Near the beginning of Kirsty Logan’s fine new novel, a travelling theatre company stages a nocturnal performance on a frozen lake. It’s winter and this play, which tracks a woman’s trajectory from maiden to mother to crone, is a small smudge of light in a grim surround of dark. It’s the perfect image – life atop icy precarity; festive warmth upon unforgiving cold – to set the stage for a tale whose protagonist will be confronted by many perilous contrasts.
Her name is Lux, and when we first meet her she is standing in a garden of poisonous herbs above the remains of her recently buried mother, who has been unjustly executed for witchcraft. In the harsh world of Now She Is Witch, which would seem to be some version of medieval Europe, most girls and women are possessions for men either to harm or play with. Any who assume agency are swiftly denounced and brutally dealt with: those labelled witches are tied to poles in the sea and left to slowly drown; others guilty of lesser offences (talking too much, too loudly or indeed at all) are paraded around in scold’s bridles, torture devices deployed to humiliate.
