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A review by jesshindes
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death and Vomit
Moderate: Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Bullying, Sexual assault, and Murder