The Cromarty Library Circle, by Shona MacLean review: 'credible and immersive'
Some historical fiction gives us the past we wish we’d had, but The Cromarty Library Circle doesn’t make that mistake, writes David Robinson
It’s two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon on 1 October 1831 and the 12 members of the Cromarty Circulating Library are meeting in the bank manager’s house to choose what they want to buy. That’s how Shona MacLean begins her first standalone novel since The Bookseller of Inverness, but even before we are introduced to its characters, there is a rather excellent map of the town illustrated with miniature drawings of pictures of their homes.
Although her main protagonists are all fictional, the novel’s historical underpinning is credible and immersive - so much so that I feel sure plenty of visitors will soon be making their way to Cromarty, book in hand, trying to work out exactly where on Little Fennel the aged governess Miss Juniper lived or how near minister’s wife Rachel Mackay was to her friend, Lady Charlotte Mackenzie, further along the Causeway at Cromarty House.
So much historical fiction gives us the past we wish we’d had (freewheeling, feminist, individualistic) rather than the past we actually did (repressed, hierarchical, conformist). MacLean doesn’t make that mistake. Her 1831 Cromarty is a place where everyone knows their place in the social pecking order, from the sequence in which they are listed on the library’s minute book to who sits where in the kirk on Sunday. The preservation of one’s good name is paramount: the merest suspicion of an attraction to a married woman - warranted or not - might occasion a visit from the minister at least and social ostracism at worst. “Speculation that the parish schoolmaster had harboured inappropriate feelings for the minister’s wife,” we are told, “would linger about the town for a hundred years at least.”
MacLean’s cast of two dozen ranges from the emotionally fragile second wife of the laird to the freed daughter of a slave from his Caribbean plantation working as a hotel maid. The large ensemble inevitably means a slower narrative pace than that to which readers of her Alexander Seaton and Damian Seeker series of historical crime novels (written as SG Maclean) may be used: the pay-off here comes in the final 100 pages when, by virtue of the fact that we know the links, overt or covert, between half the town, the denouement is all the more devastating.
Socially claustrophobic this Cromarty of 1831-2 may have been, but it is also opening up to the wider world, and MacLean shows this too. Ships carrying emigrants to the New World leave from its harbour, others carrying cholera arrive from the Old, moored offshored and quarantined. The Reform Act is making its way through the Lords and at Cromarty House, the laird is starting to worry about whether he will be ruined if slavery is abolished. At the clockmaker’s shop, a former Jacobin trains a Pole fleeing from the Russian invasion of his country. Plus ça change.
And then there are the books, the 12 library members’ choices neatly threading into gossip. Is Hajji Baba – a satirical novel set in Iran – the right thing for a minister to be reading? Can the bored bank clerk persuade his mother to allow him to emigrate by getting her to read Basil Hall’s Travels in North America? Is Moore’s Life of Byron really suitable reading for the laird’s wife? Despite the provincial 1832 setting, it’s not quite McMiddlemarch, but the books do furnish the characters with an added degree of interiority as well as providing the novel’s structure.
In her Afterword, MacLean points out that there really was a Cromarty Circulation Library, that it was founded around this time, and above their names their founders explained its raison d’être: “Books were precious, carriage costly, and communication slow and expensive”. As soon as she read that, she writes, the idea for this novel settled in her head. The Black Isle’s tourist industry will be grateful that it did.
The Cromarty Library Circle, by Shona MacLean, Quercus, £20
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