* although by everyone naturally I mean the members of a rather specialised Facebook Group called 'Scottish Books of the Year 2020' and a few other Scot Lit friends.
The book was called What We Did in the Dark and it's by Ajay Close. It was in our local library so I borrowed it, with some trepidation, as my track record for liking books other people rave about is not good. But in fact I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Well possibly enjoyed is not the word. The book is a fictionalised account of the marriage of a Scottish writer called Catherine Carswell, who famously married in haste and repented at leisure. The story of her dawning realisation of her husband's insanity, which manifested itself to start with as what we would now call 'coercive control' and her subsequent struggle to free herself of him, isn't particularly joyful, but Close is brilliant at evoking it.
The author has obviously done a massive amount of research into Carswell and her circle but it's lightly used; no great slabs of 'I found this out so I will insert it come hell or high water' here. I was quite amazed to see that she was English, although only in the sense that she knew of Carswell at all since she's not a particularly well known writer even in her native Scotland.
It's nice to be able to be positive about a book now and then; I'm not going to be telling you how brilliant the current Saturday Slaughters choice is any time soon. Or at any time at all really.
I’ve heard good things of this, but I don’t know if I could face reading it...
ReplyDeleteWorth giving a go if you can get hold of it. It's beautifully written and although bits of it are hard it wasn't nearly as difficult as, say, listening to the Helen/Rob storyline on The Archers. It's sad more than anything.
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