Newes of Witches by Mairi Kidd review: 'Devastating and compelling'
Mairi Kidd’s new novel forces us to ask whether enough has changed since the witch trials of the 17th century, writes Rachel Mackie
The Scottish Highlands, 1629, and in an unnamed village children are going missing, the daughter of a rich family has fallen into a trance and a maidservant has been accused of being a witch. Mòrag, a local healer and midwife, works to uncover the truth in these suspicious and brutal times.
This is a beautiful, haunting novel, and Mairi Kidd doesn’t hold back when exploring the pain, suffering and agonising injustice of the witch trials in Scotland. It is an unflinching look at times already rife with exhaustion, struggle and death. Working to survive, to eat, to stay warm is only possible when the members of small communities support each other, and here the village’s fragile ecosystem is completely destroyed by the accusation of witchcraft. Uncertainty bleeds into friendships, and there is a growing sense of dread, expertly captured by the author.
Newes of Witches is completely immersive, the writing captivating. You feel every breath, every step, every wound. You feel the icy cold of the weather, and the damp seeping into your clothes. You feel the ground moving unsteadily under your feet as attitudes change.
The use of language adds to the turbulence: the main characters speak only Gaelic, and many of them are unable to speak or understand English. This feeds into a wider theme in the novel, the clash between old and new: the old language clashing with English; the old religion clashing with the new; old stories, old remedies and old ways of life drifting away in a new age.
The novel covers the best part of a year in which we follow Mòrag through a cold, harsh landscape. There are no rose tinted specs here, no gentle, trad-wife past. This is a world full of struggle and uncertainty. The village is predominantly filled with those who must live off the land to sustain themselves, working under the watchful eye of the sadistic master of the big house and the uncaring and complicit church.
The injustice running throughout this story burns, and it would take a heart of stone not to shed a tear or several at the end. Mòrag is in every way believable and empathetic. She is no modern woman transposed into the 1600s but of her time, which makes her all the more engaging. Her actions are always understandable, too. That sounds like something that should be simple, but it often isn’t the case in fiction. To create a character who acts consistently and believably is a challenge, and one which Newes of Witches rises to.
If you’re looking for a whodunnit, this isn’t it: the mystery aspect of the story feels deliberately easy to see and, there’s no sense of needing to gather clues or compare alibis. Whenever children go missing or turn up dead, witchcraft is said to be the cause, yet the reader can see the truth almost instantaneously, adding to the sense of injustice.
Newes of Witches is a devastating and compelling novel, but it is also a challenge. It challenges us to ask ourselves whether enough has really changed. The abuse of women in the book is recognisable from contemporary headlines. The scorn, the refusal to believe women when they speak out, the way that class, race and sexuality intersects with this violence, the ease with which a woman’s reputation can be destroyed - it is all horrifyingly familiar. We like to think these evils of the past were “of the time”, that people somehow didn’t know any better - but they did, and as this remarkable novel reminds us, so do we.
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