Lizzie Craig has a gift: She sees “pictures” of events before they take place. It happens first when she’s 10, with a vision in which her grandfather’s scythe slips from a whetstone and injures his leg. It’s the tail end of the 19th century in Fife, rural Scotland, where Lizzie is brought up by her grandparents on Belhaven Farm. Her pictures, more often than not, are premonitions of accidents and disasters: a hurt leg, a wheel coming off a cart, a tree hit by lightning. They tend to arrive “a few weeks before the accident,” giving Lizzie time to prepare, and sometimes, intervene accordingly.
That’s the magical concept behind the Scottish writer Margot Livesey’s new novel, “The Road From Belhaven.” But the book is not a tale of supernatural intrigue and suspense. Lizzie keeps her gift secret, anticipating disapproval after she witnesses her grandmother’s reaction to a visiting fortuneteller. “We all want to know the future,” she says, “but only God can know what’s coming. It’s the devil tempting us when we try to find out.” Similarly, the novel sidelines the supernatural; Lizzie’s visions appear occasionally to kick-start various plot points but otherwise the story focuses on a familiar and subtle historical coming-of-age story.
The book follows Lizzie through youth and young adulthood. She is preternaturally sweet, and growing up, she wants nothing more than to inherit her grandparents’ farm and care for them in their old age. As a child, she attends the local school, reads Lewis Carroll, helps at home and is praised for her skill at drawing. As a teenager, she watches her older sister bloom into sexual curiosity, tell lies, desire adventures and covet what others have. But Lizzie experiences few of these adolescent eruptions herself, later reflecting, non-euphemistically, that “she had thought nothing mattered besides plowing a straight furrow.”
It’s naïveté, rather than lust, that leads her to have premarital sex with Louis, a friend of her family’s farmhand and an apprentice tailor, when Lizzie is a young adult. She first meets him when he comes to work at Belhaven for the summer and, smitten, she eventually follows him to Glasgow, where she finds work and lodgings. Not knowing about sexual precautions, Lizzie becomes pregnant while an increasingly evasive Louis swears he will marry her when he finishes his apprenticeship. “Soon we’ll have our own home, not a blanket on the floor.” Lizzie is initially happy to wait, but a series of visions changes everything, setting her on a course that will shape not only her life, but the lives of those around Belhaven.
The contrast between Lizzie’s childlike innocence and her status as a fallen woman offers rich material for an immersive and emotionally complex narrative. At every turn, it seems, all Lizzie’s options end in sacrifice — family estrangement, relationship breakdown, separation from her child. Yet Lizzie often appears to recite her despair and emotions, rather than experience them. The third-person narration, often charmingly populated with historical detail, exposition and dialogue, leaves little space for Lizzie’s interiority to develop on the page. This makes for tricky reading, because “The Road From Belhaven” seems like an ode to 19th-century character-driven novels. But “Belhaven” is lacking either a contemporary reflexivity or an urgency that would propel us through the emotional tribulations of its heroine.
Lizzie’s emotional remoteness seems compounded by certain narrative omissions. Violence and destitution are only occasionally glimpsed on the margins of her world as she paces the streets of Glasgow, a stone’s throw from slums, brothels and poorhouses. The novel breezes in the span of just a few pages from Lizzie learning she is pregnant to the sudden appearance of her daughter months later, a choice that sidesteps potential sources of physical, social and emotional tension, given the heightened risks of childbirth at the time and the added stigma of illegitimacy. (We briefly see Lizzie’s grandfather’s rage and disappointment when he learns Lizzie is expecting, but that’s about it.) Lizzie’s “pictures” merely steer the plot, and are never explored beyond their surface. The novel doesn’t mine them for their supernatural potential, nor for the danger they put Lizzie in as a lower-class woman with occult powers.
Lacking intensity or suspense, Livesey’s novel is most accomplished in its presentation of history. The story brims with vivid observations of 19th-century Scottish life. A skilled draftswoman, Lizzie finds work as a locomotive tracer. There’s also a rich evocation of the era’s cultural tapestry, including the local Celtic-Rangers rivalry and the influence of literature such as “Kidnapped” and “Jane Eyre.” Yet there’s a sense that the novel’s deluge of historical detail is present to compensate for the lack of drama or atmosphere.
“The Road From Belhaven” is Victorian Scotland seen through heather-tinted spectacles, and its heroine is unfortunately wrapped in a layer of narrative cotton wool. Livesey has landed on an intriguing premise, but I felt myself yearning for something to help the book’s emotional arrows land. Without that, the novel risks reading like a sketch, awaiting embellishment and texture to bring it alive.
THE ROAD FROM BELHAVEN | By Margot Livesey | Knopf | 259 pp. | $29
