The Call of the Cormorant
By Donald S Murray
Saraband
In middle life, Donald S Murray has become not only an established novelist, but unquestionably one of the most interesting and enjoyable writing in Scotland today. Impressively, he sets himself a new and more demanding challenge with each book. The Call of the Cormorant, set in Iceland,
the Faroe Islands, Denmark and Nazi Germany, is remarkable.
It is based on the life of an extraordinary figure, Karl Einarsson, a poet, artist, confidence trickster and mythomaniac who, among a number of self-awarded titles, called himself Cormorant XII, Emperor of Atlantis – there is, I fear no record of the previous 11 Emperor Cormorants – and also Count Duke of St Kilda, though he never visited the islands. But his story begins in a small town in Torshavn in the Faroes, where his father kept a village store.
The father, a fine, garrulous auto-didact with a greedy zest for knowledge and a taste for fantasy, is, like Dickens’s Mr Micawber, a delight to meet in a novel, though you might cross the street to avoid him in life. A voracious reader of anything that comes his way, he believes that the great rockfaces of the St Kilda archipelago are the last standing walls of the lost continent of Atlantis. Young Karl is schooled in this belief, his enthusiasm sparked by an encounter with two Scottish fishermen washed up on the Faroes in a mighty storm. The conversations between them and Karl’s father, neither side much understanding the other, are very funny, as indeed are the interventions of the local parson. Later, when Karl is in his teens, it is the parson who persuades the father that the boy’s exceptional promise as poet and artist will be stifled unless he furthers his education in Denmark. The father is convinced, though his mother and Karl’s sensible sister Christianna, who shares the burden of the narrative, are more doubtful.
It seems natural that, after a chequered few years in Denmark – artistic success marred by his dishonesty – Karl should find himself in Nazi Germany. He may, in his Atlantis fixation, his claim to be able to speak its lost language and his belief that Atlantis was the homeland of the Aryan race, be loopy to the tonsils, but he is no more so than the SS leader Heinrich Himmler, whose Aryan fantasies drove him to send an expedition to Tibet in search of other evidence of the race’s origins. Murray revels in all this absurdity, even while writing with a degree of sympathy and understanding of the Cormorant Emperor. His depiction of the madhouse that was Nazi Germany is acute, lively, horrible and very funny.
When war comes Karl is recruited to broadcast on German radio to the Faroes, joining a bizarre gang which included William Joyce (Lord Haw-haw), the fine Irish novelist Francis Stuart and at least a couple of Scottish Nationalists. To his credit, the Emperor Cormorant does so reluctantly, all the more so because he has seen enough of the Nazis and Allied bombing of Germany to believe that Germany will be defeated. His claim that the broadcasts were harmless since he delivered them in the otherwise long-lost language of Atlantis is more ingenious than convincing.
This is a fine story, rich in irony, a story of folly and a fool who nevertheless invites one’s sympathy. It is neatly and wisely offset by the voice of Karl’s sensible and caring sister. The construction is good. I might have liked more of the Cormorant's father, but I suspect that Murray might have thought this self-indulgence. It is his most ambitious novel to date, if only because he has stepped out of his home territory. It leaves one wondering what he can – and will – do next. AM