'Our God would give us hope and inner freedom' – Christian Viewpoint from the Highlands
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Sally Magnusson’s latest novel, The Ninth Child, is set in the heart of 1850s Scotland, writes John Dempster.
A Glasgow doctor and his wife relocate to Loch Katrine in Perthshire, where he is project medic on the mammoth engineering operation to pipe water to Glasgow from the loch.
We meet the great and good of the city; navvies and their families; Queen Victoria; the doctor’s wife Isabel Aird, worn down by her apparent inability to carry a child to full term; the strange man she meets, newly released from faeryland.
The novel employs ‘magical realism’. Robert Kirke, the man Isabel meets, was a historical figure, the minister of Aberfoyle from 1685-92. He was a scholarly man, drawn to research “the little people”, believing that the faeries of local lore formed a fundamentally good “secret commonwealth” part of God’s creation.
Angered by his inquisitiveness, the faery folk seize him. He finds himself in a feverish underground dance in what sounds like a suburb of hell. “It puts ourselves in the centre of our own dance and stops us thinking o’ what it means to be another.” He realises how wrong his assumptions have been.
After 164 years of captivity, he is released with instructions to commit a terrible act – only then will he die and be united with his wife in heaven. His former self has been corrupted. Good and evil battle in his heart. He meets Isabel…
In a novel of ‘magic realism,’ making the supernatural explicit, I would have welcomed some explicit evidence of supernatural goodness. We meet the minister Mr Clark who works at the navvies’ camp, and Kirstie, a woman of quiet faith. But we’re not given any sense of the reality of God to them.
There’s love, compassion and courage in the book alongside the threat; medical science progresses through the work of Dr Aird’s friend Joseph Lister; the water project has life-changing impact on the health and hygiene of Glasgow citizens; Isabel Aird shakes off drawing-room lethargy and comes alive in the hills, finds a vocation, connecting with the strength of her womanhood.
There is no hint that these good things might be the fruit, not of human impulse only, but of divine prompting.
And God is silent when Kirke calls out for help. “He cam not for me. He never cam for me.” No divine liberation, or hope, or reassurance.
This does not sound like the Christian God who gives us hope and inner freedom, who heals the inner moral ‘canker’ of which Kirke speaks, replacing the smell of death with the sweet freshness of Christ as the water of life flows into our hearts.
But is there just a hint of possible redemption for Kirke?
'God, if you exist, you've got to help me out of this'
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