O Caledonia
Elspeth Barker
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Recommended by Rachael
‘O Caledonia!’s Janet is a classic comic heroine, in that she is also a classic tragic heroine: lonely, unloved, overlooked, and yet somehow staunchly herself throughout. And who that self is is truly splendid: imaginative, spiky, bookish, fiercely intelligent, and completely socially unaware. Her family despise her – her mother Vera finds even the sight of Janet reading ‘peculiarly irritating’. Her schoolmates make use of her intelligence to cheat on their homework and laugh at her ‘exaggerated stories of her incompetence in every aspect of the day's routine, and the dire consequences it provoked’, while also preferring to avoid spending any actual time with her. We know from the start how Janet will end the novel – dead in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted on the stone staircase in the dilapidated castle in which her family live and run a boarding school – and by the end we’ll know how and why she got there, but all the real fun is in the journey the novel takes us on through 'l’étouffoir familial', the family suffocation chamber (Proust by way of Janet).’
From the publisher
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM MAGGIE O'FARRELL
Janet lies murdered beneath the castle stairs, oddly attired in her mother's black lace wedding dress, lamented only by her pet jackdaw...
In this, her first novel, Elspeth Barker evokes the unrelenting chill of Calvinism and the Scottish climate; it's a world of isolation and loneliness, where Barker's young protagonist turns to increasingly to literature, nature, and her risque Aunt Lila, who offer brief flashes of respite in an otherwise dank and foreboding life. People, birds and beasts move in a gleeful danse macabre through the lowering landscape in a tale that is as rich and atmospheric as it is witty and mordant. The family motto - Moriens sed Invictus (Dying but Unconquered) - is a fitting epitaph for wild, courageous Janet, and her determination to remain steadfastly herself even as events overtake her.