Since the launch of ‘No Safe Anchorage’ I’ve been travelling around Skye and further afield to Inverness, talking to all sorts of different groups and selling copies of the book. I’ve also been a travelling bookseller, taking books, not only to bookshops but to Skye’s Gaelic College, craft shops, post Offices, galleries and petrol stations. My journeys were mostly by car but I also took the ferry over to the island of Raasay, close to Rona where the story begins.
Display of local artists’ work in the Portree Post Office window
My second book, ‘No Safe Anchorage’ is coming out in October. Here is a preview of the cover. I’m very pleased with this dramatic image. As a seascape it’s different from the cover of my first book but both pictures are brooding and atmospheric.
This magazine will be available soon. It will feature articles about
creative people, involved in Design, Art,Craft and Literature who live and work on the Isle of Skye.
Do have a look at the website: www.Skyemakers.Com
I’m very excited by this prospect. Like ‘Love and Music Will Endure’ it is set in the nineteenth century but in other respects it is very different. Robert Louis Stevenson makes a guest appearance but the main character, Lieutenant Tom Masters is a creation of my imagination. The action moves from the Highlands of Scotland to Canada.
I shall write more about the story nearer publication but for now I shall quote the comments made by Donald S. Murray. He’s the acclaimed author of, ‘Herring Tales,’ ‘The Guga Stone’ and many other books of both prose and poetry.
An evocative and fast-moving tale set in Skye and the West Highlands, ‘No Safe Anchorage,’ like its title, swirls with risks and dangers. It invokes the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson whose childhood it portrays. With its sharpness of dialogue and tight, concise description, it also conjures up hat writer in other ways, creating an adventure story that is as breathless and exciting as some of that nineteenth century novelist’s work.’
Since publishing my book I’ve done numerous readings across Scotland, from the Western Isles to Selkirk in the Borders and Wigtown in Dumfries and Galloway. This has been an enjoyable and stimulating process.
More recently I’ve embarked on a different kind of talk,’Researching the life of Mairi Mhor – reconciling fact and fiction.’ I’ve spoken to full houses at the Gaelic Society of Inverness and for Portree Local History on Skye.
The Gaelic Society of Inverness has a prestigious history. It was established by Charles Fraser MacKintosh, M.P. one of the leaders of the Land Reform movement. Mairi campaigned for him and helped him gain election as a Crofter M.P. The Society attracts eminent academics to speak at its meetings. So I found it quite a daunting experience. However I believe it’s important to publicise the thorough research done by historical novelists as some famous historians, David Starkey for example, has stated,’We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludricious.’ That’s a view that should be challenged!
‘A most readable, entertaining and thought provoking historical novel’.
Roger Hutchinson is a respected writer of numerous books on Highland topics. His best known work is probably ‘Calum’s Road’ about a crofter on the island of Raasay. After Inverness County Council refusing to construct a road from his village he built one himself. The book became the inspiration for a film about the struggle of African villagers construct their own road.
Roger writes reviews regularly in the West Highland Free Press
Here is what he said in his review of ‘LOVE AND MUSIC WILL ENDURE’
‘It is a terrific portrait of a woman who, as Aonghas MacNeacail writes, was big in every way.Big in size, yes. But big also in talent, in personality and above all in heart. Mairi Mhor deserved this book.
HER HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
Mary Macpherson of Skeabost in Skye, who is better known to this day as Mairi Mhor nan Oran, is one of the most celebrated and least understood Highlanders of the 19th century. She was also, which is extremely relevant, arguably the most gifted woman to come out of the Victorian Gaidhealtachd. In her later life she produced a stream of song and verse which became legendary, which gifted her the cognomen ‘nan oran’, and much of which, owing especially to the efforts of Donald Meek, is still accessible today.
HER EARLY LIFE
The trajectory of her life was not uncommon.
She was born in 1821. Her MacDonald parents moved to Glasgow when she was about eight and back to Skye when she was a young woman.
Mairi then moved for work to Inverness where she married a shoemaker called Isaac MacPherson. Isaac died in 1871 and Mairi became a nurse.
She was briefly imprisoned for theft of minor items. That offence could have been an understandable mistake or a miscarriage of justice. Mairi always protested that she was innocent, and her time in jail seems to have cemented her radicalism.
She then took up nursing in Greenock and became extremely active in Highland émigré social, sporting and political groups before returning finally to Skeabost in 1882 at the age of 61 years.
She died in Portree in 1898. Thanks to Portree Local History Society there is now a plaque outside the town’s Rosedale Hotel which commemorates her last days in Beaumont Crescent.
It seems like another age and of course it was. But as William Faulkner wrote – and Faulkner was not even thinking of the Highlands – ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’.
ORAL MEMORIES
If you’re looking for a good example of the man who shook the hand of the man who shook the hand of the woman who…..look no further. The late Colonel Jock MacDonald of Viewfield in Portree, who many of us remember, knew Mairi Mhor when he was a boy.
Shortly before his own death in 1980, Colonel Jock passed on his memories of the grande dame to Aonghas ‘Dubh’ MacNeaacail, who is very much alive today and who subsequently published them.
There are three Skye names to play with! There is a baton passed down through three centuries. The past is not even past.
The ROLE Of HISTORICAL FICTION
It is never more present than when interpreted in good historical fiction. All of which brings us to a great book which has been available for over a year but which has until now been inexcusably overlooked in this column.
Liz MacRae Shaw’s, ‘Love and Music Will Endure’, is as its subtitle explains, ‘a novel based on the life of Mairi Mhor nan Oran.’
Historical fiction is a tricky genre at the best of times, which may partly be why Scotland is swamped by so much of the worst.
It must satisfy two difficult criteria. It should read, obviously enough, as good fiction – it should have the approachability and stimulus, the narrative tension and gripping characterisation of a novel. Simultaneously, it should be faithful to fact, at least in its essentials.
The two are not always compatible. In ‘Love and Music Will Endure’, Liz macRae Shaw squares the circle with charming ease. She has researched with the diligence of an historian. She has then used her imagination to slip loose the surly bonds of non-fiction to tell a wonderful story.
THE IMPACT OF THE LAND WARS
In many ways Mairi’s first 60 years were a rehearsal of her later life in Skye. Liz MacRae Shaw offers us a girl of her time; born and raised in pastoral hardship and beauty, lost and unhappy in the city stews, forced to ride the murderous waves of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, but thanks to the Gaelic ubiquity in 19th century Scotland, never deracinated.
If she was personally radicalised by her experience of injustice in Inverness, her radicalisation was refined by the land politics of Clydeside in the 1870s.
She returned to Skye in 1882. That was coincidental but could not have been more auspicious. It was the year of the Battle of the Braes, of militant discontent in Trotternish and Glendale. It was the year when everything kicked off and Skye became an international symbol of rural revolution.
Many great names flocked to the island. Several of them were already familiar to Mairi Mhor and she soon got to know the others.
This in turn gives Liz MacRae Shaw the opportunity, which she seizes with relish, to put flesh on the bones and words in the mouths of John Murdoch, Charles Fraser Macintosh, John Stuart Blackie, Edward MacHugh, Michael Davitt, Alexander MacKenzie of ‘The Celtic Magazine’, John MacPherson of Glendale and others.
What bliss it would have been to be alive in Skye in those tumultuous few years in the 1880s, when anything seemed possible and a very great deal proved to have been achievable.
These men stride into Shaw’s book and Mairi MacPherson’s life like mythological heroes. Their arrival is beautifully handled. By then Liz MacRae Shaw, and consequently her reader, is familiar enough with Mairi Mhor to realise how much of a Gaelic nationalist she is.
MAIRI’s CONTRADICTORY POLITICAL VIEWS
Unlike Murdoch and Fraser Macintosh in particular, Mairi’s attachment to her fellow Gaels was more cultural than political. We are in no doubt that she would sooner, far sooner, have attended a shinty match or a ceilidh than a land league rally.
Influenced at least in part by a long friendship with the Skeabost landowner, Lachlan MacDonald, she was often unwilling to think badly of native, hereditary Highland landowners, especially if those landowners spoke Gaelic,
ROGER HUTCHINSON’S VERDICT ON THE BOOK
Liz MacRae Shaw offers us a person who is consequently torn between an attachment to the old clan structure and the new politics of land reform which were directly intended to disempower if not dispossess men like Lachlan Macdonald of Skeabost. Her sympathies were very far from uncommon among Highlanders of her own and later generations.
It is a terrific portrait of a woman who, as Aonghas MacNeacail writes, was big in every way. Big in size, yes. But big also in talent, in personality and above all, in heart. Mairi Mhor deserved this book.
My new novel has been christened with a new title. I had a working title of ‘Light from the Window’ and it took me a long time to find something to replace it. As Robert Louis Stevenson appears in the story I turned to his writings for inspiration. I had already used a line from ‘Requiem,’ in the story itself,
‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea’.
When I looked at the poem again the line, ‘The wide and starry sky’ leapt from the page as it embodies the theme of a quest that is central to the story and also evokes the huge scale and wild nature of the Canadian landscape.
There was one snag – when I checked on Amazon this title had already been used for two other books. The same applied to any other quotations from that poem. This is not surprising, given the fame of Robert Louis Stevenson. But I had become attached to my title. I left the problem for a few days, hoping that another idea would surface. I decided that ‘No Safe Anchorage’ conveyed a sensation of danger. Also of travelling in remote places, both real and metaphorical.