Douglas Watt

Set against the backdrop of James Stuart's last year on the throne before he was deposed in 1688, John MacKenzie, an advocate from Edinburgh, and his assistant Davie Scougall are contacted by an old family friend of MacKenzie's, Lady Lammersheugh. In her letter, which was to be posted in the event of her death, she asks him for help in protecting her daughters from an unnamed danger. Arriving in Lammersheugh, MacKenzie and Scougall 'find themselves in a village overwhelmed by superstition, resentment and puritanical religion', with several women accused of witchcraft.

It is easy to forget that the existence and practice of witchcraft is not simply a novelist's device to sell more books, but to people in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries presented a real danger, so much so that a Witchcraft Act was introduced by the Scottish Parliament in 1563. Douglas Watt manages to convey perfectly the sense of the all-pervading cloud of superstition that must have lingered over the country. With political, social and spiritual upheaval everywhere, anxiety and fear were running high, 'unleashing frenzies of witch-hunting' that resulted in the deaths of probably more than a thousand men and women in Scotland alone. There is a real sense of hypocrisy here where upstanding citizens, claiming to be good and God-fearing people, abandon all reason and humanity and let the darker parts of human nature - such as suspicion and malice - take over. The sections where the witch pricker, Kincaid, gets to work in a very efficient and emotionless manner are genuinely terrifying. Standing tall against this mass hysteria is enlightened lawyer John MacKenzie (hence the golf?), a man ahead of his time. Getting the historical context so perfectly right, it is somehow curious to note that Watt's characterizations are less successful, with several of the major characters remaining vague and pale, never coming truly to life, even though some speak with a Scottish accent or quote Gaelic proverbs to make them more real. The main culprit here has to be MacKenzie himself who I could never really warm to and who remained a remote presence throughout the book. I guess that some of this stems from the author's device of keeping his chapters extremely short, often just four or five pages long; consequently there is not enough opportunity for atmosphere or suspense to build up, or for a person's character to be developed before the reader is transported to a different place. Running through the novel like a thread is the sense of repressed sexuality which at times makes for slightly awkward reading, I thought. I also felt that the Poirot-like revelations near the end, where MacKenzie confronts the originator of the witch-hunt, were not completely realistic, his conclusions not entirely convincing.

A good effort, but I don't think I'll be chasing up the first volume in the series, Death of a Chief.

(Review was originally written as part of the Amazon Vine programme.)… (meer)

In 1698, a Scottish company tried to establish a colony in Darien (Panama). 71% of the colonists died (some 2,000) and this withering experience lived on in memory. In the 1860's David Livingstone was cautioned against trying to start a Scottish colony in Barotseland because of the lessons of the Darien disaster. The author, in an otherwise extremely well-phrased book, calls Darien "an early example of a corporate cock-up on the grand scale." (p.253) The sentence construction in this book is to be wondered at - all the way through. It is easy to read even when one is befuddled by the details of Scottish history. The English, who took mean and determined steps to undermine the Company of Scotland, later paid a bail-out to shareholders that secured the easy passage of the Act of Union in 1707 (which created Great Britain). The book allows one to understand what a Jacobite was. The quote that southern Scotland before union was in the grip of a clerical tyranny like the Taleban is intrigueing. (p.251)… (meer)

Why did I read it? It was given to me in exchange for a review and I was keen on the idea of a fictional work set in Scotland during the the notorious witch hunts.

Synopsis: John Mackenzie is an advocate in Edinburgh who is charged by a letter from a dead woman to investigate happenings in the village of Lammersheugh. He and his assistant, Davie Scougall, a man raised in religious superstition, arrive to find the dead woman's daughter, Euphame also accused of witchcraft and the enlightened Mr Mackenzie and his reluctant assistant must work quickly to save her.

What did I like? Douglas Watt keeps his chapters short and each has a different voice, focussing on one person, or section of the community and this keeps the story moving at a cracking pace. The zeitgeist of the Scotland in the 17th century - the religious fervour and political unrest - is evoked with apparent ease and Mr Watt is explicit when describing the gruesome nature of the treatment afforded those accused of being in league with the devil but this adds to the feeling of uncertainty and terror of the time.

I enjoyed this book and sped through it keen to discover the underbelly of Lammersheugh with John Mackenzie, but unlike other murder and/or mystery books, I was unable to unravel the mystery ahead of the author's reveal. For me, this is a big plus for the book.

What didn't I like? Very little. Some of the chapters were difficult to read as over half the chapter was written in a Scottish dialect, though the few Gaelic phrases scattered throughout other chapters were translated into plain English.

Would I recommend it? Yes! I would thoroughly recommend this book to others: friends, family and even my grandmother, a fussy reader.… (meer)