sympathise with Helen, who wants to see the best in her lover - but do you think she is too forgiving, to the point of complicity?

Màiri: I think ‘my’ Helen does something many of us will recognise – put kindly, seeing the best in people, or less kindly, turning a blind eye to significant concerns. People are terribly torn in their loyalties when loved ones do awful things – just look at the partners of perpetrators in the Pélicot case in France who have refused to accept the wrongdoing of their partners.

The level to which the real Helen was complicit is unclear and I had to make a call on that for the book. In my early reading around the case, I was struck by the fact that the Hares wanted William Burke to kill Helen, and Burke took Helen out of Edinburgh for a time, presumably to keep her safe. They seem to have left the Hares’ house thereafter. That doesn’t really speak to me of a fully complicit member of the ‘gang’. Again, though, I recognise my own biases! Helen was described by one commentator as a female ‘of the degraded sort’ and that perhaps made me pity her. Society definitely viewed people in that way, had no ambition for them and accordingly offered no safety net, creating the conditions for people without a strong moral compass to be motivated and able to do awful things, or to turn a blind eye.

WR: Susan, Dr Knox's (supposed) wife, is largely your own creation, and in her way she is just as much a 'specimen' as the bodies procured by Burke and Hare - kept in close confinement, repeatedly pregnant and used shockingly as the object of observation and experimentation. You cleverly use the device of the dolls' house and its miniatures both to emphasise her infantilisation by Knox and to link her story with Helen's, and later to reach a kind of resolution. How did this idea come to you?

Màiri: The idea of miniatures came to me in part because the plot links to a set of miniature coffins found on Edinburgh’s city centre volcano Arthur’s Seat in the early 1830s and which are traditionally associated with the killings. Recent research has suggested that the coffins were made with cobblers’ tools and that suggested a plot thread to me.

More broadly, the idea of collecting is key to the novel. During the period in which it is set, the real-life Knox manoeuvred his way into a role as curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum where – much later – Burke’s own skeleton would join the collection. The ethics of retention and display of medical specimens are the crux of the case and remain controversial into the present day. Interestingly, there is a tendency today to view the Burke and Hare story as though it was all about ‘medical progress’, whereas doctors like Knox were in it as much for profit and social advancement as the good of humanity.

Outside museums, ‘cabinets of curiosities’ were all the rage at the time, and the feminine equivalent was the baby house. I didn’t see Susan’s house as being infantilising – these were costly women’s treasures – but she does see it as a symbol of her imprisonment, only gradually realising she can use it to form a new allegiance.

WR: I found that one of the most moving chapters was the one from Abigail's point of view - a fictional character we accompany through a hard but successful day of trading that ends in her fateful encounter with Margaret and William Hare. These details of working life lived on the edge of poverty give the novel such colour and texture. The story of Burke and Hare has been recounted many times, but is yours the first to tell it entirely from the point of view of women?

Màiri: Generally the focus is on the murderers although I understand that one Victorian melodrama focused on one of the known victims - Mary Paterson, or, The Fatal Error by David Pae, originally serialised in the Dundee Courier. I don’t think anyone else has ever thought much about Susan, who really fascinated me. How could a man have a secret wife and seven children in a small place like Edinburgh?

WR: Having worked as publisher and editor, how did it feel to be sitting on the other side of the desk as an author?

Màiri: It is quite strange but I am lucky in that my publishers are very understanding and let me be involved in things like the briefs for covers. I hope that having experience on both sides of the desk means that I am not too hard to work with from my publishers’ perspective! I have of course learned immense amounts from working with so many authors I admire over the years (including one Linda Newbery – I think back very fondly on working with your books for Barrington Stoke, including the unusual experience of commissioning an embroidery for the book jacket of Tilly’s Promise!)

WR: (Ah, thank you ... I was so delighted with that cover!) What has been the response to the novel so far? It would make an excellent TV drama or film ... 

Màiri: The response has been very kind. It has been reviewed very positively in the most amazing places, and the Scottish press and booksellers in particular have been really generous. Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal. I am also enough of a publisher to know that books must be positioned and its beautiful jacket says ‘women’s fiction’ to me, so I have been especially pleased when it has been reviewed by male readers like Teddy Jamieson in The Herald who have said it spoke to them too.

WR: Finally - will you be writing more historical fiction?

Màiri: I am just finishing the first draft of my next book and yes, it is historical. It hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say an awful lot except that it is about a group of people who are generally incredibly well documented, but not for the period about which I am writing. It is set largely north of the Border but links to an iconic work of literature most people do not associate with Scotland at all…

WR: Well, that's an intriguing note to end on! Thanks so much, Màiri, for answering our questions and we hope The Specimens will reach many more appreciative readers.

The Specimens is published by Black & White Publishing.

Guest review by Helena Pielichaty: THE GIFTS by Liz Hyder

 

"Something extraordinary and haunting ..."

Helena Pielichaty is a children’s writer. She has had over thirty books published, mainly by Oxford University Press and Walker Books.

Website: www. helenapielichaty.com 

A few chapters in to Liz Hyder’s engrossing debut adult novel, a Thames boatman finds a woman’s body: ‘It is not the usual sort that Peter King drags from the murky Thames with his hook. She is older, for a start. Silver hair and pale white skin. She looks in good nick, he thinks to himself, as if she has fallen asleep underneath the waves …’

No, don’t roll your eyes. The Gifts is not another crime story of a hapless female victim and the detective sent to solve the case. This story is different, for the body is different. As Peter King discovers, this dead woman’s body has wings. Seizing the opportunity to make money, King hears that a surgeon is in attendance in his tenement. ‘Might you be interested in a curio, Sir? A body with some distortion to it, perhaps?’

Surgeon Edward Meake is most interested. The corpse is brought back to his basement to be analysed and dissected. As Meake severs the wings, his curiosity is piqued, his ambition ignited. Could this be his chance to make his name? To outshine his rival, the more flamboyant Samuel Covell? When, a little later, he takes possession of another ‘angel’, this time very much alive, his question is answered and his destiny is sealed.

Meake is one of five main protagonists in this multi-narrative, fantasy-reality tale set in 1840. The other four are women: Etta, a botanist, daughter of a deceased free-born Jamaican slave and a wealthy Shropshire landowner. Natalya, a gifted storyteller, forced to leave the serenity of her remote Scottish island to seek, she hopes, lodgings with her cousin in London. Eighteen-year-old Mary, the spirited ward of journalist Jos and the late George, reduced by circumstance to doing piecework by fixing buttons on cards. Finally, there is Annie Meake, Edward’s wife, a talented artist, desperate to conceive. Over the course of the 469-page book, Hyder skilfully nudges these characters towards each other, one powerful voice at a time, until they inevitably converge.

The Gifts is a page turner with a feminist twist. Through the four women’s experiences, we are left in no doubt about the unequal status of women in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when men felt they had ‘God-given’ rights over women and the law supported the notion. Yet it was also a time when women began to rebel against this misogyny. Although such ground has been well covered in fiction and non-fiction (the recent televising of Ann Lister’s diaries, Gentleman Jack, springs to mind as one example), by having two of her characters possess something as supernatural as wings, Hyder is able to explore these injustices in a freshly-imagined way. Wings can be ‘clipped’ and they can be used to soar – metaphors which are played well here.

It is hard to believe this is only Hyder’s second book, so seasoned a writer does she seem. Her first was the highly acclaimed Bearmouth, a dystopian YA novel which won the Branford Boase Award 2020 and the Waterstones Children’s Book of the Year for Older Readers 2020. Hyder makes the crossing from YA to adult seamlessly, bringing with her, perhaps, the caveat of making sure something happens on every page. Multi-narratives risk the reader losing track of the various strands but Hyder avoids this by keeping the chapters short and pacy. The result is something extraordinary and haunting and I applaud her for it. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

The Gifts is published by Manilla Press.

Guest review by Catherine Johnson: THE LONG SONG by Andrea Levy

Catherine Johnson has written many books for young readers, including her most recent, Blade and Bone, the continuing adventures of young surgeon and anatomist Ezra McAdam and his friends first encountered in Sawbones. Blade and Bone finds Ezra in Paris just as the terror begins. Another recent novel, The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, was shortlisted for last year's YA prize. She also writes for TV, film and radio.

One book I return to again and again is Andrea Levy’s masterpiece The Long Song.

It’s not just the central narrative, which breaks your heart more than once, in several ways, it’s the way the different characters frame those narratives. It’s a writers’ book about stories and how we tell them depending on who we are talking to, about how some stories are just too painful to be told and about how changing those stories is sometimes the only power we have.

I cannot recommend this book enough.

It is set across the nineteenth century, mostly in Jamaica although Victorian Hornsey gets a look in. The story of Miss July, born into slavery, fathered by a white overseer, living through the upheaval of the Baptist Wars and eventually becoming free. A woman who gives up her son to a white couple for his own betterment.

In July’s old age, her son, Thomas, returns from his upbringing and education in London to set up a printing press in Kingston. July agrees to set down the story of her life. But as anyone in any family knows, there is always more than one story.

I can imagine you might think – Another slavery narrative! Save me from Twelve Years a Slave or another remake of Roots! And I will nod my head; I could not watch Roots again. But there are a million reasons why you should read this, not including the experience of a time so often overlooked, and histories that are ignored.

Due to limitations of space and time I will outline just two…

Firstly it’s hugely funny. July, our main narrator is very dry and very unreliable. The horrors of how she came to be and how she exists, often descend into a kind of farce. And after all isn’t it a ridiculous, unbelievable situation? People arbitrarily owning other people?

Secondly it’s the actual writing of it. The structure of a story framed within a story. Of how we all shape our own history in order to be able to live and in order not to hurt those we love.

As someone who has scraped a living from writing for the past twenty years it is fascinating to see how artless and clever the structure of this book is.

It was on the Booker shortlist in 2010 and won The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

The Long Song is published by Tinder Press.