The Last Witch on the Knock, by Aimée MacDonald review: 'perplexing'
There are some well-handled scenes in this dual-timeline novel, writes Stuart Kelly, but the prose style won’t be to everyone’s taste
This is a most perplexing novel. It is a chimera of a book, a confabulation if you will. There are two primary narratives, but before we come to them, there is a “poem” headed “1715”. These recur across the book. It begins “I came into this world a sweaty hot mess a mass / no hair until I was three at least / this big big thing / and my mother took one look and said / my girl / seems like a devil child”. I did a little digging because the phrase “hot mess” seemed so incongruous, and the idea of a chaotic but attractive person seems to date from 2005 or so. It continues, with the narrator Kate, with her “looks / and my personality” being sent to The Big House.
Kate is the titular witch, who is condemned as such because she eventually rejected the Laird of the Big House’s sexual demands. Increasingly I find the whole obsession with witches extremely passé, oddly archaic and a form of back-writing valorisation. There is, at the end of the novel, a rather well done scene where a monument on the top of the Knock Hill is witnessed, and the other narrator is astonished it commemorates an aristocratic man and not the persecuted women.
The other narrator is Thomasin. She has, in a manner of speaking, rusticated herself from her third year studying English Literature at university – rather predictably she wants to be a novelist – but has run aground. There is a certain nebulous quality about what is wrong with Thomasin. She certainly self-diagnoses a kind of depression, repeatedly. It is complicated by her relationship with Leo – the back of the book describes him as “her toxic boyfriend”. Controlling and egotistical though he may be, Thomasin seems ready to forgive him on account of his frequently mentioned good looks (and the fact that people are surprised he would choose to be with her) in a spiral of neediness.
It is partially because of this relationship that Thomasin has gone to stay with her eccentric Aunt Agnes, who prefers to be called Nance. She does stir herself to work in the local hotel, which, of course, transpires to be The Big House. Some of the scenes of her domestic work there are done acutely. The evocation of a kind of anomie and anhedonia reminded me a little of the early works by AL Kennedy or Janice Galloway. There is also a touch of the also currently fashionable body horror and abjection which a writer like Katherine Dunn did so well. Thomasin has a suppurating wound, and this wound seems to be linked to being possessed by Kate. The two are therefore linked by the aforementioned masculine toxicity; the grotesque Laird and the dashing Leo being uncanny mirrors.
Many years ago, when speaking with the late and brilliant historian Angus Calder, he said to me that he could never write a novel because he was “insufficiently interested in clothing”. MacDonald does not suffer from this. The repetitions of jogging pants, blue jumpers, court shoes, things filched from Thomasin’s flatmates and suchlike are almost Gerturde Stein-esque. What does this add up to? Not much, I fear. It seems scribbly detail.
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The real problem with all this is far simpler: the prose. Anton Chekhov, Mark Swan, Ernest Hemingway and others have been credited with the creative writing mantra, “Show, don’t tell”. So I shall show. This is from page 270 but I could have plucked plenty of other examples.
“It was me and him and Mum just the three of us this morning before school and he was off the lead and we were down near the hotel and he is a cheeky boy Mum always says he tries his luck and tries to run but he never actually runs obviously like he wouldn’t really run and I was chasing him or he was chasing me and Mum was down on the beach and she was just on her phone or something for just one minute and I shouted over to her look at us is what I said and then I looked back at him but he was gone and I don’t know where he went and we looked for ages for the whole morning and Mum went into the hotel to get them to look too but then she started crying, crying a lot and she wouldn’t speak to me, and I was saying: Mum, we have to keep looking, but she got someone from her work to drive me home in case Finn, like, in case he walked home and she said she would keep looking but then they drove her home to and Finn won’t go with them he needs me and my mum he needs us”.
And exhale. One might charitably suggest it is enacting on the level of syntax a kind of fugue state or cognitive dissonance. One could equally say it is self-indulgent tosh. I will leave it to readers to decide whether they wish to part with nearly 20 quid to read nearly 300 pages of this.
The Last Witch on the Knock, by Aimée MacDonald, John Murray, £18.99
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