Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (1914)

 My new domicile in Shetland has brought on the wish to look further into Scotland's literature. The reading of this extraordinary novel forms the first fruits of that intention. What a first step. It is a moral tale, expressed poetically. Many novels can be described in this way, so I need a likening which will bring further focus, and the one I feel impelled to choose is Moby-Dick. There is grandness here, the wrack and twist of human greed, the impulses of fate swinging humanity around by whichever failing they leave exposed. There is something of that drench of negativity here too, like a wash applied which seeps into all the corners of the portrait, making the shadows a little darker, the fearful grey of the sea a bit more impending, the flailing of the characters under their instincts and whims a little more misdirected. It's set in a coastal town of western Scotland in the late 19th century, early 20th. It is the time when the herring trade became industrialized, or at least a lot more organized and mechanized. Gillespie himself is a grasping sort who has an unending wish to rise above the work of fishing or shop-keeping which is the usual lot of people of his class. He wants to control the fishers, command all the trade, inveigle himself into various positions of authority in the town. His attention is solely with this, and anyone who either gets in his way, or takes too much of his attention away from the core task, gets short shrift. So his wife and sons are sorely neglected in all ways except perhaps the material, but even there his growing wealth is severely protected, and enjoyment stinted. His emotional neglect though is perhaps the key arena - his wife quickly develops a reliance on alcohol, his sons' dislike of him curdles their personalities to varying extents. His exploitative career begins with the takeover of the farm of a widow after her husband's death, in league with a greedy farmer whom he eventually double-crosses. The widow realizes his perfidy too late to save her home, and Gillespie makes an enemy for life. Mrs Galbraith is a talisman figure through the whole novel, her soul soured and made duplicitous as she manipulates quietly to expose Gillespie, playing the long game. Of course, all that Gillespie does in these cases is completely within the law, and incontestable - a matter of gaining the agreement of the unaware, and then pressing his advantage home. But as he does it, again and again, the roster of those calling themselves 'enemy' grows. He has a showdown with desperate fishermen at a time of drought and plague, driving several to virtual madness. His control of ostensibly the entire fleet is confirmed, and then the desperate ones connive, against their own interests, to burn the boats that used to be theirs as they wait in the harbour, at least hoping to ruin Gillespie, echoing their own downfall, engineered by him. He is indeed seemingly laid low, and wanders the streets of Brieston disconsolately, but he finds a way to survive, and rubs their foolishness in their faces. As the novel matures we hear more of his sons as they grow up. Iain, the older and more genial of the two, becomes a fisherman and drowns in a boat which has been poorly fitted out by his father, just at the entrance of the harbour, nearly home in a storm. Eoghan, the younger, is a nervous, intelligent and somewhat religiously-obsessed boy. We see a lot from his point of view. He vacillates, torn between his growing horror of his mother's alcoholism, his wish to head to university, and his love of a cousin, Barbara, who has been tricked by Gillespie into handing over her fortune. His mind has been soured by his upbringing, unstrung between these parents. As his mother's shame turns into madness, entirely traceable to his father's baleful effect, he begins to have thoughts of killing her, to lance the family boil. In the end, in a truly horrifying scene, instead it is his mother who, unrecognizingly taking him for an enemy who will take away her beloved drink, and addled utterly, grabs a razor and slits his throat in a struggle in the dark of the house. She is killed in the process, hitting her head on the fender as he thrashes around and knocks her flying in his death throes. So Gillespie is finally undone. His entire family is gone, and his culpability in their accursed ends is manifest. Broken, he goes to visit his father, who is dying from the effects of a stroke in the family pub, around the other side of the harbour. A long-unpaid debt, which caused the rift which has separated them for many years, starts to torment him. Unable to engender a response from his father, and starting to feel the effects of lockjaw brought on by stepping in the dark on a shard of one of his wife's broken bottles, he collapses, and over the period of a couple of days, his skin going black in patches as the infection takes him over, he breathes his last in agony, tended by a somewhat chastened Mrs Galbraith, who has been caring for his father. This chronicle of single-minded greed, and its laying waste of many lives, is written with almost toppling fervour, the agitated intensity and rolling poetics recalling the grandness of Melville's restless vehemence. Some parts, particularly where Eoghan's story starts to take shape, feel episodic, almost as though this was originally a much larger opus which Constable asked Hay to cut down for its initial publication. Certainly one of the ringleaders of the fishermen's revolt is Barnacles, who forms the centre of Hay's only other novel. Was Barnacles an expansion of an excised portion of this book? There seems so little published information about Hay - I wonder if much remains of his papers. Perhaps a reader's report in Constable's archives? Correspondence there also? Now there's a flavoursome arena of research calling.