The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd

Nan Shepherd’s Scottish hillside is one of the most beautiful places to which a novelist has escorted me. In the first book of The Grampian Quartet, she takes you right out of your book or eReader and into the wind and rain and mud and green and sky of her Scotland. I don’t mean that she does this the way many writers do. I’m insisting that she does this in a way that very few writers do. Her descriptive writing is so concentrated, she makes you smell and feel the humidity over the wash sink or the heat coming up from wet socks before a fire as immediately as the characters’ thoughts and feelings.

I love writers who can do that.

The Quarry Wood is a coming of age story about a young woman from a working class family who seeks a higher education with limited resources. She does this against a backdrop of challenges: the difficulty of being a woman in higher education, having an embittered and often cruel mother, coming to terms with (and then refusing) being underestimated or worse, idealized, by men who love her in ways that suit themselves.

And throughout, there is the challenge of the hillside on which she lives. Be it the weather (she walks and cycles through rain, sleet, snow, and always wind), or the terrain (in all weather, it is uphill). The brae is rough and wild.

Shepherd’s writing about nature shows up in the nature of her writing about people. She ties individual characters to the universal in such a way that the character becomes as real as a person reading next to you as well as a portrait of those human idiosyncrasies and qualities known to us generally.

“There was something elemental about Geordie’s laughter. It flooded up out of the depths of him – not gurgling, or spouting, or splashing up, but rising full-tide with a steady roaring boom. It had subterranean reserves of force, that no common joke was able to exhaust. Long after other people had fatigued their petty powers of laughter at some easy joke, the vast concourses of Geordie’s merriment were gathering within him and crashing out in mightily renewed eruptions of unwearied vigour. He found a joke wholesome until seventy times seven.”

For me, this passage conjured up the specific character of the Geordie in this story and also people I’ve met in life. I hope we all know a Geordie.

Poets make amazing novelists.

The other favorite thing I want to say about The Quarry Wood is that, as a coming of age story, Shepherd puts truths into words where many writers might leave them unspoken. Some things are observed truths so difficult to communicate that a writer will illustrate or lead you right up to them to view. Guiding you up to the Grand Canyon, then standing beside you to take it in.

Nan Shepherd can paint that canyon in a sentence.

“Our acquaintances have no past for us until we have a past ourselves.”

She’s describing the often myopic phases of very young people taking other folks for what meets the eye. Simply not having the wisdom yet to recognize the depth of felt experience in another person, particularly an older one. I’m a parent of a teen and when I read that sentence, I chuckled for how concisely it describes so much of being a 15 year old.

Lastly, I loved that this novel about the growing up of Martha Ironsides on a windswept hill in Scotland did not center around her finding a lover. Her “coming of age” was a “coming into her self” story about the richness and sovereignty of self.