‘Fess up. How could you resist a debut fiction whose blurb describes it as “a muddy, pastoral fable”? The mud is immediate and immersive. It’s 1915, and World War I rumbles from over the horizon. In rural, remote Aberdeenshire, rich Lizzie and wandering Johnny dig up a corpse from a peat bog. As one does. It’s a woman, “a thing of hide”, black-faced and orange-haired, with gold around her throat. Age? Cause of death? Relevance and resonance for the local community? All – much, anyway – will be revealed.
For the claustrophobic village, it’s an ominous discovery. That’s ominous as in omens, and they soon appear. A returned, wrecked soldier smells and glimpses something inimical under his bed; strange red rashes disfigure a girl; torrential rain wrecks the harvest; silver lights have been seen drifting above said bog.
We hear about it in chapters told alternately by Johnny and Lizzie. Both our protagonists inhabit fruitless presents; both have dark pasts. And, of course, they’re so opposite, they’re bound to attract – each other, that is, as well as rumour and resentment on the farms, in the pub, even in the kirk.
Griffith cogently evokes the small, strained community ‒ its manpower is dwindling, because of the war. It’s a gaunt environment at “the arse-end of nowhere … not a place for great displays of emotion”. Everyone is being wrenched out of their comfort zones – not that Lizzie or Johnny has ever really had one.
But there are unexpected friendships, within and between genders, that extend the emotional range. There’s a surprising, convincing degree of tenderness among males, overt as well as implied. Supporting characters, such as svelte, forensically inclined James, or sister-in-law Jane, “bound up in wool, thick-ankled” and able to lower any room’s temperature by just entering it, bring extra perspectives.
Flashbacks – trek-backs, rather – through the preceding decade clarify and complicate. Internal and internecine tensions and accusations build. A Halloween dance explodes. The landlady’s cat becomes portentous; so does Johnny’s scarred hand. There’s a near-maiming, intimations of shackles and torture and witchcraft. Night noises are heard in the yard; a tooth is found in a bed; the bog woman herself blooms with mildew.
We get much vernacular and folklore, especially from Johnny and his fellow farmworkers. Meet a hairst, a chaumer, an arra-loon. Learn not to offend a grieve, how to shove a flauchter, the inappropriateness of havering. It’s used neatly and nimbly.
Greater Sins does occasionally fall back on the inexplicable or otherworldy to bridge a few gaps. A few times it starts inflating towards melodrama. Organ notes start up. But things are mostly well-paced and well-proportioned; Griffith makes a good job of leaving secrets to reveal themselves, rather than poking us in the ribs when they appear.
An awfully significant ledger and a matching hidden identity herald the climax. A subdued burial points to a bleak future. Then comes a last-page, aw-shucks dénouement, “like when spring comes, and the sun deigns to rise again”. And gracious me, it works.
Greater Sins, by Gabrielle Griffith (Doubleday, $48), is out now.
