AudioBooksReview: Lewis Trilogy

read by Steve Worsley

Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy has for good reason drawn praise for its enviable prose – the vivid descriptions, almost palpable atmosphere – and for its psychological and emotional depths. In The Blackhouse, May brings maturity and grandeur to the crime novel that remind us of some of the greatest of Scots storytellers. This is certainly more literature than pulp – full of dark truths that make it at the same time compelling and disturbing. And any avid reader will celebrate the added power brought to the audiobook by the narrator Steve Worsley.

It will be a rare listener who is not drawn in by the setting, the characters, the plot, the denouement. There are two murders with similar MOs – the first in Edinburgh, where former Lewis man police detective Fin Macleod is living, having recently lost his young son in a hit and run accident, a second on the Isle of Lewis, which is why Macleod is sent to investigate. His local knowledge will be invaluable, and it will take his mind off his own bereavement.

But Macleod’s return to where he grew up stirs up more than simply memories of his boyhood. There are more profound revelations, including the existence of a teenaged son, Fionnlagh, born to the girl he fell in love with when they met at primary school and who followed him to the mainland where they began at the university. Fionnlagh, like Fin before him, is set to make the treacherous annual voyage to a far-off rock in the middle of the sea to cull and bring back the gugga seabirds that are still prized as delicacies by the locals. The Blackhouse of the title is the only shelter on this awful place. When Fin made the trip, as a teenager himself, he almost lost his life after slipping on the guano-covered slopes of the island. And it is the long-incubated rivalry, envy and jealousy, having festered all the years since Finn’s distantly recalled accident, that finally reveal themselves in a dramatic climax to the novel. Only this time, Finn’s new-found son is going to pay for what ensued.

A modern classic.

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read by Peter Forbes

The Lewis Man is not to be dismissed simply as ‘crime fiction’, a label often associated with those last-minute grabs from mountainous piles at airport bookshops. The mise en scène of The Lewis Man might read at first like a murder thriller, but it is so much more. A corpse, which could have lain buried for thousands of years like the famous peat men of recent discovery and celebrity, is recovered from a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis, except that a tattoo of Elvis Presley visible on the darkened flesh makes the date of death much more pressing of enquiry, as do his injuries. And when DNA from the remains is matched to some recently taken from all the men on the island during the murder enquiry in the first Lewis novel, The Blackhouse, Former Detective Inspector Fin Macleod is drawn into the drama. It turns out the dead man is related to Tormod Macdonald, father of Fin’s childhood love Marsaili, whose house is overlooked by the ruin Fin is attempting to bring back to life.

Tormod is now an elderly man suffering from dementia, thrown out by his wife and rescued by Marsaili before he is found refuge in a care home. He always claimed to be an only child and, like many in the Islands, was fervently anti-Catholic. But we hear brief remembrances of his boyhood and upbringing in the small moments of lucidity in his deepening dementia; and we learn a different story – tragic, profound and moving – as Fin discovers the painful truth of Tormod’s relationship with the body buried in the peat, and their bitter experience of Scottish Roman Catholicism.

Peter May’s writing in the Lewis novels has a literary quality that makes these books equal to the best authors writing in English in the twenty-first century. And, arguably, his prose is even better in Peter Forbes’ reading, which is superb – sympathetic, dramatic and intense in all the right places: a true tour de force.

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Buy The Lewis Man

The Blackhouse by Peter May

The Lewis Man by Peter May