News of the Dead by James Robertson
To recount the history of a nation or continent is undoubtedly a monumental and challenging task; nevertheless, it may be more difficult to piece together the history of a peaceful, unassuming location like Glen Conach where there are few residents, fewer recollections, and almost no trustworthy archives. Whatever truths there are become more entwined with myth and folklore the hazier everything becomes. Glen Conach, a site of secrets and memories, folklore and history, is located deep within the Scottish mountains in the northeast. In specifically, it contains the tales of three distinct eras that are separated by centuries yet connected by place, an antique manuscript, and timeless echoes.
News of the Dead by James Robertson
12 used from $10.30
Amazon.com
Conach, a Christian recluse in ancient Pictland, meditates on God and nature, works marvels, and gets ready to offer himself as a sacrifice. Legends concerning him are recorded in the Book of Conach by an unidentified hand many years after his passing. Charles Kirkliston Gibb, a self-promotional antiquarian, is drawn to the Glen and into the large home in the centre of its frail community generations later, in the early nineteenth century. Young Lachie tells Maja about a ghost he thinks he has seen in the present. Maja, who has lived a long time, believes him because her own ghosts stalk her. The intriguing novel News of the Dead explores the concepts of safety, retreat, and welcoming strangers.
It calculates the distance between the tales people tell about themselves—what they remember and makeup—and the stories that may or may not be used to recall them. This book is kind, unsentimental, and thought-provoking in this year of narrative. The stories are connected to the past in the same manner that we are all. What difference does it make how precise they are, he says, when that is all we have?
A profound appreciation of a landscape, the rocks, the rain, the streams, trees, and mosses of the remote Scottish glen, lies behind the beguiling, interconnected narrative of three characters from different eras of history—an Iron Age hermit, a nineteenth-century literary conman, and a child abandoned in the world from war-torn Europe.
