Paisley in the early twentieth century is a typical prosperous, worldly town. Into it one day comes someone who seems as though he is from another time and place. His real name is Benjamin Brocklehurst, but he has been known as Barnacles since he was a little boy, due to a fiery skin condition. He has lived until now in relative seclusion with his father on their farm nearby, but his parent's sourness and savagery have finally driven him out. He takes one of their sheep and heads to the town, thinking that he may be able to sell it, and with the proceeds buy a beloved violin.
It becomes clear to the people of Paisley that Barnacles, wandering the town with his sheep, is an original, a beautiful-souled simpleton, "one of God's innocents". Causing some amusement, and some impatience, he slowly becomes part of the town. The great and the good come to know him, and some of them are delighted by his eccentricities; he gains thereby their help. He also secures the very different care of the humble and simple, and is soon sharing rooms with a poor carter, Skelly, his young son wee Kitchener, and ageing father, Hector the sailor. These three are innocents themselves, so Barnacles is a perfect fit.
At the home of one of his wealthy benefactors, where he comes to play the violin, Barnacles comes to know Martha Normanshire, a young woman with a terrible story. She is a secret refugee from a horrifyingly abusive husband back in Glasgow, who wheedled his way into her family, manipulating everyone around him until much of it was laid waste - he is like a living pestilence. Barnacles responds both to her beauty and her sorrow in his simple way, treasuring her in fascination. She also sees something in him which, in its remoteness from all her recent experience, is like a soothing balm to her exhausted and outraged psyche.
But then Barnacles loses his always tenuous job as a clerk for the town council, and can find no other work. He finally secures employment far, far away in the port of Brieston at the head of the Kintyre peninsula. Will he and Martha ever see each other again? What if Martha's husband finds her? Will fate smile on them, or will atrocity intervene?
In this, his second novel, J. MacDougall Hay employed again the highly poetic, spiralling style so acclaimed in his first, the classic Gillespie, two years previously. His celebrated detailing of malign characters who blight the lives of all around them is leavened here with delight in purity and simplicity, a mixing of the spheres with humour and horror in extraordinary counterpoint. Barnacles was first published in 1916.
