Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63921 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-17
• Binding: Paperback
• 346 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
When I Lay Bare is skilfully paced and unputdownable. Part thriller, part romance, it contains the promise of exceeding both these genres. At the very least, it breathes fresh life into a series of romantic clichés. A mysterious young woman moves into deserted Crawhill cottage on the estate of Sir Simon Elliot in the Borders. He fears she is the daughter of his mistress whom he loved passionately but may have murdered. What does the young woman want? Was her mother pushed or did she fall? Is she really Elliot's daughter? "If it wasn't the child, Sim wondered, who was she and what the hell was she doing moving into Crawhill? And if it was her, what had she came back for, why had she not come to see him? Instead she had taken up residence in the cottage and waited. What did the lassie want with Davy?"

The novel is, in a certain sense, the giving of flesh to a set of antique plates that the young woman brings with her. It moves perspectives continually and subtly. Sometimes the reader is inside the mind of Tat, the all-seeing spy of Elliot who may or may not have his own agenda; sometimes the perspective is that of Elliot or his son. Can the reader interpret the images on the plates more quickly and accurately than the characters? The overall effect is one of a vertiginous kaleidoscopic unfolding; the subtlety of the storytelling pushing hard against the kitsch of what is a truly gripping plot.--Neville Hoad

Synopsis
Spied on by the factor of an estate in the Scottish Borders, an unknown woman enters a cottage that has been empty since the violent deaths of its inhabitants more than 20 years ago. She has a set of antique plates which she believes can tell her the truth about the past and what she is to do now.

From the Author
Query the Scottish Border Ballad 'The Twa Corbies'
This is the seed of the whole novel. I've always been haunted (as the characters are) by it. Does anyone have any info on its origins, its source, of any other use of it in a novel? I'd be very interested.

Customer Reviews

A fine blend of narrative, myth and locality
An excellent novel, which establishes and sustains a fine weave of different narrative voices with a strong sense of rootedness in local terrain and myth.

The device of nourishing a contemporary story from the Borders ballads,"Twa Corbies" and "Barbara Allen", could have resulted in a mere technical exercise. In Greig's hands, however, it adds the iron to the soul of what might have otherwise amounted to little more than a relationship story. A very impressive work which sends me back to the author's previous novels.

Well written and gripping story.
This book traces a contemporary story set against the violent history of the Scottish Borders, both in the time of the Reivers and more recently. Greig succeeds in evoking the atmosphere of the location with its bare hills with concealed lochs and dry-stone dykes, running with swift streams and scattered with sheep and occasional cottages. The landscape simmers with old tensions and hatreds, brought alive by the set of antique painted plates that the woman carries with her. Their interpretation is an integral part of the story and to an extent drive the woman's actions. Greig has an uncanny ability to transcend the now and make us aware of the connections with the past that are all about us. The desperate lives of the 16th century Reivers echo in the late twentieth century and find a place in modern emotions. This is the complete reverse of Hartley's famous opening line: "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there". On the contrary, it is here and now and they are still doing things the same. It is a dramatic book, both in setting and in the direction the narrative takes. The final denoument, although guessed, is nonetheless profoundly shocking. In the end, nothing changes. This is a fine book, well-written, with an erotic charge which is an integral part of its energy.