| Product: |
O Caledonia - Elspeth Barker |
| Date: |
15/03/02 (1088 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: lovely over-the-top language, its got everything- laughter, tears and suspense
Disadvantages: One of those books you either love or loathe, could be described as a bit of a girly read
I had to read this book last year as part of my Higher English (being Scottish and all, we are supposed to study a Scottish text). Like all books I'm forced to study in college, I automatically decided I would hate it. But joy of all joys, the teacher had actually picked a book I like for once! O Caledonia is more than a Scottish text. It's more than a humorous novel, more than a murder novel. It's a fantastic tale of the short life of a very misunderstood little girl.
The story centres on a young girl called Janet. In the prologue of the book we are told that she has been murdered. Then in chapter one we go back to the day she was born. Janet is part of a very dysfunctional family living in Scotland in the 1940's. Her father Hector is strict and extremely sexist. He cares little for his children, only taking a small interest in his son Francis. Her mother Vera is self-involved and Janet's over-active imagination correctly portrays her as an 'ice princess'. Growing up Janet and her brother Francis are close, but they grow apart as they get older. Her little sisters Rhona and Lu Lu can do no wrong in the eyes of the family. Janet on the other hand can do no right. From the outset of the book she is a very unusual child. She is mad about animals and reading and these are the two main loves in her life for most of the book. The other thing that makes her different from her peers is her unusual spirituality, she loses faith in the stern Calvinist God she was brought up to believe in rather quickly. Instead her religion could be described as almost Pagan, she turns her attention to the mythological Greek and Roman Gods and at one point casts a little love spell.
The family starts out in Edinburgh but later move North to the isolated Auchnasaugh, where Janet spends the remainder of her sixteen-year life. Her dad sets up a boys school there and Janet is the one girl in the entire student body. Naturally this leads to much tea
sing, especially when she hits puberty. But she is perfectly happy there and loves Auchnasaugh; despite the creepy Gothic hints about the house and its wild, remote surroundings. She spends her days riding her horse over the hills, and reading everything from the Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens to Macbeth. Then she is forced to go to a boarding school called St. Uncumba's. Naturally, being incredibly smart and more or less incapable of human interaction, she is shunned for most of the boarding school 'career'. Janet becomes more and more isolated and spends most of her time learning Latin, French and memorising parts of her favourite books and poems. Basically the entire book is about Janet becoming more isolated and misunderstood. Not the happiest story on earth!
O Caledonia is much more than a murder mystery. Its a gorgeous portrayal of a very unusual girl growing from a child into a young woman. The author Elspeth Barker made parts of this book autobiographical. Janet's slightly melodramatic character perfectly complements the poetic language used. The book abounds with fairytales, legends, poems and literary descriptions. These include Janet being compared to the story of the Ice Queen, Auchnasaugh as being seen like Macbeth?s castle and Janet hoping a tribe of Sawney Beans eats her baby sister! The book describes key moments in Janet's life with beautiful complexity and intricacy, including simple events like the moment when baby Janet first laid eyes on a purple flower and was in love with the colour for the rest of her life (you have to read it for that not to sound weird!), and the first and last time she fell for a boy. The book is told in the third person but is biased perfectly towards Janet's point of view. While everyone in her life sees her as completely mad, to the reader she seems the only sane (if a little eccentric) person in a sea of people obsessed with appearances and shallow concerns. You can feel Janet's rage
and sense of fairness when surrounded by those who aren't remotely fair (Her dad Hector seeing girls as inferior forms of boys being a nice example). My copy of this book has entire pages of beautiful language underlined, as I suspect most of Janet's books were!
The book is also tinged with humour. Mostly it is fairly morbid; comparing pet birds to Kamikaze pilots and so on. The main source of humour (however, ironically it is also very sad) is Janet's lack of understanding of simple things. My teacher suggested that it sounds like she has a very mild form of autism (which I can't remember the name of). It doesn't affect the sufferer too much, except them finding it a bit complicated to understand other people and taking things literally (eg bite your tongue). She doesn't realise why she has to grow up and loathes anything that even remotely suggests sexual relations. When she starts to develop she hopes that her breasts will turn into spiky stabbing horns to stop the boys at school teasing her! It also takes the mickey out of many other types of book- including popular romance and murder mystery, and the jolly-schooldays Enid Blyton type books. The humour in the book is very subtle, and also sardonic and mocking rather than the kind that has you in fits of laughter.
Another key element of the book is that of a murder mystery. It is revealed at the beginning that Janet is murdered but we don't learn the murderer until the end of the book; although you'd have to be a bit daft not to figure it out. Although having said that, the list of suspects is a mile long considering how unpopular Janet is. The book often mocks the popular murder mystery genre with its over dramatic language and the Gothic setting of the book. By the time the murder comes along you're left with a feeling definitely not of surprise, that's for sure. Sadness probably, but then I cried at Free Willy so I really shouldn't go into the fac
t that this book had me in tears once or twice and not just a the end. However it is a fairly emotional book and the reader tends to get caught up in Janet's feelings and actions. It strikes a chord too with the whole pain of adolescence thing, and of course Janet is really no ordinary girl, which makes the whole ordeal of growing up a whole lot worse!
There are a whole lot of lessons to be learned in this book. One of the bigger issues is that of truth and keeping up appearances. Janet is isolated for most of the book just because she talks about more than boys and hairdos and of course, because she isn?t gorgeous, unlike her two sisters. She begins to deliberately defy people; which ultimately leads to her death. Guess there's a lesson to be learned there too.
I could yap on about this book forever, but I think I'll leave it here. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry and probably make you very annoyed at just how nasty the human race can be when it wants to.
Summary:
|
|
