Salt and tradition

Amanda Curtin’s second novel, Elemental, tells the story of Margaret (Meggie) Duthie Tulloch. Meggie, an old woman who is dying of leukaemia, writes her life story in a series of notebooks intended to be a twenty-first birthday present to her granddaughter, Laura, who grew up clamouring for tales of ‘Fish Meggie, The Gutting Girl from the Top of the World’. Elemental is temporally and geographically vast. In its substantial research and carefully structured story, it echoes Curtin’s excellent début novel The Sinkings (2008). Meggie’s story is told in three sections that move through the elements: ‘Water’ from 1891 to 1905, ‘Air’ from 1905 to 1909, and ‘Earth’ from 1910 to 1932. ‘Water’ traces Meggie’s early years in Roanhaven, a rugged and isolated village as ‘far north-east as you can get on the Scottish mainland’. Curtin beautifully evokes Meggie’s harsh childhood steeped in salt and tradition, where the sea is life-giving and death-dealing, ‘a witch who can give or take at leastest whim’. In her deeply superstitious community, Meggie’s flaming red hair is considered a genetic ill omen, powerful enough to curse the fleet. Meggie chafes against a grim life that offers little to men, but even less to women. The women’s lives are as physically demanding, but with no respite; they are expected to serve their menfolk, even carrying them on their backs and wading into the freezing water to hoist them into the boats so that their feet stay dry. When the women are not working, they knit. A clever child, Meggie finds succour in books, but her formal education is cut short at the age of fourteen when she must go out to earn for her family. This, however, unexpectedly becomes an opportunity for freedom from her suffocating life on ‘the boatie shore’. The second section follows Meggie’s escape from Roanhaven when she starts work gutting herring from the North Sea boats and meets her husband-to-be, a young cooper named Magnus Tulloch. ‘Earth’ encompasses their emigration to Fremantle and a new life, set against the Great War. ‘Fire,’ the final section, is set in the present day when Laura, now middle-aged, finally receives her grandmother’s exercise books, decades after Meggie’s death. She reads them with her daughter-in-law as they sit in vigil at Laura’s injured son’s hospital bedside. Amanda CurtinElemental is preoccupied with the unreliability of memory and storytelling. Meggie’s observation that ‘there’s no-one can tell a story true’, destablisesthe affirmation about the importance of knowing from where one comes. In the pauses in Meggie’s story when she shifts to her writing present, she self-consciously notes the troublesome nature of recollection. Her daughter discourages Meggie’s writing; Meggie’s memory itself is failing. Further, family secrets are skirted around, excised altogether in ripped-out pages. Deeply wounding moments precipitate a shift from first- to third-person narrative. More than a collection of stories, Meggie’s notebooks are a ‘gift of words’ knitted together like the rough woollen garments fashioned by the gutting girls when they aren’t working. Meggie remembers hiding her worn underwear from her mother to soften the garments. Meggie’s notebooks do not reach her granddaughter for her twenty-first birthday, but are delivered when Laura is middle-aged, prompting Laura to wonder how their reception might have differed had she read her grandmother’s love story ‘as a brash, careless twenty-one-year old’. The notebooks are conversational and intimate. The reader assumes the position of Laura, or ‘lambsie’, who is frequently directly addressed in Meggie’s narrative. Some readers might experience initial reservations about the narrative voice, which employs a Scottish brogue (a glossary is provided for some of the unique terms of the region); but Curtin handles the language superbly. Meggie’s voice is entirely convincing, and her life story is absorbing: the reader is soon pulled into the slow tide of the narrative, rolling with the rhythms and lilt of the Scottish tongue. Inheritance, lineage, and genetics are shot through the yarn of Elemental. ‘You don’t know who you are until you know where you come from,’ Meggie writes to Laura. Generational threads bind the characters together; Laura’s injured son is unintentionally named Cooper, the profession of his great-grandfather. Cooper is in a coma after apparently recklessly rescuing a child from a burning house, and as she sits at his bedside with Meggie’s story in her hands, Laura wonders about her family’s ‘dark strain of altruism, some ancestral compulsion to rush off a cliff, down a well, into a fire for others. And to hell with the risks.’ Curtin has produced a beautifully realised character in Meggie Tulloch, and Elemental is deeply satisfying and gracefully composed. Taken at face value, certain elements of the plot might seem contrived, like the trope of the older woman reflecting on her life, or the clever girl denied her education who treasures books. Yet Curtin’s skilful execution saves Elemental from cliché, and Meggie’s philosophical observations ring true. Ideas of transcendence also underpin this work: ‘when things change, something new enters the space you live in, something you must move with, turn to, chafe against, until you ease a new shape for yourself. But something is lost, too, in the changing, some small piece of your world is gone for good.’ The element of chance has the potential to disrupt the determinism of biology, illustrated beautifully through a metaphoric device of butterflies.

Wendy Were

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