Star Read joins Alan Warner to travel with Bonnie Prince Charlie
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The Scottish publisher Polygon came up with the idea of Darkland Tales, asking writers to reimagine stories and legends of the country’s past. Crime writer Denise Mina imagined Mary Queen of Scots’ tragic favourite Rizzio as one early subject for the 100-odd-paged novellas.
The latest sees Alan Warner – of Morvern Caller, Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour and the elegiac Kitchenly 434 set in a rock star's country mansion – travelling back in time to imagine a damp 1746 tramping the Highland hills with a defeated, post-Culloden Bonnie Prince Charlie and his faithful.
This week’s Star Read, Nothing Left To Fear From Hell sees Warner’s more usual punky, alternative take on life reined in, as if to take a fresh look through fiction at the often sneered-at prince, searching for grace and nobility in a figure so universally mocked these days for his failures.
Having said that, it’s hard to be glorious presented from the opening pages leaping off a boat to present the land with a coil of vomit from one end and stream of diarrhoea from the other.
Even the sound of the oars of these Jacobite heroes on the water, Warner likens to “the slap of linen shirts on riverside stones” – a safe domestic comparison to rein in any pictures his reader might be concocting of grand warriors.
But in almost poetic language describing this testing land, and almost in spite of himself, perhaps, Warner follows “the pale man” who is tholing days in wet clothes, rarely sleeping, eating scraps and enthusiastically donning drag to play Flora MacDonald’s servant girl – with a grudging but growing warmth.
He writes: “When meeting any person of high or low station – a great chief of eight hundred men, a general, a beggar or an orra man – the Prince, without fail, held a necessity to impose a striking and always pleasing impression of his easy humour.”
Warner seems to relish reassessing his royal “brigand”.
Nothing Left To Fear From Hell (Polygon, £10).
