One for sorrow

John Lister-Kaye's 1994 novel, ONE FOR SORROW: is it a murder mystery? Yes, among four or five other literary genres as well. For we sense from the first that something terribly bad had happened during "the brief apologetic summer" of 1989. We are about to learn what happened and why. ***

In both northern England and northeastern Scotland people have long foretold the future with the help of either a venerable crow or magpie counting augury, a rhyme which begins, "One for sorrow, one for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy ..." Admittedly, our first magpies, three of them, did not augur ill. They popped up in England, on the 800 years old estate of Lord Gerry Denby. Instinctively, "Gerry threw his left hand in the air, holding three fingers aloft as he had been taught by his grandfather, to make the superstition hold good." That superstition, "three for a girl," in the magpie counting rhyme, simply foresaw some girl playing an undefined role in the Lord's future. She turns out to be 19 year old Shiona Duncan. Her father Andrew is Lord Denby's shepherd on his 45,000 acre Arvendish Estate in northern Scotland. Soon we have also met all four Duncans as well As Shiona's boy friend and friend of her Highlands environment, naturalist Rob Pearce, the novel's hero. Rob is bitterly opposed by the novel's undisguised villain, wildlife-hating (or at least vermin-hating) Jimmy Forbes, Lord Gerry's long time game keeper at Arvendish. Rob found proof that Jimmy had poisoned two golden eagles. As a result, Jimmy had been fined and lost his powerful position with Lord Denby with all its opportunities for poaching and theft. ***

There are plenty of crows to count both upon, above and around the large Highlands estate of Lord Gerry but very few magpies. Therefore our advance knowledge that sighting just one lonely magpie means "sorrow" tips us off to the significance of the following passage at the end of Chapter 25: "Just then a bird flew out of the alders and crossed the river ahead of them, uttering a raucous, rattling laugh. The sound was alien; that of an intruder who didn't belong there, its black and white plumage vulgar and shocking. 'Look at that!' said Shiona. 'I've not seen a magpie in the glen before.'" No murder has yet occurred, but we now know it will not be long in coming -- for sighting a solitary magpie portends sorrow. ***

ONE FOR SORROW is a rare detective story in reverse: clues show up first, murder later. Does that make this novel a tragedy rather than a murder mystery? Whatever else ONE FOR SORROW may be, it is also argumentative, rhetorical. It makes a steady drumbeat case for keeping impoverished ordinary Scots (as distinct from wealthy absentee owners of hunting estates) on the land, their land. In the final analysis, the Highlands belong to their own small-scale yeoman, shepherds and fisher folk. ***

After Bonnie Prince Charlie Stuart's defeat by the Hanoverians in the 1746 battle of Culloden, the Highlands clan system with its paternalistic protection of the little people was systematically destroyed by government. Next "the clearances" without mercy drove many thousands of farmers and shepherds off their lands away to the alien south or to New World Colonies. The clearances were also undertaken in order to favor sheep, deer and grouse while destroying the land for native trees and birds of prey. Of late government subsidies had, however, also begun to reward fast-growing commercial plantations of non-native trees. ONE FOR SORROW is filled with debates on how to keep the tiny Highland remnant of true Scots on what is left of their land. ***

There is something in this fascinating book for every reader -- much more by far than I have sketched. -OOO-