The Unrecovered, by Richard Strachan review: 'an audacious debut novel'
This is an ambitious, sometimes puzzling first novel. The author, formerly an Edinburgh bookseller, has published short stories in a number of magazines, and there are some episodes in The Unrecovered that might well have been brought out as individual stories.
Among these is an admirable honeymoon scene in which a young wife trails her naval officer husband around Florence, seeking out every place connected with her favourite poets, Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth. Meanwhile, the husband drinks and grumbles, complaining it's not much of a honeymoon. This scene is brilliantly done, all the more so because we know the wife, Esther, is a widow, her husband killed in the early weeks of the Great War, and she is working as a volunteer nurse in a hospital for war-wounded.
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Hide AdEsther's relationships with the people she works with there - the doctors, the matron, the other nurses and the wounded patients - one of whom she has to feed because he has lost both hands - are very well done. Indeed, the hospital scenes make for satisfying, realistic fiction, the moods, stresses, moments of hope and moments of despair all convincing, true to life in an appalling time.
There is of course a vast store of novels and memoirs from the 1914-18 war, and one has read enough of these to know when the note struck rings true or false; here, circumstances, memories, hopes, fears and resentments are all convincing. There is, however, a very different story running alongside the hospital one, and though they will be linked, quite neatly indeed, this second narrative strand is as extravagant as the other is satisfyingly true to life.
The hospital is a large country house on the Edinburgh side of the Firth of Forth. Not far away and on a cliff-face is a medieval castle, dating apparently from the reign of David I, who granted it to a Norman baron who had followed him north. Fair enough, and the idea of a medieval castle always plays well in fiction. This one has it own horror, though, a rather familiar and (of course) implausible one: a dog will howl in a ghastly way whenever the heir to the laird of the castle is dying, and a promontory just over the water is traditionally known as "Hound Point”.
The present occupant of the castle is not a descendant of a Norman baron but a tubercular young man whose late father, a proprietor of a chain of funeral parlours in India, bought the estate and employed an old and rather odd local man as his factor.
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Hide AdThe the two sets of characters, and the two plots, should converge at some point, and they do so quite convincingly, even of not with such certainty perhaps as to persuade the reader that there is ultimately a happy marriage between the realistic and effective treatment of the hospital theme and the Gothic fantasy of the grim castle.
Novelists write the novels they want to write, of course, and it is impertinent of a reviewer to argue that the two parts of the story hardly come convincingly together, or to suggest that there are two vey different novels yoked together here, and that each might have been more satisfying on its own.
Still, Strachan has made a good beginning here, and his audacious novel will give much pleasure to many people. He can create credible and engaging characters - and perhaps next time he will content himself with the sort of novel in which such characters can persuasively live, and deny himself more hounds of ill omen.
The Unrecovered, by Richard Strachan, Raven Books, £16.99
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