Book review: The Salt and the Flame, by Donald S Murray

Spanning much of the 20th century, this story of a couple who emigrate from Lewis to Detroit is moving, convincing and crafted with great skill, writes Allan Massie

Donald S Murray is one of the best and most enjoyable novelists writing in Scotland today. He is in some respects agreeably old-fashioned. He tells a good story. His characters ring true to life and experience. There is no showing off. His voice is very much his own, but he writes in a Scottish tradition; there are echoes of Iain Crichton Smith, Eric Linklater in his later novels, AJ Cronin and George Blake. By this I mean primarily that his characters are convincingly rooted in time and place, his narrative is always interesting and often moving, and his work is distinguished by emotional sincerity. There is also an admirable economy to his work.

The Salt and the Flame is quite a short novel though it spans much of the 20th century. A lesser writer might have stretched it out to five or six hundred pages. It begins in 1923 when the heroine Mairead is about to leave her home on Lewis, emigrating to Canada and resolving not, like Lot’s wife in the Book of Genesis, to look back. She will make a new life, first in Canada , then over the border in Detroit. She will marry one of her fellow emigrants, Finlay, and their two sons will become Americans, but the family croft on Lewis and her parents and her brother Murdo, a damaged survivor of the Battle of the Somme, will remain in her heart over the long years of her new life.

Finlay, energetic and ambitious, will prosper in America, first working in the Ford factory, then establishing his own car business. Murray traces the course of their marriage with sympathy and skill. They will grow apart while remaining together. Detroit is a troubled city as immigrants from the Southern States flock there in search of work, most of them Black. There is racial tension and then there are riots. Finlay, influenced by his friend Nathan, whom Mairead dislikes and even fears, becomes stiffer and harsher in his prejudices: a Protestant, he is resentful of Blacks, Catholics and Jews. He drinks more and more heavily. But they stay together, rear their two sons. The shifting relations between ever more difficult husband and loyal and dutiful wife are compellingly developed.

Meanwhile there are frequent returns to life on Lewis. Mairead’s best friend Ina is assiduous in keeping track of what happens there, also of the lives of their fellow emigrants. Mairaid early resolved never to go back – one Atlantic crossing was enough for her – but of course she is regularly in communication with her brother. Though she will always, she thinks, be an exile; there are roots that can never be pulled up.

A great deal of research has gone into the making of this novel, but it is never obtrusive; indeed you are scarcely aware of it while you read. The skill with which Murray harmonises the passages dealing with the emigrants and the lives of those who remain on Lewis is done with such skill and empathy that the novel seems to have been remembered rather than invented. In this respect it is indeed comparable to Linklater’s masterpiece The Dark of Summer. Both novels have a huge canvas and cover long periods of time, yet both read like true stories recalled.

There is generosity here too. Finlay becomes someone it is hard to like, scarcely possible to respect, but Murray is fair to him. You understand how this self-made man, proud of his success in the USA, has come to be as he is, to think as he does. His brutal opinions and intolerance ring unhappily true. In making good, he has destroyed much that was good in himself.

Indeed, Murray is fair to all his characters. There may be understandable nostalgia for life on Lewis, but he doesn’t pretend that it is a lost Eden; a damaged Eden perhaps, for there is cruelty there too, one victim being the woman Murdo eventually frees from her bullying and selfish brother.

Donald S Murray PIC: Sandie Maciver

This is a moving novel, crafted with great skill. Murray writes from experience and with imagination, sympathetic imagination. There is much to delight, much to ponder on. He came to novel-writing in middle-age; everything he has done is good. This, however, is arguably his best novel yet.

The Salt and the Flame, by Donald S Murray, Saraband, £9.99