Butcher's Broom

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Originally published in Scotland in 1934, this tale by the author of the well-received books Morning Tide , chronicles the demise of Scotland's highland culture. A marvel of rich language and mythic storytelling, the book is set in the early 19th century and centers on the figure of Dark Mairi, a widow and healer in a small, close-knit community. Dark Mairi and her neighbors have lived and worked on the Riasgan estate for generations when the absentee landlord evicts them to make room for herds of sheep. In prose heavily laced with Gaelic language and poetry, Gunn depicts the rustic Highlanders in the fundamental human business of love and hate, birth and death. Unfortunately, he tends to proselytize when outlining the political and economic forces underlying the mass expulsion of Highland tenant farmers and his portrayals of the landlord and others involved in the dirty business of dispossession verge on caricature of the villainous. Yet he writes with a fierceness that inflames this personal story of one poor, simple woman and her neighbors in a shattering epic of social destruction. Gunn died in 1973. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Gunn, who died in 1973, wrote more than two dozen novels (e.g., Morning Tide, LJ 1/93); Butcher's Broom was originally published in Scotland in 1934 and is now receiving its first U.S. publication. The novel is set during the Highland clearances of the early 19th century, when landowners evicted their tenants to make way for flocks of sheep. Gunn focuses a loving eye on the culture of the Highland Gaels, demonstrating in heartrending detail the effect of the clearances upon the crofters. With a lush style reminiscent of the Romantics themselves, Gunn ennobles the crofters and stirs the reader's wrath against the sheer inhumanity of the whole clearance movement, which literally destroyed lives for the sake of ``progress.'' Though the density of his prose can often be a challenge, Gunn nevertheless has written a stirring, rewarding, and passionate tale. Recommended for large fiction collections.-- Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Ctr. Lib.

Ray Olson

The latest of Scottish novelist Gunn's works to finally receive American publication is a historical novel so rich and beautiful that the ruck of contemporary historical fiction pales in comparison. It is about a tiny Highlands community, the Riasgan, living by the old quasimedieval ways in a nearly cashless economy at the time of the Napoleonic wars, which coincided with and enabled Scotland's greatest national tragedy and disgrace, the Highland clearances--the often murderously brutal evictions of such communities, whose people were bound by vassal-like loyalty to clan chiefs, in order to turn the land, owned by the chiefs, to sheep-pasturage. At the center of the action is Dark Mairi, an old woman whose talents as an herbalist sustain the Riasgan's health and whose silent indomitability in the face of misfortune emblematizes the community's integrity. Among the actions that swirl around her are the recruitment of the young men into England's army, hence their dispersal throughout the empire; the self-chosen exile and then return with her child of a young woman left pregnant by one of the new soldiers; the growth to young manhood of Mairi's grandson, who eventually elects emigration to America; and the horrors of the clearances. Gunn's extraordinary style enlivens both characters and action by portraying physical, psychological, and natural developments simultaneously, thereby realizing the characters as utterly rooted in their community and their eviction as a calamity that is, however seemingly small and local, as monumental as the fall of Troy or the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. It is a style of poetic intensity and occasional rhetorical grandeur that must be read relatively slowly but that also invites sustained reading; it is as hard to break away from, even to look up the meanings of its Scots words, as a thriller. "Butcher's Broom"--the "English" name, by the way, of a plant symbolic of the clan to which the Riasgan belongs--is historical fiction on the order of "War and Peace" and "Doctor Zhivago".