Strange Allegiance: Ian Macpherson's Wild Harbour

Ian Macpherson’s Wild Harbour might initially seem like an outlier in the world of apocalyptic narratives. First published in 1936, and telling the story of a war-torn Scotland in 1944, the novel depicts neither divine retribution nor material devastation. The environment is not poisoned, technology has not run rampant, and whatever hardships that the general population may experience are scarcely represented. Indeed, the first half of the novel, which depicts its protagonists Hugh and Terry – closely modelled on Macpherson and his wife Elizabeth – building a life in a remote part of the Cairngorms, seems more akin to survival narratives like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) than anything in the realm of science fiction or disaster writing. Hugh and Terry do not initially experience any direct violence, but leave their small town for a cave when they hear guns in the distance, and resolve to fend for themselves. The action of the novel is premised on the persistent threat, and growing reality, of foreign invasion, but for long portions of the novel that threat remains as an unsubstantiated rumour. While the couple initially finds, in Hugh’s words, that ‘the civilization that brought us to exile had first unfitted us for the life of outlaws’, they soon develop skills in hunting and fishing, as well as making their domestic space gradually more comfortable.1 The novel can be seen as a story of survival and recuperation, rather than destruction.