The Captain’s Wife – Kirsten McKenzie

This is one from the guilty pile and I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself for striking it off the list. I really liked McKenzie’s first book ‘The Chapel at the Edge of the World’ (heavily featuring the Italian Chapel in Orkney) so had high hopes for book number two which also has an Orkney connection but goes back a little further than the second world war.

‘The Captain’s Wife’ is a multi stranded tale which follows the life of John Fullerton, Orkney boy and eventual pirate, and also Mary Jones a young woman sent off into the world to marry Captain Jones, a much older and previously married man who needs a male heir to secure his uncles estate. Unfortunately Captain Jones (as well as being a laudanum addicted drunk with a violent streak) seems incapable of fathering his own child so he gets his best friend and possible lover Robert to do the job for him. From there on in it gets complicated.

John’s story is also complicated, the illegitimate son of a poor crofter who acknowledges him enough to give him a good beating when he asks for more for his mother. He seems to be mostly motivated by greed (with a good dose of paranoia) his fate is set when he joins ship after running away from home. He’s picked up by an older man who wants him for his body rather than his sailing skills, but from him John develops a taste for finer living and eventually a ship of his own. Merchant life doesn’t provide enough money and he turns first to smuggling and eventually as mentioned to piracy, he also turns to brandy and gambling – from where – well it gets complicated.

As long as I was reading I was totally caught up in the tale but as soon as I put the book down I found myself picking holes in it. I think McKenzie is a gifted story teller – otherwise I wouldn’t have finished this book, never mind found myself enjoying it, but I also think, and hope that she’s got much better to come. There were just too many holes in ‘The Captain’s Wife’, little things that didn’t quite add up in the plot; descriptions of emotions that felt wrong for the eighteenth century setting and possibly too many drunken gay sailors. I was doubtful about Mary’s life on board ship as well though cursory research suggests that this was quite common, but this brings problems of its own because apart from Mary it’s an exclusively male world.

In fact it needs to be an entirely male world to make sense of all the same sex relationships – the suggestion initially seems to be that a boy is a necessary adjunct to an officer’s life and that the boy will get used to it in return for better food, better clothes, and a better bed (the boys in the book seem to be happy enough with the terms). Still the male relationships are entirely convincing, which is a bit more than I felt about the ménage a trois between Mary, her husband, and their lover.

I ended up feeling quite lukewarm about ‘The Captain’s Wife’ but the Scottish one who read it almost as soon as I got it really enjoyed it although he’s failed to take to ‘The Chapel at the Edge of the World’ so it seems there’s no accounting for taste and if you can suspend your disbelief sufficiently it’s certainly a gripping yarn.

 

The Guilty Pile.

Months and months ago Rosy Thornton sent me an email asking if I'd like a copy of ‘The Tapestry of Love’ to read. Yes please I said because I’d heard good things about it and thought it sounded just the thing that I was looking for. I’ve still not read it. I also have a copy of Richard Mabey’s ‘Weeds’ which I’ve read 3 chapters of, was fascinated by, and haven’t got any further with, and perhaps most guilty of all is ‘The Captain’s Wife’ by Kirsten McKenzie. I’ve had ‘The Captain’s Wife’ since August; a lovely lady from John Murray had said to let her know if I wanted anything. I really liked McKenzie’s ‘The Chapel at the Edge of the World’ and so asked for this her second book. It arrived, I got really excited, the Scottish one read and loved it, and I still haven’t managed to open it.

The problem is that all these books are hardbacks and I really struggle with hardbacks. They don’t fit in my bag (which is small to fit in the teeny tiny lockers we have at work) and as most my reading is done on work breaks and bus trips books that don’t fit in my bag suffer. I gave up trying to read two books at once because I never seemed to finish either or any of them. I never seem to be at home for more than a few hours at a time so the chance of reading a book in one session is ever diminishing... See the excuses piling up – why in the time it’s taken me to write all this down I could probably have read a couple of chapters.

These three are the tip of an unread iceberg but they’re the only ones that induce guilt, partly because in accepting (or soliciting) them I made a bargain if only with myself to read promptly. Partly because I know I’ll get to most those other books (perhaps not the Milton or Dante – but all the rest for sure) in the fullness of time and when I’m in the right mood – but hardbacks... there are dozens of times I’ve meant to pick up all of these three and just haven’t. Anyway the point of writing all this down is as a prompt to self to get on with it. I procrastinate far too much so this is me getting my act together and setting myself a goal which should be easy to reach – hopefully the goal reaching thing will become a habit and I’ll be able to tackle hardbacks any old time.

The Chapel At The Edge Of The World

I’ve only visited the Italian Chapel on Orkney once – and that was almost twenty years ago but it’s a place that makes an impression. I tried to find some decent pictures of the chapel to decorate this review with, but none of the one’s I found on line came anywhere near to doing it justice. (Highland Park whisky used to have a decent one on their website, but it’s gone now.)

The thing about the chapel is that outside it really is just Nissan huts with a cement facade. It’s a pretty facade, but it doesn’t really prepare you for what’s inside. When you step through the door though you leave Orkney and enter Italy; the Chapel boasts some really impressive trompe l’oeil – at seventeen I’d never seen anything quite like it – and nor have I since, but sadly it seems you have to go and see it – I can’t show you.

Anyway all this and more was at the back of my mind when I picked up Kirsten McKenzie’s book. Reviews have been mixed, or at least mixed enough to make me think twice about buying so I phoned the nice people at John Murray and pushed my luck for a copy. They very kindly promised to oblige and I waited hopefully, sadly no book appeared so I phoned again and they obliged again. I have long held dark suspicions of my posty – an unnaturally cheerful man who whistles whilst he works, it’s disarming but sinister (in my opinion) but second time round the book arrived and even better proved to be worth the wait.

‘The Chapel At The Edge Of The World’ is Kirsten McKenzie’s debut novel which I think shows, but she’s definitely a writer worth watching. This is one separated couple’s war – Emilio sets off to fight and soon ends up a prisoner first in North Africa and later On Orkney. Rosa left at home has a slightly more eventful time fending off amorous Nazis and almost accidentally becoming involved with the resistance.

Emilio deals with imprisonment by ignoring it and trying to ignore news of the war – instead as an artist he immerses himself in creating the chapel, and holding on to the idea of all he’s left behind in the hope that it will still be there when he returns. Rosa says goodbye without any real expectation of getting Emilio back assuming he will be lost either to another woman, to a wider experience, or possibly killed. What she isn’t really prepared for is what happens – his being taken prisoner which leaves her in a sort of limbo for the duration of the war. To say much more would be to give too much away about Rosa but her part of the story is excellent; I like that it’s the woman who has gone to war here – or at least had the war come to her, whilst the man stays locked up, uncomfortable but basically safe. It’s an effective role reversal and makes a nice change from reading about life for the girls left behind on the home front.

Emilio’s story I had a bit more trouble with. I think McKenzie does a convincing job on the P.O.W experience but I felt she got a bit carried away with the greyness of it all – to the point that it started to niggle. Everything about Orkney is grey in this book – over four years it seems never to be summer – just one endless grey winter. The sky is grey with stars, the Aurora creates a kind of grey dawn, the long summer nights (on a rare appearance) are grey, and the ground is covered in dead grey heather. I get it, I really do, I believe in the grey, I’ve seen the grey, I feel the grey, but I also know the aurora as a great sweeping curtain of billowing coloured light (not at all grey) and I’m not having a sky greyed by stars either. The sun does shine in the north albeit rarely and the insistence on grey seems heavy handed – more obvious perhaps because the rest of the book is so spot on. Still it’s a tiny niggle about an otherwise absorbing read. The Orkney side of the story although fictionalised closely follows actual events and the Italian half reads as equally likely. I think this is a more than promising debut – I await McKenzie’s next novel with interest, she’s certainly challenged my prejudice against contemporary writers. (A quick look on amazon suggests that book number two is a ship board romp with pirates and a strong female lead – normally I’d be suspicious but as ‘The Chapel At The End Of The World’ was so good I’m actually enthusiastic. Both books have fantastic cover art too.)