Reviews with content warning for Murder - O Caledonia

Reviews tagging 'Murder'

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

18 reviews

tamarant4's review against another edition

dark emotional funny inspiring reflective medium-paced

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

4.5

The billows washed into Janet’s face, the wind took her breath, she clung to the mane, elemental air and water, terror and ecstasy. She could die like this and never know the difference, horsed on the sightless couriers of the air. [loc. 1710]

O Caledonia opens with the murder of sixteen-year-old Janet, and then flashes back to her short, unhappy but vividly beautiful life. Janet is a misfit in her family: poorly parented, fonder of animals than of humans (who behave inexplicably and unpredictably), intelligent, romantic, solitary. She is an utterly charming and relatable protagonist, though I do sympathise (a little) with her parents. I saw myself in Janet who, given a pram to play with, repurposes it as a chariot for Dandelion, the family's apex predator: 'so long as in transit he could gnaw at a sparrow’s wing or other pungent trophy from his lair'. Dandelion is not the only excellent cat in this novel: also of note is Mouflon, Aunt Lila's cat, who caused the death of Lila's husband. By way of contrast, when Janet and her brother Francis are presented with a new baby sister, they bury her under a heap of earth and dead leaves.

Janet's perception of the world is marvellously rich and voluptuous. There are hints of synaesthesia, and vivid multisensory responses to words: "...she intended to be a princess... she loved the word, with its tight beginning and its rustling, cascading end, like the gown a princess would wear, with a tiny waist and ruffles and trains of swirling silken skirts. Purple of course" [loc. 241]. The sheer exuberance of her solitary experiences in the wilderness surrounding Auchnasaugh Castle, the rambling family home, is uplifting -- and in sharp contrast to Janet's misery in the company of her family, and especially at boarding school.

For some reason -- perhaps the comparisons to I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, perhaps the measured and precise prose -- I'd assumed O Caledonia was written in the 1950s (when it's set) or a little later. No: Elspeth Barker's only novel, it was published in 1991, to great acclaim.

I bought this in April 2022, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

Maggie O'Farrell's introduction drew me in when I read the sample chapters...

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jennikreads's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad medium-paced

4.25

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thatchickengirl23's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? Yes

5.0

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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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kirstym25's review against another edition

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dark sad medium-paced

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

4.0

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peculiarcelia's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad 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? Yes

5.0

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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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