A Country of Eternal Light – By Way of Introduction

By Paul Dalgarno

Grief is indiscriminate: we’re all destined to feel it for others and, if we’re lucky, have others feel it for us. In some ways it’s mundane, as sure as taxes but without even the prospect of clever accounting tricks to temper our losses.

Like debt, it’s also subject to compound interest – our sadness for one spectre joined by sorrow for those that went before, a pile-on of grief that, sooner or later, steals the spring from our step and holds us, kicking, under the water: a lonely and individual experience that chimes with, but doesn’t replicate, anyone else’s.

In writing about grief, as I do in A Country of Eternal Light, I tried to hold those twin realities close: grief as intensely personal and intently universal.

Alongside so-called ‘normal’ grief, there’s a pick-n-mix of adjustment disorders, including what psychologists like to refer to as ‘complicated grief’, a variation 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 can also manifest when you’re unable, through circumstance or volition, to see a loved one’s inanimate body or attend their funeral.

Since moving from Scotland to Australia in 2010, I’ve had three versions of this last type: 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 us hugging and saying ‘I love you’, and me 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. In other words: she was (in fact, all three of them were) still full of life.

Enter complicated grief: I take it as given that those loved ones are gone because I took the dreaded phone calls at ominous hours and fell apart on cue, but I haven’t seen definitive proof, meaning that 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. Like Victor Frankenstein (Shelley’s novel and its themes are stitched like a monster through Margaret’s tale) she’s interested in, if a little baffled by, her unwitting contemplations on the spark of existence.  

She’s recounting her day-to-day from the early 2020s, revisiting some experiences she was there for the first time around, some she was alive for but wasn’t privy to, and others from the months and years after her death. I should point out that they’re 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 space.

Some early reviewers have described the novel as a ‘ghost story’ and I suppose that’s a useful shorthand. But, to my mind, Margaret’s not a ghost – she’s simply alive and dead.

Margaret isn’t my mum, but she is inspired by her, hence the dedication – For June – 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 being alive, as did my mum.

Margaret is likewise inspired by my paternal gran, who – like 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 the many people who shine as brightly as they did without even realising it.

Margaret, like those 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 (mainly healthy) states throughout the years. She also, increasingly, has the sense that there’s something she’s forgotten, either by accident or design.

Lots of people have told me they cried heaps reading the book (as I did writing it, so no judgement here) 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 nor should it be. Readers have their own bittersweet memories to draw on, as they should.

The way forward for me wasn’t to go too deeply into grief in its particulars, the multifaceted maelstrom of it, but to have it as the stage and backdrop. We know Margaret is dead by the middle of the first sentence – unlike in real life, her demise is no surprise. Establishing that from the get-go allowed me to focus less on pain and much more on what gives grief its power and often frightening dimensions.

I was – and still am – working on the assumption that the memories that keep resurfacing when a loved one dies follow no obvious chronology and hardly ever feature what might be thought of as grand Shakespearean gestures. They’re much more likely to be the low-key, 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, and that those moments were the stuff of life and love.    

A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno is published by Polygon on 3 August 2023. Buy it here.

This article was published in The Scotsman on 18 July 2023, with the headline: For those who are gone, but not forgotten.