Skallagrigg

[peter]

Skallagrigg is not an easy book to read, but it is profoundly beautiful in places - a beacon of light within the grim settings often portrayed in it's long and detailed story.

It concerns the search made by a young girl, Esther, beset by cerebral palsy, for an earlier sufferer, an elderly gentleman named Arthur, who institutionalised in the 1920's had spent decades within a brutal and uncaring system that was more concerned with the hiding away of society's misfits than anything approaching care and development. Amongst the brutal brick establishments of Victorian asylums, the inhabitants somehow manage to hold their dignity and spirit together, aided in part by a mythical being known only as the Skallagrigg, and of whose sublte interventions on their behalf Arthur tells - how unseen and unrealised, he comes when most needed, in forms most unexpected to shepherd them through periods of crisis. Hearing of this odd evanescent being, catching wisps and glimpses here and there, Esther somehow makes the connection with Arthur, seen in a photograph taken in an institution some half a century before, and resolves to research both his story and the tales of the Skallagrigg that all seem to lead back to him.

And what a search it is! Accompanied by a Downs syndrome boy, Tom, who is both carer and wise friend, she persues her goal with a fixity of purpose that is uncompromising of the damage it is doing her, the toll that exposure to so much suffering is exacting from her. And on the long journey we experience, along with Esther, moments of the most heart-rending sadness, moments of the most poignant grace, that it would take a harder heart than mine to read them without having a tear roll down a cheek. And at the end, the book, as well as telling you the most beautiful ugly story you will probably ever read, has given you a window into the world of disability, an understanding that you must expand your thinking on this subject, such that you cannot but emerge a different and better person for reading it.

Few books can do this for you. William Horwood's Skallagrigg is one of them.