Skip to main content

The Silver Darlings



A boy grows to manhood sealed in ownership of his own fishing boat and prospective marriage. His mother rediscovers happiness as she nurtures him, becomes reconciled to a tragic past and finally marries again. And lots of fish, mostly herring, and fishing on an unpredictable sea.


From these apparently simple elements, Neil Gunn, wove his masterpiece that is, 'The Silver Darlings', published first in 1941. Set in the merging herring fisheries of the 1820s, it not only follows the trajectory of its principal characters over a twenty year period but demarcates the refashioning of a community around the sea.


Driven by the clearances from their inland glens, communities found themselves either emigrating or on marginal land forced to take up a new life. The novel starts with Tormand's first fishing expedition in his own, new boat that ends in tragedy when it is accosted by a press gang ship and its crew hijacked for imperial service on the high seas. Tormand resists and in the resulting melee is injured later dying from his injuries. His wife, Catrine, back on land, is not to have this fate confirmed for many years and it is this that shapes her life and the life of her new born child, Finn. Her binding to Finn becomes a suffocating one that must be broken if it is ever to be renewed on a new basis. This drives the narrative, combined with Catrine's long suiting by Roddie, a newly emergent successful herring fisher and stimulus and rival to Finn's longings. This tale of binding and unbinding, of admiration and jealously, of shifting emotional scales, often in a twinkling of time, is beautifully told, never putting a psychological foot wrong.


But this being Gunn not everything flows along this well drawn, evocative path of social realism. Catrine knows that Tormand is dead (though cannot act on her knowledge until outwardly confirmed) because at the moment of his death, he appeared to her, unmistakably gesturing his new state. Finn has an abiding vision of elderly man, beckoning him forward towards a better image of himself, that he sees as a young boy at the ruined 'House of Peace' (probably once a simple monastery) a calming, challenging image he carries through life. And so it goes.


This is a world not only wholly real in the complexities of the hope and injustice of history, both communally and individually, but a world saturated in the psychic - of intuition, dream, ritual and superstition that may continually be more than that; and, ultimately it is hinted, if not said, of a unifying transcendence. A transcendence that culturally is invested in the abiding, and ever present Christian faith, however disfiguring of that faith certain presented theologies (or ideologies) may be; but, for Gunn, more deeply in a common unification of mind and way that could be best be described as 'the Tao' (a recognition Gunn himself came to in later years). The world is the expression of a unifying way, beyond description, that we recognize at critical moments when our seeing is clear and we consciously merge with its flowing and being (and from which comes the intuition of our best Self).


Meanwhile, there are fish and the sea! What makes Gunn a great writer is his ability to weave all these elements together - communal life, individual narrative, deeper meanings - with an epic story of a community's coming to be - and with great set pieces - the opening press ganging, a cholera epidemic, the fight in a pub, the tension of a sustained period of fishing failure, a storm tossed trip to the Outer Hebrides; and, Finn's epic scaling of cliffs to effect a rescue (of different kinds) not once but twice. A continual sustaining of interest over its 584 pages (and, like Moby Dick, a lot of information about fish and fishing).


Finally, and tangentially, there is the image of a community faced with apparent inexhaustible abundance without recognition that this was not true (though one conversation hints at the first signs of insecurity). It was a more innocent age than ours - though even as we know fishing stocks are in collapse - it barely yet touches our behaviors - the story of inexhaustible material abundance remains with us yet.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more