Nothing Left To Fear From Hell

BY ALAN WARNER POLYGON

£10

★★★★

At just 145 pages, I piled through this wonderful novella within a weekend. Warner, who is from Oban, sprang to prominence with his debut novel Morvern Callar, and has since penned eight novels and gone on to win a slew of prizes (he was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Somerset Maugham Award, to name but two). His tenth book Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is also the third in Polygon’s Darkland Tales series in which prominent writers reimagine seminal moments in history. Warner focuses on the frantic final journey on Scottish soil of Charles Edward Stuart as the Young Pretender flees from the aftermath of Culloden in the company of a small bunch of companions. He has subtitled it ‘A Surreal Chronicle’ and that’s a pretty accurate description of a darkly comic travelogue through the islands and mountains of the Hebrides.

History has adjudged Bonnie Prince Charlie as a loser, a ditherer who prevaricated as his followers were cut down by grapeshot and musketballs on Culloden Moor. In the journey that follows, for all his faux stoicism Stuart knows he has failed, that he may be leaving Scotland forever, and that his legacy is heartbreak and bloodshed. If that knowledge underpins this tragic tale, Warner leavens it with lashings of dark, earthy wit. He writes beautifully and injects life into a wide cast of historical characters ranging from Clanranald and John O’sullivan to Flora Macdonald and Cameron of Locheil. Warner’s writing is both relatable and period-perfect; the sensibilities are those of the men and women of the mid-eighteenth century. The novella ends with Stuart escaping on the French frigate L’heureux from Arisaig in September 1746. Despite Stuart’s protestations that he will return with a French army, he never set foot in Scotland again. The Stuart attempt to reclaim the British throne was over.

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This is a darkly comic reimagining of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tragically surreal Hebridean travelogue