A shard of flint inspired Margaret Elphinstone's evocative novel about hunter-gatherers in Scotland

Published on Friday 29 May 2009 13:58

THIS STORY BEGINS WITH A TINY piece of stone, a little sliver buried by centuries of sand and silt. You might not notice it at all unless you knew what you were looking for, but this piece of flint has been carved, chipped to make a blade, by a human hand 8,000 years ago.

Novelist Margaret Elphinstone recalls vividly holding a microlith like this one during an archaeological dig on the island of Coll. For her, it acted as a bridge across time, back to Mesolithic Scotland to the man or woman who fashioned it. She held it and asked a novelist's questions: who were they? what were they talking about? what were they thinking?

Elphinstone's historical fiction has visited different ages, from the Vikings to the fur traders of the Canadian wilderness in the early 19th century, but her latest novel, The Gathering Night, is perhaps her most ambitious. It is one of only a few that imagine the Mesolithic world, an age for which we have no written records and almost no physical evidence – except for those fragments of stone.

"When you begin to read about prehistoric Scotland, you notice that in every book there is a paragraph saying: 'Before that, there were hunter-gatherers for 7,000 years'," Elphinstone says. "I would read this and think, 'That's a big gap'. As a writer, your attention is always drawn to the gaps, to the silences. It's a hell of a long time, and it's passed by complete silence."

It proved a stark contrast to working on her last novel, Light, about lighthouse keepers on an island off the Isle of Man in the 1830s. "It is a huge step, to go from so many voices, a babble in your ears, to nothing. In the 19th century, you're drowning in documentary evidence, there are so many contemporaneous accounts. There are no voices at all from the Mesolithic."

But that doesn't mean the imagination gets free rein. As with all Elphinstone's historical novels, The Gathering Night is the product of stringent research, reading widely not just in the academic study of the Mesolithic age, but studies of hunter-gatherer cultures elsewhere in the world.

"I really wouldn't like people to think: 'Oh there's nothing there so she made it all up'," she says. "I would like to think there is nothing in the book that hasn't been real for somebody at some time in some place. Of course, there are hypotheses about Mesolithic Scotland because there are so few signs, but that doesn't mean you go off into a complete fantasy."

She creates a richly imagined world as she follows a group of families, the Auk people, around their peripatetic hunting camps on the Sound of Mull and the Inner Hebrides. It's a landscape of forest and water, a world with boar, bears and beavers, yet by its mountains and beaches it is still recognisably our own. The stability of the Auks' world is shaken by the unexpected death of a young man, and by the arrival of a stranger from the East coast whose family has been lost in a tsunami (there is archaeological evidence that this took place around 6,050BC).

The story is told by various members of an extended family, as if around a camp fire at their annual Gathering Camp. In keeping with the storytelling traditions of hunter-gatherer cultures, she has no protagonist: the story belongs to the community.

In creating a world from the past, the novelist's greatest need is for detail. Hence the poring over environmental archaeology texts that describe the plant life of the time.

But Elphinstone says that some of the most useful information she found on hunter-gatherers was in "utterly unreconstructed Victorian accounts by male explorers who went about and cohabited with (whatever culture] they could find. In terms of political correctness, you can forget it, but they describe how they cooked the dinner."

Still, she needed to go further, she needed to feel, touch, smell the time she was writing about. So she napped her own microliths – "very poorly" – and made a coracle, a boat made of hazel or willow wands covered with animal skins believed to be similar to those used by Mesolithic people.

"It was crucial to be working with these live materials. I would not set out for Treshinish in my coracle – usually I just go round in circles – but the fact that I have made and paddled it is important. When I describe a character feeling the water under her feet through the hide, I couldn't have felt that if I hadn't done it."

Elphinstone doesn't shirk adventure when it comes to investigating the worlds of her characters. She travelled through Greenland when working on her second Viking novel, The Sea Road, and canoed up the Ottawa river when writing Voyageurs, set in the Canadian wilderness in the early 19th century.

Another key experience was taking part in an archaeological dig in Lapland when she was at university, where she met the indigenous Sami people, following the reindeer. Islands and wilderness permeate her books. She loves hill-walking and sailing and moved to Galloway last year – after taking early retirement from her job as Professor of Creative Writing at Strathclyde University – to be closer to the great outdoors.

She is careful not to idealise the Mesolithic life. Though people enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the animals they hunted, and a diet that was organic and sustainable in a way we can only dream about today, it could be a harsh, precarious existence. "We all project an image from our own world on to that past. It might be a very Hobbesian image, where life is 'nasty, brutish and short' or an image from Rousseau where noble savages cavort around in an Edenic golden age. But given that, trying to look as dispassionately as we can, life was probably in many ways quite good.

"All hunter-gatherer societies today exist in lands that were considered too marginal for agriculture – if they weren't, the land would have been taken over long ago. So if they can live all right in these marginal territories, what must it have been like in Scotland in 6,000BC, with rivers and seas full of fish, forests full of animals, lots of edible plants, not that many people? A lot of the time, times were very good."

Tantalising finds from the Mesolithic age elsewhere in Europe hint at a society with a rich mythology and belief system: in Yorkshire, a mask made for a man with a pair of deer antlers; in Scandinavia, the body of a newborn buried laid on a swan's wing. "These were people with poetry and symbolism. In some ways, they were far less sophisticated, in others far more – I suspect if I sent you out into the Galloway rain to get your dinner, I suspect you'd have a problem."

Her tales of their belief systems – "go-betweens" fulfilling roles of shamans, healers and "social workers" – is adapted from accounts from hunter-gather societies elsewhere in the world, from the Inuit of Greenland to the bushmen of the Kalahari, which are incredibly similar, despite their diverse locations.

There are ways in which the Mesolithic world seems imaginably different to our own, but Elphinstone is keen to emphasise the similarities. "I've been astonished by some of the things people have said, like: 'Could these people speak? Didn't they have different sorts of jaws from us?' They're thinking of Neanderthals, but in terms of the history of the world, this is yesterday. Genetically, these people are us. Sometimes, picking up microliths, or you're sitting somewhere they sat, it's almost like you could reach out and touch them. They were just as human as us."

Elphinstone believes that "history is the only way to learn about ourselves and what we're likely to do". And, yes, we can look at the world of The Gathering Night and see a reflection of our own: the same family bonds, the same gender dynamics, the importance of how – and whether – we are prepared to receive a stranger at our metaphorical hearth. A world where we might learn something.

"The last thing I had on my mind was any propaganda about how we should all become hunter-gatherers, there are far too many of us and the world has changed a great deal too much. But there is something to learn that we've lost.

&#149 The Gathering Night by Margaret Elphinstone is published by Canongate, priced 12.99.