Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - O Caledonia

Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

16 reviews

monalyisha's review against another edition

challenging dark funny mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.0

I felt clever when I realized that O Caledonia is like a twisted & tragic “I Capture the Castle,” as seen through a funhouse mirror, with Wednesday Addams as the protagonist. Then, I read Maggie O’Farrell’s introduction, which I saved for last to avoid spoilers, and saw that she made the same literary comparison. Despite its short length, I didn’t find this a fast read. It is, however, witty and darkly atmospheric with a keen attention to language.

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shinysarah28's review

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emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? Yes

4.25

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womangenius's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Extremely accurate depiction of what it's like to be an melancholy young girl who feels she doesn't fit in...but there's a lot of those books. It didn't give me much else to chew on. I would definitely have recommended this to a younger me. The moody Scottish Highlands setting was beautifully rendered, and adds to the whole Gothic affair. Definitely is a modern Gothic classic as advertised, if you are searching for such a vibe, you'll find it here (mid century modern, anyway).

I don't understand why Janet died except in a figurative sense - the curmudgeonly old groundskeeper, symbol of old patriarchal Scottish society, snuffing out the young rebellious girl the exact moment she seizes some semblance of freedom. I can appreciate it in that sense but I'm just someone who prefers the events of a novel to also be grounded in a reality whose machinations have a logic to them, and Jim's random act of violence made no sense to me. "that's the point, killing her is as inconsequential to him as the rabbits he butchers for dinner☝️" Okay I don't care for me it's a three star book. Because it makes sense to butcher rabbits for dinner. Theyre not having Janet for dinner except metaphorically, as fodder for their endless snarking gossip.

However, I can see why it's so adored and it has a chance to grow on me if I stop worrying so much about realism.

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saltedsnail's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

There’s something gorgeous and terrible about O Caledonia. It’s a quick little read… which is a rarity for a gothic novel. This is beautifully countered by the fact that, whilst reading it, I felt at every single moment that I was only in the exposition, albeit a long winded and poetic one. It manages to maintain this sensation right up to its brutal end - like set dressing for a great story about to start. This is not a failure on the part of Barker; it is intentional, it is her mastery, it is the point.

It all reads as a masterful character study - flashing vignettes of formative experiences that define and surround our would-be-heroine, only serving to make her demise all the more somber despite the fact that we know from page one that it is coming. O Caledonia is not a murder mystery. It is not even really a book about Janet’s death in any meaningful way. It is a book about girlhood and yearning and fantasy and reality. It is an absolutely indignant coming-of-age tale set against a tableau of breathtaking natural beauty and casual, systemic human cruelty.

Barker earns our discomfort, our mourning, not by making Janet “good” or easily lovable in the pages detailing her life leading up to her murder at 16. She is not something so easy as “good”… she is doomed. From the start, she is doomed. Over and over again she is doomed. Barker manages to, miraculously, make this feel poignant rather than tiresome.

The mundanity of the tragic elements of this story cut like a knife - they are viscerally grounded and resonant to anyone who’s felt a misfit, especially those who’ve experienced the inherent trauma of prescriptive girlhood and found it as baffling and distasteful as Janet. I suspect that those who will love O Caledonia do so with the prerequisite of relating to Janet in some way or another. I’ll be chewing on this one for a long while, glad to have finally given it a read.

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mrh29992's review

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

AH! How has it taken me so long to read this remarkable novel?!

Far away in the black pulsating torture chamber of her skull she perceived the form of the weeping manatee, and the word humanity and the word manatee merged in dolour. (p. 170)

Elspeth Barker's first and only novel, O Caledonia, is a heady mixture of coming-of-age novel, gothic, state of the nation, and manifesto for the individual.
Janet, the protagonist begins the novel dead. What follows is not a whodunnit, but an acerbic, astute and lyrical exploration of her young life, so brutally cut short.

Ever the fan of the plotless novel, Barker's deftly constructed sentences paint vividly the difficult life of a difficult girl. I felt for the rich interiority that Janet cannot share with those around her, her love of animals and books surpassing that of her patience for human companionship. Yet also so full of yearning for love.

Beyond being a book about an introverted girl, who was potentially neurodivergent, it is also a book about the difficulty of not fitting in to a world where to conform to the expectations of others is seen as the norm. Not only does Janet disappoint her parents by being, in their eyes, strange, aloof, unwilling to change and 'grow up', but she also disappoints her teachers, schoolmates, siblings, and even the eccentric and tragic aunt. But it is heartbreaking to see depicted how her not conforming led to such a rift, because people were unwilling to engage with her on her own terms, and she then saw no other option, in her juvenile mind, than to try to detach herself from it.

This novel has shades of Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, a hint of Shirley Jackson, a dash of Dodie Smith, and lashings of Iain Banks, James Hogg and Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Do not read this if you seek an uplifting experience.
Do read this if you want to read a masterclass in prose and insight into the human condition.

CW: sexual assault

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blewballoon's review against another edition

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dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I found the experience of reading this to be generally unpleasant. Backwards as it may be, the more a book is considered a "literary darling," the more skeptical I become that I will enjoy it. The forward praising the book before it actually started made me appropriately apprehensive.

I imagine there must be readers who like the main character Janet, but I did not find her relatable or sympathetic. In some ways she strikes a "not like other girls" chord to the extreme. She's above frivolous things like learning how to clean and sew, she is too busy with poetry and flouncing around her family's estate. She has the drama of Anne of Green Gables but none of the charm. Her single redeeming quality is that she likes animals and doesn't want them to suffer, but this is oddly juxtaposed with a total lack of empathy or understanding of people.

She can't mercy kill a pigeon, but she did try to kill her baby sister and she nearly killed another baby sibling by handling her with the care of a bowling ball. She also didn't care about sending two boys to get seriously injured in a decaying building. These boys in particular were just children who hadn't done anything against her.

It's often hard to tell what age Janet or the other children are meant to be at a given point in the story, but even so, their behavior (specifically Janet's) and lack of understanding feels too strange to be explained by childhood. I mean, not to victim blame, but a lot of Janet's suffering is because of her own choices. She makes really bad ones. Janet isn't the only one, though. Every human character sucks, sometimes more and sometimes less, but none of them are a positive presence. The Jackdaw is the best character, but he's only there for a very small part of the book, and he's a bird.

There are many instances of animal cruelty and death that are hard to read, and they contribute to the overall somewhat gross and disturbing tone of the book. The

asylum scene

and the scenes with a variety of male characters after Janet has gone through some puberty also contribute to this vulgar tone, and there's a little fatphobia sprinkled in as well.

I listened to this on audiobook and the narrator was fine, but any parts where there were poetry or song recitations in the text felt grating to me. I felt myself clenching my teeth when they'd pop in.

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jesshindes's review

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dark emotional funny sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Well, after getting held up on my previous read, I raced through this one. O Caledonia was great fun in lots of ways but also oh, it was a bit poignant to my heart. If you like Cold Comfort Farm or I Capture the Castle, that's the vibe: big crumbling country house, extremely dysfunctional family, teen heroine, very funny (relentlessly funny), but underpinning it all something essentially sad.

The book begins by letting us know that Janet, our protagonist, is going to be killed at the age of 16; that nobody except her pet jackdaw will much regret it. Then it whips us back to the start of Janet's brief life, born to a not-very-mumsy mother and doomed, apparently, to disappoint her from the outset. I feel like I've encountered Janet-like characters before: she's a bit lumpy, not very beautiful (wishes she were beautiful, as her younger sisters are); loves to read, alternates between being shy and showing off, annoys everybody by failing to pick up on social cues; is terribly un-sporty and struggles to make friends. I felt like I understood her environment, too; post-war, aspiring to gentility, boarding school for the children but not a prestigious one. That didn't mean I didn't enjoy either character or setting: Barker writes so confidently and precisely, with such anarchic humour, that it's impossible not to be charmed. (That said, the novel was written in 1991, which is intriguing to me: it could easily date from decades earlier and I'm not sure there's much in the way of modernity there at all.)

Barker is relentless in the development of chaotic, terrible, hilarious situations for Janet to hurtle through; there is a lot of that thing where something that makes sense to you as a child slides out of control and becomes something for adults to lambast you for (a terrible scene where Janet finds a slug in her salad - in her mouth - and doesn't feel like she's able to say anything at the table). I found her sympathetic, as probably most bookish people would. (For some reason I found myself thinking of one of my nieces, which probably contributed to my feeling of protectiveness over her; kids who feel a lot, sit in their imaginations, worry about the state of the world.) Other characters are depicted savagely, with lacerating precision: the girls at Janet's school, her siblings, teachers, her strange aunt Lila. 'O Caledonia' is so funny that it can get away with being bleak, and there are also moments of happiness, mostly around the natural world: Janet loves animals and she loves the wet, cold, wild environment around the Highland home into which the family moves fairly early in the book. Barker is an accomplished writer and there are moments of real beauty; but the overwhelming feeling that the book created for me was a kind of specific awkward unsettledness that I associate with adolescence in particular but which is definitely part of a lot of childhoods, too. It's that feeling where the world around you doesn't make much sense but you don't have any power to change it or its rules, and if you're someone who (like Janet) can't do much to change your emotions and reactions, you're always going to be spilling out of line.

I think what made the book so sad for me, then, was the fact that Janet gets arrested - interrupted - killed off - before she ever gets the chance to move beyond that and into the world. Who'd want to be stuck in that horrible teenage phase of feeling like nobody understands you, vaguely picturing a future where everything might be different, and then never attaining it? It's a pretty cruel blow. I was looking at other reviews and saw this described as a coming-of-age novel somewhere, and an anti-coming-of-age novel somewhere else; I think it's probably closer to the latter, in that Janet never moves beyond the sort of daydreamy unreality of her teenage years. She's edging towards it as the novel begins to wrap up, but the way that she dies is decisively characteristic of the Janet we know rather than some new, more sophisticated iteration. To some extent the fact that we know from the outset where the novel is going does something to cushion the blow of its ending - and the pace of the ending doesn't leave much room for mourning - but I still feel bad for Janet, never getting beyond the family and her uncomfortable place within it. I went back, once I'd read the end, to the beginning, where we're told that the jackdaw mourned her but also - just briefly - that her sisters cried. I guess I find that note intriguing; we never get anything of the sisters' interiority and it made me wonder about their view on Janet, what they made of her. We're so much in her head that we never really get outside it (which egoism is, again, characteristic of youth; you're so absorbed in figuring yourself out that other people are never fully realised). So there's something there to mitigate the blankness, but in general Barker is a pull-your-socks up sort of writer. Things happen, wham, deal with it, move on: it's what makes the book so funny, even in its darkest moments. I definitely recommend this, especially if you like the novels I listed above.

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