The Repentants by Kate Foster review: 'soap operatic'

Kate Foster | Local Library

This novel does not exactly have a subtitle; rather, it has the kind of slogan that you could imagine being said breathlessly at the end of a film trailer in the cinema. It might be called The Repentants but the proof even has the hook-line instead of the actual title emblazoned on the cover: “Her Scandal. His Revenge”. It is also billed as “thrilling feminist historical novel”, which somewhat masks how conventional it actually is.

Before the plot commences, there is a half page where a nameless character tells us about a fire – arson, we assume – at the salt pan windmill. It might be meant as a hook, but it really does not take long to realise who the pyromaniac is, especially when there is only a small cast of characters. That Jonny Aitken, a local entrepreneur, is scarred in it is a kind of motivating incident.

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Each of the chapters is narrated by one of the three principal female characters, and as is now almost obligatory, it is narrated in the present tense. This is a difficult mode to write in effectively, as the question of the condition of narration constantly arises. It is St Monan’s, at the end of the 18th century, and one character, Florrie, the unsatisfied wife of the local salt magnate Jonny, is off to play Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina with a Danish sailor in an insalubrious inn in Pittenweem. Although it begins “Today is going to be a day of pure bliss” – so note, the character has no idea what is going to happen – by the end of the chapter the reader is elsewhere: “There are snatches that remain in my memory afterwards as though my mind was a strange sort of sponge that day”. From when, from where, is Florrie narrating this? Where and whenever, she is clearly taken with her own imagery as the next chapter starts “It is a dragging and a squealing sort of memory that comes from my mind-sponge when I squeeze it”. Again: to whom and under what circumstances is she articulating this?

An attentive reader will realise that, if nothing else, Florrie is going to have to stay alive in order to recount all this, for a while at least. Later, when we get substantial parts of letters written and suchlike, the idea we are being told this in the present is stretched even further (though even Sir Walter Scott got in a bit of a muddle with convincing epistles and first person narration in Redgauntlet: indeed, he dropped the whole conceit after a while).

Florrie’s slightly tawdry liaison ends disastrously, and she ends up on the sinners’ stool in the Kirk, alongside a salt-serf, Eliza, who is “owned” by her husband. There is a more than a whisper of stereotype here. The uppity, fragile, wealthy woman is disgraced alongside a sharp-tongued, no-nonsense character – the kind of creation that might have earned the soubriquet “a saucy moxie” if this were the 18th century. Eliza has been skipping church, and moreover is refusing to say why. Aside from the fire at the windmill, Foster drops in a little reference to Jonny attending a “gentleman’s club” and even a smattering of background knowledge will click to such institutions as “The Most Ancient and Most Puissant Order of the Beggar's Benison and Merryland, Anstruther” – basically, a lap dancing club with intellectual pretensions.

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Jonny’s shaming leads him to take Florrie and her newly installed maid, Eliza, to Iceland, where he intends to start another salt business, but using convicts from a prison-hulk as a workforce. We meet their neighbour, Hallgerd, and various contrivances of plot mean they are all connected. This becomes soap operatic – I was reminded of Harry Hill saying “What are the chances of that happening?” – when the various, not particularly cunning, interconnections are revealed. The sense of Arctic place is evoked competently enough, but Hannah Kent beat her to it with both Burial Rites and her later memoir – and I’d rather have Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland any day of the week.

There is an air of anachronism throughout, and not just in the feminist consciousness on display. Eliza will say “I think it has the air of that Mermaid Inn his wife fugged in” and yet a page later “thank f***” (I was reminded of Dorothy Parker’s put down to Mailer – the young man that can’t spell f***, given “fug” was used throughout The Naked and the Dead). More concerning is the extent to which the plot merely fizzles out. Although it conforms to the “victim victorious” trope, other parts – Hallgerd’s wrongly accused brother, in a section reminiscent of Graeme Macrae Burnett’s His Bloody Project – are barely resolved. The scenes where Florrie is put under lock and key in Iceland, having been gaslit by her husband, would be stronger if it did not knowingly wink at Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.

As I approached the end of the novel, I had a sense of dread thanks to the title. This is barely a spoiler, but one character triumphantly declares, as the last line, “I am unrepentant”. It is not the only thing that a reader could see coming from a mile off.

The Repentants, by Kate Foster, Mantle, £18.99

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