Book review: The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle

By STUART KELLY
Published on 15/07/2012 00:00

WE SCOTS are very fond of quoting the lines of Robert Burns: “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursel’s as others see us!” When the opportunity to do so does in fact present itself, we can be singularly supercilious, especially when the gift is given via culture.

The Silver Bough

Lisa Tuttle

Jo Fletcher Books, £14.99

WE SCOTS are very fond of quoting the lines of Robert Burns: “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursel’s as others see us!” When the opportunity to do so does in fact present itself, we can be singularly supercilious, especially when the gift is given via culture.

Music seems to fare best – Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture or Peter Maxwell Davies’ Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise, and even Roever and Korb’s Highland Cathedral has its fans. Pixar’s Brave may endear itself, in a way that Braveheart and Brigadoon did not. Literature is by far the least forgiving format. Whether it is “high art” – such as Virginia Woolf’s ersatz Skye in To The Lighthouse – or genre fiction – such as Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series – Scots, or at least Scottish critics, have a tendency to jib.

I hope such a fate does not await Lisa Tuttle’s The Silver Bough, an intriguing fantasy novel written by a prize-winning American author now resident in Scotland. A former winner of the British SF and Nebula Awards, the novel comes with praises from two titans of the genre world, George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman. The Silver Bough both wholeheartedly inhabits and subtly undermines certain stereotypes, particularly those connected with Celtic mysticism, to create a tense and tender parable.

It opens with Ashley, a teenage girl from Houston who has lost her best friend in an accident, arriving in Scotland to seek out distant relatives in the Appleton peninsula. Her grandmother originally came from the town, and left in circumstances that were never discussed.

On the way there (on a “weirdly exotic” bus that feels more like a theme park ride given the landscape) she sees a man walking in the middle of nowhere and feels an unaccountable pang of desire. The narrative focus switches, to the American librarian who has moved to Appleton and is fending off, with good humour, the more esoteric book requests from the local postman and amateur historian; to another American, a widow, and the orchard she is growing; and to a Sicilian lad exiled to the chippie there because of an indiscretion with an older woman. On Ashley’s first night in Appleton, some kind of seismic event blocks the road and cuts the peninsula off completely; almost as if it were the island the postman claims it once was.

The chapters include “found documents”, from local histories, newspapers and works of mythology, detailing the apples Appleton was once famous for, and the folkloric festival where if the golden apple is eaten with one’s true love, any wish might be granted.

Might Appleton be Innis Ubhall, its Gaelic name meaning “island of apples”, and a linguistic cognate of Avalon? What it is in the here and now is an economically stagnant and rapidly depopulating town that is “furthest from anywhere and closest to nowhere”, with the faded grandeur of an under-used library and two closed cinemas.

The mythic aspects of ­Tuttle’s story would not work unless they were grounded in the reality of small town, rural Scotland. It is a place made up of incomers – and there is a brilliantly shivery revelation about the indigenous in­habitants.

The shifting focus sets up the arc: which woman will eat the apple, and with whom? And what might they wish for? The Silver Bough might, very broadly, be called Young-Adult Fiction, but Tuttle’s depiction of teenage angst, lust and bewilderment is mature, and more importantly, is not judgemental. That the same lusts and angsts and bewilderments affect the older characters is a significant strength.

The only point that I jibbed at was that more than one character compares things to bits of the Harry Potter books. I suppose it is probably forgivable realism – and shudder to imagine how many books in the future will use Rowling’s work as a form of shorthand.

As the strict demarcations between the actual and the legendary, the past and the present, begin to blur and collapse, Tuttle’s writing becomes more unsettling and evocative. There is a sense of threat, made all the more ominous by its diffusion (parts reminded me of Stephen King’s Needful Things and the novella The Mist, but without the nudging about what to be scared of). Without being polemical, ­Tuttle gently suggests both the limitations and small-mindedness of small towns, and their equally real strengths and charms. With its title taken from F Marian McNeill’s famous retort to JG Frazer’s compendious work on comparative mythology, The Golden Bough, it is a story where the feminism is always about women and not Woman.

The subplots and back-stories­ almost always involve how women’s lives were thwarted, restricted and curtailed, and that Tuttle eschews just repeating those patterns, but in an unexpected way, is admirable.

The Silver Bough has a loveliness, of both enthusiasm and complexity, that probably comes with an outsider’s eye. That said, it reminded me most frequently of a writer I adored as a child, Mollie Hunter, especially A Stranger Came Ashore and The Walking Stones. Tuttle is every bit as eerie and memorable. «