Beautiful and strange - this story will stay with me for a long time. ( )

A few years after the end of the Second World War, a group of people living on a far-flung Scottish island grapple (or are in denial about) their grief and loss while also dealing with the annual arrival of the supernatural flock of crows known as the sluagh. The sluagh, however, are becoming ever more unpredictable—perhaps even violent.

Emma Seckel is at her strongest when dealing with specific moments of grief that her characters experience, or conjuring up a certain kind of atmospheric landscape. Where The Wild Hunt falls down, though, is that Seckel isn't necessarily able to push beyond "vibes" in her writing. I can accept a level of ambiguity or things left without overt resolution on the page, but the explanation we get for what's been going on—such as it is—just left me half-distracted from the rest of the book's denouement because I kept thinking "but what about..." and "but why then..." Also, while Seckel's unnamed island is atmospheric, it didn't really convince me as being Scottish. For a bunch of reasons to do with dialogue/syntax, but then also just because of some choices which smacked of Seckel really wanting to include what I think of as Misty Celtic Bollocks: Scots Gaelic is, we're told, the island's heritage language which people still speak to some extent and which they intone during the Ancient Clifftop Rituals. Except we're also told that this fictional island is very far in the North Sea, somewhere north and east I think of the Shetlands and with Norway not so far away—how was Gaelic the language spoken there? And not Norn? Gaelic is historically western Mainland/the Hebrides, not in the Shetlands.

Readable, with some nice passages, but not one that I'll be coming back to. ( )

To dark and sad, didn't finish ( )

Despite a slow start, this spooky story is a good look at how grief can strike people in different ways and to varied extents. I think the incorporation of a supernatural element really help emphasize the way that war itself is a horror not unlike the sluagh. I would recommend reading this on a rainy, windy day in autumn: it could only lend to the atmospheric vibe that the book already gives off. ( )

The Trans-cultural Spectra in Emma Seckel's Wild Hunt

A Pragmatic Approach

Dr. Mohammed Sameer Abd Elsalam

In her novel The Wild Hunt, Emma Seckel confirms the aesthetics of the spiritual depth, the plurality of the artistic impact of historical and cultural contexts, and the diversity of levels of existence; such as the real, artistic, metaphorical, and spectral deferred existence that may manifest itself in dream cries, body parts, crows, or ancient tales of the place, and its myths in the context of the rising of the experimental tendencies of the neo-gothic novel.

Consequently, the narrative discourse is based on raising the premise of the intermingling of cultural contexts across time; that the narration brings us to the aesthetically transformed atmosphere of the Second World War in the island’s calm and mystery, and its own horror tones that develop from the old Gothic worlds that reminded me of Lovecraft, Stoker, and Kafka in a new experimental and potential context in the neo-gothic novel process; that the narrator here puts the recipient of the discourse in a state of wide cognition of space, its ancient sounds, and its spectra, and embodies these sounds in the formations of crows that appear as hidden active tones in a calm narrative rhythm.

We can read Emma Seckel's novel according to the mechanisms of the pragmatic approach to literature, in terms of the principle of relevance, speech acts, analysis of forms of communication between the self and the other in the structures of discourse, and conversation according to the cognitive ways of interpreting the context of communication.

First, we will notice that the narrator of Emma has caused a kind of aesthetic experimentation in the spatial reference, in the references of crows, and in the references to the spectra; the island appears as a vast metaphorical and dreamy space and transformed according to the atmosphere of the Second World War and according to its ancient mythical history, and according to the pains and tragedies of all human voices. Also, the cave appears as a place that indicates the tone of dreamy authenticity; As for ghosts, they are figural formations that range between appearance and absence, and paradoxical beings that resemble Nietzsche's talk about the mixture of joy and the dismemberment of Dionysius in the Greek drama, or similar to Derrida's talk about Kafka's spectrum in his novel The Trial, but the ghost in Emma Sekel is manifested in the explicit of the discourse as an interpretive saying of the inhabitants of the island and the heroine Leigh, or seem transient to self-identity toward sympathy for the ancient symbolic sounds, the new imaginary signs of the crows, and their tones under the deep layers of the island.

Hence, the main inferential argument in the discourse is related to the validity of the hypothesis of increasing the potency of hidden sounds and spectra in a relative perceptual cultural context within the becoming of the main character of Leigh, the result being a superconscious awareness of the vastness of space, its transformations, and its neo-Gothic artistic specificity.

The narrator's consciousness elects - according to the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson - the connection between the deep spiritual layers of the place, and the aesthetic impact of war on the structure of the narrative moment that happened during World War II, and chooses the importance of the idea of the other ambiguous appearance of the dead, the mystery of space, and the space explorer archetype of experiential space, a return that exhausts the centrality of the idea of absence. Therefore, the context of communication between the narrator and the recipient of the discourse is formed according to the cognition of the depth of the island, its mental multiplication, and the experimental interpretation of the spectra in the visual, dreamy, narrative, or mythical field.

In some detail, the narrator constructed her speech according to a set of representative speech acts according to an experimental and probabilistic narrative language related to Hugo's disappearance, Leigh's dreams, Hugo's spectral return, the transformations of crows, the dreamy return of the father, and the mysterious fate of Hugo and Leigh in the double space of the island. A directive speech related to the question about the fate of the character and its relationship with the spectra of the past and the living spectra of literature, and the question about the contradictions of delay and efficacy. As for the expressive speech act, we notice it in the narrator's love for that aesthetic complexity, the huge architecture of sounds, and the specters beyond the island and the calm sea.

The narrator has developed the character of the heroine Leigh cognitively when her perception shifted to the vast ancient world of renewable spectra as a substitute for the effectiveness of crows alone, and then her perception of herself was transformed according to Hugo's other spectral image; As for Hugo himself, he developed in a dialectical way from detachment from the island to sympathy with its hidden images and spectra, and Iain evolved from searching for Hugo and haunting the void to recovering the character of Leigh again and in a new image that bears the renewed question of identity.

In addition to the above, we can analyze the conversation between Leigh and the other Hugo according to Paul Grace's cooperative principle, and the sequence of speech acts; So we will find that Leigh was the most quantitative; because she wants to inquire about the fate of Hugo, his absence and his return, while we find Hugo the most intense and silent; because he is located between two opposing worlds, and we will find that Leigh's argument rests on the assumption that Hugo's old image is identical with the present while he deepens the delayed question of his identity, Leigh has elected the importance of the past, while Hugo has elected his metaphorical presence, and Leigh's manner seemed close to invoking conflicting stories about the place while Hugo's manner seemed close to syllables, and then the harmony of the conversation came deferred, and full of questions, and expectations.

In short, I see that Emma Seckel added a new aesthetic impact to the history of the neo-gothic novel, especially in the hidden diversity of the space and its potential cognitive ways.

Dr. Mohammed Sameer Abd Elsalam
Literary Critic
Art Critic ( )