Margot Livesey’s new novel immerses the reader in Victorian Scotland so thoroughly that I began to feel that world as the present. It made me consider that what’s “the past” to us is just a departed generation’s everyday, breath-by-breath existence, just as our present—and everything that mattered so much to us—will be a future generation’s past. I suppose that’s a way of saying that this engaging, moving book is an especially good instance of both the historical novel and the coming-of-age tale.
We follow Lizzie Craig, the callow young protagonist, from the 1880s into the early 1890s, leaving her at the age of twenty. As tall as she is hard-working, she grows up on Belhaven Farm near the village of Langmuir with her maternal grandparents, a farm boy named Hugh, and later a sister, Kate, whom she didn’t know she had. Langmuir is said to be somewhere in between Cupar and St. Andrews in the Kingdom of Fife, which is surrounded on three sides by water: the Tay Estuary to the north, the North Sea to the east, and the Firth of Forth to the south. For all their sometimes backbreaking efforts, Lizzie and her family, though literate, struggle at times to stay on the edge of poverty.
Beginning when she is ten years old, Lizzie sees “pictures” that foretell the future—“although she never saw herself.” Often her pictures are a kind of warning—they often forecast danger or even death—though she finds she can’t prevent what they show from happening. Around the age of eighteen, she finds herself falling desperately in love with Louis, a young fiddle-playing apprentice tailor from Glasgow. Increasingly chafing at life on the farm, Lizzie moves to that city and gets work as a housemaid. She feels like an immigrant in Glasgow, “a part of her always left behind.”
She returns to Belhaven to have Louis’ “illegitimate” baby, Barbara. In Lizzie’s era, girls who “get in trouble with boys” sometimes kill themselves. Being a “fallen” woman can lead to ruin for the mother, even as the father’s life goes on much as before.
Lizzie’s increasingly urgent “pictures” drive the plot, prompting her to reluctantly and deceitfully return to Glasgow without Barbara. Her life becomes “a tangle” as each lie and deception and broken promise leads to larger ones. I’ll leave you to discover her adventures from there. I’ll only add that given what we know of the cautionary nature of her pictures of the future, her final vision is significant in many ways, lending the ending just enough of an edge of ambiguity to make it deeply satisfying but not pat. How much of life is just “a thin chain of coincidences,” and how much is fate?
Livesey unfolds the story in mainly short sentences in a beautifully compressed style. Her lines are well-turned but never showy. She has a gift for the granular sensory detail that shows how it was for Lizzie to be alive in that time and place; she makes the reader feel it, too. At the cèilidh, people dance the “Gay Gordons” or the “Duke of Perth,” an “Eightsome Reel” or “Strip the Willow.” In the evenings they play card games like whist or Happy Families or cribbage. Or they read—Lizzie’s literary life encompasses Robert Burns’ “Tam O’ Shanter,” Walter Scott, “Frankenstein,” “Tristram Shandy,” and “Mansfield Park” and “Persuasion” by Jane Eyre; as a girl she likes “The Princess and the Goblin” and the “Water-Babies.”
Because its events almost never feel contrived, I almost didn’t notice that the book has got quite a taut narrative line. Livesey never lets the plot slacken so the novel feels fast; because she is so attentive, it feels patient as well.
There is a subtle and quite beautiful way in which “The Road From Belhaven” is very much about mortality and the transience of generations, even while its focus remains squarely on Lizzie. Lizzie’s story, we sense, is prologue to Barbara’s just-beginning tale; to Barbara, that’s what it will be. In fact, a book could be written telling the story of Lizzie’s late mom, Helen, whom she never really knew. Lizzie cherishes a picture of her parents, who both died young, drawn by her mother (Lizzie too is talented at drawing in a way that plays into the story); to her, their story is prologue to hers. Our own life and times, the future to Lizzie, will be to a future generation just a story that happened a long time ago.
The events in this story took place over 130 years ago. Like us, Lizzie yearned, felt shame and anger, knew passions, experienced freedom, chafed at its absence, was transported by paintings, made mistakes. Livesey clearly loves Lizzie Craig for all her very human shortcomings; I came to care about her deeply as well, and to cherish this book.
“The Road From Belhaven”
By Margot Livesey
Knopf, 272 pages
