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A review by saltedsnail
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Animal death, Misogyny, and Sexual assault