| John McPhee’s The Crofter and The Laird was another book I found at my local library’s book sale and I bought it eagerly. I would love to visit Scotland and have always had a very definite idea in my mind of what the Scottish highlands and the islands of the Hebrides are like (on my first visit to East Hampton in late October in the late 1980s, I took a long walk on a misty day over a green, rolling, and deserted golf course bordering the Atlantic ocean on one side and with huge old stone mansions on the other, and declared it to look just like Scotland — my ideas remain firm although East Hampton has changed). I was sure McPhee would fill me up with abundant and fulfilling descriptions of the tiny island of Colonsay, satisfying for a little while my desire to see Scotland for myself. But he did not. This book is not a travel book for dreamers of heather and peat and summer days that last until midnight (M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth books do a better job). The Crofter and the Laird is McPhee’s account of the people who live as renters of land and homes owned by a Brit with little interest in supporting their rural and antiquated lifestyle or in preserving the history of his inherited summer home — the island — beyond the what has already been done in a small exhibit at his manor.
There are some charming stories of twisting ancestry (including McPhee’s own) and of village gossip-mongering and community backbiting that exists co-dependently with survival and camaraderie. There is a wonderfully funny section in which McPhee names all the rock formations and cairns of the Island, giving their Gaelic name and the English translation; and there are too-true-to-be-made up but fantastically grim stories of islanders and incomers alike facing hardship, redundancy (unemployment) and the fact that their way of life — two centuries behind the times, tough, and yet satisfying — is facing extinction. McPhee presents the people (represented by the crofter) and the laird (the titled owner of the island) fairly and fully, but there is little doubt with whom he sides (or maybe it is just my inclination, and so I think it is the right one, to side with those whose families have lived for generations on the island). The feudal system continues on Colonsay, but with a socialist/welfare state twist: is there a way to evolve towards land ownership, job diversity, and population maintenance? McPhee makes a strong argument for why we should care but does not presume to offer a solution for allowing the islanders to continue living on land and in homes they could not afford to buy, and yet sparing the owner from the financial losses borne along with the privilege of owning (lording over) his island. |
