My Review of McPhee's The Crofter and The Laird

A Review of

McPhee, John. The Crofter and the Laird. New York: The Noonday Press, 1969.

A Simpler Life

by Stacie Brady

In The Crofter and the Laird, John McPhee presents an enjoyable snapshot of the vanishing culture of the Scottish islanders living on the Isle of Colonsay. This is geographical writing at its best and most satisfying. With vivid imagery of the island and its inhabitants drawn from firsthand experience, McPhee composes a complete and intricately detailed story of this island in the Hebrides. The islanders of Colonsay come to life, relate their history and share their woes through the words of McPhee, who describes their island as “…less like a small town than like a large lifeboat. By a scale of things that begins with cities and runs to hamlets, the island is some distance off the end” (48). While linking the relatively insignificant island to greater political, historical and economical forces on the mainland, McPhee engagingly describes the dwindling Scottish sheep ranchers living on the island and their simple, humble way of life.

Clearly observed in this book, modern culture too often supplants more antiquated ways of life like that found on Colonsay, despite the resistance of inhabitants who cling tenaciously to their ways. McPhee describes to his readers the unpretentious beauty found in this society which is unhappily on the brink of extinction and in so doing shows the value of such a culture and why it should be preserved and celebrated. At the same time, he presents an honest look at its weaknesses–the feudal crofting system, reliance upon welfare, and irresponsibility—to explain why it is succumbing to modernity and why it may ultimately dissolve into oblivion.

Reading The Crofter and the Laird captures a piece of the broader world and connects it to the needs of today. Thomas Carter, in his article “Studies in Utah Vernacular Architecture,” refers to novelist Wallace Stegner, who says, “You don’t know who you are…until you know where you are;” in response, Carter remarks, “The way we have chosen to live is physically etched on the land and becomes a presence that affects both our everyday behavior and our collective consciousness” (Carter). The story of Colonsay’s inhabitants clearly reveals this reality. The islanders show the importance of place—their place—to them: “Almost every rise of ground, every beach, field, cliff, gully, cave, and skerry has a name. There are a hundred and thirty-eight people on Colonsay, and nearly sixteen hundred place names” (53). Their story is a lesson to all who struggle to find their place where they live. McPhee conveys this importance to his readers: “Seventeen square miles in eight minutes of latitude may be the next thing to nothing, but after a short time it becomes a continent. The hills…have the scale and appearance of mountain ranges, walling off one area from another in the way that mountains will divide two states or countries” (50). Colonsay is a microcosm of the larger world.

Perhaps the greatest value found in this book is the narrative of the islanders’ simple lifestyle. With all the current outcry for conservation and a decrease of consumption among modern countries, The Crofter and the Laird illustrates how Colonsay’s inhabitants live out conservation in a practical, uncomplicated, content manner. Even though many may be mortified at the thought of living as simply and meagerly as do these islanders, there is a lesson to be learned from them about what is truly important and necessary…and what is not.

McPhee effectively accomplishes the absorbing writing found in this book by immersing himself in the culture of which he writes; he took his wife and four daughters and moved onto Colonsay for a good while. To vacation there would not suffice, and McPhee incorporated himself into the culture to observe it most comprehensively. He lived the way the islanders live and did the work they do, and in no other way could their culture be so thoroughly discovered by a researcher and communicated to an unacquainted reader. His first-hand knowledge of the island infuses his writing with authority and vitality, while at the same time providing the more objective view of an outsider. Indeed, McPhee does not spare the reader the dark underbelly of the island or the faults of the inhabitants or the Laird, but reveals the unhealthy alongside all that is good and beautiful presumably for the sake of revealing where change is needed for the survival of the civilization on the island. Regardless of the island’s unresolved weaknesses, it is inevitable upon reading this book to finish it with a newfound affection for Colonsay and its people. The reader cannot help wanting to wander “The grazing, covered with sheep and cattle, …framed by converging rocky shorelines that met in a distant point” (65).