A Country of Eternal Light: By Way Of Introduction:

Image copyright: Paul Dalgarno

By Paul Dalgarno

Grief happens to us all: we are destined to feel it for others and, if we’re lucky, have others feel it for us. In many ways it’s mundane, as sure as taxes, with no prospect of clever accountants or offshore havens to temper our losses. It’s also subject to compound interest, our grief for one spectre joined by grief for others, a pile-on of grief that, sooner or later, steals the spring from our step and holds us, kicking, under the water.

In writing about grief, as I do in A Country of Eternal Light, I tried to hold those two truths close: our grief is intensely personal and impeccably universal.

It comes in different shades, of course, the many hues of so-called ‘normal grief’, a pick-n-mix of adjustment disorders, and what psychologists like to refer to as ‘complicated grief’. The complicated kind is most often set in motion by specific situations: losing someone before what we think of as ‘their time’ is one – a child, say, or an athlete in the prime of their life. It’s also common when you’re unable, through emotional or physical circumstance, to see a loved one’s inanimate body or attend their funeral.

Since moving from Scotland to Australia in 2010, I’ve had three instances of this: with my maternal gran in 2012 (at which point I had no money to return for the funeral); my mum in 2014 (a few days after me visiting her for three weeks in Aberdeen); and my maternal grandad (who died during the Covid travel restrictions in 2021).

Thankfully, my last encounters with each involved me saying ‘I love you’ and seeing them in comparatively good cheer. My mum, just before she died, drove me to Aberdeen airport and stood by her car waving and smiling as I – reluctantly – backed into the terminal to catch my flights back to Australia.

Hence complicated grief: I take it as fact those loved-ones are dead but I haven’t seen the proof, and somehow, illogically, for me, they’re still alive.

Like my mum, the narrator of A Country of Eternal Light, Margaret Bryce, has been dead since 2014. She’s recounting her story from the early 2020s, revisiting scenes from a life she already lived through, some she wasn’t present for the first time around, and some from the days, months and years after she died. I should point out that these are not recollections from beyond the grave: she’s literally returning to those times, meaning in some scenes we have both Living Margaret and Dead Margaret sharing the stage. To my mind, she’s not a ghost – rather, she’s alive and dead.

Margaret isn’t my mum, but she is inspired by her, hence the dedication to my mum on the opening page. Margaret worked at the Aberdeen Telephone Exchange as a ‘hello girl’, as did my mum; Margaret put her own happiness on hold for what she believed was the good of her family, as did (I wish she hadn’t) my mum; Margaret died at a relatively young age, when there was still so much that intrigued and excited her about life, as did my mum.

Margaret is likewise inspired by my paternal gran, who – alongside my mum – was a major friend, teacher and ally to me growing up. My gran was the first person at Foresterhill Hospital in Aberdeen to successfully birth triplets (who consequently became local celebrities known as the Dalgarno Triplets). Margaret, meanwhile, has twin daughters: Eva, who we see in Madrid, living and teaching at an international school, and Rachel, who lives in Melbourne with her wife, Gem, and their two children, William and Ewan.

My paternal gran, in addition to raising the triplets and my dad, and working in the Aberdeen fish yards, was also a great reader: Salman Rushdie, John Milton, Barbara Cartland, and whatever else took her fancy. Like my maternal grandad, who taught himself to speak fluent Spanish from library tapes and built TVs for his neighbours for free in an era when few people had one, she was an autodidact, for no other reason than she was curious about, and engaged with, the world.

When I’d visit her weekly during my university years, she (and others in my family) would rehearse variations of ‘I’d have loved to go to university if I’d only had the brains’. I’d try – in vain, I think, to point out the bleeding obvious: that they were at least as smart as anyone I’d come across at university, myself included; that the reason they didn’t have those opportunities had nothing to do with their IQ or eagerness to learn and everything to do with class structure, social expectations and (as a result) self-perception about their ‘station’ in life. Margaret Bryce is my tribute to them and to all people like them who shine so brightly without even realising it.

Margaret, like the loved ones she leaves behind, is also grieving. The loss of her daughters to their lives overseas; the steep decline in what had once been a loving and perfectly passable marriage to her husband, Henry; her body in its various states throughout the years; and also, increasingly, something she senses she’s forgotten either by accident or choice.

Lots of people have told me they cried heaps reading the book (as I did writing it), but also that they laughed a lot and fell in love with the characters. I think I might know why that is.

My personal grief isn’t the subject of this novel, and that feels right and proper. Readers will have their own bittersweet memories to draw on. The way forward for me wasn’t to write about grief in its particulars, the clawing, multifaceted emotion of it, but to have it as the foundation stone. We know Margaret is dead by the middle of the first sentence – unlike in real life, her demise comes as no surprise. Establishing that from the get-go allowed me to focus less on sorrow and much more on the very thing that gives grief its power and often frightening dimensions.

I was – and still am – working on the assumption that the memories that keep returning to us when a loved-one dies are rarely the grand Shakespearean gestures. It’s much simpler than that. They’re more likely the basic, everyday, distracted times we shared with each other in gardens, on school runs and over dinner tables, with barely a sense that we were miraculous, that everything was temporary, that those moments were the stuff of life and love.   

A Country of Eternal Light is published by Polygon Books. This article was published in The Scotsman on 18 July 2023.