The smell is sweet and foul – when your nose first catches it, you think you’ve found a meadow lily, and then like a finger behind the eyeball, the smell scratches in. [loc. 668]
Three interlocked stories, with three protagonists, in three time periods: Sarah, fleeing accusations of witchcraft in the seventeenth century, and reliant on the kindness of a disgraced preacher and his son; Ruth, married to a controlling widower with two sons just after the Second World War, trying to make a place for herself in close-knit, secret-ridden North Berwick; and Viviane, self-exiled from London after a nervous breakdown, mourning her father's death and engaged to clear out the family's old home. This is a beautifully and rigorously structured novel -- seven chapters, each with a section for each of the three women, each with an interlude about the fate of an anonymous woman -- with a definite Gothic flavour, and with a relentless focus on misogynistic violence. We start with Viv, as a young child, discovering the body of a woman in a suitcase, washed up on the beach; later there are rapes, murders, child abuse (male violence manifesting as pedophilia in the absence of women) and infidelity. Viviane, Ruth and Sarah are all damaged and grieving (in fact, I think they're all grieving the death of a male relative) and all experience some kind of haunting, a sense of not being alone, a precarious grip on sanity. These are perhaps less obvious in Sarah's case, but they are there. And then there's Viv's new friend Maggie, a self-proclaimed witch and occasional sex worker, who is perhaps the most powerful character in the novel.
This wasn't exactly an enjoyable read, but Wyld's gift for description (especially evocative, often unpleasant smells) makes The Bass Rock compelling. It's interesting to work out the links between the three protagonists, and the backstory of Viv's family. And the atmosphere of the area, the coast around North Berwick with the Bass Rock looming on the eastern horizon ('she often found herself drifting if she stared at it for too long, unable to look away') is vivid and chilling.
I think I bought this book because of the setting: I think I might not have bought it if I'd understood that its focus was violence against women and children. ('You didn’t report these things. It was all part of life, we were led to believe.') The story repeats: but Maggie, who strikes terror into a violent man, offers some hope that the cycle can be broken, or at least disrupted.
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