A passing encounter with a girl on a ferry to Mull has such a powerful effect on the young man who brushes against her on a stairway that, not only does he remember every detail for the rest of his life, he believes the love he felt in that moment “has encased every choice I have ever made”.
Credulity is stretched but it was a long, hot Hebridean summer and our narrator, with “the university behind me and the world before me”, is hyper-sensitive to new experiences in the world around him.
For the moment, that world is Angus Peter Campbell’s home territory of South Uist.
There we are soon enmeshed in a time warp of old stories which provide precedents for such a coup de foudre and a context for the magical realism that, in Campbell’s fiction, fuses Gaelic folk tradition and literary boundary-breaking.
This is quickly counterbalanced by the physical task of boatbuilding. The nameless narrator, who later becomes Alasdair (one of several Alasdairs, reinforcing the concept of an inescapable continuum) spends this last summer of freedom as labourer to Big Roderick, boatbuilder, ecologist, philosopher and alcoholic. In a finely observed vignette, the reader shares the delights and disappointments of the consummate craftsman: “nothing ever is as you really intended, for the garboard is not quite right, and the strakes just not quite as bevelled as you meant them to be...”
The inevitable failure to produce absolute perfection sends Big Roderick back to the drink and Alasdair to a “substitutionary life where all the failures are repeated and redeemed in the vain hope that, sometime, words will sing”.
The unrequited love for the girl on the ferry is more than the contemplation of where the road not taken might have led. For Alasdair, despite a marriage and a successful career, it has been a thorny reminder of a life not fully lived. Worse, there have been elements of falseness in earning a good living as an expert on Gaelic culture, feted at international conferences by academics who are impressed by his “abstract guff” but don’t know enough to recognise when they are the butt of a joke.
The reader must surely bear this in mind in relation to the islander who was thrice taken elsewhere by the Host of the Dead. The point is to illustrate a dual state: the possibility of being at once in the present and in the remembered (or re-imagined) past and the impossibility of defining which is reality. That Campbell simultaneously wrote English and Gaelic versions of this novel further explores the idea of the same event being experienced differently.
Helen, the girl on the ferry, is the stuff of dreams but no mirage. Her story begins with a violin stolen in Waverley station, causing a devastated Helen to return to Mull to explain the loss of a family treasure. The smallholding run single-handedly by her widowed mother is a very paradise.
Nevertheless, it cannot hold the young woman whose ecology training leads to humanitarian work in blighted parts of the world. He story, told in the third person, is the shadow to Alasdair’s and frustratingly condensed to a summary. By contrast, other lives are revealed in more detail, such as the meeting of the couple who commissioned Big Roderick to build their boat, another Alasdair and Katell.
They first see each other through the window that Alasdair is cleaning – and now have grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered across the globe.
Helen and Alasdair are fated to re-enact that ferry encounter with different results and it does not spoil the denouement to say a happy-ever-after ending would be too simplistic.
In terms of plot, this is more novella than novel, a linked series of tender but largely unsentimental scenes from a way of life that is under threat, interspersed with equally assured cameos in London and Paris. As with the boat, its construction is not quite perfect but, despite its gentle tone, the questions it raises about fate, chance, and love persist after the book is closed.