As the Women Lay Dreaming

Donald S Murray

Saraband, £8.99

Review by Catriona Black

“I think they’re going into the harbour the wrong way,” says a bemused sailor on page 180, near the end of Donald S Murray’s debut novel, As the Women Lay Dreaming. Billed as “a novel of the Iolaire Disaster”, this tightly structured, time-hopping memoir-but-not-a-memoir knows you know what’s coming, and it makes you wait.

If you don’t know what’s coming, you will by Hogmanay, the centenary of Britain’s worst peacetime maritime disaster since the Titanic. The Iolaire, a naval yacht, was filled to the gunnels with 285 sailors keen to get home to Lewis and Harris to celebrate their first New Year since the Great War.

On its way into Stornoway harbour, the ship hit the infamous Beasts of Holm. After years of war at sea, over 200 men were drowned and smashed against the rocks just yards from shore, their bodies washing up on their own doorsteps.

It’s easy to be blinded, creatively, by the disaster. I know – I’ve been working all year on a short film about it. The event heaped tragedy on tragedy; the grief twisted a generation on the island, and another, and another after that. So it’s especially interesting to see that while I start my film with the shipwreck, the writer holds it back to the end.

Donald S Murray has an impressive slate of non-fiction books under his belt, last of which was The Dark Stuff, a meandering tour of Europe’s peat bogs and the thoughts and adventures they sparked. But this, his first novel, a work 16 years in the making, dispenses with that easy nonchalance. Discipline has been imposed and a story spanning 74 years whittled meticulously into shape.

The story is told by Alasdair, an art teacher in Glasgow. It criss-crosses between three time periods: 1992 (his present day), 1936 (his childhood memories of Lewis and his grandfather Tormod) and 1918 (Tormod’s diary, filtered through Alasdair’s retelling).

If the generations become confused, it’s by design. What should be constants – family and home – are constantly shifting. Alasdair and his bewildered sister Rachel have lost their mother, and their drunken father sends them to their grandparents in Lewis: Tormod, a kind, creative man, and Catriona, his stern second wife, whose late husband’s family kept her son when they sent her to replace Tormod’s beloved first wife.

This compression of generations, a pattern of loss and substitution, is echoed in the drawings Alasdair finds in Tormod’s sketchbooks. His depictions of his daughter, Mairi, and his granddaughter, Rachel, always seem to evoke his first wife, Morag. “All in all, it was as if, despite her death many years before, she had become immortal, gaining the gift of not only eternal youth but also continual ageing, moving back and forth over the years.”

And then there is the photograph, treasured by an old woman whose son sent it from America (the misery following the Iolaire disaster triggered a wave of emigration, which included, incidentally, Trump’s mother). She imagines it’s her son pictured in the tall cedar tree, but nobody dares mention that “with every passing year, her son was becoming fainter.” Every image in this novel is prone to change and uncertainty, like the families, like history, like memory itself. Even Tormod’s diaries are an unreliable reconstruction of those which went down with the ship.

The idea of home is also built on shifting sands. The children’s father is a restless Aberdonian, blaming his inability to cope on his dislocation in Glasgow. Alasdair and Rachel are shocked by the open moors of Lewis after their upbringing in a poky city flat. Big-eyed Rachel is stunned into muteness, unable to process her overwhelming loss and disruption, a potent symbol for all Lewis in the wake of the Iolaire tragedy.

This book can only have been written by an island native. Where Gaelic pops up, it’s far from the usual borrowed kitsch: there’s the toll-braim, a ‘fart-hole’, caused by poking the bog to make it belch, and the throwaway insult: clamhan cac, shit buzzard. Birds are summoned more poetically, time and again, to symbolise suffering, freedom, death, redemption and steadfastness.

Again avoiding the easy clichés, Tormod is unenthusiastic about his impending return home on the Iolaire. He draws shit constantly, “caked on the backsides of cattle, little deposits left upon the grass, smearing, too, the soles and uppers of his boots, wads of straw thick with the stuff becoming embedded in his clothing”.

As the disaster finally unfolds, Murray pulls off the perfect combination of fact and fiction, giving Tormod a key role which is not, to my knowledge, associated with a known individual. The disaster is fictionalised but is the truer for it. And once you’ve read those final pages, it dawns on you: you weren’t waiting to get to the point. The disaster doesn’t start on page 180. It was not an event of a few hours, but a silent unfolding of pain and dislocation spanning all the generations since. Murray’s assured journey through the disruption, trauma, love and loss threaded unspoken through one Lewis family, with barely a word of the shipwreck, is on every page a novel of the Iolaire Disaster.