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Elemental
Nearing the end of her life, Meggie Tulloch takes up her pen to write a story for her granddaughter, Laura. It begins in the first years of the twentieth century, in a place where howling winds spin salt and sleet sucked up from ice floes. A place where lives are ruled by men, and men by the witchy sea. A place where the only thing lower than a girl in the order of things is a clever girl with accursed red hair. A place schooled in keeping secrets. Thirty years after her grandmother's death, Laura receives her notebooks and discovers the painful past that Meggie spent a lifetime trying to forget. Moving from the north-east of Scotland to the Shetland Isles to Fremantle, Australia, Elemental is a novel about the life you make from the life you are given.
436 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2013
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912 people want to read
About the author
Amanda Curtin
7 books72 followersAmanda Curtin is the author of Kathleen O’Connor of Paris (narrative non-fiction, 2018), Elemental (novel, Australia/NZ 2013, UK 2016), The Sinkings (novel, 2008) and Inherited (short fiction collection, 2011). She lives in suburban Perth, Western Australia—traditional lands of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation—and works in a backyard studio among magpies, doves and old trees.
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May 28, 2013
Book Review – Elemental by Amanda Curtin
There are so many aspects of this book that snagged my heart that I would need to do several reviews to do justice to all those aspects. So I will content myself in this review at least, by saying that this is a deeply believable book, deeply forgiving and deeply lyrical. As with all of Amanda Curtin’s work, the language is achingly beautiful, the characters are raw and real and the story has the sweep of an elegy.
When Meggie Duthie, former herring girl from the north east of Scotland comes to Western Australia in 1910, she leaves behind an unspeakable past shadowed with the ghosts of her beloved sister, mother and that boy, Bruki’s Sandy. But she comes with her blue-eyed cooper-boy, Magnus Tulloch, who makes her a promise, who gives her his heart, breath, blood when she had none of her own (p 203). Meggie’s legacy to her granddaughter Laura is her story, handwritten in three thick exercise books, which Laura acquires at a time of crisis in her own life. As Laura waits for her injured son Cooper to awaken from a coma, she reads her grandmother’s journals and wonders if it is possible there’s a gene for heroism (p 418).
Meggie has survived childhood in bleak Roanhaven, where her Granda Jeemsie, a glowering, scumbling, salty man, with ears like whelks and brine in his eyes, (p 41) mutters balefully about the misfortune of a having a red headed child in the family. Then as Fish Meggie, hands infected by gutting and salting herring but still loved by Magnus Tulloch, she loses her sister Kitta and wants to curse Jeemsie Neish for his beliefs, and every last person in Roanhaven for what they condemn and what they let to pass (p 147).
Laura, the granddaughter who inherits Meggie’s story as a grown woman instead of the twenty one year old for whom it was intended as a birthday gift, wonders if she might have been squeamish about her grandmother’s story when she was younger, whether she would have had the grace to recognise the hope contained within the grimness. As she waits by the bedside of her unconscious fireman son she questions her family’s dark strain of altruism, some ancestral compulsion to rush off a cliff, down a well, into a fire for others. And to hell with the risks (p 403).
Kitta and Meggie, Clementina and Jessie, Stivvy and Magnus, Kathryn and Laura and the remote Granda and Da are people I have lived closely with this past month. I read this book slowly, reluctant yet impatient to finish it, aware that it would change me as a reader and as a writer. A haunting, beautiful, exquisite book and Magnus Tulloch must have the last word – I will not forget you, Fish Meggie.
Elemental by Amanda Curtin
Published by UWA Publishing, 2013.
There are so many aspects of this book that snagged my heart that I would need to do several reviews to do justice to all those aspects. So I will content myself in this review at least, by saying that this is a deeply believable book, deeply forgiving and deeply lyrical. As with all of Amanda Curtin’s work, the language is achingly beautiful, the characters are raw and real and the story has the sweep of an elegy.
When Meggie Duthie, former herring girl from the north east of Scotland comes to Western Australia in 1910, she leaves behind an unspeakable past shadowed with the ghosts of her beloved sister, mother and that boy, Bruki’s Sandy. But she comes with her blue-eyed cooper-boy, Magnus Tulloch, who makes her a promise, who gives her his heart, breath, blood when she had none of her own (p 203). Meggie’s legacy to her granddaughter Laura is her story, handwritten in three thick exercise books, which Laura acquires at a time of crisis in her own life. As Laura waits for her injured son Cooper to awaken from a coma, she reads her grandmother’s journals and wonders if it is possible there’s a gene for heroism (p 418).
Meggie has survived childhood in bleak Roanhaven, where her Granda Jeemsie, a glowering, scumbling, salty man, with ears like whelks and brine in his eyes, (p 41) mutters balefully about the misfortune of a having a red headed child in the family. Then as Fish Meggie, hands infected by gutting and salting herring but still loved by Magnus Tulloch, she loses her sister Kitta and wants to curse Jeemsie Neish for his beliefs, and every last person in Roanhaven for what they condemn and what they let to pass (p 147).
Laura, the granddaughter who inherits Meggie’s story as a grown woman instead of the twenty one year old for whom it was intended as a birthday gift, wonders if she might have been squeamish about her grandmother’s story when she was younger, whether she would have had the grace to recognise the hope contained within the grimness. As she waits by the bedside of her unconscious fireman son she questions her family’s dark strain of altruism, some ancestral compulsion to rush off a cliff, down a well, into a fire for others. And to hell with the risks (p 403).
Kitta and Meggie, Clementina and Jessie, Stivvy and Magnus, Kathryn and Laura and the remote Granda and Da are people I have lived closely with this past month. I read this book slowly, reluctant yet impatient to finish it, aware that it would change me as a reader and as a writer. A haunting, beautiful, exquisite book and Magnus Tulloch must have the last word – I will not forget you, Fish Meggie.
Elemental by Amanda Curtin
Published by UWA Publishing, 2013.
December 10, 2016
So nearly 5 stars. This is a beautifully written story about Meggie, born in NE Scotland at the end of the 19th century. At the end of her life, she is writing her memoirs for her granddaughter before her memory fades or she dies. She talks about the harshness of a life tied to the sea. Her family were fishermen and she became 'a herring quine', employed to gut the herring before they were layered in pickling barrels. Her work took her to Lerwick in Shetland and Great Yarmouth in England. Eventually she and her husband, a cooper, emigrate to Australia where life in the early 20th century could also be harsh. The story is full of joy and tragedy in equal measure and Meggie's voice is so strong, I felt she was telling me the story personally. The title, 'Elemental', is in reference to the natural elements folk had to work with and against but it also ties in with the divisions of the book into water, air, earth and fire.
So why only nearly 5 stars? 'Fire' is described as a coda. Having been totally invested in the story of Meggie's life and mesmerised by her voice, I was rudely wrenched from the 1930s to 2011. It was a culture shock and left a sense of bereavement. What connection did this have to Meggie? I can't say more without it being a spoiler but I felt this last section was a little contrived and too separate from Meggie's story. The final chapter of her memoirs had been hinted at throughout as too traumatic for her to relate or come to terms with but I didn't find it any more shocking than much of what had gone before. I'd go so far as to say the ending is weak and contrived and spoils the rhythm of an otherwise excellent novel.
Overall, the writing is often very beautiful, evocative of the harsh times Meggie lived through. For that reason, I strongly recommend it and will look forward to reading more of this author. [One last word - there is a glossary at the back which contains Scots, Doric and Shetland words. I can't vouch for the accuracy of them all but I can say that to describe a 'piece' as a piece of bread is totally wrong. A piece, no matter where you are in Scotland, is a sandwich. I'm not just being pedantic. It irritates me that an otherwise well researched book should let this slip through.]
So why only nearly 5 stars? 'Fire' is described as a coda. Having been totally invested in the story of Meggie's life and mesmerised by her voice, I was rudely wrenched from the 1930s to 2011. It was a culture shock and left a sense of bereavement. What connection did this have to Meggie? I can't say more without it being a spoiler but I felt this last section was a little contrived and too separate from Meggie's story. The final chapter of her memoirs had been hinted at throughout as too traumatic for her to relate or come to terms with but I didn't find it any more shocking than much of what had gone before. I'd go so far as to say the ending is weak and contrived and spoils the rhythm of an otherwise excellent novel.
Overall, the writing is often very beautiful, evocative of the harsh times Meggie lived through. For that reason, I strongly recommend it and will look forward to reading more of this author. [One last word - there is a glossary at the back which contains Scots, Doric and Shetland words. I can't vouch for the accuracy of them all but I can say that to describe a 'piece' as a piece of bread is totally wrong. A piece, no matter where you are in Scotland, is a sandwich. I'm not just being pedantic. It irritates me that an otherwise well researched book should let this slip through.]
April 9, 2017
Elemental is Amanda Curtin’s second novel and it is a huge work, richly researched and steeped in atmosphere. It takes the reader on a geographical and chronological journey – from the isolated fishing village of Roanhaven on the north-east coast of Scotland at the turn of the twentieth century, to the vast, blue skies of Fremantle, Western Australia, during war-time. It ends in 2011, in the hills around Perth.
Meggie Tulloch, nee Duthie, sets out to write her life story for her grand-daughter, Laura. Meggie writes as if she is talking to Laura, and her phrases sing with the dialect of her childhood. So well does Amanda Curtin personify this wee Scottish lass, I kept wondering if she had grown up with the dialect spoken around her. The style reminded me of Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture and this novel could well be the Scottish-Australian equivalent, for the prose is equally as lyrical. The novel includes an expansive glossary at the end, and I was torn between continuing to read the story and hoping the meaning would come with the context, or flicking back and forth between the chapters and the glossary. In the end I used the glossary minimally, and stayed in the story. It reminded me of how I read Shakespeare or watch a foreign film with subtitles – it’s distracting at first and I feel all adrift, but I’m soon swept away by the story and forget to notice the language.
My copy of Elemental is full of underlining and scribblings, gems I don’t want to forget, and my defacement of a novel is directly proportional to my pleasure in it. Meggie Duthie/Tulloch is quite a philosopher, and her turn of phrase is delightful:
‘… When things change, something new enters the space you live in, something you must move with, turn to, chafe against, until you ease a new shape for yourself. But something is lost, too, in the changing, some small piece of your world gone for good.’
And,
‘Lambsie, there are moments in your life when it seems like the skin covering the core of you is peeled away and a new one, a harder one, begins to grow.’
And there’s plenty more.
Much like the weather and the coastline of the North Sea, life in isolated Roanhaven is rugged and harsh. Lives are governed by nature – by the weather, by the sea, by the elements. Cold, pregnancy, illness, insanity, death are all part of the everyday, and there’s very little that can be done to change it. This is alien to our comfortable first-world lives in the twenty-first century where we control the climate in which we live as much as we can; it doesn’t control us. Our lives are no longer at the mercy of nature — modern medicine can cure almost everything, and if it can’t, researchers are working on it. We genetically engineer our crops, our animals, and even our children. We don’t have to get pregnant and if we do, we don’t have to accept it. If someone dies young, we are angry because it’s not fair.
Elemental takes us back to a time when the earth and nature shaped our lives and we couldn't mould it to suit us. It takes us back to when human nature accepted that we are just another being on this earth, and here only fleetingly, that tragedy and loss are a part of life, and that despite its harshness, life can still be good.
There’s much more I could write about this novel – about the strength of the women and their resilience, about female friendships, about bravery versus recklessness – but I will finish here. This story is carefully sculpted and shaped and will satisfy readers much like a fine dinner in which each item on the menu has been carefully chosen to complement the other. Highly recommended reading.
Favourite Character
It has to be Meggie herself, especially the young Meggie. She found life in Roanhaven to be cruel and mostly not to her liking, and knew she wanted to leave. She realised the way out of a bleak existence and did what she had to do, watched and learned from others and their mistakes, kept her mouth shut when necessary, worked hard, obeyed the rules, yet never lost sight of her goals or her own worth. Nor did she lose sight of love.
(Disclaimer: I am red-headed, too, so am perhaps a little biased.)
Favourite Scene
The devastating yet striking scene involving Meggie’s sister, Kitta, in a wild, grey ocean has stayed with me. This was so vivid and poignant. I won’t give away anymore here …
Favourite Quotes
‘And suddenly I know that I will never be the same again because I have felt freedom in my lungs.’
Oh, I know that feeling of inhaling freedom, Meggie …
Meggie Tulloch, nee Duthie, sets out to write her life story for her grand-daughter, Laura. Meggie writes as if she is talking to Laura, and her phrases sing with the dialect of her childhood. So well does Amanda Curtin personify this wee Scottish lass, I kept wondering if she had grown up with the dialect spoken around her. The style reminded me of Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture and this novel could well be the Scottish-Australian equivalent, for the prose is equally as lyrical. The novel includes an expansive glossary at the end, and I was torn between continuing to read the story and hoping the meaning would come with the context, or flicking back and forth between the chapters and the glossary. In the end I used the glossary minimally, and stayed in the story. It reminded me of how I read Shakespeare or watch a foreign film with subtitles – it’s distracting at first and I feel all adrift, but I’m soon swept away by the story and forget to notice the language.
My copy of Elemental is full of underlining and scribblings, gems I don’t want to forget, and my defacement of a novel is directly proportional to my pleasure in it. Meggie Duthie/Tulloch is quite a philosopher, and her turn of phrase is delightful:
‘… When things change, something new enters the space you live in, something you must move with, turn to, chafe against, until you ease a new shape for yourself. But something is lost, too, in the changing, some small piece of your world gone for good.’
And,
‘Lambsie, there are moments in your life when it seems like the skin covering the core of you is peeled away and a new one, a harder one, begins to grow.’
And there’s plenty more.
Much like the weather and the coastline of the North Sea, life in isolated Roanhaven is rugged and harsh. Lives are governed by nature – by the weather, by the sea, by the elements. Cold, pregnancy, illness, insanity, death are all part of the everyday, and there’s very little that can be done to change it. This is alien to our comfortable first-world lives in the twenty-first century where we control the climate in which we live as much as we can; it doesn’t control us. Our lives are no longer at the mercy of nature — modern medicine can cure almost everything, and if it can’t, researchers are working on it. We genetically engineer our crops, our animals, and even our children. We don’t have to get pregnant and if we do, we don’t have to accept it. If someone dies young, we are angry because it’s not fair.
Elemental takes us back to a time when the earth and nature shaped our lives and we couldn't mould it to suit us. It takes us back to when human nature accepted that we are just another being on this earth, and here only fleetingly, that tragedy and loss are a part of life, and that despite its harshness, life can still be good.
There’s much more I could write about this novel – about the strength of the women and their resilience, about female friendships, about bravery versus recklessness – but I will finish here. This story is carefully sculpted and shaped and will satisfy readers much like a fine dinner in which each item on the menu has been carefully chosen to complement the other. Highly recommended reading.
Favourite Character
It has to be Meggie herself, especially the young Meggie. She found life in Roanhaven to be cruel and mostly not to her liking, and knew she wanted to leave. She realised the way out of a bleak existence and did what she had to do, watched and learned from others and their mistakes, kept her mouth shut when necessary, worked hard, obeyed the rules, yet never lost sight of her goals or her own worth. Nor did she lose sight of love.
(Disclaimer: I am red-headed, too, so am perhaps a little biased.)
Favourite Scene
The devastating yet striking scene involving Meggie’s sister, Kitta, in a wild, grey ocean has stayed with me. This was so vivid and poignant. I won’t give away anymore here …
Favourite Quotes
‘And suddenly I know that I will never be the same again because I have felt freedom in my lungs.’
Oh, I know that feeling of inhaling freedom, Meggie …
January 22, 2019
A strong and highly resonant novel which embraces the disparate locations of north-east Scotland, Shetland and Western Australia between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Amanda Curtin succeeds magnificently in capturing the voice of narrator Meggie Tulloch throughout, moving from childhood to maturity with sensitive and beautifully-realised writing.
Unfortunately the decision to place the final section in the present day and to introduce the youngest family members and a crisis into the novel’s narrative core really detracts from the climax, resulting in a less than satisfying conclusion to a remarkable tour de force of creative writing and historical research.
Unfortunately the decision to place the final section in the present day and to introduce the youngest family members and a crisis into the novel’s narrative core really detracts from the climax, resulting in a less than satisfying conclusion to a remarkable tour de force of creative writing and historical research.
January 20, 2016
As you know if you saw the Sensational Snippet that I posted about Amanda Curtin’s new novel Elemental, I loved this book. Curtin is an author of exceptional talent and in this novel she tugs at the heartstrings without being maudlin, sentimental or twee. This is one of those novels that is at once both tender and brutal so that the reader becomes emotionally bound to the world that has been so skilfully created, not wanting to stop reading and yet not wanting the book ever to end.
The central character Meggie Tulloch is a tough old lady who has lived through that cruellest of centuries, the 20th. In her old age, something is bothering her so profoundly that she is setting down the story of her life for her grand-daughter, Laura, whom she calls ‘lambsie’. Her memories are painful, and the reader feels the tension between the impulse to conceal and the will to reveal, a struggle that must be resolved in order for Meggie to explain herself and her family, for some reason that is not revealed until the end of the story.
She was born near the turn of the century in the north-east of Scotland when economics meant that unskilled labourers worked in atrocious conditions. The men work hard, but the women’s lives are a misery. A man comes home from the boats to a meal by the fire and a chance to rest a while, but the women’s burdens are Sisyphean. They lug creels of fish for sale across the bitter landscape, and it is they who must wade into the freezing sea – to hoist their menfolk into the boats so that their feet stay dry during the long hours at sea. Girls take on responsibility early: cooking, cleaning, endlessly knitting with frozen fingers the clothes that protect the men from the harsh winds and water. What education there is, finishes early, even for a bright girl like Meggie, because superstition and tradition rule, with each succeeding generation bound to the same hopeless existence.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/06/07/el...
The central character Meggie Tulloch is a tough old lady who has lived through that cruellest of centuries, the 20th. In her old age, something is bothering her so profoundly that she is setting down the story of her life for her grand-daughter, Laura, whom she calls ‘lambsie’. Her memories are painful, and the reader feels the tension between the impulse to conceal and the will to reveal, a struggle that must be resolved in order for Meggie to explain herself and her family, for some reason that is not revealed until the end of the story.
She was born near the turn of the century in the north-east of Scotland when economics meant that unskilled labourers worked in atrocious conditions. The men work hard, but the women’s lives are a misery. A man comes home from the boats to a meal by the fire and a chance to rest a while, but the women’s burdens are Sisyphean. They lug creels of fish for sale across the bitter landscape, and it is they who must wade into the freezing sea – to hoist their menfolk into the boats so that their feet stay dry during the long hours at sea. Girls take on responsibility early: cooking, cleaning, endlessly knitting with frozen fingers the clothes that protect the men from the harsh winds and water. What education there is, finishes early, even for a bright girl like Meggie, because superstition and tradition rule, with each succeeding generation bound to the same hopeless existence.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/06/07/el...
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May 6, 2013I'm not naturally drawn to historical fiction, but I was utterly captivated by the story of 'Fish Meggie' - a girl born into a poor fishing village on a remote coast of Scotland in the 1890s and the many unexpected turns her life took.
The novel is in the form of a diary, written by Meggie, in her old age, for her granddaughter. Often I find the trope of an older person looking back on their life distancing, but occasionally (think 'The Blind Assassin') it really works and this is the case with Meggie's story, mostly because of Meggie's voice, which is so gutsy and singular.
Meggie is a woman ahead of her time, even as a child, chafing against the reduced place of women in her community, vowing never to marry, and certainly never to endure the indignity of wading through the freezing ocean, carrying a man on her shoulders so that he might stay warm and dry for a night's fishing.
I particularly loved the section in which Meggie, aged fifteen, left her village for the first time to be a 'gutting girl'. Despite the privations of the job, Meggie revels in her newfound freedom and the joys (and dangers) of exploring the wide world. The phenomenal detail about a now lost way of live make this section absolutely riveting to read, and there is a gorgeous love story to boot.
There is a great deal of tragedy in this novel, and a sense of lessons learned the hard way, but these are always balanced by the joy of community, and hope, and also by Amanda's beautiful prose:
'When things change, something new enters the space you live in, something you must move with, turn to, chafe against, until you ease a new shape for yourself. But something is lost, too, in the changing, some small piece if your world gone for good.'
*I know Amanda as a friend and writing colleague so I am not rating this book.
The novel is in the form of a diary, written by Meggie, in her old age, for her granddaughter. Often I find the trope of an older person looking back on their life distancing, but occasionally (think 'The Blind Assassin') it really works and this is the case with Meggie's story, mostly because of Meggie's voice, which is so gutsy and singular.
Meggie is a woman ahead of her time, even as a child, chafing against the reduced place of women in her community, vowing never to marry, and certainly never to endure the indignity of wading through the freezing ocean, carrying a man on her shoulders so that he might stay warm and dry for a night's fishing.
I particularly loved the section in which Meggie, aged fifteen, left her village for the first time to be a 'gutting girl'. Despite the privations of the job, Meggie revels in her newfound freedom and the joys (and dangers) of exploring the wide world. The phenomenal detail about a now lost way of live make this section absolutely riveting to read, and there is a gorgeous love story to boot.
There is a great deal of tragedy in this novel, and a sense of lessons learned the hard way, but these are always balanced by the joy of community, and hope, and also by Amanda's beautiful prose:
'When things change, something new enters the space you live in, something you must move with, turn to, chafe against, until you ease a new shape for yourself. But something is lost, too, in the changing, some small piece if your world gone for good.'
*I know Amanda as a friend and writing colleague so I am not rating this book.
January 19, 2016
The best read I've had in a while. Evocative- I felt the cold ,I smelt the sea & experienced the lives of characters.I tagged pages of my book & read passages again & again.
My favourite " when things change, something new enters the space you live in,something you must move with,turn to, chafe against,until you ease a new shape for yourself.But something is lost,too, in the changing, some small piece of your world gone for good.
Her description of the " preposterous puffin"on page 143 is unforgettable.
I thought a book that started with " If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies"would be good & it was a 5 star read for me till the ending, I thought it melodramatic.
My favourite " when things change, something new enters the space you live in,something you must move with,turn to, chafe against,until you ease a new shape for yourself.But something is lost,too, in the changing, some small piece of your world gone for good.
Her description of the " preposterous puffin"on page 143 is unforgettable.
I thought a book that started with " If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies"would be good & it was a 5 star read for me till the ending, I thought it melodramatic.
March 23, 2016
The story of Meggie Tulloch will become a classic. Amanda Curtin shares 'Fish Meggie's' extraordinary life-- from the north of Scotland, to the Shetland Islands, to Fremantle in Western Australia. And within Meggie's story Amanda expresses, through a subtlety and beauty of language that is the hallmark of her prose, a deep-felt humanness that connects us all. I recommend Elemental to everyone. See my review essay, The Year's Work in Fiction, in the Australian journal Westerly 59.1
January 25, 2019
A very enjoyable read. Written in quite a different format. I quite liked the characters way of speaking differently and found it easy to follow what they meant. I can’t believe how many sad mishaps happened to Meggie throughout her life with the people she lost. Very sad.
June 6, 2013
Elemental is not only a well-crafted story filled with fascinating historical facts, it is a beautiful exploration of the human condition. Reaching above and beyond the life of a herring girl to touch universal themes such as love,loss and regeneration, this novel will give most readers something to identify with.
I know that Meggie's wise, poetical and lilting voice will stay with me for a long time to come.
I know that Meggie's wise, poetical and lilting voice will stay with me for a long time to come.
July 3, 2013
I loved this novel.
I’ll never forget little Fish Meggie, the Gutting Girl from the Top of the World. I’ll never forget the woman she became; the woman who speaks to her ‘Lambsie’ in an endearing Scottish brogue. She shares her agonies, of which there are many; her delights, of which there are few. The delights are dotted neatly throughout, so, whilst this is a sad novel, poignant and painful, it is not entirely grim; rather, the small joys shine, diamond clear, aching in their beauty.
The women of Roanhaven carry their men on their backs through icy water to the Lily Maud and it’s a long time yet before any of the women will wrestle free. But wrestle free they do, some shackle free and in love, others on the wings of death, destined for tragedy. I want to be careful not give too much away; the pacing of the storytelling is superb; Curtin is an expert of the slow reveal. But I have to say this: I just about punched the air at a certain utterance from Meggie Tulloch on page 137: ‘I say lassies can make up their own minds about where they go.’ Unlike poor Kitta and Unty Jinna, Meggie finds a good man; a fellow who bids her to ‘make up [her] own mind’. Ahhhhh…see, there’s one of those aching, diamond clear joys.
We’re interested in similar themes, Curtin and I; the female experience, the intense nature of relationships between women. There’s a beautiful sense of female camaraderie expressed in Elemental; it’s the female version of mateship that we forget to mention in the Aussie mythology. We see it amongst the Gremista girls and later, the women of Mills & Ware; we see it in Meggie’s bond with her sister Kitta, and later Clementina. So often, women, grandmothers, mothers and girlfriends, provide the emotional support that the men in their lives cannot. The sisterhood of Gremista provide Meggie with a romantic interlude in the way of an upturned box and a jug of ale on her wedding night. Similarly, the women of Mills & Ware inject joy in the war-time nuptials of Enzia and Enzia’s Joe (a neat reversal of the earlier patriarchal possessive namesakes) with a wedding cake that melts in the hot South Beach sun. More joy.
Curtin’s prose just about had me buckled over with a whole body, physiological exclamation: every pore sang, ‘Oh, to write like that!’
I know…I gush. But to assume a voice such as Meggie’s is no small feat. I’m inspired: I’m hoping to play around with a radically different voice in my next short story. But I can’t deny that I had to read and reread the earliest chapters; it was the dialect that got me; it’s hard to make meaning when your semantic understandings don’t marry, when you’re constantly monitoring your own comprehension and flicking back to the glossary. It was an interesting exercise for me: I thought of my little students who suffer from Specific Language Impairment, who are constantly faced with these semantic difficulties. I was reminded of the deep value in reading good literature; in the acquisition of new world knowledge and vocabulary; the way we are enriched as we participate, we conjure, we magick from the air new meaning. Of course, it isn’t long before you’re swept out on the Roanhaven tide, til you know your quinies from your limmers. I’m not sure if I just grew accustomed to the vernacular, or if Curtin eased off on it as we edged deeper into the story, but how I grew to love the distinctive cadence and rhythm of Meggie’s Scottish tongue.
There’s heady relief in the latter part of the book when we travel from ice to sun, from fish stench to the sugary waft of Mills & Ware butter biscuits. There’s a real affection for this place, this wide-skyed place: Fremantle. I’d hazard a guess that some of the descriptions will leave West Australian language lovers weak at the knees.
There’s so much I could say about this book, but it’s time to close now. There’s the wonderful description of the puffin that made my son ask me why I was smiling, eyes closed; there’s the central mystery revolving around Brukie’s Sandy; there’s Granda Jeemsie, and the coda at the end. Read it.
Ooh…one last thing that I must not fail to mention: Oh, to write a sex scene like the one on page 195. It’s very, very good.
April 6, 2019
Not quite good enough for four stars, not sure about the fourth part, seemed more of an add on rather than an integral part. However, enjoyed the first three elements, as Meggie swapped a closed community in cold and windy Scotland to sunny Australia, via fishing ports in the British Isles. The writing gave a living history to life in the fishing communities, especially gutting the herring. A hard life, but an escape from small village life.
The First World War happens while Meggie is married in Australia and her husband eventually goes to war. I felt that this book gave a better representation of "life for those left at home" than or previous book which majored on WW1. it also dealt better with the return of her "damaged" husband.
After the death of her husband the story becomes less detailed, but is this how we remember our life, holding on to memories of our youth where everything is new and skip over the less memorable later years.
So the last two parts are less interesting, than the first two and i took less away from them. The last part deals with life after Meggie and I struggled with it. There is an attempt to discuss whether characteristics are carried across generations, but it seemed to me a bit forced.
Also there was the obligatory time jumping, we presume from a creative writing course and the latter conversations use the term "lambie" too often for my liking.
Otherwise an enjoyable book giving an insight into a hard, remote life.
The First World War happens while Meggie is married in Australia and her husband eventually goes to war. I felt that this book gave a better representation of "life for those left at home" than or previous book which majored on WW1. it also dealt better with the return of her "damaged" husband.
After the death of her husband the story becomes less detailed, but is this how we remember our life, holding on to memories of our youth where everything is new and skip over the less memorable later years.
So the last two parts are less interesting, than the first two and i took less away from them. The last part deals with life after Meggie and I struggled with it. There is an attempt to discuss whether characteristics are carried across generations, but it seemed to me a bit forced.
Also there was the obligatory time jumping, we presume from a creative writing course and the latter conversations use the term "lambie" too often for my liking.
Otherwise an enjoyable book giving an insight into a hard, remote life.
May 17, 2014
Just started this after finishing an enjoyable but definitely chick lit book. Amazing how after only 4% and the story barely begun I just know it's going to be 4 or 5 stars. The writing draws you in and affects the clarity with which you see what is going on in a way that fun filled writing does not. I see a Mother's Day on the sofa curled up with the kindle!
Have just finished this beautiful lyrical book. Betty I think you would love it! Adored the writing of 'fish meggie' telling the story of her life to her granddaughter. From early 1900s to present day, over four generations set in Scotland and Fremantle. Some of the writing moved me to tears, a beautiful novel from a gifted writer.
Have just finished this beautiful lyrical book. Betty I think you would love it! Adored the writing of 'fish meggie' telling the story of her life to her granddaughter. From early 1900s to present day, over four generations set in Scotland and Fremantle. Some of the writing moved me to tears, a beautiful novel from a gifted writer.
June 3, 2014
For anyone with a nostalgic yearning for the good old days, who fancies living in a small fishing village, this book is a great antidote. Set in Scotland in 1903, this novel begins by depicting the main character Meggie and life in a village where children are merely workhorses and women have a life time of being controlled and what is basically a mean and miserable existence. Meggie eventually emigrates to Fremantle in 1914 and it was at this point I realised it had to be an Australian author. It is a lovely story, beautifully rendered and engaging.
I just am not sure I am going to forgive Curtin for what happened to the dog!
I just am not sure I am going to forgive Curtin for what happened to the dog!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 14, 2013
Amanda Curtin possesses what can only be described as a supernatural ability to evoke the world of young Meggie in Northern Scotland and Fremantle in the early 1900s. Reading Elemental is like holding hands with Meggie as she endures hardship and heartbreak, finds love and forges a life for herself in a new colony in an old country. A superbly written novel. I loved it.
6 de May 20:52 · see review
6 de May 20:52 · see review
June 13, 2013
For my review of Elemental please go to http://lynneleonhardt.com/news-events/
January 20, 2015
Delighted to be in "couldn't put it down" territory. Well crafted story line, richly researched. Total pleasure to read.
January 8, 2022
I’m really surprised I have never heard of this book or Amanda Curtin. It is a wonderful historical family saga that encompasses the extremities of the northern and Southern Hemispheres and the 20th century. While there is a great deal of suffering in this story there is also an overwhelming message of humanity and sacrifice. While these themes are not written in an unfamiliar way the rendering of life as a ‘gutting girl’ and the work entailed is memorable and interesting. The most heart wrenching moment for me was when Meggie chases and retrieves the float that has escaped her grandfather’s boat.
Read
May 5, 2013Margaret Duthie Tulloch is a storyteller whose bedtime tales of Fish Meggie, the Gutting Girl from the Top of the World, delight her granddaughter Laura, her “lambsie”. She promises to write those stories down for Laura, and though her Lambsie has grown up and Meggie is dying, she manages to write it all out, but rather than a series of whimsical stories, Meggie Tulloch writes her own story. It’s an extraordinary tale of life in a small insular fishing town called Roanhaven, as “far north-east as you can get on the Scottish mainland”. Life there was harsh, governed by the sea, by bitter wind, by daily chores and by superstition so strong that when a little red-headed (reid-heidit) girl runs in front of the fishermen as they’re setting up the ships, they all pack up and go home for the evening. Young Fish Meggie's world is so beautifully depicted, and so sensual and engrossing, that it's a tiny shock every time the narrative shifts to the ‘present-tense’, reminding us that we aren't there along with Meggie plucking whelks from pools or cleaning bits of rotten bait off fishing hooks.
Meggie’s story is told in a series of journals that move through the elements: Water from 1891-1905, Air from 1905-1909 and Earth from 1910-1932. The tale is beautifully told, rich with Doric, Scottish and Shetland dialect that’s so pervasive you’ll be using it, aye, in your own speech as you fall into the rhythms of its cadences. The writing is also full of the detail of its historical setting. The images are harsh and beautiful, from the cold wind biting through hand knitted clothing and salt dried skin, to gorse and multi-coloured flowers on cliff faces full of puffins. Amidst the bleak beauty is Meggie’s own wonderfully canny observations as she grows from a wee bairn to a young women, discovering herself and unravelling the hushed-up groundswell of tragedy that underpins her world:
In “Earth”, Meggie moves with her husband Magnus, to Perth, Australia, where the fish-girl begins to feel the pull of the earth beneath her feet, exchanging fish gutting for biscuit filling. Meggie begins to make a life for herself in Perth, through the first World War and the inherent changes that bring more tragedy, deep friendship, and motherhood to Meggie’s life. The narrative flow of Meggie’s story is naturalistic, progressive and provides so compelling a voice, that it would be quite possible to believe that these are actual journals discovered and reprinted some thirty years after Meggie’s death by her granddaughter. Meggie’s tale on its own would be good enough, but Elemental is far more than simply a beautifully written narrative or even a clever mise-en-abyme in the midst of a modern narrative structure. There are multiple ‘present-tenses’ that the reader, who assumes the role of Lambsie through the first part of the book, is reminded of as the story progresses. Every so often Meggie pauses her narrative to revisit 1972, referring to her progressing disease, her forgetfulness, or the way in which her daughter Kathryn resists Meggie's journaling. We also learn, just a little, about young Laura, to whom the story is addressed. The Coda, “Fire” brings in another present tense – 2011, where young Cooper, a firefighter injured after saving a young girl, lays in a coma in the hospital. His wife Avril is by his side, occasionally relieved by her mother-in-law Laura, Meggie’s now older granddaughter, who joins Avril to sit by Cooper's side, talking to him and hoping he'll wake up. When Laura receives a package containing Meggie’s journals, the story is brought full circle and the reader gets to re-experience Meggie’s story through Laura and Avril’s eyes. So subtly that the transition is almost imperceptible, the story begins to grow beyond Meggie’s personal tale into a much larger one that transcends time, place, guilt and tragedy towards forgiveness, healing, love and ultimately transcendence. Laura is breeding butterflies and as they go through their live cycle the monarchs provide a metaphor for transformation – for what remains and what is changed we we move through the stories of our lives:
Elemental is an exquisite novel. Every word of it is tightly crafted and pregnant with possibility. It is self-referential and post-modern in the way it undermines time, creating a genetic and emotional link between characters in multiple times and places. Yet, at the same time, there is something almost old fashioned and timeless in its deep perceptions and observations, and in the sheer, slow beauty of its prose as Meggie not only discovers herself, but creates a genetic immortality through what she passes on to her children and the way in which she recrafts her inheritance. Elemental is indeed a wonderful, engrossing read, but it also shines of greatness. There is something so true and real, not just in Meggie’s story but in the way Meggie’s story becomes Laura’s story, and Avril’s story, and indeed, our story.
Meggie’s story is told in a series of journals that move through the elements: Water from 1891-1905, Air from 1905-1909 and Earth from 1910-1932. The tale is beautifully told, rich with Doric, Scottish and Shetland dialect that’s so pervasive you’ll be using it, aye, in your own speech as you fall into the rhythms of its cadences. The writing is also full of the detail of its historical setting. The images are harsh and beautiful, from the cold wind biting through hand knitted clothing and salt dried skin, to gorse and multi-coloured flowers on cliff faces full of puffins. Amidst the bleak beauty is Meggie’s own wonderfully canny observations as she grows from a wee bairn to a young women, discovering herself and unravelling the hushed-up groundswell of tragedy that underpins her world:
…when things change, something new enters the space you live in, something you must move with, turn to, chafe against, until you ease a new shape for yourself. But something is lost, too, in the changing, some small piece of your world is gone for good. (54)
In “Earth”, Meggie moves with her husband Magnus, to Perth, Australia, where the fish-girl begins to feel the pull of the earth beneath her feet, exchanging fish gutting for biscuit filling. Meggie begins to make a life for herself in Perth, through the first World War and the inherent changes that bring more tragedy, deep friendship, and motherhood to Meggie’s life. The narrative flow of Meggie’s story is naturalistic, progressive and provides so compelling a voice, that it would be quite possible to believe that these are actual journals discovered and reprinted some thirty years after Meggie’s death by her granddaughter. Meggie’s tale on its own would be good enough, but Elemental is far more than simply a beautifully written narrative or even a clever mise-en-abyme in the midst of a modern narrative structure. There are multiple ‘present-tenses’ that the reader, who assumes the role of Lambsie through the first part of the book, is reminded of as the story progresses. Every so often Meggie pauses her narrative to revisit 1972, referring to her progressing disease, her forgetfulness, or the way in which her daughter Kathryn resists Meggie's journaling. We also learn, just a little, about young Laura, to whom the story is addressed. The Coda, “Fire” brings in another present tense – 2011, where young Cooper, a firefighter injured after saving a young girl, lays in a coma in the hospital. His wife Avril is by his side, occasionally relieved by her mother-in-law Laura, Meggie’s now older granddaughter, who joins Avril to sit by Cooper's side, talking to him and hoping he'll wake up. When Laura receives a package containing Meggie’s journals, the story is brought full circle and the reader gets to re-experience Meggie’s story through Laura and Avril’s eyes. So subtly that the transition is almost imperceptible, the story begins to grow beyond Meggie’s personal tale into a much larger one that transcends time, place, guilt and tragedy towards forgiveness, healing, love and ultimately transcendence. Laura is breeding butterflies and as they go through their live cycle the monarchs provide a metaphor for transformation – for what remains and what is changed we we move through the stories of our lives:
Elemental, these small moments of boundarylessness, of finding your place beside butterflies in the order of things. (431)
Elemental is an exquisite novel. Every word of it is tightly crafted and pregnant with possibility. It is self-referential and post-modern in the way it undermines time, creating a genetic and emotional link between characters in multiple times and places. Yet, at the same time, there is something almost old fashioned and timeless in its deep perceptions and observations, and in the sheer, slow beauty of its prose as Meggie not only discovers herself, but creates a genetic immortality through what she passes on to her children and the way in which she recrafts her inheritance. Elemental is indeed a wonderful, engrossing read, but it also shines of greatness. There is something so true and real, not just in Meggie’s story but in the way Meggie’s story becomes Laura’s story, and Avril’s story, and indeed, our story.
September 28, 2017
Not my usual genre but this book was exquisite. A stunning, deeply-researched historical fiction.
July 6, 2018
The best novel I have read for a long long time.
June 1, 2013
Australian author Amanda Curtin's third book,
Elemental
, is a beautifully realised novel about fisher girl, Meggie Tulloch, and the incredible legacy she leaves her granddaughter, Laura, in the pages of her notebooks.
I read Elemental over a month, savouring every word of Amanda Curtin’s lovingly-crafted prose. It is an emotional novel about family, memory, secrets, superstition, loss, hardship, and which celebrates love in all its forms. Elemental will mean something different to every person who has the pleasure of reading it, but it is a novel that will remain with you long after it ends.
Elemental is an epic novel at 448 pages in length, but also in terms of its span; beginning in the final years of the nineteenth-century in Scotland and concluding in present-day Perth, Western Australia. Meggie is the narrator of the first three parts of the novel, ‘Water’, ‘Air’ and ‘Earth’, while the fourth part, ‘Fire’, is told from the perspectives of Meggie’s granddaughter, Laura, and Laura’s daughter-in-law, Avril. The four elements, water, air, earth and fire, each play a part in Meggie’s journey through life: beginning as wee Ginger Meggie, the quinie with the accursed red hair; as gutting girl Fish Meggie; as Meggie Tulloch, wife of Magnus and mother to Kathryn and Steven; and finally as Laura’s beloved Grunnie Meggie.
Having this story told to you from Meggie’s perspective is a precious gift, like getting to know someone who has walked the earth for many years before you were born, who has seen places and lived during a period in history that is slowly disappearing from the collective memory. Amanda Curtin has mined the archives and has emerged with some rich treasures that most of us probably haven’t seen or only heard of, such as the herring girls at the top of the world, with their hands constantly covered in blood, salt and fish guts; the Mills and Ware biscuit factory; the Castlemaine Brewery; the Ugly Men’s Association and the Uglieland fairground.
Like the distinctive voices of literary heroines Scout Finch and Jane Eyre, Meggie Duthie’s scottish brogue will continue to speak to me from the pages of this novel for many years to come. This is a novel that I will reread, again and again, and it is a novel that I will gift to friends with the same reverence as placing a new-born child in their arms. Elemental will stand the test of time and I am confident that it will become one of the most celebrated Australian novels of the twenty-first century.
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you seek out Amanda’s debut novel, The Sinkings , which is also partly set in Scotland, and her collection of award-winning short stories, Inherited .
Read my full review of Elemental on my blog: http://bit.ly/12mYjRW
I read Elemental over a month, savouring every word of Amanda Curtin’s lovingly-crafted prose. It is an emotional novel about family, memory, secrets, superstition, loss, hardship, and which celebrates love in all its forms. Elemental will mean something different to every person who has the pleasure of reading it, but it is a novel that will remain with you long after it ends.
Elemental is an epic novel at 448 pages in length, but also in terms of its span; beginning in the final years of the nineteenth-century in Scotland and concluding in present-day Perth, Western Australia. Meggie is the narrator of the first three parts of the novel, ‘Water’, ‘Air’ and ‘Earth’, while the fourth part, ‘Fire’, is told from the perspectives of Meggie’s granddaughter, Laura, and Laura’s daughter-in-law, Avril. The four elements, water, air, earth and fire, each play a part in Meggie’s journey through life: beginning as wee Ginger Meggie, the quinie with the accursed red hair; as gutting girl Fish Meggie; as Meggie Tulloch, wife of Magnus and mother to Kathryn and Steven; and finally as Laura’s beloved Grunnie Meggie.
Having this story told to you from Meggie’s perspective is a precious gift, like getting to know someone who has walked the earth for many years before you were born, who has seen places and lived during a period in history that is slowly disappearing from the collective memory. Amanda Curtin has mined the archives and has emerged with some rich treasures that most of us probably haven’t seen or only heard of, such as the herring girls at the top of the world, with their hands constantly covered in blood, salt and fish guts; the Mills and Ware biscuit factory; the Castlemaine Brewery; the Ugly Men’s Association and the Uglieland fairground.
Like the distinctive voices of literary heroines Scout Finch and Jane Eyre, Meggie Duthie’s scottish brogue will continue to speak to me from the pages of this novel for many years to come. This is a novel that I will reread, again and again, and it is a novel that I will gift to friends with the same reverence as placing a new-born child in their arms. Elemental will stand the test of time and I am confident that it will become one of the most celebrated Australian novels of the twenty-first century.
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you seek out Amanda’s debut novel, The Sinkings , which is also partly set in Scotland, and her collection of award-winning short stories, Inherited .
Read my full review of Elemental on my blog: http://bit.ly/12mYjRW
December 18, 2013
This year there were two notable books that could be described as atmospheric. The first, for me, was Hannah Kent's highly anticipated Burial Rites. The second was Elemental. Written by Perth local, Amanda Curtin, this book takes its structure from the four earthly elements of Water, Air, Earth and Fire and travels almost the entire length of the globe, from Roanhaven Scotland, to Fremantle Western Australia. Like Annabel Smith's Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, Curtin's book is self reflexive and takes notions of story from it's inherent shape.
Its four sections, Meggie's four notebooks, centre around their designated element. Notebook one is set in Roanhaven, a fishing village where social and familial cues are ruled by the water which is both a God and a Witch. Notebook two is set in the Shetland Isles where Meggie moves to be a gutting girl with her sister Kitta. Admittedly, this section to me also seemed to be water based, although the cold wind, the air, was a strong feature of this section as well as the notion of sailing away. This section of the book was filled with sadness as well as joyousness. Births, deaths and marriages. Misfortune. In notebook three, Meggie and her husband Magnus move to Fremantle, and later they are joined by Stivvy and Clementina who come to work the land. The land is cruel and unforgiving and shapes their lives in ways they had not expected. There is a war.
Finally, fire. I could not see at first how this section would tie in. Surprisingly, the narrative jumps forward two generations, to when Laura (the lambsie for whom the story was written) is a mother herself. Laura's son Cooper (not, it seems, named purposefully for the profession of his Grandfather) is a firefighter who has been burned saving the life of a child. She waits by Cooper's bedside with his wife, Avril, and the pair of them bond over Meggie's journals which were withheld until now.
The voice of Meggie Tulloch is strong and consistent. It is easy to imagine her sitting at her coffee table and writing these stories out for Laura. I could hear her voice as she spoke of quinies, our Kitta, Magnus Tulloch. As Avril says in part four of the book, "I feel as if Meggie is a friend." The short sections that diarise Laura and Meggie's interactions in the early 1970s are as heartbreaking as they are tender and familiar.
But heartbreak is the central thread of this novel. No one gets what they want, all must make do.
I was particularly drawn to the abundance of beautiful knitting metaphors throughout this book, and the skilled way that Curtin had Meggie liken human emotions and betrayal to the process of gutting fish. It feels as if Curtin has been Meggie, lived inside her skin and felt the things she felt.
This was absolutely the best book of the year for me.
Six stars out of five.
Its four sections, Meggie's four notebooks, centre around their designated element. Notebook one is set in Roanhaven, a fishing village where social and familial cues are ruled by the water which is both a God and a Witch. Notebook two is set in the Shetland Isles where Meggie moves to be a gutting girl with her sister Kitta. Admittedly, this section to me also seemed to be water based, although the cold wind, the air, was a strong feature of this section as well as the notion of sailing away. This section of the book was filled with sadness as well as joyousness. Births, deaths and marriages. Misfortune. In notebook three, Meggie and her husband Magnus move to Fremantle, and later they are joined by Stivvy and Clementina who come to work the land. The land is cruel and unforgiving and shapes their lives in ways they had not expected. There is a war.
Finally, fire. I could not see at first how this section would tie in. Surprisingly, the narrative jumps forward two generations, to when Laura (the lambsie for whom the story was written) is a mother herself. Laura's son Cooper (not, it seems, named purposefully for the profession of his Grandfather) is a firefighter who has been burned saving the life of a child. She waits by Cooper's bedside with his wife, Avril, and the pair of them bond over Meggie's journals which were withheld until now.
The voice of Meggie Tulloch is strong and consistent. It is easy to imagine her sitting at her coffee table and writing these stories out for Laura. I could hear her voice as she spoke of quinies, our Kitta, Magnus Tulloch. As Avril says in part four of the book, "I feel as if Meggie is a friend." The short sections that diarise Laura and Meggie's interactions in the early 1970s are as heartbreaking as they are tender and familiar.
But heartbreak is the central thread of this novel. No one gets what they want, all must make do.
I was particularly drawn to the abundance of beautiful knitting metaphors throughout this book, and the skilled way that Curtin had Meggie liken human emotions and betrayal to the process of gutting fish. It feels as if Curtin has been Meggie, lived inside her skin and felt the things she felt.
This was absolutely the best book of the year for me.
Six stars out of five.
November 8, 2015
"Elemental" is a fearsome-beautiful book.
Split into four sections, "Water" (1891-1905), "Air" (1905 - 1909), "Earth" (1910 - 1932) - which take the form of first person notebooks written by Meggie Duthie Tulloch to her grand daughter "lambsie" (Laura) in the 1970s - and a coda "Fire" (2011), "Elemental" charts the life of a "gutting girl from the top of the world" as life takes her from North-East Scotland, to the Shetland Islands to Fremantle in Western Australia.
It's a 432-page book - parts of it written in Scottish and Doric dialect and covering the industrialisation of the Scots fishing industry, both great wars and the Vietnam war - but you won't want to let "Fish Meggie" go and will mourn the loss of her voice at the end of the third notebook, "Earth". Her voice alternates between that of a terminally-ill woman setting the darkness in the family history straight, and that of herself as "the girl" in the flow of time, making a life for herself from the hard scrabble circumstances she's been given: "Joy and grief. It is life, lambsie: the promise and the pain. You have to kneel to both."
At its core, the novel is about Meggie's enormous capacity for love and how, in the words of Emily Dickinson, "That love is all there is, is all we know of love.":
"Is this what love is? A force that makes you learn how to breathe again, breathe in a new way, because your heart is taking up more space in your body than ever it did, and nothing fits together any more, nor feels like it is human? Feathers in my lungs. Air in my blood. Bones as light as mussel shell. The core of me lifts on small beating wings and I know I can never be still again, nor earthbound, never be just that girl .... How does any one of us ever survive love?
In the coda, "Fire" - when Laura as a woman in her fifties finally receives her grandmother's notebooks - there's the realisation: "Love shouldn't be passive. You should be required to, you know, GIVE it. She was just there, always there, and it was like I forgot to love her." I've been guilty of that, too.
Reading "Fire" was wrenching. Written in the third person from lambsie/ Laura's perspective and the perspective of Avril, her daughter-in-law, a large part of the section is set in the burns unit of a Perth hospital, where Laura's son, Cooper, has manifested the heroic Duthie/Tulloch genes in an emergency rescue gone hideously wrong. It immediately brought back memories of the time spent in an Intensive Care Unit and all the questions that go through your mind like, "What will the new shape of our lives be?" And: "If you come back,will you still be you?" And knowing that things have already changed; they will never be the same.
It's a fearless book. Literary, but immediately, thrillingly, accessible. I have already raced out to get Curtin's "The Sinkings." Expect more raving.
Split into four sections, "Water" (1891-1905), "Air" (1905 - 1909), "Earth" (1910 - 1932) - which take the form of first person notebooks written by Meggie Duthie Tulloch to her grand daughter "lambsie" (Laura) in the 1970s - and a coda "Fire" (2011), "Elemental" charts the life of a "gutting girl from the top of the world" as life takes her from North-East Scotland, to the Shetland Islands to Fremantle in Western Australia.
It's a 432-page book - parts of it written in Scottish and Doric dialect and covering the industrialisation of the Scots fishing industry, both great wars and the Vietnam war - but you won't want to let "Fish Meggie" go and will mourn the loss of her voice at the end of the third notebook, "Earth". Her voice alternates between that of a terminally-ill woman setting the darkness in the family history straight, and that of herself as "the girl" in the flow of time, making a life for herself from the hard scrabble circumstances she's been given: "Joy and grief. It is life, lambsie: the promise and the pain. You have to kneel to both."
At its core, the novel is about Meggie's enormous capacity for love and how, in the words of Emily Dickinson, "That love is all there is, is all we know of love.":
"Is this what love is? A force that makes you learn how to breathe again, breathe in a new way, because your heart is taking up more space in your body than ever it did, and nothing fits together any more, nor feels like it is human? Feathers in my lungs. Air in my blood. Bones as light as mussel shell. The core of me lifts on small beating wings and I know I can never be still again, nor earthbound, never be just that girl .... How does any one of us ever survive love?
In the coda, "Fire" - when Laura as a woman in her fifties finally receives her grandmother's notebooks - there's the realisation: "Love shouldn't be passive. You should be required to, you know, GIVE it. She was just there, always there, and it was like I forgot to love her." I've been guilty of that, too.
Reading "Fire" was wrenching. Written in the third person from lambsie/ Laura's perspective and the perspective of Avril, her daughter-in-law, a large part of the section is set in the burns unit of a Perth hospital, where Laura's son, Cooper, has manifested the heroic Duthie/Tulloch genes in an emergency rescue gone hideously wrong. It immediately brought back memories of the time spent in an Intensive Care Unit and all the questions that go through your mind like, "What will the new shape of our lives be?" And: "If you come back,will you still be you?" And knowing that things have already changed; they will never be the same.
It's a fearless book. Literary, but immediately, thrillingly, accessible. I have already raced out to get Curtin's "The Sinkings." Expect more raving.
December 8, 2015
Amanda Curtin is the author of novels Elemental, The Sinkings, and a short story collection, Inherited. Elemental was shortlisted for the 2014 WA Premier’s Book Awards (Fiction and People’s Choice categories).
Curtin asks the reader to consider questions of morality through a prism of passing decades and the changes that occur to societal norms and expectations throughout these years. Although this sounds like a challenging, dry and unappealing task, Curtin’s achingly sad but beautiful writing, the supreme sense of place she evokes and above all the strength of the voice of the protagonist Meggie Tulloch ensure that this is not the case. Themes of love, grief, memory, the changing role and expectations of women and children within families, superstition and war, so deftly woven into the fabric of the story gave me much to think about.
Reading Elemental was for me such an enriching, enjoyable, rewarding experience that I did not want the book to end.
Highly recommended!
Curtin asks the reader to consider questions of morality through a prism of passing decades and the changes that occur to societal norms and expectations throughout these years. Although this sounds like a challenging, dry and unappealing task, Curtin’s achingly sad but beautiful writing, the supreme sense of place she evokes and above all the strength of the voice of the protagonist Meggie Tulloch ensure that this is not the case. Themes of love, grief, memory, the changing role and expectations of women and children within families, superstition and war, so deftly woven into the fabric of the story gave me much to think about.
Reading Elemental was for me such an enriching, enjoyable, rewarding experience that I did not want the book to end.
Highly recommended!
August 20, 2020
This book was passed on by a friend a long time ago, it’s a big epic book and I was so focused on my reading challenge number (looking for the shorter reads) I kept overlooking it. I picked it up on the weekend and read the first chapter and then devoured the rest, and cried when it finished!
This book is so beautifully crafted, the story told with such a beautiful wee Scottish rhythm that all you can is surrender to the turning of every page (two very late nights with this book).
Perhaps it is that it’s a Scottish tale of a fierce determined courageous strong woman that speaks to me loudest. I know this character intimately...
Perhaps it is what compelled Meggie to write her story “to make my own peace with a shift in the world when everything changed” to give words to the shame to set it free. To tell the story of the destruction that is silence.
Perhaps it is the simplicity of dear Meggie’s telling of “the life she made from the life given to me” the honesty of kneeling before both the hardships and joys and all their teachings. Resolve.
Perhaps it is the intergenerational connection and disconnection - one’s shared narrative, where does one person’s story stop and another starts?
I found the telling so utterly compelling.
This book now takes it’s place amongst my favorites, to be read again.
This book is so beautifully crafted, the story told with such a beautiful wee Scottish rhythm that all you can is surrender to the turning of every page (two very late nights with this book).
Perhaps it is that it’s a Scottish tale of a fierce determined courageous strong woman that speaks to me loudest. I know this character intimately...
Perhaps it is what compelled Meggie to write her story “to make my own peace with a shift in the world when everything changed” to give words to the shame to set it free. To tell the story of the destruction that is silence.
Perhaps it is the simplicity of dear Meggie’s telling of “the life she made from the life given to me” the honesty of kneeling before both the hardships and joys and all their teachings. Resolve.
Perhaps it is the intergenerational connection and disconnection - one’s shared narrative, where does one person’s story stop and another starts?
I found the telling so utterly compelling.
This book now takes it’s place amongst my favorites, to be read again.
August 11, 2016
This is Meggie Tulloch's story as told to her granddaughter at the end of her life.
A fisherman's daughter brought up in North-East Scotland. An unbelievably hard life. she left to work in the Shetland Isles as a gutting quinie. It was here she met her husband Magnus Tulloch and from there they made their way to Fremantle.
This is a long heart-wrenching story of Meggie and Magnus and I loved every second of it. Amanda Curtin is a very gifted writer. I could feel the salt spray on my face and smell the fish guts as she was cleaning and the sores on her hands and the grief she held inside her heart.
A fisherman's daughter brought up in North-East Scotland. An unbelievably hard life. she left to work in the Shetland Isles as a gutting quinie. It was here she met her husband Magnus Tulloch and from there they made their way to Fremantle.
This is a long heart-wrenching story of Meggie and Magnus and I loved every second of it. Amanda Curtin is a very gifted writer. I could feel the salt spray on my face and smell the fish guts as she was cleaning and the sores on her hands and the grief she held inside her heart.
January 9, 2015
This novel blew me away. I loved the writing, the way the author wove the different threads of the story together, and how cleverly it moved between Meggie and her granddaughter's life.
There was a lot of overlap between this story and my own family. I loved reading about Meggie's emmigration to Perth WA and hearing my grandma's stories in her voice too.
This is a very sad novel, but one that I would gladly read again. It's hard to say what precisely is so special about it but it's one of those books that you just know will stay with you for years.
There was a lot of overlap between this story and my own family. I loved reading about Meggie's emmigration to Perth WA and hearing my grandma's stories in her voice too.
This is a very sad novel, but one that I would gladly read again. It's hard to say what precisely is so special about it but it's one of those books that you just know will stay with you for years.
March 16, 2016
You lived through it with her; the Shetlands, the fishing, Australia. Brilliant writing
May 11, 2020
This is a story in two parts – one that works and one that doesn’t.
Meggie’s story is beautifully written, her voice clear and her own. The reader knows Meggie and the setting of her life. Her experiences are something new and revealing, spanning the late 1890s in a remote Scottish fishing village where women are there to work and assist their fishermen, controlled and restricted in their lives and their thinking by superstition, of no importance in themselves. Escape to a wider world means long hours of work and still involves fish, but it opens up a new world to Meggie with marriage and emigration to Western Australia. Then comes World War One and children, and it’s as if every heartbreaking thing in life happens to her.
In her old age, on the brink of death, Meggie writes her life story for her granddaughter. And its here that the second half of Elemental brings in the younger generation. The author has attempted to find a correlation and a meaning to Meggie’s life of hardship and sadness by relating it to events in this later time. The writing, the characters, simply didn’t resonate. I skim read, because what I was reading wasn’t worth giving much time to after what had gone before. This section felt contrived and was disappointing. There are writers who want to give their literary work some profound meaning but struggle to do so. Not surprising, given the difficulty of finding anything profound in life.
Meggie’s story is beautifully written, her voice clear and her own. The reader knows Meggie and the setting of her life. Her experiences are something new and revealing, spanning the late 1890s in a remote Scottish fishing village where women are there to work and assist their fishermen, controlled and restricted in their lives and their thinking by superstition, of no importance in themselves. Escape to a wider world means long hours of work and still involves fish, but it opens up a new world to Meggie with marriage and emigration to Western Australia. Then comes World War One and children, and it’s as if every heartbreaking thing in life happens to her.
In her old age, on the brink of death, Meggie writes her life story for her granddaughter. And its here that the second half of Elemental brings in the younger generation. The author has attempted to find a correlation and a meaning to Meggie’s life of hardship and sadness by relating it to events in this later time. The writing, the characters, simply didn’t resonate. I skim read, because what I was reading wasn’t worth giving much time to after what had gone before. This section felt contrived and was disappointing. There are writers who want to give their literary work some profound meaning but struggle to do so. Not surprising, given the difficulty of finding anything profound in life.
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