Hex: Darkland Tales
At 12 noon on 4 December 1591, fifteen-year-old Geillis Duncan was hung as a witch in Edinburgh. She was one of over 70 people, mainly women and girls, who were implicated and executed in the North Berwick witch trials. In Jenni Fagan’s novel, Iris comes to Geillis from 2021, via a séance and astral travel, to hear her story of brutal torture on the last night of her short life. Geillis is Iris’s ancestor, and they hold ‘a conversation between witches across time’. The 11 short chapters of this slender book parcel out the half hours of the night as Geillis and Iris stave off the relentless approach of morning with accounts of themselves, and care for each other.
Geillis describes how her employer David Seaton and nine other local men accused and tortured her. She claims that Seaton wanted someone to denounce the heiress Euphame MacCalzean so that he could get his hands on her money. Euphame was burnt at the stake at the beginning of 1591, on the testimony of the brutalised Geillis. The vicious atmosphere of fear of women is stoked by King James. Iris tells Geillis that modern women are still being abused and killed, having their souls clipped, and bestowing their lives to this world, ‘most often unseen’. Geillis and Iris discuss how ‘women dim their light lest they be offensive to men’.
Fagan gives us extraordinary images, such as a vision of hundreds of witches sailing in cauldrons in Berwick Bay or a patchwork of flayed women’s skin breathing and pulsing on the ceiling of the dungeon. Silence is complicity, and Geillis tells the truth of Seaton’s motives and violence to a priest and calls it out to the crowd who have come to be entertained by the hangings, but nobody listens. Written in lucid prose, no word is wasted in this taut story. Hex is an extraordinary prose poem to the brutality, abuse, and repression of women through centuries to the present.
