Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Sara Maitland, True North, Selected Stories, Comma Press, 2024
£14.99, available to buy here.


Among post-war British writers, few can justifiably claim to have amassed an oeuvre as varied and interesting as that of Sara Maitland. Like her friend Angela Carter, Maitland made her name from the late 1970s as the writer of feminist novels and stories which incorporated Magical Realism, often reworked fairy tales, and generally pushed the boundaries of contemporary writing. Her debut novel, Daughters of Jerusalem (Blond and Briggs, 1978) won the Somerset Maugham Award and is considered, alongside Michèle Roberts’s A Piece of the Night, to be the UK’s first feminist novel, though it contained disconcerting elements of Magical Realism which both underlined and were tangential to the sharp, dialogue-driven narrative. Maitland and Roberts were part of a feminist writers’ collective with Michelene Wandor, Valerie Miner and Zoe Fairbairns. Since her debut, Maitland has had six novels and many short-story collections published, though much of that fictional output appeared before the Millennium.

The reason for Maitland’s much-reduced fiction in recent years is explained in a non-fiction work for which she is probably best-known, A Book of Silence (Granta, 2008). It covers Maitland’s spiritual quest for ever deeper silence, which sees her move from London to Northamptonshire, to moorland in County Durham before a period of isolation on Skye and other research – a double-session in a flotation tank; stays at the Sōtō Zen monastery of Throssel Hole and in the Sinai desert – and two years living with her mother in Galloway, before the eventual building of a house miles from nowhere, further into Galloway. What Maitland found as a result was that, while the silence engendered by the solitude and the eschewal of television, radio and other noise-making devices enabled for her a reduction of self as a way of getting closer to her God, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of silence needed to produce narrative writing.

It seems as though Maitland isn’t as well remembered for her fiction as she should be. I have a deep fondness for her novel Three Times Table (Chatto & Windus, 1990), which, with a delightfully unexpected dose of Magical Realism, interweaves the lives and adventures of three generations of free-spirited women living in the same North London household. Maitland has hybridised non-fiction and fiction successfully, notably in Gossip from the Forest (Granta, 2012) in which she takes walks in a dozen British forests and woods, considers the dark, sylvan origins of fairy tales, and re-tells a Brothers Grimm fairy story for each of the walks. But I also very much like her other short stories too, so it’s timely that the estimable Manchester-based, not-for-profit Comma Press, whose books always look and feel beautifully turned out, have published a ‘best of’, having previously published Maitland’s stories in six anthologies and in her project Moss Witch (2014), stories written in response to conversations with eminent scientists.

True North isn’t a conventional Selected, because each of the 16 stories was chosen by a relative or friend of Maitland, including Richard Coles, who also contributes a chatty and pleasant but superfluous introduction-cum-recommendation. (Maitland should surely be at least as much of a national treasure as Coles is, but that’s by the by.)

All of Maitland’s chief fictional concerns are represented, including two updates of fairy tales. ‘Hansel and Gretel’ relates a visit made by a now-married Hansel to Gretel who lives in the forest. They look back on the story which defined their early lives and which, although they are twins, binds them closer still. It’s in the almost incidental details that Maitland’s prose really shines, with a rhapsodic beauty:

      Later, they go for a walk. She puts her arm round his waist and her head leans lightly on his shoulder. There is a little party of long-tailed tits, ridiculous and agitated, bustling along ahead of them; tiny pinkish balls of feathers with absurdly long tails. They do not talk much now. It is all hushed green gold and the wind has dropped away.

Time has also moved on within ‘Rapunzel Revisited’: Rapunzel is now an old woman, living in the famous tower, with a young witch as a maid.

As I say, Magical Realism galvanises much of Maitland’s output and here is no exception. The first story, the title-story from Moss Witch, is similar in tone to her versions of fairy tales, macabre, but with a seam of dry wit running through it. It’s her close observation of natural history, no doubt born of years of walking, and experiencing, isolated places – as well as her conversations with Dr Jennifer Rowntree, Associate Professor in Ecological Genetics – which makes the narrative so compelling. Mosses (and liverworts) are very much in vogue these days, but Maitland was evidently ahead of the game. ‘Seeing Double’ and the drolly-titled ‘Why I Became a Plumber’, the pretexts of which I won’t spoil (though the former is a little reminiscent of Bruce Robinson’s film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, and the latter springs elegantly from a trio of very clever epigraphs), both take the reader into the fantastical, but  always in a believable manner; fantastic but not fantasy.

Natural history, species depletion, over-fishing, scientific research and a deep affection for the Hebrides all inform ‘Her Bonxie Boy’. In passing, Maitland’s lyrical writing sings of,

[. . . ] the A82, the most beautiful road in the world. She drove, as always, with that strange mixture of recognition, signposts and deep desire. Loch Lomondside. Crianlarich. Tyndrum. The long haunted pass through Glen Coe. Ballachulish. Fort William. Invergary.
      She turns west. Her heart sings. The lovely lonely road through Kintail. Kyle of Lochalsh. The bridge, now free at last. Across An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, the winged island, with the Cuillin towering above the road, monstrous in their ferocity. Portree. Uig, where the road ends at the bottom of the steep curling hill. She is going beyond. Outwith the harbour wall there is nothing but sea and work and love and joy.

Obviously, the place-names do a good deal of Maitland’s work for her, but there is a delicious energy and freedom to her sentences here. This story, benefiting from the expertise of Robert Furness, Professor of Seabird and Fishing Interactions at the University of Glasgow, is perhaps the highlight of the selection, with something of the emotional flavour of the Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going mixed with serious ecological concerns and a trademark surprise ending.

As well as ‘Seeing Double’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ there are three other stories about pairings. Identical twins David and neurodiverse Derek in ‘The Beautiful Equation’ are at odds in a strange, but, as ever, all too plausible tale. ‘A Fall from Grace’ features Eva and Louise, two acrobat sisters in Paris, who bear comparison with Sophie Fevvers, the aerialiste hero of Angela Carter’s justly celebrated 1984 novel Nights at the Circus; the tone, though, reminded me of the novels of Rose Macaulay, especially The Towers of Trebizond. The dark title-story is about two women living together, one young and one old, who are visited by ‘a new shape’ which turns out to be ‘an ice traveller’.

‘Claudia Procula Writes a Letter’ is a witty, catty epistle from the wife of Pontius Pilate:

We did entertain their sort of king fellow, a nasty little quisling called Herod, to dinner last night. The most vulgar, creepy undersized worm you can’t imagine [. . .]

      Right at the moment, par exemple, there’s a whole lot of unease because of this young man from the northern half of the province who’s arrived in town. He’s rather good looking in a hairy sort of way, and can talk the hind legs off a donkey (oh, yes, I went and took a discreet peek, you know me).

Although many of them have themes of female freedom or strivings for it, the most explicitly feminist story is ‘An Edwardian Tableau’, in which a young woman, expecting a proposal from an older man, a canon with prospects of becoming a bishop, boldly and bravely bears witness at dinner to the Metropolitan Police violence, including sexual, against Suffragettes on Black Friday, in November 1910, thereby killing conversation dead and thoroughly embarrassing her parents.

‘Andromeda’ also has a feminist slant, in a recasting of Greek myth, with Perseus revealed to be a bit of a shit.

‘Miss Manning’s Angelic Moment’ is a lovely Pymesque tale with the now familiar Maitlandian twist.

Maitland varies the stories from first to third person, and sometimes they hasten a little towards their conclusions. But they are never less than entertaining, frequently informative – though without being clunkily so – and mix the light and the dark in a way entirely reflective of life as we lead it, often movingly so. Her prose style varies too, from straightforward to richly savourable, always with the best interests of her storytelling at heart. True North provides a fine introduction to Maitland’s stories and her fiction in general. 


Review copy kindly provided by Comma Press.