Trigger warnings for mentions of rape, domestic violence, child abuse, gaslighting, and femicide.
The small community near East Lothian’s Bass Rock is not a safe place for women or children. It seems that it never has been, as we learn in Evie Wyld’s unsettling novel The Bass Rock. Wyld’s narrative sends us reeling back and forth in time as depressed Viv, oppressed Ruth, and hunted Sarah try to find a measure of peace on their scrap of Scottish coast, with variable success. This is a difficult book and I’m not entirely sure that the payoff at the end was worth the creeping dread I felt while reading it.
Of the three women the book features, Ruth and Viv have the larger share of the narrative duties. Sarah’s chapters are very brief and are narrated by a male figure. She seems to appear only to represent the deep roots of the misogyny that is hard-boiled into North Berwick. In fact, it’s easy to read Sarah’s story as a serial killer’s origin story. The things that happen to her are repeated decades later in Ruth’s story. Ruth is a new wife, post-World War II, and is stepping into the ill-fitting shoes of her husband’s first wife after her death. Ruth bears her own grief; she lost her brother in France. Her new status—and the family’s relocation to North Berwick—means that she has to learn how to become a stepmother to two still-grieving boys and the lady of the house with a servant, with a bunch of duties in the community. Ruth often finds herself expected to follow the steps of a dance that no one will explain to her.
Near our present time, Ruth’s granddaughter Viv has come back to North Berwick to go through Ruth’s house and the family’s belongings to help prepare it for sale. Viv, like so many of the other characters in The Bass Rock, is also recently bereaved. Her beloved father (one of Ruth’s stepsons) recently died, triggering a deep depression that ended up hospitalizing her. Viv doesn’t accomplish much practical work at the house, to be honest, but I don’t begrudge her. Not only is she wrestling to deal with her emotions, she is also haunted by memories and (possibly) an actual ghost in the house. Viv’s chapters are full of references to the murder and abuse of women in East Lothian and across Scotland by boyfriends, husbands, and strangers. It’s hard to get oneself back on an even mental keel with constant reminders that nowhere is safe.
The Bass Rock has plot and characterization but I think it would be better to categorize this book in terms of the atmosphere it creates. Our protagonists are pushed this way and that by other characters who never explain their motivations. Ruth in particular is steamrollered by people until she starts to push back against local (frankly bizarre) customs, as well as more general expectations of her gender and status. We’re left to feel Ruth and Viv’s helplessness in the face of other people with stronger wills. We feel their fear when men intrude on their autonomy or lash out with violence when they’re turned down. By the end of the book, I felt very antsy. The denouement of The Bass Rock is so slight that there was no catharsis for me. There was so much I didn’t know about the characters, even after all that time spent in their heads, that I didn’t have a lot of hope that anything really got better for Ruth or Viv.
Although it was very well-written (this really is one of the most palpably atmospheric books I’ve read), I have a lot of reservations about this book. I might suggest it to readers who want to scare themselves without jump scares, but mostly this book leaves a bad taste in my mind rather than the bracing rush of adrenaline one gets from other scary stories.
