The Stranger’s Companion by Mary Horlock
published 2024
[excerpt] She’s wearing a cotton dress the colour of daffodils. It’s
short-sleeved with pearl buttons down the front, and too flimsy for October….
Phyllis Carey is local. Her flimsy excuse for a dress is not. It belongs to
Miranda Cecil. The Cecils are typical summer visitors and also, sadly, artists…
Phyll is very good friends with Miranda, who is extremely pretty and far more
sensible than her parents, which honestly doesn’t mean much.
comments: Is it a ghost story? A crime story? A novel about growing
up? Maybe all these things.
The Stranger’s Companion is an
interesting and unusual book, written in a dashing and original style. It’s set
in one of the Channel Islands: Sark, a small place with no cars to this day,
and has a dual timeline of 1923 and 1933.
Phyll(is) is a young girl of the island, daughter of the
postmistress: as well as the Cecils, above, she also makes friends with
Everard, a visiting schoolboy, in 1923 and they have adventures all summer,
including some practical jokes. From the 1933 perspective it’s obvious that
something went wrong with the whole group of summer visitors and locals that
year.
But that’s not the start point: for that Horlock has taken
a real incident of 1933 when two sets of clothes were found on a cliff edge,
and it took some time to unravel who they belonged to – a man and a woman – and
what happened to them. (Horlock has changed names and is not trying to explain the
actual incident.)
People come to Sark to
disappear. It is, after all, very easy to slip off the beaten track when there
are so few of them, and if the vistor tires of cliffs and beaches, they’d do
well to explore those narrow paths inland. The sheltered valley of Dixcart is
the perfect place to hide. Here the different kinds of trees knit together,
blotting out the sky, and the ground is a forager’s heaven, rich with edible
plants and herbs.
This version of Sark is intriguing – a gossip-y, friendly,
community-minded place, with a history of ghosts, folklore, magic. Are there
witches, or is that just a name for women you don’t like?
The book is narrated partially in a first person plural,
with a lot of ‘We do love our folklore’.
This could be tiresome, but actually I found it endearing and often very
funny. There are some great lines tucked away amid the dramas and occasional
violence.
We would like to point out
that there is usually a warning. Most of the shipwreck stories follow a
pattern: the locals shake their heads and mutter about a coming storm, and some
soon-to-be-dead person says, ‘Oh no, I know better’.
The First World War is always there in the background – the
men who went away and didn’t come back, and those who came back but never got
over it, and the families ravaged by it.
I’m not sure at the end that I totally understood
everything that had happened on the island, either 1923 or 1933, but that did
not affect my enjoyment – this was an intriguing and compelling story.
In a recent post, I mentioned that a book by Ruby
Ferguson was said to contain the worst letter ever committed to
print (my problem was that I couldn’t tell which one it was). And now this book
has what I consider the worst letter anyone could receive, from a vile man to a
woman. It is a shocker.
I would start a list of Bad Correspondence, and suggestions
are welcome, but it might be too depressing. The one that jumped to mind here
was the letter from Eugene
Onegin to Tatiana, in the Pushkin story. Tatiana wrote to him
first, and thus earned herself a place in a Guardian
article I wrote about women making the first move. If you read
it, there is a phrase in it that was inserted by someone at the Guardian: I
most certainly did not talk about Anne
Elliot ‘putting her balls on the line’ and was horrified when I saw it. And of course Anne's is a Good Letter not a bad one.
Tell me your thoughts.
File:François Barraud - Jeune femme en jaune (Portrait de Mme. S.).jpg - Wikimedia Commons
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File:Sark,
the Coupee, Channel Islands-LCCN2002696516.tif - Wikimedia Commons
1930s lady with cat, State Library of New South WAlesrs OE Friend, 1/1939 / by Sam Hood | Format: Film photonega… | Flickr
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