The Bass Rock Has Rocky Parts

The Bass Rock  (2020)

By Evie Wyld

Knopf Doubleday, 368 pages.

★★★

 

The Bass Rock is a saga set in North Berwick, Scotland. It cycles between three different time periods and emphasizes the violence, psychological and physical, inflicted upon women. Bass Rock, which sits in the Firth of Forth, is a silent witness to tragedies. Author Evie Wyld labels each new chapter I, II, or III, but they are not sequential. This makes for rough going until readers sort characters and relationships.

 

III is actually the oldest of the stories and is probably set during Scotland’s persecution of suspected witches, probably in the 18^th century. It involves a red-haired girl – a defining characteristic of main characters in the book – about to be killed for suspected witchcraft, until the town’s ex-minister takes her into his household. Sarah’s entire family is dead, including a sister who was raped and murdered. The minister’s decision was not a popular one and his household flees from local wrath, though Sarah does not escape tragedy.

 

Chapters marked II are the best developed and involve a World War II widower, Peter, whose new wife Ruth is English. She finds herself uprooted to a big house in North Berwick, where she serves as a surrogate mother to Peter’s sons, Michael and Christopher. She tries to fit in, but she doesn’t know the lay of the cultural landscape and is viewed with suspicion by the minister and most of the local women. Peter mourns his dead sister more than he cares about Ruth, drinks too much, expects her to be a dutiful housewife, and has secrets. He is, in short, a jerk. Only the maid Betty, who seeks a safe haven for her niece Bernadette, gives Ruth the time of day. To top it off, the house seems to be haunted.

 

Chapters marked I are set in the present and center upon Vivian, the daughter of Michael and Bernadette. “Viv” is a mess on many levels. She has rotten luck in relationships, has a tense relationship with her sister Katherine, has low self-esteem, and has a penchant for attracting oddballs. When she agrees to housesit the North Berwick home for her uncle Christopher, she runs into Maggie, a local self-proclaimed witch and occasional sex worker. Both detect a presence in the house.

 

The novel’s female bondings – Sarah and her dead sister Agnes; Ruth and Betty, Betty and her sister Mary; Vivian and Katherine, and Vivian and Maggie – parallel each other. Bass Rock is a character in its own right. It is a constant in the flow of time, and the witness to atrocities perpetrated upon women. Its silence befits a barren lump a mile from shore that has served as a monastery, prison, lighthouse, and setting for numerous novelists, including Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s also the roosting place of 150,000 gannets, which makes it ghostly white in appearance.

 

Perhaps Bass Rock is also Wyld’s second ghost. Viv speculates, 

 

                        I wonder, if this ghost everyone sees, is in fact 100,000 different ghosts? It’s only possible to focus on one at a time. They spill out of the doorway…. They fill the house top to bottom, they are locked in wardrobes, they are under the floorboards…. The birds on Bass Rock, they fill it, they are replaced by more…. They nest on the bones of the dead.

 

We wonder also what Maggie sees as she stares out to sea and remarks,

 

What would it take? What if all the women that have been killed by men through history were visible to us, all at once? If we could see them lying there. What if you could project a hologram of the bodies in the place they were killed?

 

The Bass Rock will not be everyone’s cup of herbs. Wyld doesn’t paint all women as victims and all men as potential rapists, but it’s not too far off the track. Each woman in the book deals with male-inflicted grief in some form and each wrestle with a combination of male subjugation and bad decision-making.

 

Wyld leaves herself open to having written an misandrous novel. To quote Maggie again, “The reason men want women is to fuck them…. And sometimes … they kill them because they weren’t allowed to fuck them and don’t want to get into trouble.”

Many men have been drunken, philandering, violent thugs whose personal validation is tied to processing women. Too many, but by no means most. What does it tell us when the only kind man in the novel is gay? This novel has been enormously popular, so clearly it strikes a resonant chord. But a rant is not necessarily truth.

 

Wyld’s unorthodox organization is also problematic. I applaud her desire to dispense with conventional structure, but it might have worked better in this case. Sarah’s story is detectably incomplete. Wyld needs a ghost, but it would have been better to give us one at the outset and move on. It is also detectable that Ruth’s story is so well drawn that the others pale by comparison. At the risk of being dismissed as a discomforted male reviewer, I view The Bass Rock as an incompletely realized effort.

 

Rob Weir