O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker, takes you into the mind and heart of a girl growing up in the wilds of Scotland long ago. If a poem could leap from the page and come to life – a swirl of language and feeling and energy – it would inspire the same kind of wonder as this novel. What words can do!
The book begins with a dead body on a staircase: “Here it was that Janet was found, oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted and slumped in bloody, murderous death.” From the start, we are haunted by this knowledge.
The rest of the book is chronological, beginning with her birth:
“The sixteen years of Janet’s life began in wartime on a fog-bound winter night in Edinburgh. Her father came home on leave and looked into the blue wicker basket. He strode to the window and stared out at the discreet square of Georgian houses and the snow dripping from the bare trees. “It’s about the size of a cat,” he said.”
Janet becomes a difficult and earnest girl, bookish and strong-willed. Her grandmother’s love sustains her for a time. In the years that follow, the family moves into an enormous ramshackle castle, which – along with the woods around it – become Janet’s haven, and heaven. Of sorts. Her father opens a boys’ preparatory school on the premises, which adds considerable complications.
O Caledonia is a coming-of-age novel: Janet grows up. She goes to boarding school. She learns – painfully – how to fit in, at least enough to get by. Yet we know what lies ahead for her. Throughout the novel, a voice whispers: how does it all end so terribly on the staircase? For by now, you love this brave, awkward girl.
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Elspeth Barker was born in Edinburgh in 1940 and died in 2022. She grew up in circumstances remarkably similar to Janet’s. She married a much older poet, and together they had five (of his fifteen) children. She wrote consistently for various English publications and taught creative writing. O Caledonia, her only novel, was published in 1991, when she was fifty-one.
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“Caledonia,” you may know, is an old-fashioned, poetic name for Scotland. This novel, among its other beauties and joys, transports you to a time and place that feels both impossibly distant and deeply familiar. It is the countryside of fairy tale and maybe even your own childhood.
