You couldn’t make it up, yet MacGillivray has. Manuscripts, archival documents, academic research, history, location, and a poet descending into madness or, as he believes, fairyland: the sith. Like other Norge books (this is the third and possibly final one) it is framed as a transcribed and edited version of the source material, in this case a jotter, found by an actual Shetland archivist and poet, and accompanied by an introductory essay which undertakes a number of sidesteps and sleights-of-hand to create an implausible occult web of geography, poetics, linguistics, folklore and magic spells to show how Norge ends up ‘trapped in perpetual twilight – norranta, or asleep, within his vision of the dream.’
The majority of Until the Twilight Fails shows Norge trying to deduce a way to escape from his own notebook, where he believes he is trapped as a stain on the page. So we get lists of ‘Fairy Lure Plants & Protective Tress’, brief sections on clan badges and ‘The Nine Ages of Fairy’ along with recounted dreams, journal entries and poetic reflections. In between the transcribed texts MacGillivray carefully notes where diagrams and drawings were in the original: only three are reproduced here, collected on a single page of the pamphlet.
The tone of the work is strident and declamatory, liturgical:
I can only speak in the language of the dead,
a robin in my mouth, accompanied by the wounded stone’s song
but also mystical and allusive. Norge recalls a ritualistically-induced hallucination ‘behind the pounding waterfall’ and casts wooden staves in an attempt to negotiate the ‘clot or whirlpool of meaning’ that wrong sequences or materials and erroneous deductions or assumptions produce when attempting ritual magic.
Eventually Norge recognises that there is a conflation of stars and standing stones, a wounded eagle and realises that Eilean a’ Bhàis, the Hebridean Isle of the Dead, is only a discarded flint in the grand scheme of things, although there is a suggestion that the eagle is some kind of sacrifice:
The holy stone: the animal is an eagle
on the recumbent altar stone
Norge may also have wished to become an eagle. He intuits the shape or essence of the island as ‘Bird Wound Man’, noting that there is ‘A constant line around the island for the journey of the dead.’
Until the Twilight Fails may be read as a personal book of the dead, a manual for what the back cover describes as ‘numinous transference’ or it may simply be what Norge calls ‘the book of dying dreams’, written after witnessing ‘a fairy death rite’. It is a shamanic, mythological and ritualistic cul de sac, a book of failed incantations and poetic last rites. ‘Nothing correlates, nothing calms in this book of dead dreams.’
Rupert Loydell 5th June 2026
