Reaching it requires travel along a narrow, winding, dangerous road, or else charter flight or boat, with no regular service for either.
Her characters, themselves feeling cut off from others and from the world due to the losses they’ve suffered, exist in a place that itself feels distant in both space and time from both their former lives and from the real world in general. They are the story’s major characters, but they move through and interact with a landscape that becomes, as is often the case in fantasy fiction, a character itself: a town on a scrap of land that is almost an island, that is hypothesized by at least one resident to have been drifting about in the sea before crashing into the Scottish coast, and that, due to a landslide shortly after Ashley’s arrival, finds itself abruptly cut off from the mainland.Ĭoastal places often feel as though they’re very far away from anywhere, and this is as true of Appleton as anywhere else even before the landslide occurs. All three also encounter another stranger in town, a young man named Ronan who seems to want something from each of them. All of them, too, have suffered loss: Kathleen Mullaroy, the town’s new librarian, is recently divorced Nell Westray, a new widow, has moved to Appleton with the intent of reviving its vanished orchards and Ashley Kaldis, whose best friend was killed in a car accident, has come to visit relatives. The Silver Bough features three viewpoints, all of them American, all of them transplanted to the tiny Scottish coastal town of Appleton for various reasons.
Myths and legends of Scotland and the surrounding regions steal into the lives of the characters like fog rolling in off the Scottish coast, and the way that they react suggests that they are people who have been long used to living with entities that lurk just out of sight, waiting to come in. There is, however, another Silver Bough, a mid-20th century collection of Scottish folklore that provides much of the setting of Tuttle’s novel. The title evokes that classic, if somewhat archaic, collection of myths, Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), and this is not an accident.
The setting, crossing, and erasure of boundaries, both in the world and in the human heart, is a major theme of Tuttle’s, and it weaves through The Silver Bough like a silver thread. Treading the lines between reality and myth, the modern day and the remote past, the concrete and the imagined, has long been Lisa Tuttle’s specialty: books such as The Mysteries and The Pillow Friend highlight both the appeal and the danger of blurring the line between the magical and the everyday.
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