When I last wrote about Nina Allan’s work for Strange Horizons, in 2019, I commented that she often uses the idea of parallel worlds, but in an oblique way. At the time, I was reviewing The Dollmaker, a book that stepped away from the science fiction for which Allan was mostly known, towards a kind of realism at the edge of fantasy. In her latest novel, A Granite Silence, Allan steps in a different direction again, as she turns her attention to a historical murder case. Although this is a new subject among the author’s oeuvre, her interest in parallel worlds remains. Allan examines the murder as a network of intersecting, competing, and jostling stories: The many worlds that spiral out from one tragic event.
Allan describes how she comes across the case. She is on a train to Aberdeen (nicknamed the Granite City) with the idea to write a novel about a Russian emigré who settles there. But she is reading a book about Aberdeen murder cases and one in particular captures her imagination: That of eight-year-old Helen Priestly, who in 1934 was sent out by her mother to buy bread and was never seen alive again. Helen’s body was found the next day, inside a bag placed in the lobby of her family’s tenement.
Right from the start, the question looms of whether it’s really Allan’s place to tell this story:
I tell myself … that I should be free to explore my growing compulsion to write about the case, to have opinions about both perpetrator and victim, to theorise about alternative outcomes or explanations.
At the same time, I know there is something disingenuous about the claim … the facts of what happened are still private property. […]
If I intend to blunder in, to trespass and to steal, I should at least acknowledge the intrusion for what it is. (pp. 22-3)
A Granite Silence effectively works through its own answer to this question of authority. Allan points out how historical knowledge may be contingent: For example, we know about the interior of a dwelling in Helen’s tenement, but only because photographs were taken during the murder investigation. Turn that around, and the crime scene photographs have intrinsic value as a unique source of evidence about that place. By extension, the greatest value of Allan’s telling may lie in its idiosyncrasy—and there is plenty of that.
Allan twists and sculpts her material in numerous ways which serve to undermine the idea of a single, authoritative account. These include small-scale things, such as spending a whole chapter focused on a creamware bowl from the killer’s home which had nothing to do with the case and was therefore overlooked by police—and others at a larger scale, for example fictional characters acting as proxy narrators and commentators on the Priestly case.
At one end, that bowl offers an alternative view of what gets classed as important. At the other, Susana—a fictionalized version of the Russian emigré about whom Allan originally anticipated writing a novel—steps into the story as a writer following the case at the time of the original investigation, and occasionally confers with Allan herself. There are also the frequent interventions of Allan’s authorial “I,” which underline the artifice of her project. And there’s also Pearl, a present-day crime writer whose fascination with the Helen Priestly case is at least in part displacement activity, so she doesn’t have to think about her brother Stewart, who has gone missing overseas.
What makes all this particularly notable is that Allan openly wonders on the page what might be troubling Pearl, then apparently devises Stewart’s story as she goes along. So there is a whole extra branch of story emerging here as one reads, forming and reforming, slipping in and out of reality. In this way, the killing of Helen Priestly attracts and accretes stories, beginning with the “dark man,” a figure made up by Ricky Sutton, a boy who lived down the road from her. Ricky’s tale gains its own momentum, and the police fixate on finding the dark man, until the boy owns up to his lie. It’s just one example of how Helen’s death has destabilized the normal run of life, allowing the extraordinary to creep in:
People gather together in crowds for no reason. Rumours rise on the wind like foul smells and then die down again. The city of Aberdeen, a stern and stolid place with little patience for fantasy, has become charged with an atmosphere of danger, the kind of tension that sullies the air before a fight breaks out. (p. 162)
The evidence eventually points to Jeannie Donald, a neighbor of the Priestlys. She is arrested and put on trial, where she refuses to speak in her own defense. One character likens her silence to “a slab of granite” (p. 194), which takes the novel’s title beyond a mere reference to its setting. It centers the book on the void created by Jeannie’s silence, and on attempts to fill that void. Donald stands out to observers not only for the details of Helen’s murder, but also for how her statement of what she did afterward shows an apparent disregard for the gravity of having killed a child. The question arises: What made Jeannie behave like this?
Inevitably, there is a gendered dimension to how this question is approached at the time. The courtroom is male-dominated: The defense counsel speaking for Jeannie, the experts giving evidence, the judge presiding are all men. One striking section of the novel focuses on the real-life pathologist John Glaister, and interweaves passages of him giving evidence at Jeannie’s trial (which he did) with a fictional account of his earlier life.
During the First World War, Glaister met an archaeologist named Edna McCrae, a woman who breaks the stereotypes of her day, and may even have access to a piece of alien technology. There is a parallel between how Glaister views both Edna and Jeannie as women outside of the norm. But Allan’s nod to science fiction underlines that all these supposed events are at a remove from reality, just by different degrees. Turn that thought around, though, and everything becomes real at some level. Allan comments that any “true” account has been selected by a subjective viewpoint, and any “fictional” account has lived in the mind of its creator, so both ultimately coexist:
Every true account – essays and journalism, media reportage, film footage, even personal letters – is in some sense fiction, the partial version of reality that is inevitably the product of the subjective mind. Every fiction is in some sense true, because it has actually taken place inside the head of its creator … Within the invented space of this narrative, the dark man has as much reality as Jeannie Donald’s parlour. (pp. 225-6)
John Glaister’s tale, as told by Allan, is a particularly conspicuous example of the real and the fictional blurring together, as it runs the gamut from a historical courtroom to the edge of science fiction. But A Granite Silence underlines that there are more mundane examples. A crime scene waits to be interpreted. Different versions of the truth vie for supremacy in a criminal trial. Historical accounts make their sources speak in different ways.
Jeannie Donald was found guilty of murder and initially sentenced to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment and she was eventually released in 1944. Fact and speculation come together in the novel here, as Allan presents contemporary newspaper accounts questioning why Jeannie has been granted a reprieve.
Allan’s own research then uncovers evidence that casts Jeannie in a different light, and the author tries to piece together Jeannie’s life after prison. At one point, she vividly imagines a sense of before and after for Jeannie:
When I think of Jeannie, I think of a life that was split in two by an act of violence, the old tail of itself discarded, a rotting piece of matter too repulsive to speak of. I think of the trauma Jeannie must have suffered and could never talk about. To feel your form bent out of shape to retain memories of those you loved but to have no right to see them. To see that whole back half of your life, dead and decomposing like a severed tail. (p. 292)
The sheer strength of this imagery highlights the novel’s theme of separate stories branching off from the same event. But it may also lead one to ask: What about Helen Priestly, who never got her own after, and scarcely even had a before? Allan ends A Granite Silence with a story-chapter that sets out a possible future for Helen, had she lived, and features Jeannie Donald as a figure from Helen’s past who may somehow have appeared again in her present. Of course, this does not change Helen’s fate in the real world. But it does open the novel out again, after apparently closing in on Jeannie’s trial. These stories have had their competition, and now there are more to be told.