Corrag

Product Information

Through her visits from Charles Leslie, Corrag tells her life story from her birth through to the night her friends were slain in a Scottish valley during a blizzard.

In Glencoe we had Corrag, who is said to have lived a solitary life in the mountains and been of “outstanding badness”. Fletcher has an astonishing ability to create convincing voice and character within the first fifty pages. Corrag is English and has run away “north and west” at the command of her mother who is about to be hung for also being a witch. La historia empieza cuando un reverendo Jacobita va a ver a la encarcelada Corrag, llamada bruja de las Highlands, que está condenada a morir en la hoguera. Seeing true, natural beauty can lessen it, because sunsets and winter light can make you say inside you ‘I am not alone’ – you feel it, through such beauty.At the outset of the book, Charles Leslie comes to gather information about the massacre, and he meets with Corrag, hoping for her death as a witch and the destruction of her body and soul. Leslie seeks any information that will condemn the Protestant King William, rumoured to be involved in the massacre, and reinstate the Catholic James. I have had it with every starry sky, with each bee that knocked against me as it rose up from a bloom. The book alternates between Corrag's narration of her story from childhood to the present and Charles' letters.

One was how much fear was built around these around these women - often old, often widowed or alone, sometimes too intelligent for their own good. But maybe the best thing I learnt was this: that we cannot know a person’s soul and nature until we’ve sat beside them, and talked. Her only audience was a reverend of Christian faith, whose motive was initially to obtain an eyewitness account for political purposes. I had always had it, for we all do-all people born with a heart have it, for it is the heart’s voice.But I think it is people like us-lonesome, in love with the blustery world-who hear the heart most clearly. And walks and -- it took many pages for to go from lowlands to highlands and for me this slowed the pace of about a third of the book to not a walk or a gallop but a crawl. This is historical fiction that is both character study and a telling of the massacre at Glencoe in which men, women and children of the MacDonald clan were killed by members of the Campbell clan for failing to swear an oath to William of Orange aka King William III. Every tiny thing is spoken of with such love and passion and she notices everything – a dew drop on a leaf, the changing colours of the rocks through the day, the silver sand as the grey mare gallops over beaches in the moonlight.

Both sections are equally powerful in the way they reveal the inner thoughts, values, and personal struggles of both Corrag and Charles. As she tells her story, Leslie questions his own beliefs and purpose - and a friendship develops between them that alters both their lives. Once the author’s lyricism turns to romantic love I began to feel the absence of a rigorous intelligence informing the text. Irish Jacobite and man of God, Charles Leslie journeys to the Highlands to uncover the truth behind the massacre.Pg 15, as Corrag, in jail, reflects on the momentous parts of her life, she thinks about the power of place, of how the highlands changed her and "how he said 'you've changed me', as he stood by me side. The story is alternately narrated by Corrag in her prison cell and by Charles Leslie, in the form of letters home to his wife in Ireland. Fletcher is a gifted storyteller - the characters and seventeenth century Scotland spring to life in this wonderful tale.