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The Silver Darlings
The tale of lives won from a cruel sea and crueller landlords. The dawning of the herring fisheries brought with it the hope of escape from the Highland Clearances, and this story paints a vivid picture of a community fighting against nature and history, and refusing to be crushed.
592 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1941
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858 people want to read
About the author
Neil M. Gunn
63 books49 followersNeil Gunn, one of Scotland's most prolific and distinguished novelists, wrote over a period that spanned the Recession, the political crises of the 1920's and 1930's, and the Second World War and its aftermath. Although nearly all his 20 novels are set in the Highlands of Scotland, he is not a regional author in the narrow sense of that description; his novels reflect a search for meaning in troubled times, both past and present, a search that leads him into the realms of philosophy, archaeology, folk tradition and metaphysical speculation.
Born in the coastal village of Dunbeath, Caithness, the son of a successful fishing boat skipper, Gunn was educated at the local village primary school and privately in Galloway. In 1911 he entered the Civil Service and spent some time in both London and Edinburgh before returning to the North as a customs and excise officer based (after a short spell in Caithness) in Inverness. Before voluntary retirement from Government service in 1937 to become a full-time writer, he had embarked on a literary career with considerable success.
His first novel, The Grey Coast (1926), a novel in the realist tradition and set in Caithness in the 1920's, occupied an important position in the literary movement known as the Scottish Renaissance. His second novel, Morning Tide (1931), an idyll of a Highland childhood, won a Book Society award and the praise of the well known literary and public figure, John Buchan. The turning point in Gunn's career, however, came in 1937, when he won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial prize for his deeply thought-provoking Highland River, a quasi autobiographical novel written in the third person, in which the main protagonist's life is made analogous to a Highland river and the search for its source.
In 1941 Gunn's epic novel about the fishing boom of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, The Silver Darlings, was widely acclaimed as a modern classic and considered the finest balance between concrete action and metaphysical speculation achieved by any British writer in the 20th century. It was also the final novel of a trilogy of the history of the Northlands, the other novels being Sun Circle (1933) on the Viking invasions of the 9th century and Butcher's Broom (1934) on the Clearances. In 1944 Gunn wrote his anti-Utopian novel, The Green Isle of the Great Deep, a book that preceded George Orwell's novel on the same theme, Nineteen Eighty-Four, by five years. The novel, using an old man and a young boy from a rural background as characters in a struggle against the pressures of totalitarian state, evoked an enthusiastic response from the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
Some of Gunn's later books, whilst not ignoring the uglier aspects of the modern world, touch more on metaphysical speculation in a vein that is not without humour. The Well at the Worlds End (1951), in particular, lays emphasis on the more positive aspects of living and the value of that approach in finding meaning and purpose in life. Gunn's spiritual autobiography, The Atom of Delight (1956), which, although similar in many ways to Highland River, incorporates a vein of thought derived from Gunn's interest in Zen Buddhism. The autobiography was Gunn's last major work.
In 1948 Gunn's contribution to literature was recognised by Edinburgh University with an honorary doctorate to the author; in 1972 the Scottish Arts Council created the Neil Gunn Fellowship in his honour, a fellowship that was to include such famous writers as Henrich Boll, Saul Bellow, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, Nadine Gordimer and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Born in the coastal village of Dunbeath, Caithness, the son of a successful fishing boat skipper, Gunn was educated at the local village primary school and privately in Galloway. In 1911 he entered the Civil Service and spent some time in both London and Edinburgh before returning to the North as a customs and excise officer based (after a short spell in Caithness) in Inverness. Before voluntary retirement from Government service in 1937 to become a full-time writer, he had embarked on a literary career with considerable success.
His first novel, The Grey Coast (1926), a novel in the realist tradition and set in Caithness in the 1920's, occupied an important position in the literary movement known as the Scottish Renaissance. His second novel, Morning Tide (1931), an idyll of a Highland childhood, won a Book Society award and the praise of the well known literary and public figure, John Buchan. The turning point in Gunn's career, however, came in 1937, when he won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial prize for his deeply thought-provoking Highland River, a quasi autobiographical novel written in the third person, in which the main protagonist's life is made analogous to a Highland river and the search for its source.
In 1941 Gunn's epic novel about the fishing boom of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, The Silver Darlings, was widely acclaimed as a modern classic and considered the finest balance between concrete action and metaphysical speculation achieved by any British writer in the 20th century. It was also the final novel of a trilogy of the history of the Northlands, the other novels being Sun Circle (1933) on the Viking invasions of the 9th century and Butcher's Broom (1934) on the Clearances. In 1944 Gunn wrote his anti-Utopian novel, The Green Isle of the Great Deep, a book that preceded George Orwell's novel on the same theme, Nineteen Eighty-Four, by five years. The novel, using an old man and a young boy from a rural background as characters in a struggle against the pressures of totalitarian state, evoked an enthusiastic response from the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
Some of Gunn's later books, whilst not ignoring the uglier aspects of the modern world, touch more on metaphysical speculation in a vein that is not without humour. The Well at the Worlds End (1951), in particular, lays emphasis on the more positive aspects of living and the value of that approach in finding meaning and purpose in life. Gunn's spiritual autobiography, The Atom of Delight (1956), which, although similar in many ways to Highland River, incorporates a vein of thought derived from Gunn's interest in Zen Buddhism. The autobiography was Gunn's last major work.
In 1948 Gunn's contribution to literature was recognised by Edinburgh University with an honorary doctorate to the author; in 1972 the Scottish Arts Council created the Neil Gunn Fellowship in his honour, a fellowship that was to include such famous writers as Henrich Boll, Saul Bellow, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, Nadine Gordimer and Mario Vargas Llosa.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 71 reviews
May 9, 2022
This was a beautiful story, which was spoiled slightly by a few sections that ran on for far too many pages. It was also curiously prudish, and relied so much on euphemism and innuendo where matters of the heart were concerned that I frequently had no idea what had actually transpired between characters.
January 6, 2010
This 1941 novel is what you may choose as a holiday book or, as I did, to read its near 600 pages over the Christmas period. First and foremost it’s one of those lovely warm stories to become immersed in, unworried about its cleverness or literary wit. Easy to hold up as an example of the ‘classic realist text’, yet therein lies one of its greatest mysteries: Gunn, cinematic in his descriptive powers, acutely penetrating in his observations of psychological relationships, and with a belly full of fire to locate human injustice in a broad context of the tradition of tragedy, pulls off the trick of making these ’realisms’ subordinate to an unstated but hauntingly real elsewhere. It’s writing of the highest order, and somewhat shows up the meagreness of some of the modern antirealist texts, brilliant though they are within their own small limits.
It is a powerfully skippered narrative, or, series of narratives. Journeys, clear-cut in their cartography. To skipper a narrative, incidentally, is an essential part of the novel’s themes; to feel confident under the direction of an author is whence authority should be submitted to by a crew, by a reader. Of course, the power of story-telling has been, and still is, grotesquely sentimentalised on the one hand, and, in more recent times, ‘narrative’ has become one of those nasally droned badges some folk wear to recognise each other as part of the community of postmodern cognoscenti. Gunn is much bigger than this, so’s the novel.
Perhaps an older type of literary criticism may be tempted to evoke phrases such as ‘landscape of memory’. I do, for now, briefly. The shape of the novel is as starkly simple as the outward lives of its characters. There are ad-ventures, ventures into and away from, journeys, circles, visits, orientation marks, sacred places, taboo places. Superstition or instinct shimmers in sea light or shadow, dread hangs over the wayfarers, the heroes and the clerks. Light, storm, glistening, fog, darkness, skies bluer than cornflowers, human forms as beautifully evoked as anything Byron ever did, plagues, purposeless suffering, hardship, all mixed in, always. And growth, cycles, the linear path to maturity and wisdom and acceptance, and understated mode of emotional expression, an aversion to labile neurosis.... Incidentally, there are no villains in Gunn’s writing. Why should there be? For to have them emphasise the good and heroic would be a vulgar trick. More to the point, the overall tone of Gunn’s vision is one not of individual virtue or vice, for one thing these appear as mixed as everything else in any fully expressed individual, but the realisation of the wrongness of separating single from whole, individual from community, community from landscape. As the cholera epidemic chooses no favourites, we see that the money fever attending the boom in the fishing trade is not a vice of the wicked capitalists only but touches the lovely and brave and strong too.
There’s a notion of ‘human nature’ (made explicit at one point) that will have Marxists rushing to the barricades – that there is such a primal thing and it doesn’t change very much. For those interested, Gunn fits well with the ‘Inhumanist’ tradition most sublimely associated with Robinson Jeffers. Of course, this inhumanism is a potent affirmation of the human, and history’s long cry against those which would suppress and distort it. There is a somewhat hilarious bar room brawl in Stornoway when the strong hero Roddie breaks out of his constraints, but Gunn allows the smile as he always does but never loses the gentle gravitas (elsewhere described as ‘like God thinking’) “Men craved for anything, for fights, for drink, for death, anything to break the horror that discipline kept rigid. There were only two ways out: brutality and foul language, and they went together. They were a great relief. They were like a vomit that cleared you.” Days of tedium, a horror in the mind, and the soul yearning for soaring release. Prow cutting waves bravely, leaving behind the shore, cutting through danger, embracing death....
Remarkably, the warrior motif is balanced (most keenly in the maturing of Finn) as are the other energies (such as sex) with a finalised vision of something like peace. Something like. That’s the thing with symbols, in a way they are useless and misleading but ephemerally may be felt the experience of the symbol in its profundity, “and as certainty stirs delight, delight obscures the symbols, leaving behind the sweetness of delight, as a flower leaves its fragrance.”
This is a book of sweetness and light. Its very powerful realism serves to dissolve itself and make itself the ghostly, the somehow illusionary. The passions, tragedies, sounds, furies, sufferings and loves, death and birth somehow illude. I’ll end with a short quotation, from near the end of the novel. There are symbols here, but you need to delude yourself to delight as they fade before you:
"The nights they spent in that remote place were never to be forgotten by Finn. They had the influence on his life of a rare memory that would come and go by the opening of a small window at the back of his mind. Through such an opening a man may see a sunny, green place with the glisten on it of a bright jewel, or a brown interior place and the movement of faces, or a strand in the darkening and the crying of a voice, but whatever the sight or the sound of the moment, it is at once far back in time and far back in the mind, so that it is difficult to tell one from the other. Indeed, an odd commingling seems to take place, and a curious revealing light is not even thought of, yet had always been there. "
It is a powerfully skippered narrative, or, series of narratives. Journeys, clear-cut in their cartography. To skipper a narrative, incidentally, is an essential part of the novel’s themes; to feel confident under the direction of an author is whence authority should be submitted to by a crew, by a reader. Of course, the power of story-telling has been, and still is, grotesquely sentimentalised on the one hand, and, in more recent times, ‘narrative’ has become one of those nasally droned badges some folk wear to recognise each other as part of the community of postmodern cognoscenti. Gunn is much bigger than this, so’s the novel.
Perhaps an older type of literary criticism may be tempted to evoke phrases such as ‘landscape of memory’. I do, for now, briefly. The shape of the novel is as starkly simple as the outward lives of its characters. There are ad-ventures, ventures into and away from, journeys, circles, visits, orientation marks, sacred places, taboo places. Superstition or instinct shimmers in sea light or shadow, dread hangs over the wayfarers, the heroes and the clerks. Light, storm, glistening, fog, darkness, skies bluer than cornflowers, human forms as beautifully evoked as anything Byron ever did, plagues, purposeless suffering, hardship, all mixed in, always. And growth, cycles, the linear path to maturity and wisdom and acceptance, and understated mode of emotional expression, an aversion to labile neurosis.... Incidentally, there are no villains in Gunn’s writing. Why should there be? For to have them emphasise the good and heroic would be a vulgar trick. More to the point, the overall tone of Gunn’s vision is one not of individual virtue or vice, for one thing these appear as mixed as everything else in any fully expressed individual, but the realisation of the wrongness of separating single from whole, individual from community, community from landscape. As the cholera epidemic chooses no favourites, we see that the money fever attending the boom in the fishing trade is not a vice of the wicked capitalists only but touches the lovely and brave and strong too.
There’s a notion of ‘human nature’ (made explicit at one point) that will have Marxists rushing to the barricades – that there is such a primal thing and it doesn’t change very much. For those interested, Gunn fits well with the ‘Inhumanist’ tradition most sublimely associated with Robinson Jeffers. Of course, this inhumanism is a potent affirmation of the human, and history’s long cry against those which would suppress and distort it. There is a somewhat hilarious bar room brawl in Stornoway when the strong hero Roddie breaks out of his constraints, but Gunn allows the smile as he always does but never loses the gentle gravitas (elsewhere described as ‘like God thinking’) “Men craved for anything, for fights, for drink, for death, anything to break the horror that discipline kept rigid. There were only two ways out: brutality and foul language, and they went together. They were a great relief. They were like a vomit that cleared you.” Days of tedium, a horror in the mind, and the soul yearning for soaring release. Prow cutting waves bravely, leaving behind the shore, cutting through danger, embracing death....
Remarkably, the warrior motif is balanced (most keenly in the maturing of Finn) as are the other energies (such as sex) with a finalised vision of something like peace. Something like. That’s the thing with symbols, in a way they are useless and misleading but ephemerally may be felt the experience of the symbol in its profundity, “and as certainty stirs delight, delight obscures the symbols, leaving behind the sweetness of delight, as a flower leaves its fragrance.”
This is a book of sweetness and light. Its very powerful realism serves to dissolve itself and make itself the ghostly, the somehow illusionary. The passions, tragedies, sounds, furies, sufferings and loves, death and birth somehow illude. I’ll end with a short quotation, from near the end of the novel. There are symbols here, but you need to delude yourself to delight as they fade before you:
"The nights they spent in that remote place were never to be forgotten by Finn. They had the influence on his life of a rare memory that would come and go by the opening of a small window at the back of his mind. Through such an opening a man may see a sunny, green place with the glisten on it of a bright jewel, or a brown interior place and the movement of faces, or a strand in the darkening and the crying of a voice, but whatever the sight or the sound of the moment, it is at once far back in time and far back in the mind, so that it is difficult to tell one from the other. Indeed, an odd commingling seems to take place, and a curious revealing light is not even thought of, yet had always been there. "
March 18, 2019
Good grief, this was bleak and boring. Sure it ends on a hopeful note, but I am just so done with this book.
May 31, 2019
this really is such an absolute masterpiece of a novel -- the writing is so vivid that it just totally transported me; like honestly it's the book equivalent of a conch shell because I felt like I could hear the sea every time I picked it up
June 19, 2021
Casting their nets…
When the landlords throw the tenants off their crofts to make way for sheep, the crofters of the north-east of Scotland turn to the sea to make their living in the new industry of herring fishing that is springing up, aided to some degree by those same landlords (guilt money) and by government subsidies. This book tells the story of Catrine, a young wife whose husband has been taken by the press gangs, and her son Finn as he grows from childhood into manhood, and becomes a fisherman in his turn. And through them, it shows the way of life of these people, as they slowly become masters of their new trade, learning through hard experience and sometimes tragedy.
It’s very well written and along the way Gunn gives enough information so that readers with no familiarity with the story of the Highland Clearances will pick up enough to be able to understand the huge upheaval it meant for the crofters, economically and socially. Gunn shows it as not all bad (which is quite rare in Scotland, where bitterness over the Clearances tends to make us portray everything that came out of them as disastrous). He shows that the fishermen found that they could earn far more from fishing than they ever had from crofting, and many of the men took to a more adventurous life with enthusiasm. However, he also shows how it impacted their way of life as people became more village-based and old traditions, like oral storytelling, had to be nurtured in order to survive. Women had to come to terms with their husbands and sons being away at sea for lengthy periods, leaving them to maintain any land and smallholdings they had managed to hold on to. And ever present is the fear of death from sudden storms or accidents or, as Catrine experienced, the loss of menfolk who were “pressed” into serving in the Navy.
Personally I’m a plot-driven person, and that’s the one thing the book really lacks. It’s a slow look at society through Finn’s life in it, as boy and then man, and if there’s an overarching story at all, it is simply the one of who Finn will eventually marry. This lack of a driving storyline made it a slow read for me – I found it interesting in the way non-fiction is, rather than compelling as a suspenseful novel would normally be. There were several parts that I felt dragged, but there are also several parts where it picks up pace and emotion and becomes quite thrilling, such as the first time the men take their boat round the notorious Cape Wrath and finally make it to Stornoway, such a hard journey at that time that Stornoway feels like a foreign country. Or when the cholera epidemic hits the village, again shown very realistically with older, weaker people succumbing while the younger, stronger ones tended to survive. Gunn shows the primitive, almost non-existent healthcare in these poorer, remote communities, and how the people still relied on superstition and traditional remedies to get them through.
Gunn largely leaves out the politics of the Clearances – his mission is to show the birth of the herring industry rather than the end of crofting. He does this very well, and I felt I learned a lot about how the industry grew up from a small start, with a few wealthier men setting up as exporters and building trade routes to Europe, and gradually directing the fishermen almost like employees or contractors. We see the first signs of what has subsequently become a major on-going issue – the overfishing of certain areas and types of fish, and we see the men gradually spread out into new, more dangerous seas and begin to fish for other types of fish than herring, the silver darlings of the title. It all feels remarkably relevant now that fishing, like crofting before it, has become a declining industry, hanging on grimly in the face of all the economic and political odds that are stacked against it.
Although the characters would have been Gaelic or Scots speakers, Gunn has happily chosen to write in standard English throughout, making it easily accessible to non-Scots and non-Gaelic speakers. His portrayal of the sea as a heartless mistress, dealing out wealth and death arbitrarily, is wonderful, and the sailing scenes are some of the best parts of the book. But equally he is great at showing the wild landscape, and the remoteness of the villages even from each other.
Overall, then, for the most part I found the book slow-going and longed for a plot to carry me forward. However, I found the look at this way of life interesting, interspersed with occasional dramatic episodes that for brief periods brought it thrillingly to life.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
When the landlords throw the tenants off their crofts to make way for sheep, the crofters of the north-east of Scotland turn to the sea to make their living in the new industry of herring fishing that is springing up, aided to some degree by those same landlords (guilt money) and by government subsidies. This book tells the story of Catrine, a young wife whose husband has been taken by the press gangs, and her son Finn as he grows from childhood into manhood, and becomes a fisherman in his turn. And through them, it shows the way of life of these people, as they slowly become masters of their new trade, learning through hard experience and sometimes tragedy.
It’s very well written and along the way Gunn gives enough information so that readers with no familiarity with the story of the Highland Clearances will pick up enough to be able to understand the huge upheaval it meant for the crofters, economically and socially. Gunn shows it as not all bad (which is quite rare in Scotland, where bitterness over the Clearances tends to make us portray everything that came out of them as disastrous). He shows that the fishermen found that they could earn far more from fishing than they ever had from crofting, and many of the men took to a more adventurous life with enthusiasm. However, he also shows how it impacted their way of life as people became more village-based and old traditions, like oral storytelling, had to be nurtured in order to survive. Women had to come to terms with their husbands and sons being away at sea for lengthy periods, leaving them to maintain any land and smallholdings they had managed to hold on to. And ever present is the fear of death from sudden storms or accidents or, as Catrine experienced, the loss of menfolk who were “pressed” into serving in the Navy.
Personally I’m a plot-driven person, and that’s the one thing the book really lacks. It’s a slow look at society through Finn’s life in it, as boy and then man, and if there’s an overarching story at all, it is simply the one of who Finn will eventually marry. This lack of a driving storyline made it a slow read for me – I found it interesting in the way non-fiction is, rather than compelling as a suspenseful novel would normally be. There were several parts that I felt dragged, but there are also several parts where it picks up pace and emotion and becomes quite thrilling, such as the first time the men take their boat round the notorious Cape Wrath and finally make it to Stornoway, such a hard journey at that time that Stornoway feels like a foreign country. Or when the cholera epidemic hits the village, again shown very realistically with older, weaker people succumbing while the younger, stronger ones tended to survive. Gunn shows the primitive, almost non-existent healthcare in these poorer, remote communities, and how the people still relied on superstition and traditional remedies to get them through.
Gunn largely leaves out the politics of the Clearances – his mission is to show the birth of the herring industry rather than the end of crofting. He does this very well, and I felt I learned a lot about how the industry grew up from a small start, with a few wealthier men setting up as exporters and building trade routes to Europe, and gradually directing the fishermen almost like employees or contractors. We see the first signs of what has subsequently become a major on-going issue – the overfishing of certain areas and types of fish, and we see the men gradually spread out into new, more dangerous seas and begin to fish for other types of fish than herring, the silver darlings of the title. It all feels remarkably relevant now that fishing, like crofting before it, has become a declining industry, hanging on grimly in the face of all the economic and political odds that are stacked against it.
Although the characters would have been Gaelic or Scots speakers, Gunn has happily chosen to write in standard English throughout, making it easily accessible to non-Scots and non-Gaelic speakers. His portrayal of the sea as a heartless mistress, dealing out wealth and death arbitrarily, is wonderful, and the sailing scenes are some of the best parts of the book. But equally he is great at showing the wild landscape, and the remoteness of the villages even from each other.
Overall, then, for the most part I found the book slow-going and longed for a plot to carry me forward. However, I found the look at this way of life interesting, interspersed with occasional dramatic episodes that for brief periods brought it thrillingly to life.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
September 3, 2014
This is a novel set in a fishing village in northern Scotland. It follows the fishermen as they go out to catch the herring (the silver darlings of the title), seeing this new industry as a way to escape the brutal effects of the Highland Clearances. It also follows the story of Finn from his early childhood to his marriage.
There are lots of long slow scenes in the novel, many of them set on the boats as they battle with wild weather and uncertain fishing conditions. Also a long section about the effects of a devastating sickness (referred to as the plague) that rages through the community.
Early in the book a whole chapter is devoted to Finn's early encounter with a butterfly, which is beautiful and touching as it explores the development of his relationship with nature
"As he rounded the hazel treea butterfly rose from his feet. ...... It settled and slowly, without looking at it(except out of the very corner of his eye)he moved towards it, but not directly. He got within a few feet, but then could not restrain himself from rushing. The butterfly rose and danced on through the air, down the burnside."
As you may guess though, given that a whole chapter is devoted to the encounter, it doesn't remain an idyllic scene and Finn learns his first lesson about living alongside nature.
The book is beautifully written, full of the rhythms of the language of north eastern Scotland. Also a great deal of insight into the relationships between the various characters. It's a coming of age novel, not just in terms of Finn as an individual but for the communities that are developing the new industry of herring fishing as a way to secure themselves a brighter future.
There are lots of long slow scenes in the novel, many of them set on the boats as they battle with wild weather and uncertain fishing conditions. Also a long section about the effects of a devastating sickness (referred to as the plague) that rages through the community.
Early in the book a whole chapter is devoted to Finn's early encounter with a butterfly, which is beautiful and touching as it explores the development of his relationship with nature
"As he rounded the hazel treea butterfly rose from his feet. ...... It settled and slowly, without looking at it(except out of the very corner of his eye)he moved towards it, but not directly. He got within a few feet, but then could not restrain himself from rushing. The butterfly rose and danced on through the air, down the burnside."
As you may guess though, given that a whole chapter is devoted to the encounter, it doesn't remain an idyllic scene and Finn learns his first lesson about living alongside nature.
The book is beautifully written, full of the rhythms of the language of north eastern Scotland. Also a great deal of insight into the relationships between the various characters. It's a coming of age novel, not just in terms of Finn as an individual but for the communities that are developing the new industry of herring fishing as a way to secure themselves a brighter future.
March 11, 2017
Finn is so excited. He is on his first voyage out with a crew of older seasoned fishermen.
“The boat was open from stem to stern, without shelter or Berth, but when they had eaten, they did what they could with the help of the sails and the soft bulk of the nets to get into a comfortable position for rest. Finn snuggled down, packed his hip bone, lifted the edge of the sail for breath, and prepared for sleep. But though he felt very tired, he was not sleepy. He was now more than ever pleased at having said things which had made the others laugh. His old shy self had opened, and to his surprise up the words had come...”
I began this book when I saw it on the “Read Scotland” forum on Goodreads. The author is new to me but I found his writing to be so atmospheric! “Silver Darlings” is crammed with not only authentic descriptions of life at sea but also engaging chapters about village life, a country fair, a perilous voyage (and a brave climb for water), and anecdotes about the fishing trade and professions (who knew what a curer was? not me.)
Neil Gunn brings the atmosphere and perils of the sea into this novel along with the growth of Finn, his coming-of-age time, and the trials of a small fishing community in Scotland. Finn’s father had been lost at sea (not telling you how; you will want to read this novel for yourself!) before Finn was even born. His mother was reluctant to allow Finn to even think of going to sea... but the sea was always calling to him.
“Listen, Finn. You mustn’t be angry with me. The sea has not been kind to me. And then – we have been living here, though it is not our croft, our home. I cannot do a man’s work, taking in new land. You and me – we are wanderers, who found a home.”
Although wordy at times the author gives the reader a lot to think about and not just pictures of what life in Scotland used to be for so many that were living on the edge of poverty. The readers is able to ‘get inside’ the characters’ thoughts, feelings and motivations, not just through dialog but through the ups and downs of life itself.
Finn’s mother Catrine is threatened with the plague; will she succumb? The reader cannot help being moved at poor Catrine’s plight already; losing her husband at such a young age, she lives for her son throughout the book.
At times the book moved very quickly because I was right there with Finn, hoping someday to become a sailor himself and obtain his very own ship.
“In fact, when Finn lifted his mind, he saw the clean green seas running, and knew that freedom was there, and adventure, and the song of man’s strength. He would be all right when he looked at the lifting stem of his own boat. Then would come upon him a freedom that would have in it the gait of revenge over all the cluttering doubts and anxieties of the earth.”
Finn and his companions are dogged and spunky and spend their days on the sea fighting the odds. Hoping the day’s catch would be a good one, hoping the sun would come out or the wind would rise so that Roddie, their captain (and for much of the book, Finn’s personal hero), could find their way back again.
“Silver Darlings” is a book about man against the sea; man versus his environment; man versus nature; man versus man (cruel landlords, greed, compulsory naval recruitment). But it is also a book about tenacity; the beauty of the world around us, sheer ‘holding on’ in the face of adversity, and hope.
December 6, 2012
This book was pure joy to read - the characters, the setting of Scotland just after the Napoleonic wars, when the herring fishing began, the evocative language. It's the story of Catriona, who loses her husband to the Press Gang, and of her son Finn - his changing emotions and experiences as he grows up are brought out so vividly, so naturally. What I loved most though, trapped here on shore due to ill health (but just wait till next summer, when I'm well again!) were the scenes at sea - the opening, with Torquil's first venture into fishing, and the two voyages round to the Western Isles, the first when Finn was fourteen, the second when he was master of his own ship. I felt like I was there with them, and my sea-longing heart was eased.
A wonderful portrait of a community changing from crofters to fisherman, overcoming the scars of the clearances and the hardship of their daily lives, but also the best depiction I've ever read of a boy's feelings as he grows up.
A wonderful portrait of a community changing from crofters to fisherman, overcoming the scars of the clearances and the hardship of their daily lives, but also the best depiction I've ever read of a boy's feelings as he grows up.
August 25, 2012
Neil Gunn’s masterpiece “The Silver Darlings” can be successfully read at a number of levels. In one sense it is a lively and readable account of the herring boom which came to the east coast of Scotland after the defeat of Napoleon. At another level it is a sensitive and perceptive portrayal of the relationship of the three main characters: Catrine, her son Finn, and Roddie, the man she marries. At a further more philosophical level - reflecting Gunn’s interest in Zen - it symbolically examines the contradictory forces which shape our environment, our lives and our beliefs. All these levels however are skillfully woven by Gunn around a parallel structure; a movement which Douglas Gifford describes as being “ from disruption and disharmony to unity and harmony.”
The community which Gunn focuses upon, his own predecessors, the people of Caithness, have been evicted during The Clearances which were the subject of the earlier novel “Butcher’s Broom.” “The Silver Darlings” therefore starts in a situation of disruption and disharmony. Forced from their straths where they have lived on the land for centuries, the people now face the daunting prospect of having to make their living on the sea. There is great hardship: they do not understand this environment and many of them die. Catrine’s own uncle is “taken” by the sea. But there is hope. Gunn portrays a resilient people with a positive attitude. They begin to see the possibilities opened up to them by the sea and it becomes their element; no one can put them off it - “for the sea had no landlord.” The novel traces the development of “The Golden Time,” the boom of the herring trade. Men of daring like Roddie and Finn are able to buy their own boats and make a good living. The novel is in this sense a triumph of optimism. There are still difficult times, Gunn concedes, yet the community triumphs over adversities such as shipwreck and plague and builds a new life for itself out of the ashes of the old.
At the more personal level too we see this theme of restoration at work. Catrine, dispossessed like the others, suffers a further blow when Tormad her husband is taken from her by the Press Gang. She is devastated but will not give in to despair. Quickly she decides to journey to Dunster to find a new life for herself and very gradually through the course of the novel her life is restored to her. Again there are difficulties and further loss - Gunn is no rose-tinted romantic - but Catrine finds again a harmony in her life. Her son is born; she loses Kirsty, her dear cousin; the courtship with Roddie is long and fraught with difficulty, as is Finn’s adolescence: yet at the end of the book there is harmony and accord with the two men in her life, and contentment for her.
Gunn introduces Finn, aged five, into the novel in the chapter “Finn and the Butterfly.” This is the chapter in which childhood bliss comes into conflict with and is tainted by the beginnings of adult knowledge. In a Lacanian interpretation it is the harrowing transition from The Imaginary into The Symbolic Order. In a Biblical sense it is Adam and Eve eating the apple and losing the perfection and innocence of the Garden. Then follows Finn’s journey through childhood and adolescence towards maturity. It is a painful journey at times for Finn and for Catrine. The boy is drawn to the very element which Catrine abhors and fears - the sea. The butterfly incident takes him there as does the capture of the great eel. Eventually the plague shows Catrine that her son is as endangered on the land as he would be at sea, and she gives her permission for him to seek his fortune as a fisherman.
This is not the end of Finn’s quest, for he now has to face a problem much greater than any danger faced at sea. His mother, freed of her past obligation to Tormad, draws closer to Roddie and Finn must come to terms with Freud and their marriage! Gunn shows us the Oedipal boy, torn by his love for his mother and his youthful hero-worship of Roddie, unable to come to terms with their needs as two people in love about to make a new life together. “Storm and Precipice” reveals a Finn with deeply hurt emotion trying to get his own back on Roddie, his former hero.
However in a beautiful and triumphant moment we see Finn grow to adult status and understanding. This takes place at the ceilidh in North Uist. As Finn listens to the girl singing her song - an old song of an ancient culture - he recognizes himself as part of a tradition that has lasted for centuries. He sees the circle of birth, work, marriage, childbearing, maturity, old age and death and understands his place in it as well as Catrine’s and Roddie’s. Gunn shows us his homecoming as a changed man in the scene where he brings gifts to Catrine, Roddie and their baby. He is now his own man - free of the ties of childhood, able to acknowledge his mother’s marriage and to rejoice with her in it and to go on and seek his own fulfillment with Una.
The community which Gunn focuses upon, his own predecessors, the people of Caithness, have been evicted during The Clearances which were the subject of the earlier novel “Butcher’s Broom.” “The Silver Darlings” therefore starts in a situation of disruption and disharmony. Forced from their straths where they have lived on the land for centuries, the people now face the daunting prospect of having to make their living on the sea. There is great hardship: they do not understand this environment and many of them die. Catrine’s own uncle is “taken” by the sea. But there is hope. Gunn portrays a resilient people with a positive attitude. They begin to see the possibilities opened up to them by the sea and it becomes their element; no one can put them off it - “for the sea had no landlord.” The novel traces the development of “The Golden Time,” the boom of the herring trade. Men of daring like Roddie and Finn are able to buy their own boats and make a good living. The novel is in this sense a triumph of optimism. There are still difficult times, Gunn concedes, yet the community triumphs over adversities such as shipwreck and plague and builds a new life for itself out of the ashes of the old.
At the more personal level too we see this theme of restoration at work. Catrine, dispossessed like the others, suffers a further blow when Tormad her husband is taken from her by the Press Gang. She is devastated but will not give in to despair. Quickly she decides to journey to Dunster to find a new life for herself and very gradually through the course of the novel her life is restored to her. Again there are difficulties and further loss - Gunn is no rose-tinted romantic - but Catrine finds again a harmony in her life. Her son is born; she loses Kirsty, her dear cousin; the courtship with Roddie is long and fraught with difficulty, as is Finn’s adolescence: yet at the end of the book there is harmony and accord with the two men in her life, and contentment for her.
Gunn introduces Finn, aged five, into the novel in the chapter “Finn and the Butterfly.” This is the chapter in which childhood bliss comes into conflict with and is tainted by the beginnings of adult knowledge. In a Lacanian interpretation it is the harrowing transition from The Imaginary into The Symbolic Order. In a Biblical sense it is Adam and Eve eating the apple and losing the perfection and innocence of the Garden. Then follows Finn’s journey through childhood and adolescence towards maturity. It is a painful journey at times for Finn and for Catrine. The boy is drawn to the very element which Catrine abhors and fears - the sea. The butterfly incident takes him there as does the capture of the great eel. Eventually the plague shows Catrine that her son is as endangered on the land as he would be at sea, and she gives her permission for him to seek his fortune as a fisherman.
This is not the end of Finn’s quest, for he now has to face a problem much greater than any danger faced at sea. His mother, freed of her past obligation to Tormad, draws closer to Roddie and Finn must come to terms with Freud and their marriage! Gunn shows us the Oedipal boy, torn by his love for his mother and his youthful hero-worship of Roddie, unable to come to terms with their needs as two people in love about to make a new life together. “Storm and Precipice” reveals a Finn with deeply hurt emotion trying to get his own back on Roddie, his former hero.
However in a beautiful and triumphant moment we see Finn grow to adult status and understanding. This takes place at the ceilidh in North Uist. As Finn listens to the girl singing her song - an old song of an ancient culture - he recognizes himself as part of a tradition that has lasted for centuries. He sees the circle of birth, work, marriage, childbearing, maturity, old age and death and understands his place in it as well as Catrine’s and Roddie’s. Gunn shows us his homecoming as a changed man in the scene where he brings gifts to Catrine, Roddie and their baby. He is now his own man - free of the ties of childhood, able to acknowledge his mother’s marriage and to rejoice with her in it and to go on and seek his own fulfillment with Una.
March 8, 2021
The Silver Darlings is Gunn's Highland Bildungsroman at its finest. On a macro scale, it positions the reader so firmly in the world of the east coast herring fisheries of the first half of the 19th century that my compass was totally reconfigured to perceive the sea as connector, as a medium that carried news and story and language from Stornoway to Shetland and onwards southeast of Wick. The main character's coming-of-age ebbs and flows to the rhythm of more-or-less successful fishing seasons, the continued hardships caused by the Highland Clearances, and the comparative financial security trickling out of the herring industry. Yet, on a micro scale, the plot is peppered with the protagonist Finn's formative experiences of everything from defying death to exceedingly awkward encounters with the opposite sex. It is an epic to the now long-gone Gaelic-speaking populations of north-east Sutherland, a tribute to a way of life that united Gall and Gael.
April 4, 2017
This was a slow reading book. But well worth it! Lovely descriptive writing that creates such atmosphere and puts you on the fishing boats. You can almost feel the spray and the emotion of the men. The time and the place this story is set in is portrayed beautifully.
January 6, 2020
This was a book I struggled through in high school, and while this grown-up re-read was not as revelatory an experience as Sunset Song, I still discovered so much more to this book than my teenage mind could possibly appreciate. Gunn can move from epic scale to intimate moments with deceptive ease, and the life he evokes here of Highland communities is so real you can almost taste the sea air.
February 3, 2016
The Silver Darlings is a story of fishermen in the Scottish Highlands of the early 19th century. Forced to abandon their inland habitations due to the greed and cruelty of their landlords, this historical novel chronicles a society adapting to new circumstances and the generational change that occurs in such a change. Told in a fairly straight-forward, if detailed, manner, it unfolds as a kind of bildungsroman, though meshed together with mythic elements, making it a form of modern mythmaking—and succeeds admirably in doing so. The challenges faced by the protagonist, Finn—named after the heroic Finn MacCoul (or Fionn mac Cumhaill) of Irish and Scottish mythology—thus blend conventional narrative points of coming-of-age works and more elemental challenges that characterise mythic stories, e.g. when his household is rendered incapacitated he must take up the duties of keeping the household alive, which not only has him facing the mortality of himself and those around him, a classic step in the loss of innocence, but also making a treacherous journey across a great distance, learning to live with and utilise the land and its inhabitants in one of numerous places that recall The Odyssey more than any modern fiction.
If it has any particular flaws, then, those come with the mythmaking itself. Rather than trying to adapt this mythic figure to a modern society that has moved on, the mythic constraints and traditions keep it stuck in the past. Its rigid gender roles are understandable given the historical circumstances, but the way it uplifts manhood as a desirable status to the point of mythic worship give away a tendency to reclaim a glorious past rather than move forward. The men haul in the fish while the women take care of the homes and gut the fish. And so it stands as more a retelling of myth than modernisation of it, with all the good and bad that entails, but ultimately a well-written, enjoyable, and occasionally even a spell-binding one.
If it has any particular flaws, then, those come with the mythmaking itself. Rather than trying to adapt this mythic figure to a modern society that has moved on, the mythic constraints and traditions keep it stuck in the past. Its rigid gender roles are understandable given the historical circumstances, but the way it uplifts manhood as a desirable status to the point of mythic worship give away a tendency to reclaim a glorious past rather than move forward. The men haul in the fish while the women take care of the homes and gut the fish. And so it stands as more a retelling of myth than modernisation of it, with all the good and bad that entails, but ultimately a well-written, enjoyable, and occasionally even a spell-binding one.
August 20, 2019
I bought The Silver Darlings in Caithness, Scotland, where it was both written and set. I loved every word. I'm sad to finish the book and leave this amazing world Neil Gunn brought to life for me.
December 8, 2021
“What are you reading?” asked the nurse as I was recovering from the anesthetic. “The Silver Darlings”, I said as I held up the book’s cover. “That’s what these fish are. It was written in 1941 but is set in the early 1800s, during the Highland Clearances.” “Is it good?” “Yes, it’s brilliant!” She wanted to copy down the book’s details.
Hearing my Scottish accent, another inquisitive nurse joined our company. I told them that, though it was written in English, it uses a Gaelic idiom, and therefore may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand. “Do you speak Gaelic?” I hit them with a line or two but confessed that I had forgotten more than I ever learned.
Idiom? E.g., “Why on earth was Roddie smooring the fire if he was expecting company?” p. 216. (Lallans, smooring; Gaelic, smaladh.) “There’s a dirty bit of sea running, and it’s worse it’ll be before it’s better.” p. 532.
The heart of the book is about a woman and her son, Catrine and Finn. Hardship. Heartache. Happiness. It is written in beautiful prose, in which even the mundane becomes intriguing, amidst the mores and scruples of a culture baptized with the burn water of biblical truth. It is full of emotion as deep as the ocean from which the silver darlings are drawn.
There is tension and resolution throughout. Catrine has to adjust to the reality of her boy becoming a man. And will the man in her life remain missing or reappear in a different form? “For some unaccountable reason she had actually looked forward to being alone, to being all by herself, as if the essence of some long-forgotten pleasure might arise and surround her, like the scent of honeysuckle in the air.” p. 465.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism is chiseled into stony and fleshy hearts alike. Revival. Indeed, Scripture and Gaelicisms hang in the air like sweet-smelling peat smoke. It is highly descriptive without the tedium, recording life full measure in the crofts and on the sea. Joy and sorrow, romance, and adventure, the story, like a road, wends its way from highlands to islands. There are premonitions, prayer meetings, and pub brawls in which death and the dead, life and the living intertwine in an endless Celtic knot, without beginning or end. So the story goes.
The Highland Clearances (Fuadaichean nan Gàidheal) filled boats to the Americas and the antipodes with desperate refugees. However, the same also filled towns and boats on the coasts in search of the lucrative herring, the silver darlings. The names of some of the boats are: White Heather, Seafoam, Iolaire, (no, a different one!), Sulaire, and, Gannet, (likewise, a different one, i.e., not the Sulaire). “The sound their oars made travelled a long distance, they heard the silence going farther and farther away.” p. 529.
The characters remain in character throughout, rugged manly men and strong feminine women.
(As an aside, having lived for ten years in East Kildonan, Winnipeg in the 80s, I am sure I would have come in contact with descendants of some of those Gaels who lost their homes and sailed to Canada. Kildonan, in Winnipeg, got its name from the Strath of Kildonan in Sutherland, Scotland where many of the early settlers came from.)
Hearing my Scottish accent, another inquisitive nurse joined our company. I told them that, though it was written in English, it uses a Gaelic idiom, and therefore may be difficult for the uninitiated to understand. “Do you speak Gaelic?” I hit them with a line or two but confessed that I had forgotten more than I ever learned.
Idiom? E.g., “Why on earth was Roddie smooring the fire if he was expecting company?” p. 216. (Lallans, smooring; Gaelic, smaladh.) “There’s a dirty bit of sea running, and it’s worse it’ll be before it’s better.” p. 532.
The heart of the book is about a woman and her son, Catrine and Finn. Hardship. Heartache. Happiness. It is written in beautiful prose, in which even the mundane becomes intriguing, amidst the mores and scruples of a culture baptized with the burn water of biblical truth. It is full of emotion as deep as the ocean from which the silver darlings are drawn.
There is tension and resolution throughout. Catrine has to adjust to the reality of her boy becoming a man. And will the man in her life remain missing or reappear in a different form? “For some unaccountable reason she had actually looked forward to being alone, to being all by herself, as if the essence of some long-forgotten pleasure might arise and surround her, like the scent of honeysuckle in the air.” p. 465.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism is chiseled into stony and fleshy hearts alike. Revival. Indeed, Scripture and Gaelicisms hang in the air like sweet-smelling peat smoke. It is highly descriptive without the tedium, recording life full measure in the crofts and on the sea. Joy and sorrow, romance, and adventure, the story, like a road, wends its way from highlands to islands. There are premonitions, prayer meetings, and pub brawls in which death and the dead, life and the living intertwine in an endless Celtic knot, without beginning or end. So the story goes.
The Highland Clearances (Fuadaichean nan Gàidheal) filled boats to the Americas and the antipodes with desperate refugees. However, the same also filled towns and boats on the coasts in search of the lucrative herring, the silver darlings. The names of some of the boats are: White Heather, Seafoam, Iolaire, (no, a different one!), Sulaire, and, Gannet, (likewise, a different one, i.e., not the Sulaire). “The sound their oars made travelled a long distance, they heard the silence going farther and farther away.” p. 529.
The characters remain in character throughout, rugged manly men and strong feminine women.
(As an aside, having lived for ten years in East Kildonan, Winnipeg in the 80s, I am sure I would have come in contact with descendants of some of those Gaels who lost their homes and sailed to Canada. Kildonan, in Winnipeg, got its name from the Strath of Kildonan in Sutherland, Scotland where many of the early settlers came from.)
November 19, 2021
This book was gifted to my mother by relatives of ours in Scotland, because it is set in and around their home of Lybster. Neil M. Gunn was a prolific and successful Scottish author, and The Silver Darlings (published in 1941) was one of his most popular novels. I knew nothing about the author or the book when I picked it up to read.
Set in the early 19th century, it follows the fortunes of highlander Scots who were removed from their land ("the clearances"), which was (I understand) partly an economic benefit to the landowners but also was politically expedient to retard any attempts at organising against Brittain. While many highlanders migrated overseas during this time period, most were pushed onto small plots along the coastline, where they did not have the correct skills for self-sufficiency; this was a time of great poverty.
The story closely follows the experiences of one family - Tormad, his wife Catryn, their son Finn, and Catryn's second husband Roddie - across about 20 years' time. As the story opens, the guaranteed payment per barrel for herring - the 'silver darlings' of the title - turn the highlanders along the coast into fisherfolk. Tormad, young and recently married to Catryn, purchases a boat and nets and sets out with his friends. They are immediately successful with their fishing despite their lack of skill, but as they are pulling in the nets they are press-ganged into the royal navy. This was a legal practice at the time, a common way for the navy to recruit members for the battles against Napoleon. In the fight Tormad is seriously injured.
Catryn doesn't feel she can remain in the village after this tragedy and walks a full day to stay with a friend of her mother's in another village. Here she remains, giving birth to their son Finn and falling in love with Roddie, the best fisherman in the community. As Finn grows older he joins Roddie's crew. The book provides a wealth of information on everything related to fishing and the experiences of people learning to live with the sea, how the fishing industry brought prosperity but also foreshadows the troubles of over-fishing, and also just what life was like in this period of time for the very poor. Everyday life, like being schooled in the catchecism or visiting neighbours in the evening for a chat, and momentous events, like a tragedy at sea or the arrival of the plague, are all presented in full detail.
What the author does best, however, is integrate the rich inner life of each of the characters with their external behaviours and decision making - particularly their emotional states. He perfectly captures the way emotions can wash over a person, flitting and changing from one minute to the next. I don't know if I have ever read an author who captures this human activity better.
It's a very traditional novel, quite long and full of detail. Perhaps it's not fair to mark the rating down for these reasons, but I find I am more used to a quicker pace of storytelling. Nonetheless it was a dense and delightful read.
Set in the early 19th century, it follows the fortunes of highlander Scots who were removed from their land ("the clearances"), which was (I understand) partly an economic benefit to the landowners but also was politically expedient to retard any attempts at organising against Brittain. While many highlanders migrated overseas during this time period, most were pushed onto small plots along the coastline, where they did not have the correct skills for self-sufficiency; this was a time of great poverty.
The story closely follows the experiences of one family - Tormad, his wife Catryn, their son Finn, and Catryn's second husband Roddie - across about 20 years' time. As the story opens, the guaranteed payment per barrel for herring - the 'silver darlings' of the title - turn the highlanders along the coast into fisherfolk. Tormad, young and recently married to Catryn, purchases a boat and nets and sets out with his friends. They are immediately successful with their fishing despite their lack of skill, but as they are pulling in the nets they are press-ganged into the royal navy. This was a legal practice at the time, a common way for the navy to recruit members for the battles against Napoleon. In the fight Tormad is seriously injured.
Catryn doesn't feel she can remain in the village after this tragedy and walks a full day to stay with a friend of her mother's in another village. Here she remains, giving birth to their son Finn and falling in love with Roddie, the best fisherman in the community. As Finn grows older he joins Roddie's crew. The book provides a wealth of information on everything related to fishing and the experiences of people learning to live with the sea, how the fishing industry brought prosperity but also foreshadows the troubles of over-fishing, and also just what life was like in this period of time for the very poor. Everyday life, like being schooled in the catchecism or visiting neighbours in the evening for a chat, and momentous events, like a tragedy at sea or the arrival of the plague, are all presented in full detail.
What the author does best, however, is integrate the rich inner life of each of the characters with their external behaviours and decision making - particularly their emotional states. He perfectly captures the way emotions can wash over a person, flitting and changing from one minute to the next. I don't know if I have ever read an author who captures this human activity better.
It's a very traditional novel, quite long and full of detail. Perhaps it's not fair to mark the rating down for these reasons, but I find I am more used to a quicker pace of storytelling. Nonetheless it was a dense and delightful read.
May 24, 2017
It took me almost exactly 2 months to read this one. Even allowing for the fact that it runs to 600 pages, that’s a fair bit longer than I normally spend on a novel, and is an indication that I didn’t find it that engrossing.
For better or worse, Neil Gunn is probably the best-known writer to emerge from the Scottish Highlands, having been born in 1894 in the tiny village of Dunbeath, in the far north-east of Scotland. I sometimes pass through Dunbeath on work assignments, and I have seen signs for a little museum the village maintains in honour of its famous son. As I was within worktime I had no chance to stop, and to be honest I’m not that big a fan anyway. I had previously read two of his novels and thought they were only middling, but “The Silver Darlings” is his most famous work and one I had always thought to try.
The novel opens at the end of the Napoleonic Wars amongst people who have been cleared (i.e. evicted) from the Strath of Kildonan and moved to the coast, where they are encouraged to take up sea fishing, something these inland farmers had no experience of. Initially the novel’s central character is Catrine, whose husband disappears (I would need to include spoilers to say how) and who is left to raise her infant son Finn as a single parent. Gradually Finn becomes the central character and the novel a Bildungsroman for him.
I found the first half of the novel very dry, and in each of Gunn’s novels I’ve read I have found it quite hard to identify with his characters. Based on the 3 books I’ve read, he makes his lead characters flawed but also creates a heroic element to their personalities, and that is certainly true of Finn. The novel has its moments though. I enjoyed the section where Finn has his first visit to the town of Wick, where the author conveys Finn’s sense of wonder at being in this unimaginable metropolis. The part of the book that features the islands known as “The Seven Hunters” is exciting enough, and there is a beautiful chapter near the end when Finn’s fishing boat is blown by a storm to the island of North Uist. The east coast fishermen listen to recitations of ancient epics and observe customs long forgotten elsewhere, whilst the Uist people are surprised that these things are unknown to their visitors. Finn sings them a ballad he attributes to Caithness - “A Rose Grows Merry in Time”, and I was interested to see this is clearly a version of the song “Scarborough Fair”, made popular by Simon and Garfunkel (the novel was written in 1941, and there is another version of this song, called “The Elfin Knight”, which comes from the Scottish Borders). Overall, the second half of the novel is more enjoyable than the first, but this can be a bit of a struggle at times.
For better or worse, Neil Gunn is probably the best-known writer to emerge from the Scottish Highlands, having been born in 1894 in the tiny village of Dunbeath, in the far north-east of Scotland. I sometimes pass through Dunbeath on work assignments, and I have seen signs for a little museum the village maintains in honour of its famous son. As I was within worktime I had no chance to stop, and to be honest I’m not that big a fan anyway. I had previously read two of his novels and thought they were only middling, but “The Silver Darlings” is his most famous work and one I had always thought to try.
The novel opens at the end of the Napoleonic Wars amongst people who have been cleared (i.e. evicted) from the Strath of Kildonan and moved to the coast, where they are encouraged to take up sea fishing, something these inland farmers had no experience of. Initially the novel’s central character is Catrine, whose husband disappears (I would need to include spoilers to say how) and who is left to raise her infant son Finn as a single parent. Gradually Finn becomes the central character and the novel a Bildungsroman for him.
I found the first half of the novel very dry, and in each of Gunn’s novels I’ve read I have found it quite hard to identify with his characters. Based on the 3 books I’ve read, he makes his lead characters flawed but also creates a heroic element to their personalities, and that is certainly true of Finn. The novel has its moments though. I enjoyed the section where Finn has his first visit to the town of Wick, where the author conveys Finn’s sense of wonder at being in this unimaginable metropolis. The part of the book that features the islands known as “The Seven Hunters” is exciting enough, and there is a beautiful chapter near the end when Finn’s fishing boat is blown by a storm to the island of North Uist. The east coast fishermen listen to recitations of ancient epics and observe customs long forgotten elsewhere, whilst the Uist people are surprised that these things are unknown to their visitors. Finn sings them a ballad he attributes to Caithness - “A Rose Grows Merry in Time”, and I was interested to see this is clearly a version of the song “Scarborough Fair”, made popular by Simon and Garfunkel (the novel was written in 1941, and there is another version of this song, called “The Elfin Knight”, which comes from the Scottish Borders). Overall, the second half of the novel is more enjoyable than the first, but this can be a bit of a struggle at times.
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December 30, 2021 This was a remarkable book. The setting of the Scottish Highlands, its islands and the sea were real and living. It hit some deep ancestral memory or something that connected to past stories of grandparents' lives in Ireland and their Scottish cousins.
As a story it is full of pathos and describes the lives and changes of two generations after the Clearances where superstition, family bonds, survival on the land and sea, love and loss. It is also Finn's bildungsroman from boy to manhood, from his mother's baby to skipper of his own boat and the possibility of his own family.
The fishing expeditions and the lives of the islanders are told with such extraordinary skill and language which captures the local tongue, depicts life in poetry describing the weather and the landscapes, emotions and hierarchy among the fishermen in their realm- the sea.
The narrative and the characters are captivating and we are carried along like the waves on the shore.
Gunn also manages to indicate his own heritage from the oral story tellers in the islands from whom Finn has also inherited his imaginative way to enthral his audiences. The reader is as rapt as are Finn's listeners to his tales of their daring deeds on the dangerous sea. The description of Finn's cliff climbing incident and the attempt to save the sailors from the wrecked boat are nail-biting and full of suspense.
I can understand why Ruth Prawer Jhabvala loved it and why she thanked Gunn's relatives for sending her the books when she prepared her speech for the Neil Gunn Fellowship she won in 1979. It clearly inspired the speech where she contrasted her 'disinheritance' from her roots with Gunn's deep involvement and embedded feeling for his. I now see what it was she envied: the deep well of memories of land and seascape from which to draw- all of which she lost.
As a story it is full of pathos and describes the lives and changes of two generations after the Clearances where superstition, family bonds, survival on the land and sea, love and loss. It is also Finn's bildungsroman from boy to manhood, from his mother's baby to skipper of his own boat and the possibility of his own family.
The fishing expeditions and the lives of the islanders are told with such extraordinary skill and language which captures the local tongue, depicts life in poetry describing the weather and the landscapes, emotions and hierarchy among the fishermen in their realm- the sea.
The narrative and the characters are captivating and we are carried along like the waves on the shore.
Gunn also manages to indicate his own heritage from the oral story tellers in the islands from whom Finn has also inherited his imaginative way to enthral his audiences. The reader is as rapt as are Finn's listeners to his tales of their daring deeds on the dangerous sea. The description of Finn's cliff climbing incident and the attempt to save the sailors from the wrecked boat are nail-biting and full of suspense.
I can understand why Ruth Prawer Jhabvala loved it and why she thanked Gunn's relatives for sending her the books when she prepared her speech for the Neil Gunn Fellowship she won in 1979. It clearly inspired the speech where she contrasted her 'disinheritance' from her roots with Gunn's deep involvement and embedded feeling for his. I now see what it was she envied: the deep well of memories of land and seascape from which to draw- all of which she lost.
January 25, 2020
The books of Neil Gunn were referenced in a course I took on the Scottish highlands. The first that I read, Butcher’s Broom, dealt with the Highland clearances. Landlords and clan leaders evicted their tenants in order to increase pasturage for sheep. Many poor crofters emigrated while others were pushed to the coast. The second novel, Silver Darlings, focuses on the evicted farmers turning to fishing to survive. No landlord owned the ocean. Herring was one of the prime export fish and men risked life and limb to fish in the northern ocean. This book is almost poetic in its description of the people and their struggles to survive. The descriptions of life at sea are both vivid and personal. Gunn spends time revealing the personalities of the characters. If you are interested in Scottish history I recommend you read both books. I found my copy in the stacks in the MPLS library. It is a 1945 edition printed in the USA.
August 14, 2025
This is a long read and the detail and language may not suit every reader. I enjoyed it but found I did skip over some of the chapter/paragraphs which I felt were interesting but didn't necessarily add to the narrative or the character development.
The start is a shock; a newly married woman's husband is press ganged into seafaring. She goes to live with relatives and gives birth to bay boy, Finn and it is his life which is followed in depth as he grows up and becomes a fisherman, eventually owning his own boat. The herrings ( the silver darlings) are the life blood of the poor island and highland communities, forced off their land into unsustainable crofts by rich and often absent landlords who want the land for hunting, part of the land grabs of the 18th and 19th centuries. What comes across is the deep understanding of the people for the sea and the land and their resolute spirit in the face of both natural and man made adversities.
The start is a shock; a newly married woman's husband is press ganged into seafaring. She goes to live with relatives and gives birth to bay boy, Finn and it is his life which is followed in depth as he grows up and becomes a fisherman, eventually owning his own boat. The herrings ( the silver darlings) are the life blood of the poor island and highland communities, forced off their land into unsustainable crofts by rich and often absent landlords who want the land for hunting, part of the land grabs of the 18th and 19th centuries. What comes across is the deep understanding of the people for the sea and the land and their resolute spirit in the face of both natural and man made adversities.
September 24, 2023
As I prefer action stories, this was not my usual cup of tea though I appreciate the author's descriptive powers. He obviously has in-depth knowledge of the fishing skills and living conditions of a by-gone year. I confess that at times I skimmed over his more descriptive passages. In the past I have often come across stories of the survivors of the Clearances but usually as they go off to the rapidly growing industrial cities of the Lowlands or overseas to North America or elsewhere in the Empire. Those surviving on the Highland coasts were relegated to a minor aside... until now! Really interesting historically. I am not sure of why Finn, our hero as he moves from teenager to adult fisherman, has such problems with his relationships.
April 17, 2023
"Life in the dim night, under the stars, over the land, the old, old land, the curved thatch, the still birch trees, the surge of the singing, rising as smoke rises from a fire, spreading out over the immemorial land , under the dying moon."
There is some outstandingly beautiful prose in this novel but not much of a plot to keep you pulled along. It's a dense and highly detailed novel written 80 years ago, so some parts are a little dry and harder to follow but over all, an interesting account of daily life in the north east of Scotland during the time of the clearances and the emergence of the herring industry.
There is some outstandingly beautiful prose in this novel but not much of a plot to keep you pulled along. It's a dense and highly detailed novel written 80 years ago, so some parts are a little dry and harder to follow but over all, an interesting account of daily life in the north east of Scotland during the time of the clearances and the emergence of the herring industry.
November 30, 2024
Im Buch erlebt der Leser den Beginn der Heringsindustrie an der schottischen Ostküste mit. Viele Dörfer profitieren davon und viele Menschen konnten sich ein neues Leben aufbauen, nachdem sie aus ihrer alten Heimat vertrieben wurden. Diese Entwicklung mit zu verfolgen war sehr interessant. Auch die Geschichten von Catrine, Roddie und Finn sind interessant. Was mich gestört hat sind die schon vorher erwähnten Bemerkungen zum Thema Religion. Da ist Neil Gunn sehr speziell und ich kann nicht immer etwas damit anfangen. Das Buch ist mit fast 600 Seiten deutlich länger als die meisten von Gunns Büchern. Das bedeutet leider auch immer wieder Längen in der Geschichte.
October 9, 2019
This book is set just after the highland clearances (of which I had never, embarrassingly, even heard) and follows the lives of various characters trying to make a new life and living for themselves on the land and at sea. Gunn evokes the time and place so well and some of the scenes are just so thrillingly written I couldn’t put the book down at times despite its 600 pages. This is a very underrated book, but I would definitely recommend it, he’s a very good writer.
October 8, 2020
This is a book to take to the cabin, or the sea getaway. It isn't a page-turner, things unfold slowly in a portrait of a town at the will of fish and economic forces they barely understand. On it's face it the growing up of Finn the child/adolescent; but it is cinematic in the sense that the characters mostly reveal themselves through actions rather than words. There are one or two really thrilling set-pieces at sea but the takeaway for me was both an envy for such a simple strong life and a relief that I don't live it. But a worthwhile steady novel.
June 16, 2020
It is very rare of me not to finish a book, but I powered through the first 150 pages, and it still didn't flow. His writing is almost too eloquent. For people that love books describing scenery, this is the book for you, but unfortunately no matter how much I envisioned the Scottish highlands and thought of the sea and travelled with his descriptions, I needed a story to be able to finish it, and I wasn't patient enough to find one.
June 1, 2019
A beautiful story about fisherman and crofters at the Scottish island set during the nineteenth century! To be honest I liked the book however is only a 3.4 star, in fact could well be a 5 star if it wasn’t so repetitive and a little boring at the sea voyages...
I reckon it lacks some intriguing dialogues and some mysterious events!
I reckon it lacks some intriguing dialogues and some mysterious events!
July 18, 2019
A totally absorbing and satisfying novel. Life in the Scottish Highlands and coastline and islands as seen through the eyes of fishermen is portrayed vividly and honestly. Neil M. Gunn is a master of simple but evocative prose. I was captivated throughout and didn't want this epic story to end, and will definitely be reading more works by this talented author.
April 28, 2020
Brought up in Caithness and never read The Silver Darlings? Not a fact you want to bandy about.
Took the restlessness of the Covid 19 situation to make me apply myself,
So glad I did. I could envisage both land and sea journeys described in the book. Twas a wonderful escape for me and took me home...even if just for a few days.
Took the restlessness of the Covid 19 situation to make me apply myself,
So glad I did. I could envisage both land and sea journeys described in the book. Twas a wonderful escape for me and took me home...even if just for a few days.
April 5, 2021
A world unknown to me, made real and vivid in this book written quite long ago. A bit slow in the beginning, but then it picks up pace. So much so that herring fishing became interesting for me. All in all enjoyed reading it. Some emotions and feelings from so long ago are still up to date. People are people.
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