Eighth Moon Bridge

 

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Or not quite, as Jack did not begin life on the island, which becomes home. When a primary school child, his father, a teacher, took him, and his mother, reluctantly from Glasgow, to the island, where he, the father, is to become the Headteacher of the local primary. Jack is grafted into island life, but the graft remains visible to child and islanders alike, this is not where he began, fully belonging is withheld, not unkindly but with the realism of places where communities grew up with one another, in lockstep, for good and ill.

His transplantation is softened by his friendship, and growing if unarticulated love, for Sally, his peer both in the classroom and in their joint, quietly competitive athleticism. 

Yet Jack's arc will lead him away, from Sally through tragedy, and by the draw first of professional football with Chelsea, and when that unwinds, in these pre-celebrity rewarded footballing days, with a degree in chemistry, a life in modest business, ahead of the wave for the natural and the organic, and an initially real, yet unsatisfactory relationship, both business and personal, with Charlotte that dissolves in apparent differences - her ambitions (and addictions) that do not match his own.

Our lives so often unfold like this - a mixture of choices, more or less consciously made against the wave of happenstance and the fates - but midway through life his father's death intervenes. He returns home to his mother, and at a beautifully told moment at night, an island's invitation to come home is issued, to make a home, an opportunity to leave the grafted memory behind and live into this world that is the island.

Jack becomes the local postman whose practical delivery services are augmented by his role as community sentinel, watching over, for example, the well-being of people living alone, in relative, isolation. Charlotte sobered, reappears, and takes up a new life, assuming a retiring fisherman's boat and a life with Jack. It is indicative of many communities on the perceived 'edge of things' where new paths to renewal must be woven together, insider and outsider, fashioning a renewed common cause.

Then magic appears. 

A paper is found from Olghair MacKenzie, a seventeenth-century legendary adventurer, and potential alchemist that may point to hidden treasure - Spanish gold or the result of an alchemical experiment? The unraveling of MacKenzie's clues requires Jack and his accomplices to engage not only with the Gaelic language, and naming of localities, on the then cusp of vanishing, resting principally in the minds and hearts of aging women but also with the fey, the ability to receive messaging through dream and intuition beyond the normal. The adventure of the discovery is beautifully told and is effortlessly woven into what, hither to fore, is a story of sensitive, observed realism, heightened with tinctures of poetry, now the natural and the supernatural blend together with the realism of any Indigenous tradition which entertains no sharp distinction, as we might, between seeing and vision.

The path of exploration turns full circle in a revelation that completes the book and suggests that Eliot might be right in this case after all if one includes one's ancestors in the exploration and the return!

It is a beautifully realized story that speaks of renewal, personal and communal, without ever breaching the sentimental, with insight and poetry that lifts the ordinary into an extraordinary that it suggests is, in fact, ever so possibly simply how things can be - and that alchemy is never confined to the mineral world, it lurks everywhere.