STAR READ: Electricity by Angus Peter Campbell
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
The almost ghostly figures of two people on a bike racing through a misty landscape of croft houses and telegraph poles flows across the cover of Angus Peter Campbell’s latest novel and this week’s Star Read, Electricity.
Bikes and electric power make their way all through this book of a gran’s memoir mainly of life growing up in the Hebrides, written for and to her granddaughter – ‘My Dear Emily’ – in Australia, lit by a life's wisdom.
The novel is not about the distant past, and it also includes the mysteries of now too, chapters that could almost be seen as separate short stories – but not quite.
Following the lives of Annie, her brothers – Duncan and Fearchar, mother and father and their neighbours, acquaintances and other islanders, you are quickly caught up and don’t miss being chivvied along by a single powerful plotline.
The threads of the stories weave together and unravel at their own pace – humour is always there with revelations and events that often seem inevitable – or unexpected and surprising, keeping you on your toes.
So, the story of an airport develops into how the community weathers a threat of the modern – and how it triggers urges for travel and adventure in Annie’s brother.
The chapter Electricity could stand as a self-existing piece of beautiful, understated writing.
'The evening sound of my childhood is the hiss of the paraffin tilley-lamp hanging from a nail on the ceiling. We could measure the time by the sound, for the lamp went quieter as the fuel burnt through and the smell is the sweet odour of the paraffin when it took that first flicker of flame and slowly lit up the globe."
Not just going into gleaming detail about the home lit by the tilley-lamp, there’s also a wry account of how Mr Johnston comes to the family home to offer a connection to the grid.
'Duncan and Fearchar and I loved it. We wanted the man to talk forever. About light and speed and sparks and sound and how you could see the lights of Glasgow from a hundred miles away and how the world was like a lit ball from outer space, with only Africa and where we stayed as dark spots ... We would miss toasting bread on an open fire, however. Those late winter nights, with the wind howling outside, when Dad gave us the special long fork and we took it in turns to toast the loaf through the grill of the stove.'
The Ceilidh details house ceilidhs, dances and stories. Staying with you as you read on, there is one about 'Mairead’s Stack … a huge rock cloven in half, in which young Mairead Steele had sheltered for five days and nights at the time of the great snowstorm of a century ago, staying alive by melting the snow in her mouth. She went on to live until she was one hundred'.
Noting page numbers of passages to share as you read, you soon realise Electricity has so many.
Hazel sees fairies and still does when she and Annie are old: 'Thankfully she is as free and daft as ever, walking barefoot over the heather to gather her peats, and comfortable enough, with me (though not with anyone else) to tell me about the fairies she still sees on her early evening walks out on the old shieling path on their milk-white steeds... 'And the thing is, dear Annie, none of them have grown any older. They're the same ones, for I recognise their voices as well as their dress'.'
So many characters to get to know – Campbell the man who sells big ideas, Mrs MacPherson with her beautiful garden against the odds and her colour-coded families and the babies she brings into the world.
Plug in and feel the power for yourself.
Electricity (Luath Press, £9.99) is out on Tuesday, April 25.
