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Scotsman
23-07-2025
- Scotsman
Mrs Burke and Mrs Hare by Michelle Sloan review: 'full of wisdom and compassion'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Edinburgh is notorious as a city with two faces, one elegant, enlightened and outward-facing, the other dark, squalid and dangerous. It's a dichotomy that's etched into the very geography of the 'precipitous city'; and its double identity is reflected in its literature, from James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - notionally set in London, but shot through with that same Edinburgh antisyzygy. Mrs Burke and Mrs Hare - aka Helen McDougal and Margaret Laird |There are also, though, true stories that helped shape the myth and the image; and none more powerful than the history of William Burke and William Hare, two men living in poverty in the Edinburgh of the 1820s, who discovered a lucrative line of business in killing off poor vagrants and prostitutes around the slums and lodging-houses of the Old Town, and selling their bodies to the ambitious surgeon-anatomists of Edinburgh's fast-rising medical establishment, who chose to turn a blind eye to the provenance of the bodies. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The story of Burke and Hare has itself spawned a whole industry of books, plays and articles; but Michelle Sloan's new novel - her second, following her successful 2022 debut, The Edinburgh Skating Club - takes the unusual path of telling the story from the point of view of the partners of the two men. Neither Margaret 'Lucky' Hare nor Nelly Burke was legally married to her 'husband'; but both were arrested alongside their men when their crimes finally came to light, and later exonerated, partly because the court apparently struggled to believe that a woman could have anything to do with such crimes. The Canongate Tolbooth, Edinburgh, circa 1870. Image from Picturesque Europe - The British Isles, Vol. I, published circa 1870 | The Print Collector/Heritage Images via Getty Images Sloan, though, takes a different view; and over 340 fast-moving pages, she constructs a gripping and sometimes downright enthralling tale in two parts, in which Lucky Hare becomes the ruthless and intelligent driving force behind the crimes, and Nelly Burke the troubled conscience of the group, drawn into their cult of violence only by her helpless passion for William Burke. In the first two-thirds of the book, the story of their killing spree in the Edinburgh of 1827-28 unfolds at breathless speed, and with a fierce understanding of how desperate poverty drove the underclass of the time towards crime, and how difficult it was, under those circumstances, to afford any pretensions to virtue. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Then in part two of the novel, Sloan follows the adventures of a young middle-class Edinburgh journalist, 20 years on, who sets out to discover what became of the two women; with the whole history finally tied together in a poignant motif to do with the tiny dolls found buried on Arthur's Seat in the late 1830s, and now held in the National Museum of Scotland. Sloan's narrative in both episodes is pacey and driven, yet almost lyrical in its vividness, conjuring up the teeming life of Britain's urban slums in the age before government - under pressure from countless campaigns and social movements - began to intervene to protect life, prevent disease, and raise working people up from the degradation described here. Most strikingly, she also offers a telling insight into the attitudes to other human beings bred by such a brutal system - the contempt for human life that justifies itself by morphing into whole systems of belief about the inferiority and worthlessness of its victims. She is clear-eyed about the privilege that frees her young journalist, Duncan, to take a more enlightened view. And movingly, she is also in awe of the fundamental decency she celebrates in the novel's vivid prologue; the respect, compassion and creativity of those who - under all the pressures of history - still strive to do right by the living and the dead, in a brilliantly readable novel that succeeds in bringing a new perspective to the crowded field of Burke and Hare literature, and one full of wisdom and compassion, as well as of a deep, loving knowledge of Edinburgh itself, in all its complex moods.
The Guardian
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Andrew O'Hagan: ‘A kind of Dickens and Zola energy was pulsing'
Journalist, novelist and cafe owner Andrew O'Hagan, 56, grew up in Ayrshire and lives in London, the setting for his most recent book, Caledonian Road, now out in paperback. Shortlisted for last year's Orwell prize for political fiction, it follows 60 characters over 650 pages and has been praised as an 'extremely readable how-we-live-now novel' (Margaret Drabble) that 'captures London in all its messy, multicultural glory' (Yotam Ottolenghi) and 'instantly feels like a box set waiting to happen' (the Standard). Tell us how Caledonian Road came about. I was writing a lot of big stories for the London Review of Books – working with Julian Assange [on a memoir that Assange disavowed, an experience O'Hagan reported on], with another guy who claimed to have invented bitcoin, with people who were reinventing themselves on the net – and a lot of that reporting came together in the character of Campbell Flynn, a kind of falling man at the centre of modern London corruption. I got some insight into the British aristocracy's relationship with dirty Russian money, and following that money led to street gangs, migrant traffickers, fashion brands and high-street businessmen. In my head, a kind of Dickens and Zola energy was pulsing. The research became huge: I was at the polo in Windsor one minute, with the queen attending, or with rap gangs or inside Leicester sweatshop factories the next. I was sort of amazed at the real-life connections and wanted to give inner life to them. Are you still in touch with any of the people you spoke to during your research? A few. Some are dead, some are in jail, some have flown the country, and others are thriving in plain sight, so heavily disguised they didn't recognise themselves. Or chose not to. You'd be surprised how skilled people become at not recognising themselves. I haven't had a single complaint. You and Campbell have a fair bit in common… He shares the obvious things with me, which localises his experience in a way I wanted for the story, but there's as much of me spread over the other 59 characters. Many a good narrative wants a central consciousness, a central voice, and I enjoyed mapping Campbell's years on to my own – it felt natural – but his descent into mania is completely invented. It's a dance, actually, of the deeply personal and the wholly foreign, and that is the kind of thing I like. On stage at last year's Edinburgh book festival you said you've read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde maybe 35 times over the course of your life. Robert Louis Stevenson was a kind of spirit guide with this book. I love his style, how naturally he marries his personal fixations to a vision of otherness, and the Stevenson epigraph was there from the earliest draft. Campbell is divided, shadowed by a previous self, which might be awakening a capacity for disaster in him. Personally, I've always felt quite relaxed about the passing of time, and about where I started, but Campbell isn't, and my reading of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde over the years eventually triggered, I think, a dramatic sense of inward badness in Campbell Flynn, something that dramatically contradicts his easygoing nature. Given that you're also a reporter, how do you decide when you're going to write fiction? I usually know the form of a story as soon as I meet it. For instance, it never occurred to me for a second that the Assange story would be a novel by me. Its power, as I saw it, would flow in a piece of personal reportage. Later, Jonathan Franzen told me it helped him write his novel Purity, which features an Assange-like figure. He asked me why I didn't write it as a novel myself, and I told him, quite frankly, that I thought the story had more vitality as nonfiction. That will sometimes be true, sometimes not. You learn to sense it. If you're interested in writing well you never dress down; you work to find the sentences that suit the material, and if it's nonfiction you'll want them to stand up in court. But the quality of the writing shouldn't decline an inch. Name something you need in order to work. It's changed over the years. I pretty much wrote my first book, The Missing, in bed during a harsh winter, when I was in my early 20s. I began my novel Our Fathers [1999] in a rented house in West Cork that was loaned to me by the late Jenny Diski. But nowadays I'm at a desk. I like pretty lamps and old typewriters. I've made two beautiful writing rooms, one in London and one in Scotland, and filled them full of things that help me work. I love paintings and photographs. Not long ago I was gifted one of Evelyn Waugh's black desks. What have you been reading lately? Working on a family story set in the late 1970s, I've been revisiting things – Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Seamus Heaney's Station Island – while lingering over books that capture the radiance of childhood: The Little Prince, Charlotte's Web, A Child's Garden of Verses. Tell us the last book you gave as a gift. An anniversary copy of Golding's masterpiece Lord of the Flies, to my daughter Nellie. What led you to open a cafe five years ago? My friend Sam Frears and I had always dreamed of opening a great cafe. Sam is blind, and he has other complicated health issues, so we thought we'd do it close to where we both live in Primrose Hill, to make it easy for him to visit every day. It's become a huge magnet for the community, a hub for artists, writers, youthquakers and vintage talkers, and we love it. We spend everything we make on the staff, we fill the place with magazines and books, and we're open all day every day. I'm biased, but I think it's the best place to spend an evening in north London. Caledonian Road is published in paperback on 13 February by Faber (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
