O Caledonia

While reading O Caledonia, I thought an apt subtitle would be: Portrait of the Spinster as a Young Girl, even though our protagonist is found murdered—at age 16—on the first page. Janet definitely has the quirks and qualities which—in her upper-class, 1950s milieu—brand her as a potential spinster. But it was more that I was reminded of some British women who often wrote about that demographic so cruelly expanded by WW1. Barker’s intelligence has the micro/macroscopic focus of Sylvia Townsend Warner—Janet could have been her generation’s Lolly Willowes! And her hilarious grasp of human peculiararity reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor. There’s even a whiff of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm in the ramshackle family castle and its weirdest residents. Despite these echoes, the book is as singularly bewitching as its heroine. And don’t fear that its opening portends mystery and tragedy. Just as Janet refuses to conform, her story breaks all bonds of literary expectation.