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A review by erica_lynn_huberty
The Story Keeper E/a/I by Anna Mazzola
5.0
Much can be made of the stories people have been telling themselves since the dawn of humanity. Ask any anthropologist how people thought the Earth was created, and you will get a list featuring everything from sea turtles with omnipotent powers to two naked humans living in a magical garden. Why these fables came to be is another question all together, and there remains the question of why some of us still believe them, even in our modern age of reason. With great poignancy these questions are posed—and sometimes answered—in Anna Mazzola’s second excellent novel “The Storykeeper.” In particular, the Gaelic traditions originating in the Isle of Sky, a small cluster of landmasses off the west coast of Scotland, are the crux from which human beliefs and behaviors are dictated, or adopted to explain the unfathomable.
Also a lawyer in London, Mazzola has a solicitor’s mind for facts and the nuances of human behavior, which serves her tales well—the hidden clues and reveals are speckled throughout “The Story Keeper,” unfolding at just the right moments. Her debut, “The Unseeing,” was based on a true case of an early-Victorian woman accused of murdering her lover’s wife. Equally gritty and atmospheric, this current novel follows folklorist Audrey Hart, who runs from London high society in 1857 to the place where she summered as a child and where her mother—also a fable collector—died years before. There are eerie parallels to the modern-day #metoo movement in Audrey’s past, though they are of course the sort of debacles women have been negotiating for eons. The expectation of the Victorian “good girl” (no men’s work for her, she is all about the proper etiquette, the right dress and hair, the right tone of voice) haunts Audrey, and she is as ill-suited for it as the lower-class crofter women on the island. Oppressed by the British aristocracy, these women have had their lands taken, their husbands and fathers butchered, their children vanished. All they have left is their stories and the power of their belief in them.
The plot of “The Story Keeper” is straight-forward enough—an outsider becomes embroiled in a mystery involving missing girls in a strange, Gothic land where nearly everyone could be a suspect—but it is layered with the eerie uncommon. Swooping black clouds of birds appear in the sky foretelling doom, or nothing at all; men are never to be trusted, until they have to be; claustrophobic manors and dangerous cliffs abound, yet they feel more like home to Audrey than the comfortable home she’s run from; and orphan girls parrot the ancient tales instead of revealing what has really happened to them, though it is entirely possible they believe these myths with all their heart. Also entirely possible: that they are not myth, but truth.
Also a lawyer in London, Mazzola has a solicitor’s mind for facts and the nuances of human behavior, which serves her tales well—the hidden clues and reveals are speckled throughout “The Story Keeper,” unfolding at just the right moments. Her debut, “The Unseeing,” was based on a true case of an early-Victorian woman accused of murdering her lover’s wife. Equally gritty and atmospheric, this current novel follows folklorist Audrey Hart, who runs from London high society in 1857 to the place where she summered as a child and where her mother—also a fable collector—died years before. There are eerie parallels to the modern-day #metoo movement in Audrey’s past, though they are of course the sort of debacles women have been negotiating for eons. The expectation of the Victorian “good girl” (no men’s work for her, she is all about the proper etiquette, the right dress and hair, the right tone of voice) haunts Audrey, and she is as ill-suited for it as the lower-class crofter women on the island. Oppressed by the British aristocracy, these women have had their lands taken, their husbands and fathers butchered, their children vanished. All they have left is their stories and the power of their belief in them.
The plot of “The Story Keeper” is straight-forward enough—an outsider becomes embroiled in a mystery involving missing girls in a strange, Gothic land where nearly everyone could be a suspect—but it is layered with the eerie uncommon. Swooping black clouds of birds appear in the sky foretelling doom, or nothing at all; men are never to be trusted, until they have to be; claustrophobic manors and dangerous cliffs abound, yet they feel more like home to Audrey than the comfortable home she’s run from; and orphan girls parrot the ancient tales instead of revealing what has really happened to them, though it is entirely possible they believe these myths with all their heart. Also entirely possible: that they are not myth, but truth.