MUSIC IN THE DARK

Sally Magnusson

(John Murray, £16.99)

 

A song runs through Music in the Dark, a song that brings Jamesina Ross both pain and solace. The residents of Rutherglen in the 1880s know her as the Widow Bain, a stern middle-aged tenement-dweller who makes a living doing other people’s laundry. But she had led a very different existence 30 years earlier in rural Strathcarron, before the violent eviction of 1854 that marked the end of her old life and left her face permanently scarred by the blows of a sheriff’s baton.

 

The young Jamesina was a bright, inquisitive girl, who loved language and making up songs. She was encouraged by the local Free Church minister, who spotted her potential and schooled her in Latin, and later by a campaigning journalist who had come to report on the Clearances and nurtured her love of poetry. Uprooted from her childhood home in one of the bloodiest evictions of the Highland Clearances, marrying a cruel and heartless man and, most terrible of all, seeing her six children going to their graves has left her hard and bitter.

 

Jamesina always knew, even as a young girl, that her songs were a way of keeping her culture alive as greedy landowners were scattering it to the four winds. “One day she was going to bear witness to this,” she told herself as she surveyed the fallen bodies of the women of her village, beaten half to death by the sheriff’s men.

 

Three decades on, although she retains her fascination with words, her potential has been ground away by a gruelling life. Recently, she has started to have problems with her memory too, most likely as a result of her old head injuries. In need of money, the widowed washerwoman lets it be known that she’s willing to take in a lodger, and the call is answered by Niall Munro, a skilled shoemaker from New Jersey who has been put out of work by automation and has returned to the land he left as a boy.

 

The generously moustachioed Munro, a decade her junior, finds the severe, unbending Widow Bain (“a woman with beautiful eyes and a bitter tongue”) a hard landlady to get used to. But gradually, as the two of them become accustomed to each other, a restrained fondness grows between them – helped along by the shared experience of two Highlanders who lost what they once held dear.

 

Their mid-life romance is touchingly depicted by Magnusson, who conveys their awkward reserve and their concern for propriety and boundaries, along with the depth of their feelings, as they make tentative steps towards each other. Munro is a great deal more kindly and patient than Jamesina’s late husband, keenly aware of his own lost family and heritage, and his desire to help heal her profound emotional wounds so she can enjoy life again is genuine and empathetic. And he understands her well enough to know that for that to happen he has to reawaken the singer of songs.

 

Inspired by the story of Magnusson’s own great-grandmother, evicted from her home on Mull in 1863, Music in the Dark is part understated love story and part lament for a people and way of life brushed aside to make way for a more profitable commodity. It highlights the role that women played in the front line of resistance, and the lifelong damage they suffered at the hands of those who drove them from their homes. Through it all, this affecting novel attests to a heartfelt faith in the power of song to heal wounds and keep memories alive.