Remember the Rowan by Kirsten MacQuarrie (Ringwood, £12.99)

Kathleen Raine, who died in 2003 aged 95, had a long and illustrious career as a poet and academic whose spiritual themes reflected her particular interest in Blake, Yeats and Coleridge.

But Kirsten MacQuarrie’s novel focuses on arguably the most fascinating time of her life: her unrequited love affair with Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water and noted naturalist and traveller – and, as the grandson of the Duke of Northumberland, the product of a very different social milieu from Raine’s native Ilford. Maxwell, however, would end up writing her out of his memoirs and even denouncing her for casting a “curse” on him.

What actually transpired, as Raine recorded in her own memoir, was that, after years of passionate devotion to a relationship that remained unconsummated, she laid her hands on the rowan tree at Maxwell’s remote retreat of Sandaig, near Glenelg, and unleashed an impassioned cry of “Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now!”

Not long after that, she was indirectly responsible for the death of Maxwell’s beloved otter, Mij, and he would later attribute all his subsequent bad fortune, including the fiery destruction of Sandaig and his own fatal cancer, to that impulsive outburst. 

MacQuarrie’s absorbing and substantial novel is deeply informed by Raine’s four-volume autobiography, to the extent that one frequently forgets that this isn’t actually Kathleen Raine writing, so completely does MacQuarrie seem to understand and inhabit her.

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Opening in 1949, she brings us Raine already fully formed. Forty-one and a published poet, she is twice divorced with two children who she has sent to live in Cumbria. Sending them away from “Blitz-blasted” London to a rural environment while she works to support them strikes her as the pragmatic thing to do. She hopes they will get the kind of upbringing she enjoyed during the First World War in Northumbria, where she forged a connection with nature that became the bedrock of her life and work. 

If the world can change in an instant, it changes on the day in 1949 when she is introduced to Gavin Maxwell. In this “gaunt echo of elegance”, she is convinced she has found the love of her life. When they sleep together, she believes, it will be like nothing she’s ever experienced. Except that never happens. Maxwell confides to her that he is homosexual, leaving Raine to console herself with the thought that their transcendent spiritual bond will be fulfilment enough. 

Seemingly getting through life by a process of compartmentalisation, detachment and repression, Raine detests the “coarseness and materiality” of earthly life, subscribing to an idealised platonic existence in which there are no men and women, only souls.

(Image: Remember the Rowan)

Convinced she’s found not only her soulmate in Maxwell but rediscovered her personal Eden, she overlooks the serpent that will bring about its eventual destruction in scenes that are as physically terrifying as they are emotionally raw and would affect the way Raine saw herself for the rest of her life. 

Remember the Rowan is a poignant tour de force that lays bare the complexities of both of its central characters, honouring their brilliance while examining their flaws with curiosity and compassion.

As a poet herself, MacQuarrie scarcely wastes a word, writing with shining clarity. Every sentence is exquisitely worked, every detail in some way significant. She seems to both hover above and dive deeply into Raine’s turbulent psyche, surfacing with images of rowan trees, otters’ hearts and the beautiful but forbidding landscapes of the Western Highlands, all charged with love and longing but tinged too with guilt and regret.