Scottish book of the week

As the Women Lay Dreaming By Donald S Murray, Saraband, £8.99.

On January 1, 1919, HMY Iolaire – the name taken from the Gaelic for “eagle” – ran aground on rocks on the way into the harbour at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. Two hundred servicemen, on the last part of their journey home after the end of the First World War, drowned in the disaster which has resonated in the Hebrides and beyond ever since.

As the Women Lay Dreaming is the work of writer Donald S Murray, who spent his childhood on Lewis and who now lives in Shetland.

There have been recent non-fiction accounts to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the disaster in 2019 but it’s rare to read a book so rooted in truth and actual lived experience that still manages to convey a real world and real events with such skill and authenticity.

The story is told via three timelines bound together by the central figure of Tormod Morrison, a Lewisman born and bred, who fought in the war and survived the Iolaire’s sinking, as many of his friends, neighbours and fellow servicemen did not.

It doesn’t pull its punches about the way of life of the islands of the times – the men who are going home on the Iolaire, especially the central figures, know that what awaits them isn’t an idealised dream of domestic perfection and home comforts but the harsh grind of a way of living that seems to have less and less to offer them the closer they get to it.

The tragedy of the Iolaire here exists on many levels. The timing is awful – the “crowning sorrow of the war” when many expected to celebrate survival. The loss is extreme – no community can survive unscathed the loss of 200 members, let alone one as small and close-knit as Lewis in the 1900s.

Unwilling blacksmith Tormod, is, aptly, forged by his background and surroundings but feels trapped by the land, by the constraints of religion and the way of life that imposes.

He has talent as an artist, something beyond the ken of most of his family and friends but his time in the Army frees his mind to understand his vision of his home and of the world beyond it.

Women are central to this tale but in a way that mirrors their role in the society of the time.

Donald S Murray deservedly won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize for this debut novel. It combines deep understanding with a lightness of touch that makes it something to read more than once.

Review by Helen Brown.