Book Review

The Silver Darlings by Neil M. Gunn. Faber and Faber, paperback, £9.99

Neil Gunn was born in Dunbeath, a small fishing and crofting community in Caithness, North East Scotland, in 1891. The son of a fisherman, he was born at a time when the herring fishing industries of Scotland were beginning to die out, and much of Highland culture was in decline, with a falling population and growing unemployment. He saw that Highland culture was also under threat as the old ways were forgotten, and fewer people spoke Gaelic or Scots, so traditional songs and stories were beginning to disappear. Reflecting this trend, Gunn himself spoke only English, although in his writing he used the rhythms and syntax of Gaelic speech to give a sense of the people and communities he depicted. He is one of the central figures of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, and is often acknowledged as the most important Scottish novelist of the early twentieth century.

In The Silver Darlings, probably Gunn’s most widely-read novel, first published in 1941, the Highland people have been uprooted from their traditional lifestyle of crofting by the clearances and have re-established themselves by the sea, which they harvest as once they did the land. They slowly develop a bond with the sea, which is at first tentative and unskilled, but which grows in confidence through the exploits and risk-taking of men like Roddie and, later, Finn. As the generations mature, the connection to the land is weakened and instead of the sea being viewed by a land-bound people, the novel’s perspective moves off-shore.

Gunn believed that the repetition of song and folk tales was vital to keep Highland culture from extinction. In The Silver Darlings, the art of oral narrative remains alive in the house of Meg the net maker, and in the old men of the isolated island communities that the fishing boats occasionally visit.

The jacket review by Edwin Muir says “No one else has evoked so sensitively the atmosphere of Highland life; we are taken into the intimate recesses of the characters in this story, simple characters outwardly, but with a thousand reticences, a thousand hidden or half-hidden scrupulosities, prides, thoughts and half-thoughts.” To which could be added the vivid descriptions of small boats fighting their way through storms, of hungry men clinging to cliffs, and the steadfast women waiting the return of the fishing fleets. The Silver Darlings is by turns exciting, sensitive, beautiful, and tragic, and a cracking read from beginning to end.

Alan Bellamy