ABSTRACT
This chapter, on Peter May’s Lewis and Harris novels, is written in the mode of ‘narrative scholarship’ and asks whether May’s narratives are influenced by their ‘setting’, whether the social ecology is shaped by its natural ecology - the affect of weather, land and sea upon people. Is what May thinks of as ‘a setting’ for a genre narrative actually driving that narrative in ways of which he may be unaware? And what are the limitations of his exploration of his intimacy with this distinctive ecology that is actually under threat from industrial-scale mining, wind windfarms and the riparian economy?
