Kirsty Wark - The Legacy Of Elizabeth Pringle

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good first novel

I enjoyed this book. I like Kirsty Wark's journalism and critical work very much, but journalists and critics don't always make good novelists by any means. However, Kirsty Wark can write very well and this, her first novel, is a thoughtful and involving book.

The story is of two women, Elizabeth Pringle who dies at the age of over ninety, leaving her house on Arran to Martha Morrison, a Glasgow-based journalist. We get Elizabeth's story told in the first person in her written journal intercut with Martha's as a third person narrative. The device works very well and Wark handles both her characters and the pace of the narrative with real skill, I think. I found both women very believable and I enjoyed their stories. Wark generates a very good sense of place in Arran, and Elizabeth's history is a very involving account of a life and of the island itself. With Martha, one of the dominant elements is the growing dementia of her mother, and this is also portrayed very well indeed. Perhaps the romantic elements of the tale are a little predictable, as is the Fraught Urban Existence Redeemed By Rural Life aspect, but it is a beguiling and humane story nonetheless.

The prose is good, although a little prone to over-writing, I think. Wark is very keen on adjectives and similes which, especially in Elizabeth's personal narrative are at times a little unconvincing. As an example, "I…stumbled over the verge, sending the fir cones that I had collected for kindling rolling all over the road like a swarm of giant insects." Those giant insects are a novelist's creation which don't really belong in a personal journal, and there are a lot of examples of that. She does come up with some very incisive phrases, though, like dementia being an illness that "steals people's story out of themselves," and overall I enjoyed her style.

Kirsty Wark has written a sensitive and tender story (which even tends toward the sentimental in places). I can recommend this, and I look forward to her next novel.