The Gathering Night Interview with Margaret Elphinstone
You are well known for your historical novels, such as as Voyageurs and The Sea Road. But what prompted you to reach into prehistory for your next novel The Gathering Night?
I’ve been interested in writing a prehistorical novel for some time. I wrote a short story based in Neolithic Scotland, called ‘Stone Circle’, and I vaguely thought of a novel set in the same period. Neolithic Scotland is so in-your-face – the great stone circles, Skara Brae, hut circles and field systems... But when I started reading, I was intrigued by the small paragraphs at the beginning of every book: ‘For around eight thousand years, since the last Ice Age, Scotland was home to bands of hunter gatherers....’ Apart form these brief mentions of such a huge span of years, the Mesolithic was passed over in deafening silence. As a novelist, I’m drawn to silences in the accepted story. Who were these people? Why do we hear nothing about them? What were their lives like? And so I started reaching further back in time. When I discovered the one definite event we know of in all those silent years – the tsunami of around 6000 BC – I realised I had something there to base a story on.
I was impressed at how you fully created the character of Bakar, despite him never appearing in the book. Indeed, many of the Auk People are defined by their relationship to Bakar. How well-formed in your mind was Bakar as you wrote The Gathering Night?
It’s not the first time I’ve focussed a story around an absent character. Rachel, in Voyageurs, is a crucial character who is absent for almost the whole book, but she influences everything. It’s the same with Bakar. With Rachel, I actually thought to start with that the book was going to be about her, and I’d started writing before I realised that in fact the story belonged to her brother. I knew what was going to happen to Bakar, but in a way the process was similar, in that the story began with him. He was the first character in my mind – the first one I tried to imagine what it was like to be him – and the whole story developed from him.
You admit in your author notes that there is very little material remains from Mesolithic Scotland, and that much of the culture had to be invention. What cultures did you draw upon for inspiration?
I’m very wary of the word ‘invention’. Certainly as a novelist I have to make things up, but as Margaret Atwood said of The Handmaid’s Tale, there is nothing in the book that has not happened somewhere, at some time, in the history of the world. We have very little evidence form Mesolithic Scotland, but plenty from hunter gatherer societies in different times and places across the world. Reading accounts, I am always struck by the remarkable similarities in social structures, relationships, ways of thought and spirituality, in cultures ranging from the Arctic Inuit to the San Bushmen. I used ethnographic parallels from many cultures and places, including my own brief experiences of Inuit and Sami cultures. (the Sami aren’t hunter gatherers, but they are nomadic pastoralists who share many aspects of hunter gatherer culture). I found some of the best sources were accounts by nineteenth century male explorers – totally politically incorrect – they were usually cohabiting with someone from the culture they were ostensibly studying – but they give vivid, detailed accounts of the life they experienced within the community. C21 post modern analyses tend to be too theoretical. As a novelist I want facts.
The Mesolithic setting must have been a difficult period to research - few material remains have been found. What shaped your understanding of the technology available to the Auk people?
The material remains tend to be stone – hence our misleading term ‘Stone Age’, which suggests that everything was made of stone. I went on two archaeological digs while researching The Gathering Night, and it’s very exciting to find the microliths – tiny stone points and blades – left behind by Mesolithic people. But most of their technology was made from other materials, and it’s long since vanished. But if one looks at what our ancestors did in historical times, they had the same resources and probably similar technologies – they used hazel wands and willow withies, inner bark, reeds, birchbark, leather, bone, sinew, antler, shells... and so on. There was plenty of material to hand for all they needed, just as there was almost always plenty of food from land and sea. Other peoples in other places have used similar materials well into living memory. I’ve borrowed technological detail from cultures ranging from Tierra del Fuego (a rich source of ecological technology) to Siberia. Obviously some of the resources are different, but human ingenuity comes up with surprisingly similar solutions in a lot of cases. The third source on technology is Mesolithic remains in other parts of Europe. Digs in southern Sweden and Denmark have revealed technologies probably adapted in Scotland too, but they couldn’t survive here. I’m thinking of things like the elaborate woven fish traps found in the marshlands of southern Scandinavia. I’ve invented a very similar fish trap and put in it a rocky geo where there was a fish trap in C19 Scotland. It’s putting two and two together like that, and very often making four and a half.
I enjoyed the rituals around food - the apologies for a poor showing, even after the most successful hunt, for instance. This seems to me a key part in how you made this a human story that we can relate to.
Again, the rituals, and the importance of down-playing one’s own skill or importance, are very much a part of hunter gatherer cultures. The elaborate apologies are there in accounts of C19 Inuit, for example. And you can hear vestiges of it, with similar ironic overtones, in our own culture today. The issue for me is that I must make these people human beings – the reader needs to feel that they were the same as us. As indeed they were. People get very confused about evolution, and there is a tendency to think that our hunter gatherer ancestors only eight thousand years ago, were basically Neanderthals. Readers have asked me if they could speak, or stand upright, or whether they’d invented fire. Genetically, these people were just the same as us. Their thoughts, relationships and understanding were as complex as ours. In some ways their world was simpler, and in other ways it required great skills and understanding in areas where we have lost all knowledge. In evolutionary terms, eight thousand years ago is the same as yesterday.
Why did you chose Basque names for The People?
We have no language – no voices at all – from so long ago. The only extant pre-Indo-European language on the western seaboard of Europe is Basque. That doesn’t mean that people in Mesolithic Scotland spoke anything like modern Basque, but it seemed to be the nearest I could get to authentic naming. I had to call my characters something; in fact I had to find up to 30 names of similar provenance. That’s difficult when one has no vestige of a language. I needed names that were different but readable; in the absence of any real knowledge at all, Basque names seemed to fit the bill.
In creating the Go-Betweens, you must have researched shamanistic cultures, current and historical. It seemed to me that the Go-Betweens were not fantastical people, they weren't priests or magicians, even in the eyes of The People. How important was it for you to avoid fantasy?
You’ve put your finger on it: it seemed crucial to avoid fantasy. Even The Sea Road (my novel about Viking Greenland) was once described by a critic as ‘fantasy’, which it manifestly is not. I try to inhabit the same world as my characters; they are also the narrators, and they recount events as they see them. The people in Mesolithic Scotland were not living in a post-Enlightenment, rationalist world. If they were like other hunter gatherer peoples, they wouldn’t be worried about established fixed boundaries between the material, the supernatural or the psychological. To ask ‘what exactly is real?’ is the wrong question. I read many accounts of shamanistic journeys, healings, exorcisms etc form various cultures. To begin with I was all rationalist – ‘yes, but what exactly is happening? Is this a dream? A hallucination? A psychological metaphor? Where is the shaman’s body while all this is going on?’ Then I realised that these were the wrong questions. I had to take the accounts as if I were someone in the culture that produced them, and I had to position my readers to do the same.
Unlike many of your novels, there is no map in The Gathering Night, but did you have a specific geographical location in mind?
Yes. And some of the Camps in the book are on known Mesolithic sites. Of course there must have been infinitely more Mesolithic habitations than the ones we know about. I don’t want to say exactly where the places are. Sea levels have changed considerably since then anyway. But if you want a clue – look at the map of Mull and Ardnamurchan. I’ll say no more.
Margaret Elphinstone, thank you.
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