'It's been good': Do lonely widow's reflections in Highland novel Electricity reflect something much bigger?
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Angus Peter Campbell’s Electricity is a wonderful new novel about life on a Hebridean island since the 1950s.
Annie, now a lonely widow living in Edinburgh reminisces for the benefit of her musician granddaughter in Australia.
She writes of an idyllic 1960s childhood in a community on the cusp of modernity. We are shown the islanders’ varying responses to change, and their slow realisation that the traditional understanding of the one-ness of all things – humanity, nature, the planet – holds the key to the future.
There is such beauty and loveliness in Angus Peter’s writing: and as Annie insists, there is in every beautiful thing, in everything done with care and attention, an inherent sacredness.
The islanders whose glories and failings Annie describes with such love and empathy are Catholic, attending Mass Sunday by Sunday, living in a gently understated way in the light of God’s presence. ‘Such good, innocent people,’ she describes them. It’s a goodness visible in their commitment and love, their reflective approach to life, their many kindnesses.
The local entrepreneur who plans to build an airfield fusses about the islanders’ ‘twin addictions to the past and the future. Forever going on about history or heaven as if the present did not exist. Preferring to remember than live.’
But it’s not just future-builders who value the ‘now’. The novel shows the blessings of relishing the present, like the birds who sing at daybreak ‘as if every new dawn is a surprise to them, needing a song’ or like Hazel who ‘always lived for the moment in a sort of present joy’.
What I loved most about the characters was the simplicity of their faith. How often we burden ourselves, striving to believe the ‘right things’, beating ourselves up over our failings, throwing ourselves into busy church programmes so that we forget how to be still. Christianity at heart is simply to love God as we know ourselves loved by God.
Annie touches on her own faith story. The simple faith of childhood, when ‘the sound of altar bell forgave everything’ and the statue of the Virgin ‘brought heaven nearer, within touching distance’. Her discovery of Orthodoxy, with its focus on icons and rituals pointing to God: so many visible things drawing you towards the invisible. ‘I always leave their services with a renewed sense of joy that everything matters.’ Her visits to the Free Church to sing the Psalms of David.
In the novel, mains electricity connects people, and symbolises the youthful energy which empowers change. Does it also symbolise God, who connects, energises, enlightens us?
In the first words of the novel, I suspect Annie is referring to her whole life. ‘It’s been good.’
