Nothing Left to Fear from Hell, by Alan Warner. Review

REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING

The romance that has surrounded Bonnie Prince Charlie since he raised his standard on Scottish soil has baffled historians. Despite his many failings and errors of judgement, this tragic figure holds an almost talismanic place in the nation’s heart.

Like other benighted royals on whose fate the country’s future hung – few more so than James IV and Mary Stuart – his exploits are rendered melancholy by the constant refrain of, “what if?” and “if only”. Charles Edward Stuart, known by those who did not support his claim to the British throne as “the Young Pretender”, had a personality balanced on a blade’s edge: on one side admirably determined, brave and heroic, on the other rash, feckless and weak.

Within a few years of his failed rebellion he was drinking himself to death in Italy, earning the contempt of those who, not so long before, would have welcomed his rise to power. How many novels have attempted to bring him and his followers back to life?

The Jacobites have long been a staple of fiction, from Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Perhaps most powerful of all are those written for younger readers, which captivated those of us who came to them at what Miss Jean Brodie would have called an impressionable age, notably Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona, and DK Broster’s The Flight of the Heron.

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Although many Scots of the time reviled the Stuarts and their attempts to supplant the Protestant monarchy, today the Jacobite era feels emblematic of a deeper, more existential desire for political change. Putting Charles Edward into the hands of the novelist Alan Warner is an unlikely but inspired pairing.

Nothing Left to Fear from Hell is a fictionalised account of the prince’s final months in the country, and unlike anything you will have read about him before. It is visceral, vulgar, vivid, by turns comic and grotesque, yet with a powerful undertow of elegy and sorrow.

No need to warn readers that in this portrayal, by the author of Morvern Callar, The Sopranos, The Deadman’s Pedal and others, there is nothing sentimental, schlock, or understated. In a tale that takes place in Warner’s home territory of the Highlands and Islands, his intimate connection with the land is given full rein.

The would-be king has the central role, but his supporting act is the sea, a watery and ominous presence on whose whims the prince’s fate depends. This slim novel opens with Charles Edward disembarking from a boat and promptly throwing up, and worse. Presenting this most basic scene with dramatic panache, Warner goes on to recreate the physical misery and mental agonies of a man on the run. The disaster of the Battle of Culloden haunts him and his men.

Alan Warner (Image: free)

An “unthinkable jackpot” of £30,000 in English pounds is on his head, and betrayal could lie with any of his party, or any stranger they meet on the road. For several long months, the Young Pretender must behave like a convict on the loose, forever evading capture. Among the novel’s distinguishing traits is the unnerving role played by nature: “Herring gulls passed over low, curiously silent like possible informers, then tipped away.”

At full moon, Warner writes, “it was as if an observant intelligence had placed the whole world and its every detail under the quiet scrutiny of its watch”. Implicitly, danger lies all around.

Coping with starvation rations, sodden clothes and filthy bivouacs, the prince is a stoic.

Even so, he finds the elements gruelling: “Often I thought the ball of muskets, or bones of men, had struck at my face, but it was your weather.”

Warner’s story follows the wandering royal from one island to the next, latterly to Skye in the company of the doughty Flora Macdonald, who dresses him as her servant, Miss Betty Burke.

Not since Robbie Coltrane donned a nun’s habit has there been such a galumphing maid, and Warner milks it for every drop. Anticipating the difficulty of responding to the call of nature, the refugee turns to his men: “Laugh on, my boys, but that can be your duty to me: lift these skirts, and stand clear of the guns.”

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Despite the risk of detection, as he strides over the hills in his petticoats like a rugby prop heading toward a ruck, the prince will not heed warnings. Only the courage of others and a full measure of luck allows him to make his escape from a region swarming with Red Coats. But although ultimately he emerged unscathed, Warner takes the wider view: “The escaper’s progress was clear: he always evaded capture, but it was a supernatural providence aimed at the Prince alone, for wreckage was left around him in all places.”

What is striking about Nothing Left to Fear from Hell is the depth of authorial reflection. Few can imagine a scene with such a visceral physicality, it feels as if you are personally present.

Among the finest of the set pieces is Warner’s description of what would happen were the prince’s boat to capsize and sink to the seabed, “where it would rest inverted like a slumped tent, soon silted over and rotted by the chemistries of decay always enacted upon things of the upper world now descended into the lightless places”.

It is a mesmerising scene, filmic in its intensity, and so lovingly imagined it feels like slow motion.

Best of all, perhaps, is his awareness of the role the land itself plays in the story, which adds a third dimension to this oft-told tale.

As when, for instance, the party try ineffectually to ward off a cloud of midges.

Failing dismally, they are obliged to accept that “man is not made for this open world, that we come upon the wide earth as strangers not adapted to its nature – indeed, it is our enemy”.

It is a concept elaborated at greater length later in the book, diminishing not just the endeavours and travails of Charles Edward Stuart, but us all.