viii: Book Club
Hex (Fagan, J.: Birlinn, 2022) Reviewer: Marianne Hughes CN: Hex contains detailed reference to rape, abuse, and sexual assault. The Darkland Tales are a new series of short novels from modern Scottish authors. In the words of the publisher, they offer ‘dramatic retellings of stories from the nation’s history, myth, and legend […] viewed through a modern lens and alive to modern sensibilities.’ Jenni Hagan’s Hex is the second publication in the series, and she describes it as a ‘small offering’ in honour of Geillis Duncan, a fifteenyear-old girl accused of, and executed for, witchcraft on December 4th, 1591. The novel is set in a prison cell in Old Tolbooth, Edinburgh. The timeframe is the twelve hours from midnight till noon on December 4th. The conversation is between Geillis, awaiting her fate in the cell, and Iris’ spirit/consciousness time-travelling across ether, time, and space from 2022. They share experiences and memories, demonstrating the commonalities in female experience across more than four hundred years. Jenni Hagan’s creativity, humour, and poetic craft animate the story of Geillis’ short life, echoed in Iris’ life, and illustrate the dark events of the North Berwick trials in the time of King James VI. The cell is: far below footfall, or taverns, or flats; below beds, or kitchens, or hugs, or hope … there is only one kind of weather in here – freezing cold and cloaked in darkness. Hagan’s language is evocative of the desolation facing this young girl, Geillis. It conjures our connections to our ancestors and predecessors: the ether is a tributary going out across the universe, and we can travel it in any direction— human bodies don’t live in bodies for so long.
Iris’ spirit travels to find the cell; she reflects on the power of the State, the King, and the ordinary people. She considers King James VI’s penchant for demonstrations of power, and the horrible ease with which accusations of witchcraft could be made. An accusation might be levelled, perhaps, after someone had assisted in healing another person; for being a widow; for a stillborn child; for being too tall; or for myriad unpredictable and inconsequential things. Hagan’s use of humour in the dialogue between Geillis and Iris brings relief to this dark novel, but the real light of the novel is the connection the two women build. Geillis’ voice takes centre stage as she paces her cell ‘as if it were the sandy paths near North Berwick beach … and the smell of the sea’, and she asks Iris about what women do hundreds of years hence. The two laugh together ‘wryly’ when Iris replies, ‘we look over our shoulder far too often.’ They go on to compare experiences, with Iris commenting on the significance of money and 41
