Love in the Mesolithic era
Adam Thorpe enjoys the unforced poetry of a prehistoric tale
Adam Thorpe
The Guardian, Saturday 25 July 2009
Article history
Adam Thorpe enjoys the unforced poetry of a prehistoric tale
Adam Thorpe
The Guardian, Saturday 25 July 2009
Article history
Novels about prehistoric life are kin to fantasy fiction: so little evidence has survived that any depiction is mainly surmise. The challenge, therefore, is to make it look convincing - putting flesh on the archaeological model rather than some authorial act of wish-fulfilment. William Golding did this magnificently with The Inheritors (1955), seeing the world through Neanderthal eyes; the Scottish novelist Margaret Elphinstone follows suit with a vivid tale from the Mesolithic, a transitional period of about 6,000 years between the vast tracts of the hunter-gathering Palaeolithic and the advent of farming.
Lacking surviving works of art, the period is seen as a falling-off, and yet its scattered people had the wit and suppleness to cope with the rapidly warming climate and rising sea levels that followed the last ice age. The only known "historical" event was a massive tsunami that hit eastern Scotland in about 6150BC. Elphinstone uses this as the trigger for her involved story of rival kin groups, loyalty, love and betrayal, salted by dangerous hunts and equally risky shamanistic ceremonies, as recounted years later by its various characters over eight nights of the eponymous "gathering".
Positing a Mesolithic belief in reincarnation, the novel concentrates on appearance and disappearance, embedding this in the natural cycle of seasonal change, the moving from camp to camp. We stay mostly with the Auk people, and particularly with the family of Bakar, a hunter who goes missing in the opening pages. This catastrophe provides the central mystery, and is counterpointed by the sudden arrival of Kemen, whose Lynx clan has been mostly wiped out by the tsunami - the sea's spirits are particularly unpredictable. When the local animals seem reluctant to give themselves to the Auk hunters, suspicion naturally falls on the kinless stranger, a potential carrier of bad spirits.
Bakar's mother Nekané, under the pressure of her grief-stricken search, becomes a "Go-Between" or shaman (although the only period evidence for this practice is some perforated and antlered deer-skull fragments from Yorkshire). While her wisdom owes more to psychological insight than spirit contact, her trance travels are real enough, as is the power of her self-fashioned drum: "I sang as I wrote my helpers into my Drum: Dolphin and Swan, Hind and Hazel Tree." The author keeps many of Nekané's thoughts and actions opaque, dancing on the edge of comprehension; by the end of the book we understand the reasoning behind them, but the effect is to heighten the spiritual mysteries among the deerskin tunics, flint cores and smoky huts.
Shades of the hippy commune, complete with plaits and body art, are soon thankfully dispelled; this is an animist, quasi-egalitarian culture poised between benignity and cruelty, dependent (as all cultures are) on who is in charge at the time. Yet the detailed accounts of the daily chores that kept these people going in their wholly natural environment are both lyrical and matter-of-fact, at times touched with humour: "I was trying to heat stones, split wood, scoop roasted hazelnuts off hot sand and suckle Esti all at once, when Amets came back, sleek as an otter from bathing in the beaver lake." And we trust an author who built her own coracle out of hazel, willow and hide, and knows what it feels like when the currents hit.
If our ancestors' intimate knowledge of nature brings its own unforced poetry, the main challenge of this kind of fiction is the dialogue. Even lacking cars, screens, football or Ikea, these people must have talked trivia. Elphinstone draws on accounts of surviving hunter-gathering societies to project backwards and invest her period with a convincing emotional landscape: the chat sounds as if translated from an ethnologist's tape, complete with bewildering jokes. This seems absolutely right.
As the story unravels through its differing viewpoints, the kinship complexities begin to look as fateful as Greek tragedy: brother against brother, vicious rape, impossible avengings. But the coup de grâce is satisfying, nevertheless: perhaps the most telling achievement of The Gathering Night is that it persuades us to accept its entirely different value-system without a qualm, and even to regret that humanity ever thought of swapping the hunter's spear for the tiller's spade.
• Adam Thorpe's latest novel is Hodd (Jonathan Cape). FONTE (foto incluída): guardian.co.uk - UK
Positing a Mesolithic belief in reincarnation, the novel concentrates on appearance and disappearance, embedding this in the natural cycle of seasonal change, the moving from camp to camp. We stay mostly with the Auk people, and particularly with the family of Bakar, a hunter who goes missing in the opening pages. This catastrophe provides the central mystery, and is counterpointed by the sudden arrival of Kemen, whose Lynx clan has been mostly wiped out by the tsunami - the sea's spirits are particularly unpredictable. When the local animals seem reluctant to give themselves to the Auk hunters, suspicion naturally falls on the kinless stranger, a potential carrier of bad spirits.
Bakar's mother Nekané, under the pressure of her grief-stricken search, becomes a "Go-Between" or shaman (although the only period evidence for this practice is some perforated and antlered deer-skull fragments from Yorkshire). While her wisdom owes more to psychological insight than spirit contact, her trance travels are real enough, as is the power of her self-fashioned drum: "I sang as I wrote my helpers into my Drum: Dolphin and Swan, Hind and Hazel Tree." The author keeps many of Nekané's thoughts and actions opaque, dancing on the edge of comprehension; by the end of the book we understand the reasoning behind them, but the effect is to heighten the spiritual mysteries among the deerskin tunics, flint cores and smoky huts.
Shades of the hippy commune, complete with plaits and body art, are soon thankfully dispelled; this is an animist, quasi-egalitarian culture poised between benignity and cruelty, dependent (as all cultures are) on who is in charge at the time. Yet the detailed accounts of the daily chores that kept these people going in their wholly natural environment are both lyrical and matter-of-fact, at times touched with humour: "I was trying to heat stones, split wood, scoop roasted hazelnuts off hot sand and suckle Esti all at once, when Amets came back, sleek as an otter from bathing in the beaver lake." And we trust an author who built her own coracle out of hazel, willow and hide, and knows what it feels like when the currents hit.
If our ancestors' intimate knowledge of nature brings its own unforced poetry, the main challenge of this kind of fiction is the dialogue. Even lacking cars, screens, football or Ikea, these people must have talked trivia. Elphinstone draws on accounts of surviving hunter-gathering societies to project backwards and invest her period with a convincing emotional landscape: the chat sounds as if translated from an ethnologist's tape, complete with bewildering jokes. This seems absolutely right.
As the story unravels through its differing viewpoints, the kinship complexities begin to look as fateful as Greek tragedy: brother against brother, vicious rape, impossible avengings. But the coup de grâce is satisfying, nevertheless: perhaps the most telling achievement of The Gathering Night is that it persuades us to accept its entirely different value-system without a qualm, and even to regret that humanity ever thought of swapping the hunter's spear for the tiller's spade.
• Adam Thorpe's latest novel is Hodd (Jonathan Cape). FONTE (foto incluída): guardian.co.uk - UK
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