The Loch of the Bees by Donald S Murray review: 'a curate's egg'
There’s a lot to admire in this book but it also feels curiously uneven, writes Stuart Kelly
I’ve always been fond of the rather archaic term “a curate’s egg”, meaning something which is in parts good and in parts not so good. Although, for the sake of precision, the original cartoon was actually a curate who said parts were good because he was trying to be deferential and didn’t want to say the whole thing was rotten. That isn’t the case with this review, but Donald S Murray’s new work is curiously uneven. I sometimes wondered while reading (and re-reading) it if it was actually a number of different works that had been shoehorned or cobbled or stitched à la Victor Frankenstein’s assemblage.
Murray, in an afterword, cites the work Cuddy by Benjamin Myers as formative – a book to which I gave a glowing review, and I can see how the inspiration or influence has worked. At the same time, it seems to me very different in tone even if it has structural parallels. Myers struck me as someone who sought the light even in the worst of darknesses; Murray seems to fixate on ulterior motives, dark agendas and historical grievances. But this form – the back cover refers to it as a novel, and who I am to disagree? – seems to be increasingly attractive. Helm by Sarah Hall is another example; one might include David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as well. They are, to invent a word, “shardy” books: multiple narratives, tessellated stories, fractured and fractious. (I feel obliged to mention some delightful forebears – Felipe Alfau’s Locos: A Comedy of Gesture and Nigel Dennis’s Cards of Identity.)
The narrative here starts in the eighth century, on the fictional island of Raws. Except it doesn’t. It actually begins with an epigraph from WB Yeats, from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, which includes a reference to “a hive for the honey-bee”. There is then a quatrain in Gaelic, which is unattributed; so I am assuming it is the work of Murray himself. This sets a pattern for the rest of the book in which stories are interspersed with or interrupted by poems. Some of the poems are very beautifully constructed and affecting. There are subtle rhymes, and a clever eye that reminded me of Iain Crichton Smith. But these interludes, however excellent in isolation, do reinforce the idea that this is a bit of a clamjamfrie, a gallimaufry, or to use a word deployed by Burns, an olio. Everything is thrown into the pot.
It works best when it links ideas about islands as retreats, or escapes, and counterbalances that with the sense that nobody thinks of themselves as marginal. We are always the centre of our own worlds. At the outset we have the idea that these places are always blood-soaked in one way or another; the subsequent chapter is far more charming, at least at the outset. Colm is building the beehive shieling, and is being harassed and harrumphed at by his fellow monks who consider his retreat a form of congealed pride and disobedience. There is an appropriate degree of Mariolatry and an equal measure of anti-clericalism. The latter will be more pronounced throughout the book.
By the end we have a new version of Raws, with “incomers” and windfarms. The incomers are a new iteration of Colm, seeking to be “away” in some sense. In between these we have variants on the Clearances, and a gothic-esque short story, “Seòras”, which has a hint of Stevenson about it. The minister in it is “struck dumb” by a woman he has seen, “by her appearance; her fair hair, blue eyes, the litheness of her frame emptied me of speech”. He is also tasked with “stopping the old gods of moon and water”, and yet is – to be frank – rather taken with the breasts of the woman, and is trying to reconcile this with a dying wife. To me, it had a sourness as a story: empathy and interiority were conspicuously absent; yet the kind of judgmentalism that is often slung at non-atheists was predominant. This grieved me, as the other stories had a kindliness, a quiet observance, a bit of old James Joyce’s “agenbite of inwit” that was commendable.
Much though I glimpsed the sensitivity and the seriousness in this cold collation, there were times when the prose itself let down its own aspiration. Now, I may be wrong, and it may be that there is an attempt to replicate Gaelic syntax here, but my fingers reach for a blue pencil – or even a red one – when I read an opening sentence like: “A thousand stories circled Niall’s head when he stumbled from the still late at night, his feet barely able to stay upright on the damp surface of the moor as he undertook what one of his friends had called ‘a walk of spirits’ a week or two before.” I am not a great Hemingway afficionado, but a full stop after the first six words would have helped. I do not think “his feet” were the problem; rather his legs. Most moors are not dry beneath their surface. There is a lot to admire in this book which is undone by the unedited bletherations. The linking around the “loch of the bees” seems, in the end, convenient, contrived and convoluted.
The Loch of the Bees, by Donald S Murray, Saraband, £10.99
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