Fair Helen (for review 31)

The title page of Andrew Greig’s latest novel Fair Helen announces that we have to deal with ‘a veritable account of “Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea”, scrieved by Harry Langton’. This may seem of a piece with the unpretentious gorgeousness of the dust-jacket and the faintly Tolkienian map of ‘the Borderlands’. But Harry Langton is a necessary as well as an enjoyable creation. Without him, Greig might find himself exposed in this intimidating territory, a retelling of one of the most famous Border ballads collected by Sir Walter Scott. Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea’s qualities of simplicity, melody and drama have, indeed, set it in better stead today than most of Scott’s novels. To sing a ballad as it was meant to be sung is a clear, if not necessarily an easy, task; to expand upon its themes in fiction is more dangerous. Greig risks affronting both the shade of Scott and the tradition Sir Walter purported to preserve. Harry Langton, ‘scrivener, spy, side-kick, lover, betrayer’, is the mask behind whom Greig can conceal the audacity of his grave-robbery.

But if Langton were only a mask, he would be worn to little purpose. His language, his location, his physicality and mortality conspire to deliver him as a peculiarly incarnate presence. ‘Ane doolie sessoun…’,[1] the first chapter heading murmurs, quoting Henrysoun - a poet consigned to the glorious past even within the past of the novel itself, clinging on amid Langton’s mental lumber. The scattered inflections of Langton’s Lallans convey his period and atmosphere with style, tact, and a playful glossary; but above all, they act as an engine of characterisation. Here is an educated old man, tetchy, adrift, retained as ‘a relic of lang syne’, a professional nostalgic catering to the romantic sensibility of his cultivated, modern patron.

That patron is William Drummond of Hawthornden, whose castle still offers shelter to writers today, but whose poetry is now, as Langton continually and snidely predicts, largely forgotten. It is Langton, Drummond’s picturesque old librarian, as stubbornly loyal to the ethos of Lucretius and Montaigne in his mind as to the language of Henrysoun on his tongue, who seems to us the more far-seeing. By dangling his narrator so neatly between two Scots poets – Henrysoun, indigenous, demotic, vital; Drummond, cosmopolitan, courtly, mannered – Greig makes his own sympathies clear. But he also avoids making Langton a mere spokesperson, a man ahead of and therefore alien to his own time.

Although (to over-simplify) a middle-class bisexual atheist at odds with his age, Langton is made so for detailed and convincing reasons; his mother was a gentlewoman married into ‘Embra’ city folk, while his university education deepens his ambiguities of rank and habit. He is stuck in a life he finds demeaning and a country estranged, ‘now the Kingdoms are united and the Court gone south’. ‘My breath puffs clouds as I scrape clear the garret window, ice slivers melt under yellowed fingernails…What remains of my right hand is warm in wool, as are my feet and scrawny thrapple.’ This is not a narrator cribbing his appearance to the reader over his shoulder, but a done man, counting his faculties.

‘I had not seen Adam Fleming since his mother’s wedding. He had been silent and inward then, remote across the crowded hall. Tall, slim, and agile, in his black cloak of grieving for his father…dagger in embroidered pouch…’ We too have met young Fleming before, though in our world, as CS Lewis says of Aslan, he has another name. What Greig does with Hamlet in Fair Helen is at first disorienting; at worst we might even suspect the arrival of historical fiction’s hackney carriage, neither ordered nor intended. The blurb should set us right, though: ‘The legend often called the Scottish Romeo & Juliet…brilliantly re-presented as the source of an equally famed, more complex drama’. So that’s all right, then: but, as with the ghost of Henrysoun and the loom of Drummond, there is more at work here than arch allusion. Adam the Dane, or Hamlet Fleming, will eventually lead us to one of the best bookish jokes in a novel full of them. But at first, he invites an assumption. Langton and Fleming, his ‘dearest friend’, were fellow undergraduates at Edinburgh, ‘the city, the courts, the college where we had once disputed fine points with words and argument, not the finer point of dagger and short sword’. ‘He had been effortlessly good with racquet, rapier and small pipes, while I was a dogged trier.’ Greig seems to have chosen – as Hamlet did before him – Horatio as his narrator.

But in this Hamlet we are treated to scenes in Wittenberg, or ‘Embra’, alma mater of Langton, Fleming, and Greig himself. Evoked at first in shared jokes, French tags and kestrel cries, the memory of university days becomes, more and more, the key to the novel’s central relationship (one that easily eclipses that of Fleming and the titular damsel). Edinburgh University in the latter 16th century is an arena where the otherness and drama of history, high politics and the High Renaissance can mingle with knowing, familiar accounts of undergraduate existence, flirting with anachronism without tainting the whole. Fleming and Langton, languid gentleman and infatuated swot, are not wholly free of Sebastian and Charles, but this does them no harm. The pair’s dreams of travel and adventure as they climb the hills above the city at night could come from any time – ‘We could rent a house by the Tiber, live by translation and scrivening! We would gather news and gossip, live on a retainer from the King. He said I would make an excellent spy.’ Yet these half-baked small hours schemes are historically specific – the King is donnish young ‘Jamie Saxt (but six years our elder)’ – and come to have proleptic impact on the plot. Hamlet had more than one schoolfellow, and Langton, seemingly Fleming’s loyal Horatio, is actually more of a Rosencrantz, manoeuvred by the hidden, powerful hand that feeds him. ‘I was not quite the free man my friend imagined.’

The identity of Langton’s paymaster is another of Greig’s post-modern, Early Modern jokes – it is Sir Walter Scott. Not quite, indeed, the baronet of the ballad, but his collateral ancestor, Scott of Buccleuch and Branxholme, a notorious reiver who adapted superbly to the Union of the Crowns, became the King’s proxy in the Borders, and founded a ducal dynasty. If Fair Helen were Wolf Hall, this Scott would be its hero; seen instead from outwith himself, he casts a pall of pleasing noir. ‘Among these hot-headed, impulsive, unbridled warrior lairds, he seemed cool as a well-run pantry.’ Langton is particularly fluent on the subject of Scott’s eyes – ‘pale and shining as a coulter blade’. ‘I felt myself a mouse running before them, twisting and turning from their edge…I felt a grue pass through me like a chill wind shaking a field of grain. He had seen too well where I was going.’

No traditional interpretation links Sir Walter Scott, 1st Lord Scott of Buccleuch, to the story of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea, but Greig’s leap here is, geographically and politically speaking, as plausible as it is devious. The Annandale scene, as Langton observes, is tiny: ‘Embra apart, one could ride to any of the principal locations…within the hour. Aristotle would approve.’ The events that inspired the ballad are bald and visceral – the heir of Fleming met the heir of Bell, in a duel over the heiress of Irvine; she fatally threw herself in the way of Bell’s bullet, whereupon Fleming killed Bell, indeed according to the ballad ‘hacked him in pieces sma’’. The contentions of land in this story are as obvious as those of love. In history, while Fleming, Bell and the rest of the reiving clans declined, Scott alone flourished. Of course, in this masterly cui bono prosecution, Greig is not a wholly disinterested party. By emphasising Lord Scott’s role as Machiavellian victor, the tamer of the Borders’ heroic lawlessness, the re-teller slyly suggests that Langton’s tale is the suppressed truth behind the delicate ballad handed down by Scott’s famous descendant: a sort of literary counterpart to Andy Wightman’s searing indictment of Scotland’s landed classes, The Poor Had No Lawyers.

Yet Greig must be careful not to push this intimation to the point of explicit churlishness towards his great predecessor; after all, he acknowledges in his novel’s epigraph, in the words of Montaigne, one of Langton’s heroes, ‘I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that bines them’. He quotes the ballad in full before the novel opens, in snatches throughout – always, of course, in a version he owes to Scott, the version Scott himself called ‘an imperfect state’. To take Scott to task for the contents of that version is to risk inaccuracy as well as ingratitude. As ever Greig’s ingenious solution involves Langton - personally concerned in, not to mention responsible for, the whole incident, and understandably irked by the bowdlerisation of ‘the ballad-mongers’:

Fair Helen, chaste Helen…Tastes and times have changed to favour the respectable and douce, and rendered those days of quick-blooded men and women into something noble, picturesque and sexless. They do her a disservice. She was much more than fair and chaste.

Thus Langton rebukes both Drummond and his Caroline gentlemen, and Scott and his Romantic readers; but Greig’s own guiding spirit is more generous to Scott. In the stables of Crichton Castle and the corner of an inn in Southwark, Langton encounters the same theatrical ‘senior man’, ‘balding’, ‘quiet’, with ‘lustrous eyes’.

Something about him made one want to tell all, like a confession but without any judgement made at the end…His listening reminded me of Buccleuch, except that I sensed it was not earthly power that this man sought. Nor did he seem especially bent on heaven.

Speaking of heaven, Borges has a story about this same man once he got there:

…he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”

For Scott to be placed, even obliquely, even ancestrally, even unfavourably in such a comparison is an elegant enough tribute from Greig to offset Harry Langton’s cavils.

[1] ‘A dismal season’, as Langton reluctantly renders it, before exclaiming ‘Ah, Robert Henrysoun, what a falling off is here!’