The Bass Rock

This book was a bit of a wildcard for me, but I had heard so many others recommend it online that I just had to try it. The use of the different timelines was a great choice, I felt it really gave the novel pace. I also appreciated the cast of characters; though they all lived very different lives the author kept up a consistent tone for the novel so that there was no jarring when moving between timelines. The overall feeling of this gothic foreboding really stays with the reader.

Based mostly in North Berwick, Wyld’s new novel is set across three interlinked timelines and protagonists and moves between first and third person. I love searching for clues as to how people fit together in multi-narrator works like this, but I’ll admit that I couldn’t quite fit the third narrative (which is set furthest in the past) into the others, except that the box with the teeth features in it too. Each timeline illustrates how women have been abused by men, physically and mentally, throughout history but this isn’t a particularly depressing novel; the strong female characters and what they’ll do for each other make it uplifting, as well as devastating. With the gothic fairytale elements of witches and wolves that run through it, The Bass Rock would pair very well with Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, which also takes domestic abuse as its focus.

Set on the Scottish border, and weaving together three different time periods, The Bass Rock is an intriguing, complex, heartbreaking novel about what it's like to be a woman. It is not an easy book to describe, but in essence the story follows three main strands:
In the 18th century, Sarah is a young woman accused of being a witch, on the run and desperate.
In the 1940s, Ruth is lost and alone. She is a new wife, a new stepmother, and is also on the run, this time from the truth.
In the present day, Vivian is struggling to survive, drifting through life, and becomes the accidental conduit through which the past is remembered. There are witches (both past and present), ghosts and madness (both past and present), love and death and everything in between.. Darkly unsettling, deeply disturbing in places, The Bass Rock is also strangely compulsive and beautifully, beautifully written. I was desperate to discover the fates of the women in the different, yet interconnected, eras.

Evie Wyld’s new novel, The Bass Rock, is a remarkable piece of work. It’s a long time since I’ve read a novel that has engaged me so thoroughly and moved me to the extremes of this book. Set over three different time periods, the present day, post-World War II and the seventeenth century, the narrative focuses primarily on the lives of three different women, all linked by location and by the looming presence of the Bass Rock.  Just as the rock stands immovable, dark and brooding over the landscape, so too does the question of male sexual violence darken the lives not only of Viviane, Ruth and Sarah but also of the nameless, beaten women whose stories punctuate the seven segments into which Wyld organises her book.

In each of the main storylines the focus rests upon a woman whose relationship with both herself and those around her is to some extent dictated by the men in her life. In the present day, Viviane, commuting between London and Scotland, where she has been tasked with the job of closing down the old family home of her recently dead father, is wracked with guilt at having slept with her sister, Katherine’s, husband, Dom, while at the same time beginning a tentative relationship with Vincent, a man she meets in a queue. In the post war period the narrative centres around Ruth, second wife of the widowed Peter, whose younger son, Michael, is Viviane’s father. Very aware that in the eyes of many she does not live up to the expectations associated with the ‘Lady of the Big House’ and often lonely given the boys absence at school and Peter’s frequent expeditions to London for work, Ruth makes friends with Betty, their cook cum housekeeper and through her begins to understand what motivates the disturbing undercurrents she finds in the society around her. The final strand, set in 1600s, centres on Sarah, proclaimed a witch and forced to flee with a family who, to all intents and purposes, are running not only to protect her but also themselves. These segments are perhaps less well worked than those relating to Viviane and Ruth, but the menace felt by Sarah, the constant danger that she is in simply because she is a woman, is much more directly communicated. And, between each of the seven major segments there is the story of a series of unnamed women, united by the violence that they suffer at the hands of men.  The universality of the theme that Wyld is exploring is given explicit voice quite late in the book:

I can see that there are people in the kitchen with us, there are children and women, all holding hands like us, and I wonder, is this the ghost everyone sees, is it in fact a hundred thousand different ghosts? It’s only possible to focus on one at a time. They spill out of the doorway, and I see through the wall that they fill the house top to bottom, they are locked in wardrobes, they are under the floorboards, they crowd out of the back door into the garden, they are on the golf course and on the beach and their heads bob out of the sea, and when we walk, we are walking right through them. The birds on the Bass Rock, they fill it, they are replaced by more, their numbers do not diminish with time, they nest on the bones of the dead.
Apparently, Wyld was in the middle of writing the novel when the #MeToo movement began and it is clear to see that she is exploring many of the issues relating to violence towards women which that brought to light. However, it would be to diminish this book  to suggest that it is nothing more than a feminist tract. There are good men in the book, especially Christopher, Michael‘s elder brother, and, by implication, Michael himself. Both of them, as boys, have suffered at the hands of predatory men and equally both of them have suffered as a result of a conspiracy on the part of other men who have power over them, to refute any complaint that they might make. Both of them appear to grow up to be decent human beings. It is also the case that to some extent society has conditioned women to be instrumental in their own suffering. We see this in the way in which the post war women readily take part in a traditional picnic that ends in a rite which has obvious sexual overtones and it is there in the attitude of Ruth‘s mother who has no sympathy for Judith‘s loss of a daughter, she had lost her only son after all, which was surely worse than losing a daughter. And, there is also the suggestion that when faced with violence, women don’t always act in their own best interest, almost as if accepting that such treatment is inevitable. When Viviane and Katherine are threatened by an angry Dom on both occasions their response is to freeze rather than to assert their right to safety.

The Bass Rock is a powerful and most beautifully written novel and I was gripped by it from beginning to end. My only question is this: can somebody please explain to me why such an excellent book is not on the long list for the Women’s Prize this year?

With thanks to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing Jonathan Cape and NetGalley for a review copy.

The Bass Rock is central to the story of the three women's lives which are linked and interwoven.

In the 18th Century, Sarah taken for a witch flees with her Priest and his son while in the aftermath of WWII Ruth marries widower, Peter and takes on his two sons. The house, at North Berwick is too big for her when he's working in London and the boys are at school. She befriends Betty, the cook/housekeeper, not particularly wishing to throw herself into village life and still sorely missing her brother.. The Vicar is a strange man who likes to pry into others lives.

In the present day Viviane is getting over her beloved father's death and is tasked with cataloguing Ruth's belongings before the house is put up for sale. She has her secrets, one of which is tearing her relationship with her sister Katherine apart.

The story is beautifully drawn and atmospheric and which touches on mental health issues, physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, friendship and the strengths of these three special women. Would highly recommend.

The Bass Rock is an inescapable presence in the Firth of Forth, its shadow threatening and looming those suffering in its shadow. It is dark, it is uninhabited, it is inevitable. It represents the past events that the women can never escape and the constant presence and threat of male violence that each one has, to some extent, accepted as an inevitable part of their lives.

The book follows three women whose stories intersect in North Berwick. There is Viviane, a contemporary woman struggling with life and grief who is cataloguing the contents of a family home after a recent death. There is Ruth, recently arrived with her husband in the 1950s, and struggling to live in the shadow of his first, dead wife and forge a bond with his two young sons while trying to exorcise the ghost of her brother, lost in the war. And long ago in the eighteenth century there is Sarah, accused of witchcraft by men who blame her for their circumstances and their own desire for her. Interspersed between these arcs are the tragic nameless women, victims of violence and never revealed further. It's a complex but tightly controlled structure that produces an elegant and powerful narrative.

Each woman is finding her way in a world that places her second, and in which she has learned to do the same. Gaslighting appears again and again as the men in the story question the motivations and experiences of the women, Reacting with doubt, mockery or anger when they are challenged and twisting realities. Sometimes this is a deliberate tactic to change the subject or avoid the consequences of their actions. Perhaps, more disturbing is when it happens as an unthinking reflex that makes the men automatically dismiss women's voices, when they genuinely believe in every circumstance that their own interpretation is more reliable. The sanatorium and the psychiatric ward are presences in the lives of both Viviane and Ruth and the ability of others to take their freedom and their mental stability is a constant threat.

The toxic masculinity on show isn't wholly reserved for women. By giving Peter young sons boarding away at a private school Wyld also reveals how attitudes and behaviours are transmitted to new generations. The treatment of Ruth's stepsons, Christopher and Michael, and the way that it is dismissed as a necessary evil for “making men” terrible. The silence that surrounds it is reinforced by the fact that, in contrast to unflinching description of women's suffering (mental as often as it is physical), Wyld only glances at it askance and offers mysterious hints. It's part and parcel of the masculine impulse that inspires many of the male characters to “rescue” the women, even against their will. An impulse that is more about possession than protection and which often turns violent when rebuffed.

The narrative themes that tie the whole story together are beautifully done. Episodes of tickling encompass witchcraft, a picnic with Ruth that has unsettling Wicker Man-esque undertones and disputed consent for Viviane. The imagery is full of wolves and foxes, predatory and threatening. The writing itself is delicate for such subject-matter with a welcome black humour. It's full of fury and frustration and it's pitch-perfect.

There is also a Gothic, fairy-tale current that runs throughout. Wolfmen, witches, spirits, foxes wolves and other shadowy predators. It's a haunted story and in haunts in its turn.