Lament For A Maker
A review of Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes – 230608
During my peregrinations around the world of the ginaissance I came across a wonderful gin produced by the Glasgow Distillery called Makar, Gaelic for a bard or poet. The Maker in Innes’ title is the Anglicisation of this Gaelic word and refers to a poem written by the 16th century Scottish poet, William Dunbar, entitled Lament for the Makaris. Excerpts of the poem are cited throughout the novel, the third in Innes’ Inspector Appleby series, originally published in 1938, and the refrain, timor mortis conturbat me, sets the tone for an exploration of the consequences of a premonition of an impending doom.
There is something of the Gothic about this book, a forerunner of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (1950), a dank, dusty, neglected castle occupied by an eccentric recluse, Ranald Guthrie, who goes through an astonishing character transformation before plunging to his death from a tower. Was he pushed or did he fall and if it was murder, who did it? Suspicion falls on a local man, Neil Lindsay, whose family had a longstanding feud with the Guthries and who wants to marry Guthrie’s niece. but the case is more complex than that. In fact, the reader is treated to three possible solutions.
Innes has chosen to narrate the story through the eyes of several observers, the book opening and closing with an account narrated by a local shoemaker, Ewan Bell. Innes makes no concessions to his reader. As well as assuming that his reader is literate enough to spot the literary allusions in his text, is comfortable with schoolboy Latin, Bell’s account is sprinkled with words drawn from Scots dialect. For the Sassenach this can be hard going, but it is worth persevering as the story as it unfolds is intriguing, convoluted, and perplexing.
Noel Gylby, who appeared in Hamlet, Revenge!, provides the second perspective and his jaunty letters written in a quasi-public school vernacular come almost as a welcome relief, but more than that, build up the atmosphere, detailing the dank and dark castle and its mad occupant. The third narrative, from the pen of the Edinburgh lawyer, Wedderburn, is written in a rather pompous, florid style. By this time it is clear to the reader that each of the narratives are not entirely reliably, painting part of a picture and there are strands in each that if extracted and pieced together that would make sense of what happened on that night at Erchany Castle, which for such a remote and isolated castle, had so many visitors on a very snowy night as to resemble Piccadilly Circus.
It falls to Appleby, who only appears at just over the two-thirds mark of the book, to come up with a rational explanation, suggesting, as is the wont of someone from the Yard, that the local police have got the wrong end of the stick. However, for all Appleby’s ability to conjure up a solution, finding significance in remarks and observations that others had let lie dormant, the final two narratives suggest that he too had missed the mark. To say much more would spoil what is intriguing climax which Innes masterfully builds up to as his story picks up pace.
Innes has provided a literary tour de force in the guise of a rather hackneyed Golden Age detective setting, a gloomy castle in the depths of winter with the snow lying thick on the ground making travel difficult, using different voices, unreliable narrators, and plunging in, as Ewan Bell said, in medias res, allowing the backstory to slowly percolate through. The book is not without its humour and biting social comment, the rats and Mrs Hardcastle in particular, and her revenge on her creepy and domineering husband is a diverting but amusing side story.
Once I had got into the book, I realised it was one of the masterpieces of the genre.
