Nothing Left to Fear From Hell
Nothing Left to Fear from Hell
Alan Warner
‘And tell me will we never hear the end
Of puir bludy Charlie at Culloden yet again?
Though he ran like a rabbit down the glen
Leavin better folk than him to be butchered.’
I have seen these words from Brian McNeill’s caustic anthem ‘No Gods and Precious Few Heroes’ discomfort otherwise hard-edged audiences. Rather than springing from an eternal loyalty to the House of Stuart within the Scottish soul, the roots of such discomfort are more likely to be found in a quiet boom in narrative histories of Scotland that began in the sixties and has never quite abated. The would-be king’s epic traipse across mountain and moor in the aftermath of Culloden is one of those sweeping tales of romantic twilight that is simply too good to dismiss, or disbelieve, outright.
Alan Warner’s debt to the popular historian at the heart of that boom, John Prebble, is freely acknowledged in a comprehensive historical note. But in Nothing Left to Fear From Hell, storied lochs and glens are transformed into a hellscape: populated by an emaciated people, driven across a terrain stalked by the pervasive demon that harries all before it; the midgie.
Like that sharp-toothed demon’s belly Warner’s book is fat with blood: its prose lingers on the details of a land made barren by human cruelty. In this respect, it resembles a Jacobite fever-dream penned by Cormac McCarthy. As in McCarthy’s best work, a strange and terrible beauty emerges.
Charlie himself is rendered as neither McNeill’s rabbit nor the courageous ‘young chevalier,’ but rather as a horny, retching, shitting—yet charismatic—bundle of contradictions. Reading this book as the country prepares to anoint the third Charles that Warner’s protagonist dreamed of becoming, you can’t help but reflect on the absurdity of what history demands of lone human bodies. Or, indeed, to consider how loyalty to those bodies and the ideals they represent can be a slow or a fast path to ruin for a subject people.
In these days of narrative abundance great store is set on the value of the untold story. However, Nothing Left to Fear From Hell (along with its sister titles in Polygon’s Darkland Tales series) sets out to re-tell the familiar. It is a worthy mission. Warner’s searing vision of Hebridean hell reconfirms his role as bard of the Gàidhealtachd’s seamier side, in prose that draws on lyrical traditions far older, and more resilient, than the House of Stuart’s claim to lord it over them.
—Christopher Silver