Wild Harbour

Ian MacPherson

Jul 2010 · Canongate Books

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Introduced by John Burns. This is the world of universal future war. Faced with the threat of bombs, bacteriological warfare and poison gas, a married couple whose pacifism compels them to opt out of ‘civilisation’, take to the hills to live as fugitives in the wild. Plainly and simply told, Wild Harbour charts the practical difficulties, the successes and failures of living rough in the beautiful hills of remote Speyside. In this respect the book belongs to a tradition of Scottish fiction reflected in novels such as Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Buchan’s John Macnab. But it takes a darker and more contemporary turn, for although Hugh and his wife Terry learn to fend for themselves, they cannot escape from what the world has become. Their brief summer idyll is brought to an end as the forces of random and meaningless violence close over them. Written in 1936, Wild Harbour has lost none of its relevance in a post-nuclear age, nor its power to move and to shock.

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Ian Macpherson (1905-1944), was born in Forres and educated at Newtonmore, Laurencekirk and Mackie Academy, Stonehaven. He graduated from Aberdeen University in 1928 with a first class honours degree in English. He spent the next two years writing his first novel Shepherd's Calendar which was published in 1931. The book, which has been compared t Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song, draws on his own rural background to tell of a young man's growth to maturity in a farming community dominated by hard toil and the influence of the seasons. Macpherson continued to live in his native north east, working at farming, broadcasting and writing. In the next five years he produced three further novels, including Land of our Fathers (1933), and Pride in the Valley (1936), which are set in Speyside. His last book, Wild Harbour (1936) is also set in the Highlands but it tells the story of a world destroyed by a future war, forebodings of which were already discernable in Europe. Ian Macpherson died in a motorcycle accident in 1944.