Book review: What We Did In The Dark, by Ajay Close

In 1904, Glaswegian writer Catherine Carswell made a “rash and foolish” first marriage to Herbert Jackson, an artist she had known for less than a month. Within a year, the relationship was over: he was committed to an asylum and she pursued a four-year battle to legally divorce him, at the cost of making their daughter, Diana, illegitimate.

Ajay Close

Ajay Close’s latest novel is inspired by this part of Carswell’s story, which took place in the years before she became well known as a journalist and author, one of the few women in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish Renaissance movement and famous for losing her job at the then Glasgow Herald for praising DH Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow.


However, while much of her work was autobiographical, Carswell’s early marriage to Jackson was never a subject which she tackled herself.
In the second part of What We Did In The Dark – set in 1939, long after Carswell’s marriage to Jackson – Close has her heroine say: “There is nothing that happened to me before the age of 25 and after the age of 30 that I have not set down on paper, but I never published a word about our marriage.”


The novel begins at a gathering at the house of Carswell’s former professor, Walter Raleigh, with whom she has a short-lived affair. Yet despite her attraction to Raleigh, his home is the place where she first meets Jackson, the younger brother of the professor’s wife.


From the beginning of the novel, Close has a wonderful ability to draw the reader into Carswell’s life – and her relationships. When she meets Jackson, the first person narrative’s attention suddenly switches from the reader to the artist, creating an intimacy between them. “You are standing in the doorway,” Carswell says, speaking, as she does throughout much of the book, directly to Jackson.


Equally, Carswell’s conversations with her friends are vivid and modern. “Cath, it’s as if you’ve locked your brain in a cupboard,” says one. “When it’s all gone wrong and you’re back in Glasgow, I’ll be the only one you can face.”


Once the couple are married they move to Italy, where Carswell becomes a victim of Jackson’s delusions and anger. Close’s handling of Carswell’s realisation of Jackson’s mental illness is sensitive, and it is as shocking to the reader as it appears to be to Carswell herself.
Close is a master at creating this kind of novel – she has dramatised the lives of other Scottish women, notably the suffragette Arabella Scott, who features in A Petrol Scented Spring as well as her play, Cat And Mouse.


What We Did In The Dark is a wonderfully compelling book, bringing to life a fascinating historical character.



Book review: What We Did In The Dark, by Ajay Close, Sandstone Press, £8.99