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 Cindy Jefferies: UNSETTLED GROUND by Claire Fuller

                                                    

"These characters are beautifully drawn by Fuller with their frailties and difficulties with the modern world laid bare."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars. Both titles are now available in paperback.

Unsettled Ground took me back to my teenage years, when I was made melancholy by reading some of the Russian classics. There is something of the plight of those serfs here. But while they suffered grinding poverty with no recourse to a better life, this is a very modern, English tale of two marginalised country dwellers.

Jeanie and Julius are fifty-one year old twins, living with their mother in a cottage that hasn’t been updated, perhaps ever. They do have a solid fuel Rayburn, but no bathroom and an earth closet outside. They scrape a living from their large garden, producing fruit and vegetables for sale, as well as eggs. Julius gets occasional work, but nothing permanent, while Jeanie has a weak heart and has never been employed outside the home. When their mother dies suddenly the twins are thrust into the horror of having no money for any sort of funeral, and their precarious existence begins to implode.

This novel made me both sad and angry at the plight of these two characters, especially Jeanie, who has few resources to cope in a society where data is king and electricity for charging gadgets essential. I have known people like this and these characters are beautifully drawn by Fuller with their frailties and difficulties with the modern world laid bare.

There was a point at which I wondered if I could bear to carry on reading but I’m glad I did. There are secrets in this family to be unravelled and they are revealed with skill. Unsettled Ground settles at last into an ending I could believe in without giving me sleepless nights. The gentle, unquestioned love between sister and brother is beautifully done throughout the novel. Highly recommended.

Unsettled Ground is published by Fig Leaf

More of Cindy's choices:

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

The Master by Colm Toibin

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frasier

Guest review by Jon Appleton: SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stewart

 

"This is a book full of heart ..."

Jon Appleton is a freelance writer and editor based in London.

‘She’d looked as happy as he could ever remember, and he was surprised how this hurt. It was all for the red-headed man. He had done what Shuggie had been unable to do.’

These devastating lines come halfway through Douglas Stewart’s debut novel, the deserved winner of the 2020 Booker Prize. ‘He’ is Agnes Bain’s youngest child, Hugh, known as Shuggie after his father.

The ‘red-headed man’ is Eugene, a self-interested, lonely widower who courts Shuggie’s mother Agnes and who is yet another person – specifically, a man – who ruins her. First there was her father, years earlier, who bitterly came to regret indulging his daughter, as do both her husbands. Yet Agnes’s beauty is compelling and irresistible; it also seems inviolable, enduring even when the demon drink impairs her capacity for everyday living, and in spite of the heckles and put-downs from the neighbourhood gossips on the bleak housing estate flanked on one side by the abandoned colliery and marshland on the other. In Thatcher’s 1980s Glasgow, Agnes is constantly condemned for daring to have pride in circumstances which are patently denigrating.

Shuggie, needing beauty himself, is fuelled by Agnes’s vitality. But it’s a thin fuel; one character observes of the boy at eight: ‘he had grown taller but he had also sunk somehow, like bread dough stretched much too thin. She could see he had slid deeper into himself and become more watchful and guarded. He was nearly eight now, and often he could seem so much older.’

Both Agnes and Shuggie accept the need to be normal in order to fit in but neither can manage it – mother and son form an unspoken pact to stay together even when everyone else abandons them. Agnes’s parents die, the husbands detach themselves (Agnes left her first husband but he soon stopped contact with his children; Shug Bain moves the family out of town and leaves them there), her elder children leave – first Catherine, who escapes to South Africa with her new husband, then finally Leek can endure no more and makes his own life in another part of town. But Shuggie remains. He would do anything for her.

Despite the title, Shuggie Bain is more Agnes’s story. Or perhaps there’s more to say of her because Shuggie, who is six at the beginning and in his mid-teens at the end, sees much but understands or concedes very little, remaining ‘watchful and guarded’. He keeps his precocity, and his sexuality, close to his chest, and is a quiet but potent presence in this story. In a strange way, the reader is protected from enduring an impossibly harrowing narrative.

Douglas Stuart writes with a light, lyrical touch that is not without humour. He includes a smattering of Glasgow dialect but there’s a power that transcends word choice and placement. This is a book full of heart. For all that the Scottish literary world is rightfully proud of Stuart’s achievement, he has spent most of his adult life in America and it felt like a sweeping American novel rather than a British one. Or perhaps it’s an ex-pat’s novel, addressing what’s been left behind but also carried with him.

I also think it’s like a prequel – the making of the man – because only at the very end, in the final paragraph, does Shuggie feel safe enough to outwardly display his real self. Shuggie Bain is apparently autobiographical, but it is fiction. I left it wondering where Shuggie is now, feeling hopeful.

Shuggie Bain is published by Picador.

See more reviews by Jon:

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

The Biscuit Factory Girls by Elsie Mason

An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

Carnivore by Jonathan Lyon

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

Guest review by Katy Evans-Bush: HOMESICK - WHY I LIVE IN A SHED by Catriona Davies

"We're all homesick."

Katy Evans-Bush is a poet (Salt Publishing), an essayist (Penned in the Margins) and a freelance writer and editor. Her blog, Baroque in Hackney, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2012. She is now living in Faversham, Kent, and her memoir of losing her flat, A Far Cry from Hackney, is forthcoming from CB Editions.

When I sat down to start writing my book about losing my flat and spending almost a year homeless, I knew that homelessness — maybe even especially hidden homelessness — is on the rise, but I hadn’t heard of a single book about it. The charities were silent on the subject; ‘hidden’ anything is a bit hard to count. The only two useful headlines in a Google search on ‘middle class homelessness’ were one telling me I would be very unlikely ever to become homeless, and a column in The New Statesman, by Nicholas Lezard, that was actually about me.

In July I discovered a new book, called Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed, by Catrina Davies — and let’s make no bones about it, this is an intensely political book. Catrina Davies was living in a shared house in Bristol, in a box room looking onto a brick wall. ‘Rent was a monthly trauma’. She was so consumed with the anxiety of money and ‘staying eradicated’ for monthly inspections (as she was off the lease) that she couldn’t work on the book she was trying to write.

She begins at the moment it all boils over: hunched on her bed, as her rowing housemates smash plates in the kitchen, she escapes into a tour of her old neighbourhood in Cornwall on Google Earth. She gets to the corrugated shack that used to house her father’s business — and in the days that follow, almost without meaning to, she makes a decision.

Homesick tells how Davies went to live in the shed. Instead of Virgil, she has Henry David Thoreau as a guide. She describes in minute detail the condition of the shed, the dynamic with neighbours, the reactions of her family and others, and how she eventually went legal (she still lives in the shed). Just as importantly, she contextualises how she came to fall foul of the housing crisis, which starts in her childhood. She talks about her mother’s travails as a private renter. (Private renting last year surpassed relationship breakdown as the number one cause of homelessness in London.) She is very clear about how, as a poor renter, you are effectively supporting a landlord.

She describes the local economy of Land’s End in detail, from the big summer houses lying vacant all year to the low-paid part-time work available to service them. Her sister and a few other people pay their mortgages by moving out of their homes in the summer — to sleep in fields, or vans — and renting them out to holiday people.

The first chapter starts with an epigraph from Walden: ‘the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life that is required to be exchanged for it, either immediately or in the long run’.

Davies’ memoir is also an attempt to glean meaning from her experience and its context. Her other guide is an old two-edition Oxford English Dictionary, the condensed one with the magnifying glass. She likes facts, and she looks things up.

‘I pulled out my phone and Googled the average wage for someone working full-time in Cornwall. My phone came back with £17,264. Half the houses in the window were on sale for more than half a million pounds. I ignored the houses in the window and Googled the average price of a house in Cornwall. My phone came back with £206,323. I typed in a little over the average wage — £18,000 — and estimated my outgoings at roughly £200 a month. the Halifax mortgage calculator said I would be allowed to borrow £51,000.’

It’s not just London. She is clear and insistent that what we need to do, to regain any sort of sustainable society, is recalibrate how we think about places. There is a field that gets sold in the course of the book. There is trauma, there’s making sense of her childhood, and there’s learning to go forward, but she can only do that last because of one thing. Her father actually owns the shed.

We need to recalibrate how we think about who we are: there are old friends whose paths have diverged irremediably from hers, and her different position in the place where she grew up is one of the most searching aspects of the book: ’I thought about my friend, how we had started off equal, then grown less and less equal over the years… Her story was intact. The structures her childhood had built were still standing…’

When I was homeless, one of my biggest anxieties was that I felt like a fraud: I looked fine, I had the same clothes on, I was still even working (some). Davies addresses this exact point in a characteristic way, writing: ‘I knew I was one of the luckiest people on the planet ... I wasn’t waking up on the side of the street in a cardboard box … Not yet, anyway ... I was safe and warm and educated. I had no right to feel miserable.’ But she did have a right to feel crippled by the anxiety and precarity of it all.

This is a thoughtful, sometimes funny, always interesting, deeply important book.

Homesick - Why I Live in a Shed is published by Riverrun.

Guest review by Ann Turnbull: A STATE OF FREEDOM by Neel Mukherjee

Ann Turnbull has been writing stories for young people of all ages since 1974. Her most recent book is In That Time of Secrets, a Young Adult novel about the persecution of Catholics in 1605, set in the Black Country. Find out more at www.annturnbull.com

I was immediately drawn into this story by the beauty of the writing and by the dreamlike events of the first chapter, in which an American man of Indian birth and his young son wander, sightseeing, in the ruins of an ancient palace. They are tired. It’s been a long day, and they’ve been delayed by an accident: the death of a workman who has fallen from scaffolding. They encounter the unsettling presence of a man who may be a spirit, a ghost, or a warning.

The remaining chapters follow the interwoven stories of several people: a young man from London visiting his parents in Mumbai; two determined women - Renu, a cook, and Milly, a cleaner – both of them seeking freedom from poverty; Soni, whose anger and despair drive her to join a guerrilla group; Lakshman, a desperately poor man who trains a bear cub to dance and tries to earn a living from it; and his twin brother Ramlal who leaves home to find work as a labourer in the city.

The story takes you to the heart of their struggles. Soni’s father, having borrowed money at high interest and travelled miles with his desperately ill wife, finds himself lost and defeated in the overcrowded hospital as he is sent upstairs and down, and up again, only to be brushed aside without help once more: “Soni’s father turned away, came outside and sat down on the steps. Against his will, his mouth twisted, like a child’s; he couldn’t make it hold its shape; he failed to make his crying resemble a dignified adult’s.”

The young man from London sums up his work, “My design job in London was flexible. I worked for a progressive, thinking-outside-the-box class of trendy outfit …” This is about as far removed from the lives of the other people in the novel as one could get, and he is uncomfortably aware of the very different lives of his parents’ servants, Renu and Milly, who live in the nearby slum and work shifts at several houses. Their earnings are not for themselves, but for the better future they are determined to win for their dependents.

Milly escapes to a kind of freedom, while her friend Soni’s family is left in despair. But all the people in this story had hope at first. Once, “on a golden afternoon when the boys were eight or nine”, Lakshman’s brother Ramlal had shown him how to see the face of Shiva in the mountainous landscape near their home: “Of course, Lakshman could see – he could see the god’s beautiful, lotus-like eyes, more closed than open, and the mouth, almost smiling … there he was, the great god Shiva, his face imprinted on Nanda Devi, his abode. And there he, Lakshman, was, gazing on it, a wonder revealed to a boy, and all the air, all the light and all the days were his to do what he wanted.”

These stories combine to give a deep insight into the lives of the poor in India. I’d recommend reading the book twice. On a second reading you make the connections more easily, and the writing is so beautiful, varied and engaging that it’s a joy to re-read, to experience aspects of the story falling into place, and to admire the intricacy of its construction.

A State of Freedom is published by Vintage.