Exploring the link between internet and fairy belief
Skye bard Angus Peter Campbell explores the link between the internet and fairy-belief in his latest English-language novel Memory & Straw – winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Fiction Book of the Year – which will be the focus of his talk at Waterstones in Oban next Thursday, June 14.
‘I was working on my computer one day when the thought struck me that the internet and fairy-belief were one and the same thing – or at least mirror images of each other. Ways of filtering and understanding the universe.
‘Nowadays, most of us get our news and information through the web, which acts as a conduit for the way in which we view politics and language and culture and so on. And it struck me that perhaps that process is not that much different from someone in the 16th or 17th or 18th centuries who understood things through the cultural web available at the time.
‘And as we are increasingly being shaped and directed by algorithms through our computers, so people then were being shaped by the cultural beliefs that surrounded them.
‘Maybe fairy-belief was the Google and Amazon of the time. In the same way as we get lost in a search-engine – you type in ‘Oban’ for example and before you realise it you’ve spent the day looking at fascinating pictures and facts about old Oban etc – so folk got lost in the ‘Sìthein’ (The Fairy Knoll). People would hear music coming out from the hill and the next thing they’d be trapped in there for 100 years.
‘My challenge then was to turn that ‘idea’ into a story. So I created this character Gavin MacDonell, who first of all worked in banking then moves over into the field of artificial intelligence.
‘The novel is really an exploration of the personal journey he takes to find his own true history and therefore identity, and the dilemma that gives him – whether to stay in New York or return to his ancestral home in Scotland, with the possibilities and (financial) sacrifices that choice involves.
‘I’ve always liked the quote from the Russian émigré writer, Vera Linhartova, who said: “The writer is not a prisoner of any one language”. I am a bilingual writer, which means sometimes I choose to write in my native language, Gaelic, and sometimes in my second language, English.
‘With Memory and Straw I felt it best to write in English – partially because it will hopefully give non-Gaelic speakers access into an area (fairy-belief and history and mythology) which has been so important in shaping our Highland world-view.’