Highland Book Prize finalist Duncan Gillies's Star Read stories bridge worlds
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Duncan Gillies’s short story collection Crann-Fìge/Fig Tree is his fourth, but it is his first to appear with the Gaelic and English version of his stories side by side.
His first collection to be longlisted and now shortlisted in the final four for the Highland Book Prize, it is this week’s Star Read.
The title story – the first of 12 – describes a surreal encounter in the shade of a fig tree, bringing to mind – as a reviewer also noted, an echo of Samuel Beckett. This meeting with an old man has a surreal Waiting For Godot vibe. With the description of melting heat and the mention of lions, it may seem far from the setting of many of the other stories, Duncan Gillies’s own native Isle of Lewis – and yet?
“The fig tree had a strong aroma, not unlike that of a nettle-bed in the still, sultry days of high summer …”
Many of the stories have an almost mythic, fairy-tale quality, such as The Little Old Woman, with talk of spells. Yet it’s spliced to contemporary life, seeking a counsellor’s help.
Stories linger. Often the plot circles one simple moment, as in Kate, when a young girl passes an older woman on the road.
The encounter embeds itself in the grown woman’s life – and the reader’s imagination.
Also as in the bittersweet The Nights Have Ended, our minds are left with Catherine and Donald’s toy boats, bobbing on the water.
Time stretches and flexes past ‘our’ time, Gillies creates an afterlife – and also makes you conscious of the people who came centuries before, like the Norsemen.
Sometimes the writer shifts our focus to something at the edge of his pictures.
As the heroine says in the story Kate: “I was in a different world, though still in the self-same village.”
HBP judge Mark Wringe said of the book: “Written with confidence and assurance in both Gaelic and English, these short stories have a timeless quality. These light, subtle stories gel to form a cohesive whole, depicting Gaelic culture when it too was whole.”
The other finalists on the Highland Book Prize shortlist are:
Tony Davidson, Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer (Woodwose Books, 2022);
Cynthia Rogerson WAH! Things I Never Told My Mother (Sandstone Press, 2022);
Ali Smith Companion Piece (Hamish Hamilton, 2022).
The winner will be announced on Tuesday, June 6.
Crann-Fìge/Fig Tree (Acair, £10.95).
