As I mentioned on Tuesday, I previously knew of Annalena McAfee only as Mrs. Ian McEwan, though she has a distinguished literary background: she founded the Guardian Review and edited it for six years, was Arts and Literary Editor of the Financial Times, and is the author of multiple children’s books and one previous novel for adults, The Spoiler (2011).
Well, anyone who reads Hame will be saying “Ian who?” as this is on such a grand scale compared to anything McEwan has ever attempted. The subtitle, “The Fascaray Archives,” gives an idea of how thorough McAfee means to be: the life of fictional poet Grigor McWatt is her way into everything that forms the Scottish identity. Her invented island of Fascaray is a carefully constructed microcosm of Scotland from ancient times to today. I loved the little glimpses of recent history, like the referendum on independence and a Donald Trump figure, billionaire “Archie Tupper,” bulldozing an environmentally sensitive area to build his new golf course (this really happened, in Aberdeenshire in 2012).
Narrator Mhairi McPhail arrives on Fascaray in August 2014, her nine-year-old daughter Agnes in tow. She’s here to oversee the opening of a new museum, edit a seven-volume edition of McWatt’s magnum opus, The Fascaray Compendium (a 70-year journal detailing the island’s history, language, flora, fauna and customs), and complete a critical biography of the poet. Over the next four months she often questions the feasibility of her multi-strand project. She also frets about her split from Marco, whom she left back in New York City after their separate infidelities. And her rootlessness – she’s Canadian via Scotland but has spent a lot of time in the States, giving her a mixed-up heritage and accent – is a constant niggle.
Mhairi’s narrative sections share space with excerpts from her biography of McWatt and extracts from McWatt’s own writing: The Fascaray Compendium, newspaper columns, letters to on-again, off-again lover Lilias Hogg, and Scots translations of famous poets from Blake to Yeats. We learn of key events from the island’s history through Mhairi’s biography and McWatt’s prose, including ongoing tension between lairds and crofters, Finnverinnity House being used as a Special Ops training school during World War II, a lifeboat lost in a gale in the 1970s, and the way the fishing industry is now ceding to hydroelectric power.
The balance between the alternating elements isn’t quite right – sections from Mhairi’s contemporary diary seem to get shorter as the novel goes along, such that it feels like there’s not enough narrative to anchor the book. Faced with yet more Scots poetry and vocabulary lists, or passages from Mhairi’s dry biography, it’s mighty tempting to skim.
That’s a shame, as the novel contains some truly lovely writing, particularly in McWatt’s nature observations:
In July and August, on rare days of startling and sustained heat, dragonflies as blue as the cloudless skies shimmer over cushions of moss by the burn while the midges, who abhor direct sunlight, are nowhere to be seen. Out to sea, somnolent groups of whales pass like cortèges of cruise ships and around them dolphins and porpoises joyously arc and dip as if stitching the ocean’s silken canopy of turquoise, gentian and cobalt.
For centuries male Fascaradians have sailed in the autumn, at the time of the ripe barley and the fruiting buckthorn, to hunt the plump young solan geese or gannets – the guga – near their nesting sites on the uninhabited rock pinnacles of Plodda and Grodda. No true Fascaradian can suffer vertigo since the scaling of these granite towers is done without the aid of mountaineers’ crampons or picks.
“Hame” means home in Scots – like in McWatt’s claim to fame, the folk-pop song “Hame tae Fascaray” – and themes of home and identity are strong here. The novel asks to what extent identity is bound up with a particular country and language, and whether we can craft our own selves. Must the place you come from always be the same as the home you choose? I could relate to Mhairi’s feeling that there’s nowhere she belongs, whether she’s in the bustle of New York or “marooned on a patch of damp peat floating in the North Sea.”
A map of the island from the inside of the back cover.
Although the blend of elements initially made me think that this would resemble A.S. Byatt’s Possession, it’s actually more like Rachel Cantor’s Good on Paper, which similarly stars a scholar who’s a single parent to a precocious daughter. In places I was also reminded of the work of Scarlett Thomas, Sara Maitland and Sarah Moss, and there’s even an echo of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks in the inventories of dialect words.
If you’ve done much traveling in Scotland, an added pleasure of the novel is trying to spot places you’ve been. (I thought I could see traces of Stromness, Orkney; indeed, McWatt reminded me most of Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown.) The comprehensive, archival approach didn’t completely win me over, but I was impressed by the book’s scope and its affectionate portrait of a beloved country. McAfee is of Scots-Irish parentage herself, and you can tell this is a true labor of love, and a cogent tribute.
Hame was published by Harvill Secker on February 9th. With thanks to Anna Redman for sending a free copy for review.
My rating: 
Giveaway Announcement!
I was accidentally sent two copies of Hame, so I am giving one away to a reader. Alas, this giveaway will have to be UK-only – the book is a hardback of nearly 600 pages, so would be prohibitively expensive to send abroad.
If you’re interested in winning a copy, simply leave a comment to that effect below. The competition will be open through the end of Friday the 17th and I will choose a winner at random on Saturday the 18th, to be announced via the comments and a personal e-mail.
Good luck!
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Those lists would certainly cause me to skim….. Love the cover but dont think I am that struck by the novel to want to read 600 pages….
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That’s fair enough. I can see that it won’t be for everyone; it wasn’t entirely for me either! Having requested a copy from the publisher, though, I felt I needed to bring out all the good points I could, and I did find it impressive.
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From the review in the Scotsman: “you may find yourself engaged in what Walter Scott called ‘the laudable practice of skipping’.” 🙂
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And who am I to disagree with such an esteemed personage as Sir Scott???
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Actually, I thought you did a great sales pitch for the book, and its cover is certainly gorgeous. May I throw my hat in the ring, please? I love a good bit of nature writing.
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Of course! I’m pleased you’re interested.
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The scope of this book does sound impressive, and I have to admit I’m tempted (not for the giveaway, obviously)… my husband and I both have Scottish heritage, and I’m always wishing I knew more about Scotland (historically and in the present). But 600 pages!
It also looks like the kind of book that would be nice to have sitting on the shelf. 🙂
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It certainly is a gorgeous book! And perfect for anyone interested in Scottish history. I think it would be a good one to read slowly — ironically, I had to read it quickly to get a review together for pub. date 😉
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I would love to go into the draw for this one; it sounds fascinating and I do like a Scottish island!
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This sounds wonderful. Count me in! 🙂
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What a tempting review! Having visited the Outer Hebrides this summer and even getting as far as St Kilda I would love to read this book. There is something special about books with a strong sense of ‘place’. Please include me in the draw.
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You might also enjoy Love of Country by Madeleine Bunting, a wonderful recent travel book about the Hebrides. It was back in 2004 that I went to Mull, Staffa, Iona and Skye; and 2006 when I went to Orkney and Shetland. A return visit is long overdue! I fancy Lewis and Harris as well.
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This sounds great, It sounds like a novel with impressive scope, depicting the natural world too. The lists might make me skip though.
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Popping up from the company of lurkers to say yes, please toss my name into the hat! It looks such a gorgeous book in itself, and the locations, themes and subject matter are all loves of mine. 600 pages is a tad daunting, but nothing ventured…
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Our world is in such turmoil at the moment we should be thankful for the homespun delight offered by this literary escapism. Your review is fulsome, honest and has just the right level of praise and passion for this debut. Who would not be tempted by the writing of the founder and editor of the finest section In any broadsheet? On a complete whim, yesterday I gave away a copy of a book I treated myself to at Christmas just because it was International Book Giving Day and I felt like it…so I now have a 600 page hardback sized space on my shelf…
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Not sure I’ve ever been described as fulsome before 😉 I’ll enter you in the giveaway!
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I meant it in its original sense of ‘complete’, ‘comprehensive’ rather than a later use as ‘fawning’.
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Good to know 🙂
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And we have our winner (literally plucked from a hat, as is traditional): “Catullus’ long poems”! I’ll be in touch by e-mail to get your address.
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I would love to win this, it sounds so wonderful! I had heard of it previously but didn’t the author was Mrs McEwan!
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sounds like a great book, one for my book group to read at some point maybe?!?. I would love to win a copy too… love hardback books (and hate my kindle with a vengeance)
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Oops, sorry — the competition winner was chosen a couple weeks ago!
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[…] 500+ pages fly by, best consumed in big gulps. Such won’t always be the case: City on Fire and Hame both felt like a slog in places, though were ultimately worth engaging with. But my first encounter […]
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[…] I’d previously enjoyed Malachy Tallack’s two nonfiction books, Sixty Degrees North and The Undiscovered Islands. In his debut novel he returns to Shetland, where he spent some of his growing-up and early adult years, to sketch out a small community and the changes it undergoes over about ten months. Sandy has lived in this valley for three years with Emma, but she left him the day before the action opens. Unsure what to do now, he sticks around to help her father, David, butcher the lambs. After their 90-year-old neighbor, Maggie, dies, Sandy takes over her croft. Other valley residents include Ryan and Jo, a troubled young couple; Terry, a single dad; and Alice, who moved here after her husband’s death and is writing a human and natural history of the place, The Valley at the Centre of the World. (This strand reminded me of Annalena McAfee’s Hame.) […]
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