Women on the Scottish Coast, at the Whims of Male Violence

“If I were a woman I would give men a wide berth.”

A decent man says this in Evie Wyld’s wondrous and disturbing third novel, “The Bass Rock” — and with good reason. So many other men in the book are far less decent, and all too capable of closing even wide berths.

In one of the novel’s first scenes, a woman named Viviane is suddenly, aggressively approached in the parking lot of a grocery store by another woman, a stranger who’s treating her as an old friend. It’s late at night, and Viviane is made nervous by the woman’s energy. “Sorry, I’m not sure I know you,” Viviane tells her. “Yes,” the woman responds, keeping step beside her, “but pretend that you do, there’s a man hiding behind your car.”

In this small moment you find several of this book’s larger themes: a sense of impending violence; the base, shadowy havoc that is masculinity; the complications and saving graces of female companionship; cleverness in storytelling.

There are quite a number of plot points in this book, and a great deal of structural ingenuity, but let’s zoom out first. It’s more than enough, at least for me, for a novelist to write beautiful prose — observant, melodic, imaginative. And Wyld does this. It’s on display here from the very first paragraph:

“I was 6 and just the two of us, my mother and I, took Booey for a walk along the beach where she and Dad grew up, the shore a mix of black rock and pale cold sand. It was always cold — even in summer we wore wool jumpers and our noses ran and became scorched with wiping on our sleeves. But this was November, and the wind made the dog walk close to us, her ears flat, her eyes squinted. I could see the top layer of sand skittering away, so that it looked like a giant bedsheet billowing.”

That paragraph begins a two-page prologue. The woman narrating it tells us she found a suitcase on the shore that day, stuffed with the parts of a woman’s body.

“The Bass Rock” is that potentially dreadful thing, a timely novel, though its subject — the violence men inflict against women — is evergreen. And the perennial nature of that terror is very intentionally reflected in the book’s structure, which shuffles between three historical periods. Viviane, the woman in the parking lot, lives more or less in the current day. She’s nearing 40 but adrift in all the ways someone might be in their early 20s. She’s staying alone at her recently deceased grandmother’s house while it’s on the market to be sold, in North Berwick, a village on the eastern shore of Scotland. Just a couple of miles off the coast sits the stunning, steep island of volcanic rock from which the novel takes its title.

A few steps back in time is Ruth, Viviane’s grandmother, living in the house just after World War II. She’s married to a widower, Peter, who has two sons, and she’s having trouble adjusting to both her family dynamic and the boorish locals. In one set piece that moves from comic to deeply unnerving, she’s strong-armed into hosting the town’s annual winter picnic, which is mostly an excuse for the men to get some forceful groping in during an adults-only game of hide-and-seek.

The third narrative is told by Joseph, a boy living in the same area centuries ago whose father rescues a young girl named Sarah from being burned as a witch. While they’re on the run from the angry mob of villagers, Joseph sentimentally imagines a future for himself and Sarah. It doesn’t end well.

The book’s spirit feels most anchored in Ruth’s section, though Viviane’s is vital and provides most of the book’s oxygenating levity. Maggie, the stranger in the parking lot, becomes an unlikely friend to Viviane, even staying with her in the house for stretches of time. An occasional sex worker, Maggie dispenses withering opinions about men. “I trust a man who golfs less than a man who pays for sex,” she says.

A fourth element underscores the book’s theme: a series of vignettes inserted throughout, unspecified in time and place, most of them less than two pages. These are études about anonymous women over the years who were chased, locked up, left for dead.

Within these four branches are far too many details to attempt to cover in this space. Many are vividly drawn: the wicked vicar of Ruth’s story, for instance, who likes standing naked in bad weather at the water’s edge, “arms held high above him as though he were beckoning something down, as though he were conducting the storm.”

The Bass Rock’s presence — the occasional mention of it looming in the distance, enigmatic and forbidding — has the flavor of some moments in the films of Terrence Malick, when the formidable, sometimes unchanging presence of nature is made parallel with the cycles of human action and error and unrewarded hope. Our behavior may seem under our power, this worldview suggests, but it’s not really.

Birds in “The Bass Rock” pick at beached sharks, and at murdered humans. In one of the interstitial, dateless chapters, we see the aftermath of a woman’s violent death from the perspective of a passionless bird: “A jackdaw comes from its roost where it sees from the forest to the great rock in the sea, where it maybe saw the violence and waited, thinking in its bird’s brain how this is the nature of man and soon it will be over and soon there will be meat.”

All of this makes the book sound awfully grim, but the experience of reading it isn’t. The message it leaves you with — down to its expertly chilling final line — is certainly dark. But in delivering it, Wyld consistently entertains, juggling the pleasures of several different genres. There’s something alchemical in the way that, with hardly a clumsy step, she draws on elements of eerie natural horror (“like a memory of something dreadful in childhood, something from the woods”) and the supernatural (“Ruth awoke at around 3 in the morning, with the sensation that someone had sat on the edge of the bed and then crawled over her”) alongside any number of other motifs: postwar life; boarding schools; domestic drama; sibling drama; modern, quippy friendship.

There are literal ghosts in this book — the spirits of wronged girls and women. And if, toward the end, I felt that the novel’s spectral elements simmered on a heat that could be lowered by 20 percent or so, that’s simply personal taste. Wyld essentially pulls it off, the way she pulls off nearly everything.