Witch Wood

LoveReading Says

This was John Buchan's favourite novel and an inspiration for the young C S Lewis.  It's a terrifying portrait of a cruel and intolerant age set against the backdrop of the Covenanting time.  Its main character David Semphill must choose between his God, his beliefs and the woman he loves.  As the local minister he must lead a community that is drifting towards religious extremes.  As a man he must watch the woman he loves caught up in accusations of black magic.  The veneer of God-fearing respectability becomes thinner and thinner in an increasingly intolerant age.

From the Introduction by Allan Massie in Witch Wood:

'Buchan was at ease in the seventeenth century, and of all his novels Witch Wood was the most ambitious, the longest pondered, and, with the exception of Sick Heart River, written in the last months of his life, the most deeply felt.

Buchan thought Witch Wood the best of his novels, and, though it has never been the most popular, he was right. It goes deeper than anything else he wrote. If it is first and foremost a historical novel, exploring in the manner of Scott and the mature Stevenson, a significant moment in Scottish history, and offering a study of Scottish society, and of the ideology which dominated that society and formed the historical character of the Scottish people, it is also a book which raises questions - disturbing questions - about human nature, about our capacity for self-deception, and about the consequences of repressing certain elements of that nature.

Buchan's contemporary Ford Maddox Ford held that the best imaginative literature has the power, denied in his view in other art forms, to make us think and feel at the same time. Witch Wood - more that anything else Buchan wrote - has that power. Like all great novels it makes a strong first impression, draws you to read it a second and third time, and reveals more at each subsequent reading.  '

LoveReading

About Witch Wood

Set against the religious struggles of seventeenth-century Scotland, with Montrose for the king against a convenanted kirk, John Buchan's Witch Wood is a gripping atmospheric tale in the spirit of Stevenson and Neil Munro.As a moderate Presbyterian minister, young David Sempill disputes with the extremists of his faith. All around, the defeated remnants of Montrose's men are being harried and slaughtered by the faithful, and Sempill's plea for compassion, like his love for the beautiful Katrine Yester, is out of joint with the times.There are still older conflicts to be faced however, symbolised by the presence of the Melanudrigill Wood, a last remnant of the ancient Caledonian forest. Here there is black magic to be uncovered, but also the more positive pre-Christian intimations of nature worship.In such setting, and faced with the onset of the plague, David Sempill's struggle and eventual disappearance take on a strange and timeless aspect in what was John Buchan's own favourite among his many novels.

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