Each day, except Sunday, which is the Sabbath, Maisie and her six companions are taken by Donald, their owner and companion, on a 'mile' long amble across his croft and common land to exercise, feed, rest, and fertilize the landscape.
As this daily pattern unfolds, so does Donald's mind, accustomed to its place, roaming across and around time, remembering the stories that give him and the landscape, partly through him, their meaning and purpose. Once these purposes were shared in a wider community of knowing, but this lies sadly fragmented and steadily lost in the passage of 'progress'.
The language, Gaelic, has faded away with the passage of time and generations, and the economic basis of life - crofting and the sea - has crumbled to be 'replaced' by the uncertainties of wind generation, a futuristic 'spaceport', holiday homes, and tourism. A shared faith, and Donald is a practicing Catholic, has frayed.
Yet Donald never steps into the same world twice - though many of his daily rituals are repeated, the world that weaves through them is ever-changing as it cycles through the seasons and as time runs through the past, present, and future of Donald's memory and mind. A cycle of time anchored in a gifting eternity.
What might be a daily exercise in melancholic nostalgia becomes, however, lightened by Donald's continuous curiosity and the stories he weaves from it. Stories that weave fact and memory, fancy and imagination in a dense web where you are left not knowing where one thread ends and another begins. Do the fairies, for example, live in the hollow, in Donald's summoning imagination, or in his fanciful eccentricity that could be seen (and is seen by onlookers) as 'madness'? Has Donald visited them once, and if so, in what way?
One of the beauties of the book is that it leaves this question wholly open, and suggests perhaps that our 'real' world intersects with equally real worlds of the imaginal and remembered, storied. Indeed, it is what makes living in a place, actually loved and known. It requires it to be so layered, thickly textured, and told.
This is not a novel for those who await 'development' or 'action'. Donald is gently tempted from his daily path, but returns, and the district nurse, first seen as a potential threat, for maybe she comes to section him, becomes an ally in that return and in a constructive deepening of the pattern of his life through the means of gardening.
It is a novel that meditatively dwells on the meanings of time, memory, place, and the purposes of storytelling in fashioning individual and communal lives, and does so through a life so apparently simple and regular as a herdsman of a small group of cattle, and the owner of a dog and a cat. It is the great joy of the novel that Campbell makes this life sing with layers of poetic and complex meaning, as the life itself is sung out of the texture of its manifold elements.
It wonderfully testifies to the presumption of my landlady in Oxford, the formidable and wonderful Lady Wheare, that every life is interesting (though she did add you might need more than one glass of sherry to find out in what way)!
Finally, perhaps at the novel's heart, is one of those simple questions that defy simple answering, namely, how do we want to live, in what kind of world, and what have we lost in the past that might be redeemed for a renewed future.
At the novel's end, I was reminded of Voltaire's enigmatic response at the end of Candide - that we might or should cultivate our gardens; but, here it is wisely added, we should do this in true companionship, living in shared stories.
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