Reading: A Sparrow's Flight
Oct. 7th, 2017 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartWhen I posted about re-reading Margaret Elphinstone's The Incomer earlier this year, someone mentioned that she'd written a second book featuring the fiddle player Naomi, so I sought out a copy.
A Sparrow's Flight sees Naomi setting out on a journey from an unnamed island which is clearly Lindisfarne to the "empty lands" of the Lake District (it's never spelt out what the crisis that changed the world hundreds of years ago was, but this book strongly implies that meltdown at Sellafield was part of it, rendering the area uninhabitable for centuries, so that people have only just started to return), in the company of Thomas, who is returning there to take part in a traditional dance and has persuaded her to come with him to play the music for the dance. In return, Thomas promises her music from before the world changed, preserved in his home during all the years since then.
I loved the description of Naomi and Thomas's walk from Lindisfarne to the Lakes; on her website, Elphinstone talks about following their path with her dog, and I think her familiarity with and love of the landscape really shines through. I also enjoyed seeing more of her future world than The Incomer, with its focus on a single village, offered. I did find my interest waning once the travellers reached Thomas's home, though; the story develops slowly and I found many of the characters and their motivations almost impenetrably opaque. I also found it, ultimately, quite depressing; where The Incomer depicted a future which had lost many of the comforts of the modern world but which had gained a co-operative, supportive communal way of living instead, A Sparrow's Flight shows a community turning on a member suffering from mental ill-health and driving them out rather than supporting them, while the chance friendship of two strangers proves to be stronger and more supportive than the community structures the society is built on. It feels like a much bleaker existence than the almost utopian world of the earlier book.
It's beautifully written and wonderfully evocative of the scenery of the Scottish Borders, whether present-day or in an imagined future which looks a lot like the past, but I felt that as a novel it didn't quite work for me and I didn't like it nearly as much as I liked The Incomer.
A Sparrow's Flight sees Naomi setting out on a journey from an unnamed island which is clearly Lindisfarne to the "empty lands" of the Lake District (it's never spelt out what the crisis that changed the world hundreds of years ago was, but this book strongly implies that meltdown at Sellafield was part of it, rendering the area uninhabitable for centuries, so that people have only just started to return), in the company of Thomas, who is returning there to take part in a traditional dance and has persuaded her to come with him to play the music for the dance. In return, Thomas promises her music from before the world changed, preserved in his home during all the years since then.
I loved the description of Naomi and Thomas's walk from Lindisfarne to the Lakes; on her website, Elphinstone talks about following their path with her dog, and I think her familiarity with and love of the landscape really shines through. I also enjoyed seeing more of her future world than The Incomer, with its focus on a single village, offered. I did find my interest waning once the travellers reached Thomas's home, though; the story develops slowly and I found many of the characters and their motivations almost impenetrably opaque. I also found it, ultimately, quite depressing; where The Incomer depicted a future which had lost many of the comforts of the modern world but which had gained a co-operative, supportive communal way of living instead, A Sparrow's Flight shows a community turning on a member suffering from mental ill-health and driving them out rather than supporting them, while the chance friendship of two strangers proves to be stronger and more supportive than the community structures the society is built on. It feels like a much bleaker existence than the almost utopian world of the earlier book.
It's beautifully written and wonderfully evocative of the scenery of the Scottish Borders, whether present-day or in an imagined future which looks a lot like the past, but I felt that as a novel it didn't quite work for me and I didn't like it nearly as much as I liked The Incomer.
