2023/086: The Bass Rock — Evie Wyld

2023/086: The Bass Rock — Evie Wyld

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. ( Read more... )