I was taken by surprise ....
I was taken by surprise by this novel written in the 20's and set in 17th century Scotland but having a strong message for our times.It tells the story of David Semple, an idealistic young minister who takes up his first charge in an isolated village in the Scottish borders. The year is 1644 when unrest in Scotland was at its height and the division between Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and Presbyterians was bitter and violent. Against this background, David seeks to be a kind and faithful pastor to his parishioners while engaging in study in his spare time. But it is a lonely life: his fellow ministers are for the most part bigoted and poorly educated, seeking to follow the precepts of the Old Testament and forgetting the humanity and love of the new .
The inevitable clash is intensified when David becomes aware of devil worship in the dark wood and is determined to cleanse his people of this. This is where his youth and idealism are naive as he fails to understand that the repression that brand of Presbyterianism brings in its wake pushes passions underground so that they emerge in a perverted form.The village and the church wish to turn a blind eye and his refusal to do this is his doom.
This is where I thought the novel was strangely topical.Ignored by the ruling classes, deprived of joy and disenfranchised "the folk" follow the false god, the animalistic leader of the diabolical sect . David's wish to free them comes from loving concern and a deep sense of duty but is simplistic. I may be making him sound a priggish central character but he not. His kindness and generosity of spirit are shown again and again and he is a truly engaging character as he struggles to find a moral compass in the chaos of the times.
The novel is beautifully written with a wonderful sense of place and time. Linguistically it is very rich. The more educated characters speak English but the others talk in Lallans, the language of Lowland Scots, an onomatopoeic and lively tongue. I was fortunate as many of the words were familiar to me from the rural North East of Scotland where I grew up: other readers may need to use the glossary.I knew Buchan as the author of rattling good yarns like "The Thirty Nine Steps" , a protean thriller writer. This is something else. I can understand why it was an inspiration for the young C.S. Lewis.