The Wicker Man: A Novel Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter I - Saturday – the 28th of April

  Chapter II - Sunday – the 29th of April

  Chapter III - Sunday Night – the 29th of April

  Chapter IV - Monday Morning – the 30th of April

  Chapter V - Afternoon – the 30th of April

  Chapter VI - Evening – the 30th of April

  Chapter VII - Night – of April 30th

  Chapter VIII - The Wee Small Hours – of the 1st of May

  Chapter IX - Dawn – on May Day

  Chapter X - May Day – Morning

  Chapter XI - May Day – Afternoon

  Chapter XII - May Day – Evening

  Chapter XIII - Sunset – on May Day

  Copyright

  FOR

  Peter and Paul and Christopher

  Man is born to believe. And if no church

  comes forward with its title-deeds of truth,

  sustained by the tradition of sacred ages and

  by the conviction of countless generations to

  guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart

  and his own imagination.

  BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  Introduction

  THIS BOOK, THE NOVEL OF THE WICKER MAN, THE script for which was written by Anthony Shaffer, is a curious artefact. Many films produce literary spin-offs, but more often than not these are hack jobs, souvenirs, vestigial remnants of the days before videotape allowed enthusiasts to possess their own personal copies of films. Rarely, if ever, do film novelizations add to or augment our appreciation of the film in question. Which is why this book is so unusual. In many ways it extends and amplifies the issues on which the film meditates, fills in the gaps. In the process it creates something that is often more compendious, more nuanced, than the film which inspired it.

  The novel’s existence owes much to the savage treatment its cinematic big brother received on its first release. Made as a top-line feature, The Wicker Man ignominiously ended up a B-movie, and a poorly distributed one at that. Between being commissioned and finally arriving in cinemas, The Wicker Man suffered a chain of calamity, not least of which was a reshuffle at the upper echelon of British Lion films. Peter Snell, the studio’s managing director and The Wicker Man’s greatest supporter, was replaced at the top by one Michael Deeley as British Lion prepared itself to be absorbed by the EMI corporation. It is common for incoming studio bosses to treat the output of their predecessors with something less than reverence, and such proved the case here, compounded no doubt by the fact that The Wicker Man was a most difficult film to classify in terms of genre. Deeley pronounced the finished product execrable and refused it a solo release; after some drastic vivisection in the cutting room, it was paired off with Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and sent on a despondent tour of the provinces.

  At this point, most of those involved in any film would be prepared to write the thing off as having been born under a bad sign and leave it there. But Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man’s director (previously he had been involved with Anthony Shaffer in Hardy Shaffer Associates, a company which produced television commercials), was reluctant to see the film wither on the bough. He had also been involved in researching the pagan legend and lore which adorns Shaffer’s script.

  He eventually had the opportunity to put this learning to constructive use. In 1977, the film was discovered by a pair of New Orleans-based cineastes, who were developing a movie distribution venture. The Wicker Man became their pet project; they set about restoring the version which Hardy had made and securing for it high-profile exhibition on the west coast of America. Hardy, meanwhile, had added literature to the quiver of his talents, and he set about adapting Shaffer’s script as a novel (Hardy says he had already commenced work on a Wicker Man novel prior to the completion of Shaffer’s script). The resultant novel would not only help promote the resurrected film, it would sketch a richer portrait of Summerisle than was allowed in a 102-minute cinema feature. (The advance funds which Hardy received for the book also came in handy, and were ploughed into various legal skirmishes connected to restoring and re-releasing the film.)

  Whatever its genesis, the Wicker Man novel will fascinate all lovers of the film, particularly those whose interest lies in the fact that The Wicker Man was among the first mainstream features to use religious faith as subject matter. Indeed, the novel seems to have been written to elaborate on such matters to an extent that would have been impossible in a commercial movie. It also has sufficient space to reveal how inspired Shaffer and Hardy were by the same matter as The Golden Bough (subtitle: A Study in Magic and Religion), James Frazer’s herculean study of folk mythology that was published in twelve volumes between 1890 and 1936. The children who carry death out of the village; the rites of parthenogenesis practised over a blazing fire by Miss Rose’s girls; the foreskins in the chemist’s jar; the frog in Myrtle’s throat; the pregnant women transferring their fertility to the apple blossom trees; the checklist of qualities (willing, king-like, virginal and foolish) which make Sergeant Howie ‘the right kind of adult’ to be sacrificed–all of these and many others echo the motifs explored in the pages of The Golden Bough. Hardy in the novel also transplants to Summerisle the classic myth which gave Frazer’s book its title. In the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, Italy, a grim figure was seen to patrol night and day. He was a priest and a murderer. To be succeeded he had to be killed, hence his anxious vigil. In this myth are the seeds of all Western cultural archetypes. In The Wicker Man, a similar scene is played out in a sacred grove near to Summerisle’s castle.

  Atop the foundations of Shaffer’s script Hardy built a roccoco edifice adorned with religious detail and debate. We discover more about the troubled background of Sergeant Neil Howie. He had failed in his attempt to become a priest, daunted by the challenge of preaching his minority faith, Episcopalianism, in the staunchly Presbyterian Highlands of Scotland. We see his broader range; Howie as a man and as a partner to the hapless Mary Bannock, and we see him as a figure more rounded, more formidable, than the pious, ramrod-straight cipher familiar from the film.

  His jousting with Summerisle also has more impact than it has in the film, where considerations of audience tolerance limited their exchanges to something only slightly more than bickering. When we consider Lord Summerisle here, we might even say the novel is more effective than the film. It had been Shaffer’s intention in writing The Wicker Man to argue that no brand of religious faith has a greater claim to authenticity than any other; all religious faiths are merely social constructs–culturally determined ways of living. The corollary of this is that all faiths are equal. The battle between Howie and Summerisle should for both men be from a standing start.

  In the film, however, Howie has an added advantage: he isn’t played by Christopher Lee. No audience watching The Wicker Man would be unaware of the baggage Lee brought to his role: he had played Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy. From the outset the assumption would have been that Summerisle was on the side of wrong. So the film became unbalanced in favour of the Christian consensus, becomes a conventional battle between good and evil. In the novel, Summerisle is shorn of such associations; the battle is more ambivalent, more unsettling–and, in the end, perhaps more in keeping with the treacherous moral landscape Shaffer initially envisioned.

  Allan Brown

  Glasgow

  February 2000

  CHAPTER I

  Saturday–

  the 28th of April

  HOWIE WATCHED THE BIRD CLOSELY THROUGH HIS BINOCULARS. The eagle rose from her nest with hard strokes
from her heavy, damasked wings. The outer, primary feathers looked like thrusting fingers as they forced the air downward. Then the whole bird left Howie’s field of vision.

  He saw a single, startled eaglet left in the nest; its sharp, wobbly, little head craning to follow its mother’s ascent. Surprised to see only one chick, he focused hard on the nest, looking for any sign of another. Howie was rewarded by being able to glimpse just the upper edge of an egg, half concealed by the eagle’s down its mother had left around it, keeping it warm.

  Neil Howie took the binoculars away from his eyes and stared at the mountainside below the eagles’ eyrie. Treeless and bleak, the rolling foothills of gaunt Ben Sluie stretched like an ocean swell of purple heather towards the craggy, limestone face of the mountain. Beyond was a strip of indigo sea capped by the fleeced heads of waves, choppy in the easterly wind that blew from mainland Scotland, whose hilly coast was the merest smudge on the horizon. Interrupting the gentle undulations of the heathered hills was a single pile of huge, oblong rocks perched on one of their summits. They looked like the tumbled pillars of an ancient edifice but seemed, on closer inspection, to be so eccentrically shaped as to have been, quite by hazard, strewn there through some geological accident. Here two rare golden eagles had chosen to nest.

  Howie wished, as he vainly searched the landscape for what had startled the brooding mother, that they had chosen a safer place. Yet nothing seemed to be moving in the heather below the nest. Saint Ninian’s Isle, in late April, was still fairly free of tourists and the area around Ben Sluie was six roadless miles from the ferry to the mainland. But Howie had been warned. There was someone abroad who planned to rob the nest.

  ‘Still can’t see anyone!’ he said to Mary Bannock, his fiancée, who lay beside him in a thick patch of green, spring bracken, a safe distance from the eagles’ eyrie.

  ‘Will you look at her now, Neil? She’s surely seen something to disturb her!’ Mary’s soft, Highland Scots voice was pitched deliberately low. Neil Howie had taught her, when they had started their birdwatching together, that the creatures were less likely to hear a human voice that used a lower register. Just as humans could not hear the higher notes of a songbird unless they recorded them mechanically and played them back at a slower speed. The eagle was too far away to hear her, of course, but speaking in low tones was a ‘drill’ they practised when out ‘birding’. And birding was one of the activities that Mary and Neil most enjoyed doing together. Lying on the bed of bracken that served them as their own eyrie, they had laid out sandwiches and a Thermos. For, today, theirs was a waiting game.

  Howie looked up at the eagle, soaring now on the warm air currents that rose from the earth after a day of sunshine, her head poised watchfully over territory she considered her own. He knew that someone must be there. For there was only one predator that could threaten a golden eagle on Saint Ninian’s Isle, and that was ‘man’.

  ‘Aye, I think this is it, Mary,’ agreed Howie slowly. ‘Will you look carefully to the right of the nest there, love. In the heather. Take the foreground first, then the middle distance, then the distance … working away from the nest, d’you see? I’ll do the same on the other side. And keep your head down, love. If chummy’s out there, I don’t want him to see us!’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant!’ she said, and there was the faintest hint of rebellious sarcasm in her voice, but she did as she was bid using the shiny, new binoculars he had given her for her birthday. ‘Her Neil’, as she had thought of him since the day they had become engaged, was, after all, a sergeant of the West Highland Constabulary, responsible for one of the largest police precincts in Scotland and, in matters such as this, worthy of being obeyed.

  Nor was her pride in him misplaced. At twenty-six his bailiwick consisted of one not-so-small town, Portlochlie, on the mainland, and some nine populated islands stretching westward far out into the Atlantic.

  Mary searched the territory she had been allotted carefully, but could see nothing suspicious. The eagle was still hovering watchfully, but now quite high over the nest.

  ‘If there was anyone hiding there in the heather, wouldn’t she dive at him?’ she asked.

  ‘Not dive … you say “stoop”,’ corrected Howie without answering her question. He continued his meticulous search of the landscape.

  She sighed. When he was after ‘chummy’, which she knew was police slang for the ‘wanted criminal’, he was as hard to distract as a hunting dog that thinks it has found the ‘scent’.

  ‘Maybe she’s just searching for a wee bit o’ food,’ said Mary mischievously, adding, ‘or maybe she’s “searching for haddock’s eyes amongst the heather bright … To make them into waistcoat buttons in the silent night”?’

  ‘Lewis Carroll,’ he said automatically, participating in another favourite game in which his schoolteacher fiancée won more often than not.

  ‘It’s my teatime, I know that!’ said Mary, and she undid the plastic cup on the Thermos. ‘And I think she’s just after feeding her bairn.’

  ‘No, her mate’s away hunting for food. You’re forgetting him,’ Howie reminded her quietly. He shivered slightly. ‘It’s getting cold. She’ll be wanting to get back to brooding that eaglet. You were right first time, love. Something … and someone, most like, disturbed her.’

  Mary looked curiously at her Neil as he patiently searched the hills through his binoculars. She allowed herself the luxury, as she sipped some strong, sweet tea, to stare at his profile and love it, detail by detail. His tanned outdoorsman’s face had planes and surfaces that reminded her of the physical map in an atlas. Ben Howie she’d nicknamed his rather prominent, aquiline nose–‘Ben’ being Gaelic for mountain. She noticed that his eyes crinkled with the concentration of gazing through the binoculars, but they crinkled, she thought, into the same laughter lines that came with his frequent smile. She wanted to put her hand out and feel the soft, brown hair that curled slightly at the nape of his neck. She loved the eagerness and passion of her policeman who spoke in such a fatherly, husbandly way of eagles. Yet, it saddened her that they had now been engaged for three years and he had still not asked her to name the day. Still had not attempted to make love to her. She longed to ask him why but could never find the words. When it pricked her pride that he might not find her as attractive as she would wish, then she reminded herself of his Christian principles. How could she (and why should she), a well-brought-up Presbyterian girl, try to force this good, kind man into sex before marriage? Or so she persuaded herself. Even though the ache of this incompleteness in their relationship sometimes seemed intolerable.

  His passionate nature Neil Howie showed her in so many other ways. In his love of birds. In the quiet, but incandescent joy his religion gave him. In the deep involvement with the quality of justice that he brought to his police work. Mary knew that these were not really separate facets of her Neil but logically, spiritually linked parts of the whole man. Knowing the law, in Christian Scotland, to be based on the teachings of Christ, he saw his work, in the police, as an opportunity to give a practical expression to his faith and convictions. What her Presbyterian church called ‘bearing witness’ and what his Episcopalian church called ‘living your life in Christ’. His love of birds, for instance, he expressed practically, not sentimentally, and yet he had told Mary that birds, their lives, their beauty, and the many mysteries still attached to them (that baffled scientific explanation), all this was, to him, an endless reminder of the wonder of God’s creation. Neil Howie used his knowledge of the creatures, and his power as a policeman, to watch over them and, wherever he lawfully could, to protect their environment.

  He rested his eyes for a moment and took a sip of hot tea while Mary gazed watchfully towards the mountain.

  ‘There’s another bird!’ she cried suddenly, entirely forgetting their voice drill. ‘It’s coming from Ben Sluie. Could it be the male?’

  ‘It won’t be any other bird. Not on an eagle’s territory,’ said Howie, searching the sky where Ma
ry was pointing. Then he found the bird and refocused his binoculars fast.

  ‘That’s him all right. Och, will you look at the speed of him, Mary! But he’s still quite high. Wait till you see him stoop. More than a hundred miles an hour they can do when they stoop. If chummy’s out there hidden in one of those ravines in the heather, this’ll be a grand way to winkle him out,’ and Howie spoke as if he identified strongly with the male eagle about to stoop on the wrongdoer.

  The female eagle was slowly descending towards her nest while her mate slowed his approach and hovered high over the eyrie. Then suddenly he seemed to fall out of the sky, diving tangentially towards a fold in the hillside below the pile of rocks and the nest.

  ‘Dear God!’ exclaimed a surprised Howie. ‘The bastard’s only a hundred feet from the nest. He must have …’

  Howie had no time to finish his sentence, for a man stood up in the heather pointing a shotgun straight at the diving eagle. The two watchers could see the man’s shoulder take the kick from firing the gun before they heard the shot. But the blast echoed all around the hills when the sound came, and it was followed by a second shot an instant later. The stone crags of Ben Sluie seemed to answer with a fusillade of echoes.

  Then the diving eagle hit the man, knocking him out of Neil and Mary’s sight.

  ‘Mary, get, as fast as you can, to the telephone at Taskpool!’ said Howie. ‘Call the police station in Portlochlie and tell them I want two officers on the very next ferry. Tell them chummy’s armed, right now. They’ll get the magistrate’s permission to use a gun, if we need it.’ He saw her anxious face. ‘But we won’t, we won’t! So don’t worry!’ he added urgently.

  Mary hesitated. Howie was already sprinting out of the bracken and across the heather towards the spot where both eagle and man had disappeared. She felt she had to just ‘register’ his departing body in her mind’s eye. The thick shoulders, tapering waist, and long legs of her Neil in his raw wool sweater and faded jeans. How absurd of him, she thought, to say ‘don’t worry’.