Corrag

Corrag
By Susan Fletcher
Fourth Estate, £14.99, 356 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

Few historical events that took place on the British Isles come close to the terror and the pity of the Glencoe massacre of 1692. Thirty-eight people were shot or bludgeoned to death by men they had taken in as guests. The men, women and children, all of the Macdonald clan, were murdered in their beds by the soldiers of William of Orange, led by the head of the rival Campbell clan.

Perhaps the eeriness of Glencoe itself has kept this tragedy alive, allowing it to pass from event to story and to myth: certainly it offers any contemporary writer an alluring romance, with its mix of treachery and horror. Susan Fletcher, who won the Whitbread first novel prize in 2005 with Eve Green, has chosen to tell that story again, a decision that plays both to her strengths and her weaknesses.

Her heroine, like Evie of Eve Green and Moira, the sister grieving for her past and her present in Fletcher’s second, equally lyrical novel, Oystercatchers, is an outsider. Corrag is a waif-like child-woman, the daughter of a free-spirited healer hanged as a witch by jealous and ungrateful townsfolk.

She flees north to Glencoe, where she befriends the hardy, ruthless Macdonalds when she saves the life of the head of the clan. She also falls in love with one of the clan head’s sons, Alasdair Og, who is married to a Campbell. After the massacre, she is captured by soldiers, and recounts her story to an Irish churchman, Charles Leslie, who gradually comes to believe in her innocence.

Corrag is a beguiling and sympathetic heroine and Fletcher’s powers of description are as strong as ever in her third novel. But she has always had a strong romantic streak, possibly held in check in her two previous novels, where the grit of their modern setting prevented them from tipping over into romantic excess.

Alas, the historical context here offers no such restraining influence, and so we have a great deal of lyrical repetition as Corrag recounts her tale to a poorly fleshed-out Leslie, without any real sense of peril. This is historical fiction as historical romance: high-end maybe, but romance just the same.

Lesley McDowell is the author of ‘Between the Sheets: The Famous Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers’ (Duckworth), published in May