Maylis Besserie finds her beginning in endings. The French author first came to attention in the English-speaking world for Yell, Sam, If You Still Can (2022), her vividly imagined evocation of the last months of Samuel Beckett’s life in a Parisian nursing home. Her new novel, Scattered Love, concerns the endgame of another Irish Nobel laureate, WB Yeats, and the enduring mystery over who exactly lies under his tombstone in Drumcliffe churchyard.
It is a story told not so much in the shadow of the grave as from beyond the grave. In an ingenious plot twist, she imagines a group of locals from the area around the Roquebrune cemetery – where Yeats was originally interred after his death in the south of France in 1939 – coming together to demand the exhumation of Yeats’s remains in Sligo. As the poet’s body ended up in a mass grave in France, the group known as the Scattered want to establish whether any of their own loved ones or neighbours had been mistakenly interred in the reassembled skeleton lowered into Sligo soil amid much pomp and ceremony in 1948.
Secrets are legion in graveyards and hauntings come in many forms for members of the Scattered as they perform their own private exhumations, scouring buried family secrets and the half-remembered indignities of bad ends. Yeats himself has his own kind of spectral reckoning, as Besserie imagines the unquiet spirit of the poet trying to come to terms with his doomed affection for Maud Gonne. Fascinated in his own time by the possibilities of communication with the afterlife, Yeats is a garrulous ghost, drawing on astrological and theosophical speculations to reflect on the fraught relationship between his life and his art. The business of death for the living provides its own more prosaic illuminations in the novel. A local French undertaker with a niche interest in sea burials laments the dietary habits of the newly dead: “And of course, there is physical hardship as people are getting heavier and heavier, and, in our region, the cemeteries are located on slopes and are accessed via stairs.”
Scattered Love is richly allusive, and Besserie is fortunate to have Clíona Ní Ríordáin as translator, who is alive to the multiple embeddings of history, literature and myth in this baroque tale of a dead poet and his wandering bones. If the Irish way of doing death is often regarded as highly distinctive, a French author’s way of undoing some of these Irish ends proves to be equally compelling.
