Burnt Offerings
It is 1589, and King James VI of Scotland believes himself to have been the victim of witchcraft. This leads to a frenetic routing out of crones and sorceresses, and one of those caught up in the mayhem is Besse Craw. She is the daughter of a healer and the wife of an unreliable and brutal man who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. When Besse is taken to Edinburgh’s Tolbooth prison, she finds herself fighting not just for her own life, but also for her mother, her daughter and her unborn child.
Burnt Offerings is based on true events. Besse is a fictional character, but her mother is the all-too-real Agnes Sampson, a midwife and healer who was at the centre of the notorious North Berwick witch trials. No grisly detail is spared: we follow several unfortunate women (and one man) who are tortured and put to death in the most appalling manner. It all builds up a picture of a world in which women have little power, living in fear of men and subject to their whims. As the narrator notes, charges of witchcraft are sometimes random, and an accused woman could be ‘guilty of nothing more than fending off the advances of men’.
I felt that the author could have made more of the metaphor of the loaded dice, in this context as applicable to the witch hunter as to the gambling den. And, although there is a strong dose of realism in this novel, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the characters of the two men in Besse’s life, or by the events leading to the story’s conclusion. However, the book will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about this shameful period of history.
