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Witch Light by Susan Fletcher

Chosen by Victoria Hoyle, blogger at Eve’s Alexandria

'Susan Fletcher's third novel, Witch Light, was published in hardback last year with a different title.  It was simply called Corrag.  I'm not sure why the decision has been made to retitle it for the paperback release.  Maybe it didn't sell?  If that's the case, then I hope it finds the audience it deserves under it's new name. The book is set in Inverary, Scotland in the late seventeenth century, just after the notorious massacre of the Macdonald clan at Glencoe in 1692.  Really it has just two characters: Corrag, a young woman who lived in Glencoe and witnessed the violence, barely escaping with her life; and an exiled Irish Jacobite priest, Charles Leslie, who has travelled to the Highlands to investigate and expose the killings. Unable to travel to Glencoe himself because of the weather, Leslie chooses instead to stay and use Corrag as his key informant. His decision is all the more unusual because she is lying in a dank, dripping prison cell, and condemned to die for witchcraft.

It sounds very melodramatic, and in parts it is, almost verging on the sentimental.  But the writing is very good, and Corrag's narratorial voice is oddly compelling.  Really it is not the monumental story of Glencoe, but the story of her small scattered life and the natural world of the moor, mountains and bog that has been her home.  It is difficult to explain it's effect: at it's best Witch Light is a kind of remembering; unlike academic history it can get deep into the nooks, crevices and secrets of Glencoe's past. The novelist's imagination is an emotional bypass, around the facts, to the heart of the matter.'

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