2024/168: The Gathering Night — Margaret Elphinstone

If young men didn’t die there’d be too many... Young men must die, just as young Animals must die when we hunt them. If there weren’t so much death we’d all perish, and not be able to come back. I’d always known that young men must die. But not my son! [loc. 258]

Set in Mesolithic Scotland, around the time of the Storegga slide, this is the story of Nekané and her family, who are of the Auk People: her daughters Haizea and Alaia, Alaia's partner Amets, Nekané's dead son Bakar, and Kemen of the Lynx People who joins them after his home and clan are swept away by a monstrous wave. Kemen also forms an attachment to Osané, a woman from another camp who's been badly beaten and does not speak. It soon becomes clear that something is wrong, perhaps in the world of the spirits: the hunters come home with less meat, and the winters are harsh. Nekané, who becomes a Go-Between -- a shamanic figure -- after her son's disappearance, slowly comes to recognise the root of the wrongness.

There's a solid belief in reincarnation, and a baby is not named until its soul is recognised: when someone dies, their name is not spoken again until they've returned. There's a strong spiritual element, but it's firmly rooted in the mundane business of survival, the constant busyness of finding food, rearing children and gathering fuel. Though Nekané and the other Go-Betweens talk of spirits and guides, there is nothing supernatural in this slow, thoughtful novel: just the accounts of the various characters, each with their own voice and concerns and bias, and the gradual revelation of crimes committed and the punishments that must be imposed.

In an Afterword, Elphinstone discusses her use of Basque names (which did feel slightly odd, but 'Basque is thought to be the only extant language of pre-Indo-European – which is to say, pre-agricultural – origin on the western seaboard of Europe.') There's more about the writing of The Gathering Night here.

I've owned a paperback of this novel for many years, and never managed to get past the first few chapters, which I find slow and melancholy. (I note that I also found Voyageurs difficult at first, though I don't recall having this problem with pre-blog Hy Brasil, or with Light or The Sea Road.) I finally read the Kindle version, and think it counts as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.