stitch and trim test - Scottish Arts Council

Transcription

VOL 1, NUMBER 1 2004
ISSN 1745–5014
Ian Bell
On Kenneth White
Jennie Erdal
Working with Nigella
Todd McEwen
At the Other Opening of Holyrood
Edwin Morgan
Six New Poems
Alastair Reid
Exercising on Rowing Machines
Rosemary Goring
On the State of Scottish Fiction
Scottish Review of Books
SKATING FOREVER
Birlinn
Full page
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Scottish Review of Books | 3
Scottish Review of Books
We have no use for emotions, let alone sentiments, but are solely concerned with passions. HUGH MACDIARMID
CONTENTS
4
DUNCAN THOMSON
The Skating Minister: The true story behind the nation’s
most famous painting
7
TODD MCEWEN
Diary: At the alternative opening of Holyrood
8
ALASTAIR REID Letter from Elsewhere
9
JENNIE ERDAL Publish and Be Charmed
11
ROSEMARY GORING Hyperventilating with Self-congratulation:
The State of Scottish Fiction
13
JENNIE RENTON Nerve Centre: An Interview with Anne McLeod
14
EDWIN MORGAN Tales from Baron Munchausen: Six Poems
16
IAN BELL A Long Walk with Kenneth White
19
COLIN WATERS Gallimaufry
20
LINDSEY FRASER Daring to Be Adult
21-25 Reviews
CONTRIBUTORS: Ian Bell, Allan Burnett, Ron Butlin, Jennie Erdal, Lindsey Fraser,
Rosemary Goring, Richard Holloway, Carl MacDougall, Lesley McDowell,
Todd McEwen, Edwin Morgan, Alastair Reid, Jennie Renton, Suhayl Saadi,
Paul Henderson Scott, Colin Waters.
From left: Todd McEwen, Jennie Erdal, Edwin Morgan, Ian Bell, Jennie Renton
SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS
VOLUME 1 NUMBER 1, 31 OCTOBER, 2004
EDITOR: Alan Taylor
PUBLISHERS: Hugh Andrew and Derek Rodger
DESIGNER: Graeme Murdoch
ADVERTISING: Derek Rodger
RIGHTS: Alan Taylor
COVER: Revd Robert Walker by Henry Raeburn. Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland
ADDRESS: The Sunday Herald, 9/10 St Andrew Square, Edinburgh EH2 2AF
EDITORIAL TELEPHONES: 0131 718 6443 and 07803 970344
EDITORIAL FAX: 0131 718 6105
EDITORIAL EMAIL: aftaylor2000@aol.com
ADVERTISING ADDRESS: Argyll Publishing, Glendaruel, Argyll PA22 3AE
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ADVERTISING EMAIL: info@argyllpublishing.co.uk
SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS: ISSN 1745–5014
EDITORIAL
AS the First Minister, Jack McConnell, reminded us at the opening of the
Holyrood parliament, we are a disputatious nation. Argument comes easily
to us. There is something in our psyche, something deeply rooted in our
souls, something in the pugnacious northern air, that propels us to take
issue, dispute, query, pull apart, debate, criticise. We Scots, as one
commentator acknowledged, are apt to wag a finger at ourselves or clap
ourselves on the back. It is second nature to us. We are ferrets in a bag,
boxers in a ring. No sooner is a proposition put up than someone must do
his damnedest to knock it down. We can’t help ourselves. It’s what we are.
Nor is there anything wrong with that. In fact, it ought to be a matter for
celebration. Nations which do not continually question things are in a rut,
condemned to small talk and chitchat. In contrast, the archetypal Scot is
an irascible, unignorable, intrusive fellow, who has no respect for
conventional mores. In a Glasgow bar, noted the novelist William
McIlvanney, you never know where the next assault on your privacy is
coming from. Total strangers have a way of worming themselves into your
company and hijacking your evening. In Scotland, it may not be advisable
to talk about religion or politics or football but it can be very hard not to
do so.
We have an untranslatable word for this called ‘flyting’, which is the
verbal equivalent of brawling. Down the decades there have been many
bonnie flyters, the heavy-weight champion being Hugh MacDiarmid.
Nowadays, it is fashionable in some quarters to deride MacDiarmid and
denigrate his contribution to Scottish culture. Nothing is easier to do since,
as he himself conceded, he was as likely – as a human volcano – to emit
rubbish as flame. Yet almost single-handedly MacDiarmid dragged
Scottish culture into the twentieth century and so far we have not seen his
like again.
He was a man on a crusade who was impatient with those who did not
agree with him. Among the many people he picked flytes with were Edwin
Muir, who argued that only English could further the literary aspirations of
modern Scotland, Hamish Henderson, whose love of folk songs he did not
share, and Alexander Trocchi, whom he dismissed as “cosmopolitan scum”.
None of it was personal; nor was MacDiarmid always right. But where he
did not err was in articulating his case and making matters of cultural
importance into public debate. In MacDiarmid’s day, the letters pages of
newspapers did not resound with complaints about the cost of a building
but over issues such as the status of the Scots language, the parochialism
(or not) of Scottish literature, the teaching of our history, and the place of
art in society.
Such things were important, and still are. Post-devolution, Scotland is less
inclined to blame its next door neighbour for its perceived ills, and for the
second-class status of its indigenous culture, but the debate is ongoing.
How do we see ourselves? Can we judge? Are we inclined to over-praise and
under-criticise? Is our culture in crisis, as the headline writers invariably
describe it, or is that simply scare-mongering in the hope of squeezing
fatter cheques from the Executive? Who among us is truly world-class? Does
being dubbed a World City of Literature make Edinburgh one? Was Timothy
Clifford, the Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, accurate when
all those years ago he suggested that Scottish art is “a lesser school with a
few high points”? And what are we to make of Dr David Starkey’s recent
insistence that “Scotland matters for a single reason – its involvement with
England from 1707 onwards”?
This first issue of the Scottish Review of Books does not attempt to
answer all of these questions. It is, however, the beginning of what’s hoped
will be a continuing dialogue in which flyters whether at home or abroad
are invited to participate. It is long overdue. We look forward to receiving
your comments and suggestions. Letters for publication are welcome,
whether sent by e-mail or snail-mail. Publication of the SRB will be
quarterly with the next issue due in spring 2005. The deadline for copy is
New Year’s Eve.
4 | Scottish Review of Books
The Skating Minister
BY
H
enry Raeburn’s portrait of the
Revd Robert Walker skating
on a hard winter’s day more
than two centuries ago is one
of that select number of pictures, such as Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa or Edvard Munch’s The Scream, that
is immediately recognisable. The name of the
artist or the identity of the finely balanced figure in the black coat may not spring immediately to mind, but the simple image will nearly
always provoke a smile of familiarity.
An important part of the fame of The Skating Minister, as it is familiarly known, is that
it is probably based as much on reproductions as on the picture itself. Surrounded by
other paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the National Gallery of
Scotland, it is much visited, but the lasting
impression is just as likely to have been made
by the postcards, mousemats, posters, carrier bags or mugs that are on sale in the
gallery shop. In this way The Skating Minister
is carried around the world. Such indeed is
the magic of the image that the Catalan
architect Enric Miralles transposed the
abstract dynamics of the figure into the
shape of the west-facing windows in Scotland’s new Parliament building.
Pictures that have acquired such fame have
usually been around for a long time, hanging
in public galleries and reproduced many
times over in books about the artist. But the
strange thing about this picture is that, until
as recently as 1949, practically no one knew of
its existence. It was not mentioned in any of
the early books on Raeburn and never reproduced, even when it appeared briefly at an
auction house in London early in 1914. Long
hidden in the houses of the subject’s descendants over four generations, this was its first,
scarcely noticed, emergence from obscurity –
to which it soon returned.
Raeburn painted this portrait, so different
from any of his other surviving works, when
his reputation as Scotland’s pre-eminent portrait painter was already well established.
When Robert Walker died in 1808, at the age
of fifty-three, the painting came into the possession of his widow, Jean Fraser. When she
died in 1831, it was inherited by their daughter Magdalen, who was married to Richard
Scougall, a merchant in Leith. It was subsequently inherited by the daughter of these
two, Magdalen Scougall, who married James
Bairnsfather Scott. In due course it came
down to their daughter, the skating minister’s
great-granddaughter, Beatrix Scott, who lived
in Boscombe in Hampshire. It is likely to have
been seen by many others in this period of
more than a hundred years, but there is no
record of it.
Then, in March 1914, Beatrix Scott put it
up for sale at Christie’s, hoping to get at least
1,000 guineas. The early years of the century
had been a heyday for Raeburn prices, but
times were changing as rumours of war
increased, and the painting failed to find a
buyer. In 1926, when the economy was in an
even worse condition (it was the year of the
general strike) Beatrix Scott sold the painting privately to a Miss Lucy Hume, of
Cavendish Road in Bournemouth, for £700.
The picture remained with her until 1949,
another time of austerity, when it was once
again presented for sale at Christie’s. The
chairman of Christie’s at the time believed
DUNCAN THOMSON
the painting would be “cheap at £1,000”. In
the event, on the initiative of the great historian of British art, Ellis Waterhouse, who was
then Director of the National Gallery of Scotland (NGS), the painting was acquired for the
nation – for just £525. Christie’s had on this
occasion included a photograph of the picture in its promotional literature and that is
likely to be the first time it had ever been
reproduced. It was to be the first of many
millions. Now, the long dead Presbyterian
minister, who clearly loved life, was skating
“into time and history”.
But the picture’s fame was not immediate.
In 1949, art galleries had a faintly forbidding
air, a certain aloofness, and did not go out of
their way to publicise their activities. Growing
prosperity, however, led to changes in society
that brought greater equality and a much
wider interest in the culture of the past. Galleries in turn began to sell themselves more
vigorously, and while some might question a
new-found reliance on hype and soundbites,
the health of society gained from far wider
access. Yet even that process was slow: it is a
curious fact that as recently as 1972 when the
NGS published a history of its collection, Pictures for Scotland, no mention was made of
the painting of the skating minister.
However, something of the picture’s
essence caught the eye of the man and
woman in the street, perhaps a deep-rooted
need for some lively link with the past. Marketability followed as new means of reproduction appeared and in the last two or three
decades the picture has become a virtual icon
for the National Gallery of Scotland. Indeed, it
has become more than that and is now “the
Scottish picture”, something so readily identified and so inherently witty that the image is
frequently filched by cartoonists. And, almost
inevitably, the painting has come to signify
Scotland’s greatest painter, his minister friend
fluttering on banners in the streets of London
when the major exhibition of his work was
shown there in 1997. It would have astonished Raeburn, who throughout his life felt
rather ignored by the metropolis. And, a final
pointer to a fame now wider than Scotland or
Great Britain, where the term “international
reputation” really has some meaning, is how
it became the standard bearer for the exhibition Pintura Britanica – British Painting from
Hogarth to Turner – at the Prado in 1998.
Madrid, the city of Velazquez and Goya, was
suddenly awash with posters of this startling
picture from the north.
Who was Raeburn’s friend, this Scottish
minister who acquired a kind of immortality
he could never have expected? Robert Walker
was born in the village of Monkton in Ayrshire on 30 April 1755, the third child of
William Walker and Susanna Sturment.
Susanna was an American from Virginia, a
fact that hints at horizons rather wider than
those of this rural parish. William Walker’s
manse, where Robert spent his earliest years,
no longer stands, but it lay half-way between
his own church of St Cuthbert's and the
nearby church of St Nicholas in Prestwick
where he was also expected to preach. St
Cuthbert’s is a small pre-Reformation building which remained in use until 1837, after
which it fell into disrepair. Its ruins and surrounding graveyard can still be visited.
In 1760, when Robert was five, his father was
called to the vacancy in the Scottish Kirk in
Rotterdam. Here he would minister to a large
expatriate congregation of merchants and
their families, seamen and mercenaries, as well
as the descendants of those who had earlier
fled from religious persecution in Scotland.
The Scottish Kirk, built in 1695 on the
Schiedam Dijk on Vasteland by the northern
bank of the River Maas, was an impressive
classical building, its stone frontages pierced
by large, round-topped windows. Still a relatively new building when the Walkers were
there, it was destroyed by German bombing
soon after the start of World War Two.
It is only possible to guess the details of the
family’s sojourn in Rotterdam. Robert is likely
to have learned Dutch and to have had some
awareness of Holland’s embroilment in the
Seven Years War. It must have been the Dutch
side of his being that caused him in adulthood to write his Observations on the
National Character of the Dutch, and the
Family Character of the House of Orange. A
family happening that was probably much
The Catalan architect Enric Miralles transposed the abstract dynamics of the skating figure into
the shape of the west-facing windows in Scotland’s new Parliament building.
Adam Elder
more traumatic than his uprooting from
Scotland was the death of his mother at some
time during their early years in Holland. This
was followed in 1767, when he was twelve
years-old, by the re-marriage of his father to
Elizabeth Lawson, the widow of a Rotterdam
merchant, William Robertson.
Winters were harder then than now, and
the web of canals and waterways that were
such a vital part of life in Holland were frequently frozen over. But life went on much as
usual, with the everyday activities of commerce and entertainment simply transferred
to roadways of thick ice. As paintings and
engravings show, many took to skates and
Robert must have been among them. This
early introduction to the sport and its necessary skills no doubt gave him an edge over
his contemporaries in Scotland when he
came to join the Edinburgh Skating Society.
It is not surprising, given his background,
that Robert should eventually enter the ministry. Both his father and grandfather had
done so, and his uncle Robert was minister at
the High Kirk of St Giles, and one of the most
distinguished churchmen in Edinburgh. It
was he who had proposed, although somewhat belatedly, his brother William for the
vacancy in Rotterdam. In 1771 this Robert
was elected moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Church’s
governing body; and in that same year the
younger Robert appears to have matriculated
at the University of Edinburgh. The records
are inconclusive, but he is likely to be the
Robert Walker who attended the philosophy
classes of Adam Ferguson, one of the great
proponents of the Scottish ‘common sense’
school of philosophy.
It appears that Robert did not bother to
graduate, something not all that uncommon
at the time. However, by 1776 he was deemed
by the presbytery of Edinburgh to be sufficiently well qualified to be inducted to his
first charge. This was to Cramond Kirk in the
village of the same name, some six miles
northwest of Edinburgh on the shores of the
River Forth. At the age of only twenty-one he
was being asked to cope with a parish in disarray. The previous minister had left because
he had lost faith in the idea of an established
church and the lay patron had failed for a
number of years to supply the “elements
mony”, needed to pay for the wine and bread
of the sacrament. In fact, no communion had
been administered for five years. In addition,
the manse and its out-houses, as well as the
school and schoolmaster’s house, all the
responsibility of the minister and his elders,
were in a state of disrepair. Adultery among
the parishioners was rife.
Two years after his arrival at Cramond,
Robert Walker married Jean Fraser, daughter
of an Edinburgh lawyer. She must have found
her situation difficult. It is not impossible
that Robert sought some relief from the problems of his parish by seeking more congenial
society, as well as physical recreation, in his
membership of two Edinburgh associations,
both, of course, all male. In September 1779
he was elected to the Royal Company of
Archers, the sovereign’s bodyguard in Scotland. The following year he joined the Edinburgh Skating Society.
Active membership of these bodies must
have entailed long rides into Edinburgh and
back, and, since skating was of necessity only
It is more than likely that Raeburn and Walker at least walked round the looming Arthur’s Seat together to Duddingston Loch.
possible in severe weather, pursuit of this
particular sport involved extra hazards for a
rider. In fact, the Society’s favoured stretch of
water, Duddingston Loch, lay on the edge of
Duddingston village, which was a further two
miles to the south-east of the High Street of
Edinburgh. As he rode into the city in these
years Robert would have been struck, especially in bright weather, by the sight of the
golden buildings of the classical New Town
that was rising in the fields to the north of
the Castle. This development would take
another two or three decades to complete,
and in the meantime the focus of public
affairs still lay in the medieval area of the city,
despite its increasing overcrowding and
squalor. The High Street was, and is, like a
lizard’s skeleton in plan, with its head the
Castle and its flattened tail the Palace of
Holyroodhouse, while its ribs are the narrow
streets and closes that fall away to either side.
Geologically, it is a “crag and tail”, the castle
rock and the debris left by ice travelling over
it to the east in pre-historic times. The lower
section of this mile-long tail – now called the
Royal Mile – was the Canongate, once a separate burgh outwith the city walls which
derived its name from the nearby Abbey of
Holyrood. It was to this part of the city that
Robert would soon move, attracted no doubt
by its social variety – and not by its proximity
to Duddingston Loch. It is easy to forget,
because of the fame of one remarkable painting, that skating never played more than a
small part in the life of “the skating minister”.
In the summer of 1784, Robert Walker was
preferred to the vacancy of senior minister
at the Canongate Kirk, a wonderfully Dutchlooking building on the north side of the
Canongate. The charge carried a stipend of
£99 a year together with 51 bolls of victual in
equal proportion of wheat, barley and oats
and was in the presentation of the Crown,
requiring the assent of George III. Robert was
thus, at the early age of twenty-nine, taking
up a highly prestigious position – and following, as it happened, in the footsteps of his
grandfather who had been minister there
forty years earlier.
Robert and his wife Jean, who now had
three children, Magdalen, Jane and baby
John, are unlikely to have lived in the church’s
manse in Reid’s Court, set back from the
roadway a few yards down the hill; this seems
at the time to have been occupied by the second minister, the Revd John McFarlan, a
landed gentleman with a large family. It is
probable that they moved into a house in
nearby St John Street, composed of new and
comfortable houses, one of which became
the principal manse in 1816.
While Robert was quite an adept theolo-
gian, and his sermons sometimes have a nice
turn of phrase, he was part of the atmosphere
rather than the substance. While making no
great contribution to intellectual progress, he
must have rubbed shoulders and had practical dealings with many of these geniuses. He
was elected, as we have seen, to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh in 1784 and was chaplain to the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce
from 1794 to 1807. He was also a member of
the Speculative Society whose members
included men like David Hume and Walter
Scott. Hume had died four years before
Robert came up Edinburgh and his agnosticism would have made him suspect to even a
humane and moderate churchman. On the
other hand, the homely values of Scott would
have been nearer to his heart.
One of his parishioners was Adam Smith,
author of The Wealth of Nations. He lived at
Panmure House in the Canongate and when
he died in 1790 he was buried in the Canongate Kirk’s graveyard. It has to be assumed that
Walker officiated at his funeral. Also lying in
defined the people who composed this society, Raeburn – and this should not be forgotten – himself became one of the great
luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment.
These were momentous times in the life of
the human spirit. In the previous decade
David Hume had written, “I believe this is the
historical Age and this the historical Nation”.
There was little, however, that was momentous in the outward events of Robert Walker’s
life. Social clubs and societies, card parties
and dinner parties, archery, golf and skating
(occasionally), as well as the preparation of
sermons can be assumed to be part and parcel of uneventful days – uneventful but regulated. According to the Statistical Account,
“People of fashion and of the middle rank
dined at 4 or 5 o’clock. No business was done
in the afternoon, dinner of itself having
become a very serious business.” Cards and
then a late supper usually followed.
We would love to hear Robert’s voice on
skating, on Raeburn, and on his portrait, but
it is a fond wish. We do, however, hear him in
RAEBURN PAINTED THIS PORTRAIT, SO
DIFFERENT FROM ANY OF HIS OTHER
SURVIVING WORKS, WHEN HIS REPUTATION
AS SCOTLAND’S PRE-EMINENT PORTRAIT
PAINTER WAS ALREADY WELL ESTABLISHED.
that same graveyard were the remains of the
young poet Robert Fergusson. In 1787, Robert
Burns, who saw Fergusson as his forerunner,
had sought permission from the church session to erect a monument over his grave.
Burns and Walker were close in age and their
birthplaces in Ayrshire, Alloway and Monkton,
were only a few miles apart – a tenuous bond
but the kind of thing that often draws
strangers together. But there was a stronger
link. Burns was in Edinburgh to see the second
edition of his poems published by William
Creech, a man who was not the most generous of publishers but whose premises were a
meeting place for literary society. Creech was
also Walker’s publisher, bringing out his sermons in 1791, and a friendship between the
two is suggested by the fact that he was to be
an executor of the minister’s will.
Such men of genius were part of the everyday society in which Robert Walker spent his
days. It was a society which we are fortunate
to be able to imagine through the eyes of
Henry Raeburn, who painted many of the
most prominent people of the period. In the
direct and expressive way in which his art
his writings, particularly his sermons, as we
have already seen. From these we can come
a little closer to his personality. In his short
article on the odd Dutch game of Kolf he
remarks that he himself had been “no mean
player”. In his Observations on the Dutch he is
firmly pro-Dutch, though he could be
accused of dealing in stereotypes: “The
Dutch are a steady rather than a speculative
people. They are not disposed to part with
the substance for the shadow… The phlegmatic disposition of the Dutch nation prevents them from being speedily roused, but
there is, notwithstanding their natural slowness, an energy and firmness in their character that must ever render them formidable
when once they are stimulated to action.”
From his published sermons we have already
noticed his belief that religion need not be a
glum business; and the “energy and firmness” that he saw in the Dutch are qualities
that mark his own Christian beliefs.
These sermons were published by Creech
in 1791, followed by an American edition in
1797. The following year he drew up his will,
which might suggest that he felt his health to
be failing, although he was still only fortytwo. He left all of his “moveable goods” to his
fourteen-year-old son John. Little is known of
Robert’s family life in these years. He and
Jean had lost their one-year-old son William
in 1787; in 1788 another son was born and
given the name Robert, perhaps to signal
continuity and a resolve to go on with life
whatever tribulations fate might inflict.
Robert died in 1808, aged fifty-three. He
was buried in the north-east corner of the
Canongate graveyard, but the gravestone
that must have been erected has vanished.
His widow Jean lived on for many years, until
1831. How often did she glance at the rather
strange portrait of her late husband?
Among the nine trustees of Robert’s estate
were Charles, Earl of Haddington, hereditary
keeper of Holyrood Park, William Creech the
publisher – and “Mr Henry Raeburn, Portrait
Painter in Edinburgh”.
Exactly why Raeburn made this unique
portrait of his friend will probably never be
known, unless new documentation comes to
light. That they were friends we assume from
Robert Walker’s will, but the clearest testimony of all is the painting itself. There is no
evidence that they ever skated together, but
Raeburn liked company and was a man of
great vigour. It is more than likely that they at
least walked round the looming Arthur’s Seat
together to the frozen Duddingston Loch.
Skating, when conditions allowed, had
become a fashionable sport in Scotland in
the latter part of the eighteenth century and
the Edinburgh Skating Society, which dated
back to at least the middle of the century,
placed great emphasis on good fellowship
and mutual admiration. Robert, however,
skates alone. The 1797 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the vogue in
this way: “The metropolis of Scotland has
produced more instances of elegant skaters
than perhaps any other country whatever;
and the institution of a skating club… has
contributed not a little to the improvement of
this elegant amusement.” Raeburn was never
a member of the club – he probably didn’t
have enough spare time for that kind of commitment – but he must certainly have seen
Walker skating, and been intrigued by the
sight. He must, at the very least, have made
some sort of mental record of the gliding figure, to be sorted out and elaborated later in
his studio. Whether that studio was his original one in George Street or his painting
room in the splendid terraced house he had
had erected at 32 York Place (now a dejected
looking suite of offices) in 1798, depends on
the date of the painting.
Robert Walker had joined the Edinburgh
Skating Society in the winter of 1780. This
was fifteen years before the introduction of
an entrance test which involved skating a
complete circle on each foot, and then making three jumps over three hats piled consecutively on top of each other. Although these
tests were introduced long after Robert
joined the club, an ability to skate well was
always expected of the membership. This
consisted mainly of lawyers and landed gentlemen, with a number of army officers, a few
merchants, civil servants and medical doctors – and three ministers. It is not clear what
form of skating the club favoured in these
early years but, although it was a sociable
affair, it had not reached the elaborate combination styles of the nineteenth century. The
club’s motto, engraved on the medallion each
skater was expected to wear suspended from
a ribbon round his neck, was “Ocior Euro” –
swifter than the east wind – a quotation from
the Latin poet Horace. That Raeburn has
shown Robert without the club's badge suggests that he was not particularly familiar
with the rules of the club.
The motto hints that speed was a significant aspect of the kind of skating practised
by the club. Another was the performing of a
series of “attitudes and graces”. Many of them
had been described by an artillery officer,
Robert Jones, in the first text book
on skating, the grandly titled Treatise on Skating, published in 1772.
Among these attitudes was the socalled “Flying Mercury”, illustrated
in an engraving in Jones’s book. It
was a pose that imitated a famous
piece of sixteenth-century sculpture, the bronze Mercury by Giovanni Bologna. A version of this was
engraved on some of the members’
medallions. The illustration in
Jones’s book, although the skater’s
arms make elegant gestures, shows
the figure in pure profile, the body
taut, and recalls Raeburn’s portrait
in a number of ways.
Walker chose – or was it Raeburn’s choice? – to be portrayed
propelling himself forward in the
conventional “travelling position”,
his arms folded compactly on his
breast. Raeburn has not been topographically accurate in this way.
Indeed, doubts as to whether
Robert should be described as skating on Duddingston Loch have
been raised from time to time, but
the traditional title is certainly an
appropriate one. Although Raeburn
generally believed that landscape
backgrounds should not be too
detailed, in this case he has been at
pains to convey the feeling of an
actual locality. He has done this by
loosely combining the two landscape features most likely to leave a
lasting impression in the minds of
those who walked out from Edinburgh to the village of Duddingston
to skate on its loch: the towering
form of the Nether Hill (or Lion’s
Haunch) of Arthur’s Seat on their
left as they approached the village,
and the distant, snow-tipped Pentland Hills to the south as they are
seen from the surface of the ice.
It is, however, the finely modulated, dark outline of Robert
Walker's figure against the icy greys
of the foreground and the slight
pink of the landscape and the gathering dark of the clouds in the distance, that are so striking and
memorable about the portrait. The
same delicate precision that has
traced the figure’s outline also
marks the warm profile of his face,
the flecks of paint so deftly placed
that we are convinced that this is
exactly how the man must have
looked. Although the hazy background is brushed with the easy
freedom we have come to expect
from Raeburn, the lower part of the
picture shows that fine skill in portraying the minutest details that
Raeburn always retained. For
example, there is the filigree of the
buckle on the garter at Robert’s
right knee and, again, the amazing
complexities of the bindings that
fix the skates to his shoes. Two
materials are used here, subtly differentiated in texture and colour.
Each skate is fixed to the shoe by
three brownish leather straps, one
at the heel, one across the instep
and the other at the toe. These
straps have then been tensioned by
a pink linen tape (inkle is the technical term) whose windings and
knots are perfectly detailed.
One aspect of the refining and
correcting which underpins the
seeming perfection of the finished
picture has given rise to some
unfounded myth-making. That is
the now very visible change that
Raeburn made to the position of the
wide-brimmed hat, which casts a
tiny shadow onto Robert’s forehead.
This alteration would have been
made as the painting developed
and would not have been visible
when it was completed. However,
oil paint has a tendency to become
transparent with time and so the
change of mind can be seen once
more. Interesting as it is in showing
how Raeburn’s mind worked, it gave
rise to the notion among Robert’s
descendants that Raeburn had
altered this part of the picture many
years after he had painted it so that
it matched Robert’s appearance at
the time of his death. However,
there is not the slightest sign of a
change of that sort.
Was Raeburn’s image of the skating minister a wholly original
invention, or was it suggested by
the work of some other artist? Raeburn must have been familiar with
the little etched portraits of the
Edinburgh caricaturist John Kay,
lively and humorous but entirely
unsophisticated. A large number of
these etchings show well-known
figures of the city perambulating
through its streets – whole length,
and both body and head usually in
profile. There is an especially witty
one, set in the countryside, that
illustrates a hilarious episode in the
life of William Forbes of Callendar.
Dated 1797, and unusually animated, it shows the rich entrepreneur fleeing in disarray from his
imagined enemies, his Falkirk
neighbours who disapproved of his
wealth. But the flames that cause
him to leap in a way that is so reminiscent of the skating minister’s
posture were in fact spouting from
the nearby Carron blast furnaces!
Did Raeburn take a quick look at
this amusing print and note its possibilities? It so happens that Raeburn painted a very grand portrait
of Forbes the following year, 1798.
Forbes is hardly likely to have produced Kay’s print for inspection
when he came to Raeburn’s studio,
but the painter is more than likely
to have been aware of it as he
worked on the portrait of his vainglorious sitter. If there is a grain of
truth in the notion that Raeburn
was influenced by this little print,
it could mean that the portrait was
painted in 1798, or even a little
later. This would make Robert
about forty-five at the time and
solve a problem that has bothered
many – the fact that he seems too
old for a portrait of the early 1790s
when he would still not have
reached forty. However, the one
experiment in profile which comes
closest to the portrait of Robert
Walker, and it is a performance just
as unexpected, is the little cameo
portrait Raeburn made of himself
in 1792. Raeburn is known to have
contemplated becoming a sculptor,
but this is his only work in three
dimensions. It is likely to have been
modelled as a jeu d’esprit, a little
competitive game, with that other
great portraitist of the Scottish
Enlightenment, James Tassie, during one of his modelling visits to
Scotland. Tassie is the supreme
profile portraitist of the period and
we can guess that Raeburn was so
intrigued by his workmanship that
he was tempted to try his hand,
using himself as the subject. The
wax model he made would then
have been cast by Tassie in his
opaque glass paste on his return to
London. The result was another
unique portrait, where the touch of
the modelling tool, not finicky but
subtle and refined, is so close to the
crisp brushstrokes that describe
the outline of Robert’s face, the
merging of his ear and hair, and the
stock that enfolds his throat.
Henry Raeburn, the painter, and
Robert Walker, the minister, would
no doubt be amazed at these
attempts to work out the story
behind this painting – for they
knew the truth! However, the one
truth we are sure of is that, with an
intimacy rare in portrait painting,
they have left for our enjoyment a
picture of wit and beauty that,
while it intrigues, expresses a wellbeing of the spirit. The Revd Robert
Walker’s resting place in the Canongate kirkyard may have vanished,
but he skates on in grace.
An edited extract from The Skating
Minister by Duncan Thomson,
published by The National
Galleries of Scotland.
DIARY
B T
M E
Y
ODD
C WEN
BOREDOM
Or, The Beginning of the Same Old Song
The Boredom of Glass at Greenside
To Calton Hill on October 9, for what
was promised to be a more “real”
response to the new Parliament. For
those of us who live near Picardy
Place, Calton Hill has all but disappeared behind two large volumes of
glass, archetypical behemoths of our
new capital. One contains a sweep of
hideous, synthetic restaurants, the
other, seemingly, nothing at all. The
absolute boredom this architecture
radiates! We passed a bored-looking
mannie, sitting looking cold with his
tinnie. He looked annoyed at those
who were going up his hill; he also
seemed to proclaim, in his choice of
seat, that he would not be shopping
today, which was what most in town
were doing. Out of boredom.
The people were bored with the
Parliament and its breast-beating
inhabitants. They were bored with the
building, its atrocious, unforgivable
cost, bored with the idea of the Queen
showing up and pouring tonnes of
official boredom all over it. They were
bored with the hollow conviction any
statement or action by the Parliament
exudes. They were profoundly bored
with the idea of an alternative celebration, or cerebration. The bored
took their boredom onto Princes
Street. As usual.
designed this pretty building almost
entirely in the Doric order; it has elements of the little temple of
‘Unwinged Victory’ at the Acropolis,
and of the stoa, or market colonnade.
The idea of unwinged victory my
head, unasked-for, connected depressively to this day. The restatement of
the marketplace you may see on
Greenside, and all over town.
I tried not to look at the school too
fondly – after all, how much would
‘they’ possibly have spent making it
the debating centre of the new Parliament? Nice big office building across
the road too. Oops! Spent it! In 1977!
Answers to Mr Sheridan’s Rhetorical
Questions. By the Man Standing
Behind Me
No one ever seems to get anything
together up here on Calton Hill.
– Aye. – Aye, man. – Scottish. – Fuckin’
Scottish, man. – Scottish.
Boredom, Uses of Ellipsis In
Carpe Diem
Drawing Near
We were expecting to find an enthusiastic, milling crowd as we crested the
hill, but all we saw was a police van
parked overlooking Holyrood. Far, far
away in the park, high above Radical
Road (a portent?) someone had
planted a tiny white banner. What did
it say? It seemed to read, ‘HOPE’ We
crested another hillock, walking
around the National Monument.
Helicopters were circling, ‘protecting’ some body or some thing. They
could have been used to drive the
populace up here, sweeping down on
the very doors of Jenners: “People of
Scotland! Proceed to Calton Hill
immediately! Carpe diem!”
This was an uncomfortable gathering. Many were missed. Where were
the ‘stars’ of the left? In vain would
you have looked for them, even if you
had broken into the Observatory and
borrowed the telescope. Except when
Mr Sheridan was speaking, people
talked among themselves.
There came some very bad music.
God, it was awful. This was a terrible
sign. I hated that boredom had
seeped in here, from the city down
below, for I share these hopes and
dreams.
When Miss Kane got up to read the
‘Declaration of Independence’, the
crowd quieted, and drew near. The
crowd drew near, as they might have
in old Parliament Square, and it was a
moment to remember.
Not Another Parliament!
In 1632, Charles I told the Court of
Session it could not continue to sit in
St Giles’ – that was a profanation.
There was a “lack of convenient and
fitt roumes within this burgh”. Sound
familiar? Panic – a psychological state
akin to boredom – and the Town
Council began building Parliament
House.
In 1707, the people didn’t seem so
bored as they did on October 9 this
year. The impending Treaty of Union
was burned in public. Glasgow rioted
for a month. Every day an unhappy
crowd surrounded the Parliament
House. Lord Queensberry, Commissioner of the treaty, was chased in his
coach down the High Street and
Canongate by a mob of the politically
astute.
But the Parliament was lost. And
that began an almost interminable
epoch of acute and painful boredom
for Scotland, for if there is anything
more boring than England, it is sitting
on a fence for three hundred years in
all Caledonian weathers.
Unwinged Victory
We walked up the hill from Regent
Road, on the lane that runs behind
the old Royal High School. Was this a
bad omen? Thomas Hamilton
Observatory
Guy with a microphone, hardly setting
the world on fire. By my count some
three hundred souls. There were more
people on the postcards being handed
out, which depicted the event like a
merry circus, a political Meadows Festival, complete with face-painting.
It doesn’t take much not to draw a
crowd in Edinburgh. Even the possibility of freedom and national independence will do it.
But Mr Sheridan
Is a powerful speaker, and a hoarse
one. Somehow his own vocal chords
carried his message beyond the abilities of the truly pathetic sound system
in the truly predictable lorry from
which he spoke. “We want freedom
from the Crown”, he said. And yes,
standing up here, looking down on
that ugly, schizophrenic building,
which was vibrating with what
sounded like a glorified SWRI programme, we did.
Scotland… Scotland… Scotland…
Another on the Way
Down Jacob’s Ladder
Mr Sheridan and his wife are to have a
baby soon. He expressed the hope
that it might be born with one
clenched fist, a small red flag in the
other hand.
Ouch, Mrs Sheridan.
The Boredom of Obscenity/
The Obscenity of Boredom
What a good idea, to end this little
rout with obscenity! A Comedian, trying to rally the crowd, obscenely
attempting to suggest our little group
had the same power, the same élan,
even the same rights, as those below
in Miralles-land: “I wish I had a big
cock, so I could piss all over them!” he
said. “But no matter – we have pissed
on them politically”.
No – this man pissed all over
himself, and possibly on us. Was
this any way to end such a gathering, to feel we had been made fools
of? But we were still dry, so I guess
he was right – he doesn’t have a
very big cock.
Not Another Parliament!
It felt strange to have behind us the
National Monument, abandoned forever in 1829. Perhaps this was a bad
omen as well. In 1908 it was suggested
that it could be made part of a new
group of buildings for a proposed
Scottish Parliament!
In the spirit of inquiry, of friendship,
of boredom, we trooped down to
Holyrood. By one o’clock the Canongate was already deserted of whatever
boring jollity it had witnessed. From
inside the Parliament there came
many charming noises: pop stars,
movie stars, children singing, bad
poetry. You’re never far from the village hall in Scotland.
The Site
They used to make useful beer here,
for God’s sake.
The Queen
The Queen always looks bored, bored
out of her skull, by everything; she’s a
little heroine to us all. But consider: if
she’d had a look around this crazy
building and said, ‘I don’t like it,’ the
people of Scotland would have immediately taken it to their hearts, forever.
The First Minister’s biggest headache
would be over. He’d be on Cloud Nine.
But she never says anything.
Atonement
The public has the right to be murderously furious about the cost of the
Parliament, possibly forever. But coming down from the hill, it was plain to
see that the old buildings never would
have done. Power, it seems, now has
to be seated in new buildings, made
of glass and rhetoric and marketing,
in a nation which is in real danger of
being driven by hubris rather than
conviction.
As a taxpayer, I ask a small and necessary atonement for this colossal
error be made by MSPs: give up your
salaries. Serve us for free, for a generation. Two? Three? Put the money back –
in this way we may adhere to the Scottish ideal of thrift, which seems all but
to have died. Then we would no longer
honour career politicians; we could
have representatives with ideals, and
ideas. And were our MSPs selected
direct from the people, as those on a
jury – it could never be boring. It
would never be boring again.
Letter from
elsewhere
BY
I
have spent a good part of
my life living in remote
places, and almost always
they have served up adventures in the form of small
happenings that suddenly
raise enormous questions, happenings that still rumble in my mind.
One of the most vivid of these
occurred in the Dominican Republic, where I spent a string of shoeless winters in its remote province,
beyond the reach of mail, telephone, electricity, newspapers, and
running water. My neighbours
lived mostly by fishing and subsistence farming, and over the years
we grew to know them well. The
men from a nearby settlement had
helped build our small house above
the beach, and they would often
wander up of an evening to sit on
ALASTAIR REID
the stone terrace and talk, always
bringing some offering – an egg, a
hand of bananas, some coffee
beans in a leaf. Few of them could
read or write, but they were no less
than eloquent in conversation, and
inexhaustibly curious. They would
ask endless questions about life in
the United States, for many of them
had a relative who had made the
hazardous journey there; and we in
turn learned their ways. Nothing
delighted them so much as making
small deals, a kind of barter that we
all lived by, sharing harvests and
catches by way of the children, a
band of small, swift messengers.
Two neighbours in particular,
Pucho and Porfirio, both fishermen, often helped me on the land
when the sea allowed, and with
them I made a deal, to bring them
fishing gear from the grand mundo,
as they always called it, in exchange
for an eatable share of their catch,
an arrangement that served all of
us well over the years. One morning, I had returned from my weekly
visit to the nearby town to get some
supplies and to pick up a batch of
mail, and was sitting on the terrace,
slitting open envelopes from what
seemed increasingly another
world, when Pucho and Porfirio
appeared on the path, bearing fish,
among them two squat cofre, or
boxfish, to which we always looked
forward. They perched on the edge
of the terrace, and we exchanged
news.
Among the mail spread on the
warm stone of the terrace were two
or three mail-order catalogues. Porfirio began to leaf through one of
them, stopping here and there to
point to an illustration. “Alejandro,
what is that?” I tried to wave off his
questions; I sensed trouble ahead.
Sure enough, he eventually
reached a double-page spread
advertising a rowing machine. “Alejandro, what is that?” I could no
longer put him off. “Es una
máquina de remar” – a rowing
machine – I told him. Pucho
grabbed the catalogue, and the
effect on both of them was electric.
They crowed with delight. “And
how much does wondrous
machine cost?” Porfirio now had
the scent. I made a rapid calculation: “Almost four thousand pesos.”
They whistled, but their eyes were
already gleaming.
“Do you know?” Porfirio stood
up suddenly, and pointed far out,
to where he waves broke. “To get to
the reef out there where we fish,
Pucho and I, we row for almost an
hour. And back, when we’re tired.
And when we fish nights across the
bay, that is a two-hour row for us,
and the same back! But with this
magnificent machine – ”
“YOU MEAN, THERE IS NO
BOAT?” PORFIRIO SAID. I
SHOOK MY HEAD. “AND NO
WATER AT ALL?”
“Porfirio!” I stopped him with a
hand. “Take a good look at the picture. People keep these machines
in their houses.” Both pairs of eyes
looked at me in disbelief. “You
mean, there is no boat?” Pucho
said. I shook my head. “And no
water at all?” He could hardly contain himself. “So people in the
grand mundo have this expensive
machine at home to make themselves do the thing we most hate
doing in our miserable lives?” I
could do nothing but confirm their
horror.
Porfirio waved the catalogue
indignantly, “Alejandro, forgive me,
but this world in here seems crazy
to me. Why would sensible people,
who can afford to buy fish, want
this torture instrument in their
houses? It is far beyond my understanding.”
There was little I could say, for I
felt much as they did. Feebly, I tried
to explain. “People there sit at desks
for too long, so they have these
machines at home for exercise.”
They frowned in unison. “Exercise?” Pucho had trouble with the
word. “And what is exercise?”
I gave up. From then on, I got rid
of the catalogues whenever they
appeared. In that place, they had
come to seem increasingly subversive. I discovered later, however,
that it was as well Porfirio had
stopped at the pages with the rowing machine. Three pages further
on, a tanning machine had been
lying in wait.
Publish and be charmed
BY JENNIE
A
RRIVING at Tiger’s publishing
house [where she was
employed as her boss’s ghostwriter] from Fife for the first
time was like turning up in
someone else’s dream. It
seemed a very long way down the rabbit hole.
There were no familiar points of reference,
no compass bearings. It felt high-voltage and
slightly dangerous. The first thing to notice
was that there were abnormally high levels
of emotion – lots of spirited laughter, shrieking and embracing. The atmosphere seemed
to teeter on the edge of hysteria and it was
hard to work out the sounds. Were they angry,
or were they just loud? None of it made sense
to begin with. It did not seem to accord with
any place of work, real or imagined. I suppose I had the mistaken idea that only clever
serious people worked with books, and that
they probably operated in a quiet, meticulous and, well, bookish, manner.
In fact, the building sizzled with youthful
vigour, in the shape of stunning, sophisticated young women. They had patrician
accents, exceptional poise and uncommonly
long legs. Their skin was not pale but healthy
and bronzed. And there wasn’t a man in
sight. Indeed the mythical Martian, if he had
happened to drop in, could not have imagined that women had ever been oppressed,
or that their role had once been secondary or
passive. Here, in this office, in 1981, women
ruled. Yet there were no bluestockings, only
silk stockings.
The premises were in a run-down part of
Soho and extended in a ramshackle way over
two buildings, separated by an Italian restaurant and a hairdresser’s salon. A faint odour,
a mixture of garlic and hair lotion, hung in
the air. The offices covered four floors, with
staircases slightly aslant and walls off-centre.
The furnishings were quite shabby and a
layer of black London dust rested on the surfaces. Everywhere there were piles of books
and high-rise manuscripts. And, curiously,
for a publishing house, there were clothes
everywhere, suspended in the doorways and
draped from light fittings, as if the premises
might actually be shared with a dressmaker.
Boas and belts hung on the backs of chairs,
and on several doors there were coat-hangers
bearing evening gowns and stylish camisole
jackets. In the loo, I found underwear, tights
and nail varnish.
Tiger’s girls, as he called them, were wellborn and highly bred. They included a
Heathcot-Amery, a Bonham-Carter, a
Sackville-West and a Vane-Tempest-Stewart.
There was still a lot of class about in those
days. A de Chamberet, a Ferdinando and von
Stumm added an exotic touch. Nearly everyone, it turned out, was the daughter of an
aristocratic or similarly prominent family.
“Famous Englishmen write to me about their
daughters,” Tiger had told me when we first
met. “What else can I do?” he said, “I have to
find a job for them.”
Tiger had a conglomerate of companies
connected with publishing, fashion, films
and theatre. He had been dubbed “a cultural
tycoon” by The Times newspaper and he lived
up to his dubbing assiduously. The ethos in
the empire was not one of profit and loss, but
of name and fame. In the latter, so it became
clear, he was greatly assisted by these daughters of famous men, for they were scarcely
ever out of the gossip columns and they
always knew somebody who knew somebody. Even when they were not at work they
were still working – at dinner parties, fashion shoots and hunt balls. Their most important work, as Tiger himself affirmed, was
done out of the office hours, for they ensured
that news of his latest exploits was trawled
through London’s most fashionable hotspots.
The smart outfits hanging from the office
doors began to make sense.
I was introduced to Cosima, Selina,
Lucinda, Davina, Samantha and two Sophias.
There seemed to be a conspicuous homogeneity of Christian names. Surely there
ought to be a collective noun for this phenomenon, I thought, this concentration of
cognates. An assonance perhaps? An
artillery? I then met Andrea (a Baroness) and
Sabrina (an heiress) and, in due course,
Alethea, Rebecca, Nigella, Eliza, Candida,
Mariella, Zelfa, Georgia, Henrietta and Arabella. It was a lot to take in, the sort of list I
would have been made to learn by rote at
school, like books of the Bible or irregular
Latin verbs. When walking around London, I
sometimes recited the names to myself, trying to fix them in my head, marvelling at the
sound patterns they made.
“Do you like my girls?” Tiger asked not long
after I had started my new job. He was wearing crocodile skin shoes and odd socks in
purple and yellow. “They are amazing, isn’t
it?” We were sitting in a much smarter building a few streets away, in his penthouse with
the tiger skin on the wall above his head.
Without waiting for an answer, he continued,
“And here is my most amazing girl!” At this he
grabbed hold of Henrietta, his personal assistant, and tugged her hair. “She looks so soft,”
he said, “but underneath she’s a tigress. Only
I can tame her!” And as if to make the point,
he squeezed her tight and smacked her bottom. Henrietta did not seem to mind.
In truth everyone loved to please him, and
he loved to be pleased. It was fascinating to
watch, and it had the feel of a phenomenon,
ERDAL
something bordering on the fantastic. There
was a cult of personality in place, and the
worshippers came from all over to demonstrate the strength of their veneration. The
air thickened with encomia as they vied for a
mark of favour, a preferment for a friend, a
sister, a beautiful daughter. When he uttered
the simple words, “I will see what I can do,”
he gave hope to the worshipful and was
hailed as a saviour. It was evidently an honour to pay homage at the imperial court. And
it was an empire of sorts – not quite Versailles
perhaps, but with rules and routines that
were in some respects just as precise, and just
as remote from ordinary living.
At the palace there was a retinue of attendants – valets, scribes, equerries, foot messengers, maidservants, not to mention a
chamberlain figure, who had the difficult job
of balancing the books. Things had to be
done in a particular way and at a particular
time, and the various ceremonies were
attended by the modern equivalent of curtsies and bows. The emperor’s exactitude
came over as an amazing thing, a glorification of reverent observance. At the touch of a
button, a maid on stiletto heels delivered an
apple cut into eight segments and carefully
arranged on a silver plate. A different signal
summoned a beautiful vision bearing a tiny
gold-encrusted cup containing black coffee
to which, under her master’s gaze, she added
two drops of rose water in the manner of a
holy rite.
Life at court was ordered in such a way as
to delight the emperor. Mastery of detail was
ranked highly, and if ever the detail was mismanaged a heavy price was exacted. Even the
minutiae of the court were accorded great
importance: the way an envelope was sealed,
the positioning of the blotting paper on the
leather desk, the hanging of an overcoat in
the cloakroom – each task was managed with
painstaking care. Everything was codified
into a precise system on which the smooth
running of the empire depended.
The emperor’s personal grooming was also
Dave Sutton
a matter for the most careful attention. Each
morning before arriving at work he went first
to the barber and then to the hygienist. In
those days I was a bit unsure of what a
hygienist might do – it is one of those words
that sound so very clean that it might actually
be dirty. As far as I knew we didn’t have
hygienists in Scotland, but so frequently and
cheerfully did Tiger say, “I have just come
from my hygienist” that I was fairly certain
there could be nothing shameful involved.
Eventually I asked one of the girls in pearls,
who said matter-of-factly, “Oh, it’s teeth. He
goes to get his teeth cleaned.”
The barber was an even more important
figure in Tiger’s life, a man of near magical
powers. Throughout the eighties Tiger had
one of the most spectacular cover-ups in the
country. He was not yet ready to accept that
he was bald on top - that would take another
dozen years or so - and the concealment of
this fact must have presented a serious challenge. But the challenge was well met: the
hair, crinkly and wiry like a pot-scourer, was
persuaded to travel from a line just above his
ear to be pomaded into place over the crown.
It was a substantial thatch, by no means the
few lean strands that are combed over many
a male pate. People in ancient times used to
believe that good and bad spirits entered the
body through the hair on one’s head. But
Tiger’s canopy was thick enough to prevent
any spiritual traffic, good or bad. In fact it
looked as if it could be its own biosphere,
capable of supporting diverse organisms. In
fresh winds it became separated from its
base and hovered independently, like a flying
saucer preparing to land. In addition to having his hair fixed every day, Tiger had a shave
three times a week. He had complete faith in
his barber. “He is wonderful,” he would purr.
“I adore him. You know, he heats the shaving
cream and wraps my face in a warm towel.”
Whenever he spoke of his barber, a beatific
smile crept on to his lips. “He looks after me
so nicely. I feel soothed by him.” Long ago
the barber was regarded as the most important man in the tribe – medicine man and
priest rolled into one. Some of this belief
lived on in Tiger.
It was with Napoleonic thoroughness that
Tiger controlled every aspect of the day-today running of his empire. He maintained
absolute authority in a number of ways: by
keeping the court guessing about his next
move, by never showing his hand completely
to anyone, and by possessing a medieval
savoir-faire. There were at least two Tigers:
one was the exotic, flamboyant, quixotic, lovable character, defined by his generosity,
compassion and energy; the other was a
vainglorious dictator. The latter was generally in the shadow of the former, but both
versions were real.
His natural inclination was towards lavish
extravagance, and he encouraged immoderation in others. “How much will it cost?” he
often asked when a member of staff went to
see him about something, usually to do with
publicity or marketing. “Two thousand
pounds! It that all? Then do it darling! What
are you waiting for?” But every so often there
would be a crack-down, and he would rail
against expenses claims, overuse of the telephone, fringe benefits and sundry perks.
“What! Take an author to Bertorelli’s? You
must be mad! Where am I supposed to get
the money to pay for these bloody
authors and their lunches?” Storms
broke and storms blew over, always
leaving a little wreckage behind,
but nothing so devastating as to
bring about any radical change.
Whenever Tiger became agitated
about something it was noticeable
that everyone competed to placate
him. If children have tantrums,
parents are generally advised to
keep calm and ignore them. But
Tiger’s tantrums were both heeded
and indulged; girls hosed him
down with one gush after another
as they rushed to pick up his toys
and put them back in the pram.
They swished their hair back and
forth like curtains and drenched
him with love till he calmed down.
He wallowed in all this. Indeed
there seemed to be a degree of selfawareness about the tantrums. “I
got hysterical,” he would often say
when recalling some incident that
had upset him, his voice rising an
octave or two in the recollection.
And to a sober bystander his
behaviour did come over as a kind
of hysteria, the sort that in days
gone by would have earned a
woman a slap in the face and a
threat to remove her womb.
In Tiger’s publishing house there
were many passions. People often
seemed to be in a bad mood, or at
least pretended to be – I was never
entirely sure about what was real
and what was affected. What confused me was the amount of
embracing that coexisted with the
girls’ rages – a fascinating sequence
of aggressing and caressing. There
was also a degree of unsisterly cruelty as they jostled for position and
tried to curry favour with Tiger. I
say ‘they’, for it was clear that I did
not belong to this world. I was
looked upon, with some justification, as one of Tiger’s whims: I lived
in Scotland after all, and turned up
only for editorial meetings, staying
for just a few days at any one time.
Even then it was clear that I was
just passing through this foreign
land – I was in it, but not of it.
Besides, I didn’t know anyone. Not
even anyone who knew anyone.
It was a strange place for me to
dip into and out of, and its sheer
otherness never lost its impact. At
home in Scotland, there were two
small children and a baby, the centre of my universe. But in the London office I never mentioned the
fact that I was a mother. I was at
pains to fit in, and I sensed that talk
about children would not be wise. I
therefore pretended to be someone
else, someone I was not.
There were two others who didn’t
belong, at least not in the social
élite, but they were both men and
usually worked in a separate building. One occupied the role of chamberlain, treasurer of the household,
a trusted aide-de-camp and a magician with figures. He was a cultured
man, shy and sensitive, as different
in character from Tiger as it was
possible to be. The other was a
member of the Old Guard who had
access at all times to the throne. His
distinctive Cockney voice was pep-
ADVERT
OTTAKARS
pered with glottal stops and aspirated aitches, and he always
referred to Tiger as The Chairman.
In days of old he would have been
the chief courtier. As it was, he
served as Tiger’s eyes and ears, his
spy-master, and though he behaved
as if he were one of the gang, his
loyalty to the throne was absolute. If
ever anyone complained that Tiger
was being unreasonable, he would
listen for a while, drawing heavily
on a cigarette, and then solemnly
recite: “Look ’ere, ’e’s The Chairman
and wha’ ’e says goes.”
Tiger prized loyalty above all else.
Loyalty meant, among other things,
plenty of fawning at the feast and
not questioning any policy decision. Some members of staff were
inefficient
and
occasionally
unprincipled but, provided they
were loyal, their jobs were usually
safe. Tiger himself would sometimes say “I know she fiddles her
expenses, but she’s very loyal”; or
perhaps, “She drives me mad –
she’s always talking on the telephone, but on the other hand she’s
very loyal.” In fact, he tolerated all
manner of wild, anarchic behaviour; indeed he seemed to relish it.
Tales of wayward conduct amused
him and he would often exclaim, in
squeals of delight, “My girls are
delinquents! They are hooligans!”
Once during a party at an exclusive
club on Pall Mall, one of Tiger’s
girls, something of a free spirit, was
caught urinating in a wash-basin in
the gents. Despite a grovelling apology to the club, a lifetime ban was
imposed on the publishing house
and its staff. Tiger was mortified, or
affected to be. For weeks on end he
would say to everyone he met,
“CAN – YOU – IMAGINE?” He gave
the same stress to all three words
and thumped them out in turn on
the table. “Peeing in the basin! She’s
a complete liability. She will ruin
us!” But after a perfunctory rant
against her character, he always
finished by saying, “But, you know,
I love her! She’s so loyal!” Unsurprisingly, it was disloyalty – a
potent and protean concept – that
was the unforgivable sin.
After a while I discovered that the
girls came and went with striking
regularity. When I travelled to London to attend monthly meetings, I
would find that Cosima had been
replaced by Nigella, or Sophia by
Candida. There were new arrivals as
well as bare survivals. And even
occasional revivals, since it was not
unknown for a girl to be recalled
from the wilderness into which she
had been so precipitately cast. Tiger
alone had the power to pardon the
condemned; no amount of special
pleading by anyone else on behalf
of the offender had any effect.
In due course Lucinda left to
marry an Earl and Sabrina was put
in charge of a book club. She
claimed never to have read a book –
she even confessed this to the press
– but it didn’t seem to matter. It was
enough that she had been a girlfriend of a member of the royal
family. It was clear that Tiger’s
appointments policy was full of
purpose and intent, and I soon
began to notice interesting patterns
in the hiring, and also in the firing,
a rare but always dramatic occurrence. On these occasions, reason
was set aside while emotion did its
dirty work. No one understood the
specific trigger, but the reaction
was extreme. Knives would be
sharpened, and over the next day
or two the girl in question, often
quite oblivious of the offence she
was alleged to have committed,
would be branded and traduced.
Tiger put energy into umbrage; his
pique was majestic. And when his
pique finally peaked, the most
faithful member of the Old Guard
would be called upon to do the
necessary? Tiger himself was
unable to face it.
Every so often he got a gleam in
his eye, and we knew he had fallen
in love. Again. It was always a coup
de foudre followed by a complete
infatuation. It had the energy of a
natural phenomenon – a typhoon
maybe, or a freak storm, Single
orchids would sent to the chosen
one and French perfume would
arrive by special courier. At these
times Tiger behaved like a little
puppy, rolling over on his back,
paws in the air, simpering and
slavering, hoping that his tummy
might be tickled. Just like the rest of
us, this mighty potentate could be
made ridiculous by love. The girl so
beloved would be designated La
Favorita – a recognised position at
the imperial court – and a job would
usually be found for her in public
relations. In the days that followed
she would dine in the best restaurants and occupy a box at the Royal
Opera House. Previous holders of
the position would drop down the
pecking order, and for a while there
would be furious spitting and pout-
ing. Being La Favorita, however,
was generally a short-lived affair.
Though the after tremors of it could
be felt for some time, Tiger fell in
and out of love quickly and decisively.
Now and then I sat at my desk on
the top floor of the publishing
house and listened to the complex
sounds coming from the rest of the
building. Telephones rang, kettles
boiled, hairdryers wheezed. And
some people didn’t just talk, they
squawked. They spoke, as it were,
in italics, so that perfectly ordinary
sentences were brought into
prominent relief. Something as
simple as “What are you doing?”
was invariably “What are you
doing? – which gave normal dialogue a theatrical quality. They also
spoke in shrill absolutes, so that
someone was a total darling or a
complete noodle. They would say
grotty and golly, they complained
of a frightful pong, and they were
never just angry, but always
absolutely livid. The way they
expressed themselves seemed
every bit as significant as what they
were speaking about; in some
strange sense it was indistinguishable from it.
Of course, a lot of time was spent
on the telephone, which was used
just as much for making social
arrangements as for conducting
business. The collective sounds of
Tiger’s girls on the phone to their
friends were not so very different
from the whooping at a children’s
party. It seemed that if you were out
of the top drawer you did a lot of
shrieking. At closer range it was
impossible to make out the words,
the discussion of menus and venues, of the night before and the
night to come. And always of what
was worn and what to wear. But the
language was alien, brimming with
chumminess, and there seemed to
be no way in for those not born to
it. You can come to imitate the way
someone speaks, but you cannot
take the substance as your own.
Theirs wasn’t a private language
exactly, more a system of communication that naturally excluded.
The vowels were particularly distinctive, springing from a place way
down the larynx and travelling up
fine swan-like necks before emerging in beautifully modulated tone
patterns. The Scots have short,
stunted vowels, cut off in their
prime, strangled humanely before
they get too long and above themselves. They sprout from pinched
throats and squat necks. Of course,
this is to speak generally, for there
are longer shorts in Kirkwall, say,
than in Kirkcaldy. Even so, vowels
can never be underestimated – they
are basic in forming, and sometimes impeding, social contracts.
Mercifully, human beings need
very little to be able to understand
each other’s way of speaking – just a
few sounds strung together are
usually enough to get the gist. But
there is so much to distinguish one
kind of speech from another, to
separate us one from the other.
There’s nothing quite like language
for coming between us.
An edited extract from Ghosting
by Jennie Erdal, published by
Canongate.
Hyperventilating with
self-congratulation
BY
ROSEMARY GORING
WHEN SCOTTISH
NOVELISTS ARE
OVERLOOKED,
THE RESPONSE
IS ONE OF
MYSTIFICATION
AND ANGER
Left: A. L. Kennedy;
above: Janice Galloway;
right: James Robertson
C
arl MacDougall’s recent BBC 2
series, Writing Scotland, swept
a magisterial yet kindly eye
over the history of Scottish literature. It was an intelligently
economical programme, deftly
simplifying complexity to make a highly
watchable, informative series that until
recently would not have got past the preliminary round of producers’ offers. Ignoring the
girning background of breastbeating as the
nation’s intellectuals bewail its cultural meltdown, its paranoic sense of dumbing-down,
MacDougall let loose an elegant quiver of literary arrows that illuminated not only the
wealth and fascination in Scotland’s literary
past but, perhaps as vividly, its current state
of vigour and confidence.
Indeed, it was impossible to view this evocation of past writers without sensing the
looming presence of today’s literary clan. It is
fashionable now to consider Scottish fiction
one of the most vibrant cultural arenas in
Europe, but from the first episode of Writing
Scotland the calibre of past masters cast a
faint pall over the glory that is heaped somewhat indiscriminately on current writers, our
novelists in particular.
In that first episode, Sorley MacLean, Norman MacCaig and Hugh MacDiarmid lit up
the screen, by turns harsh, thoughtful, selfabsorbed: men whose writing not only made
a spiritual connection with their own times,
and those of an earlier Scotland, but hooked
into the future too, where their words remain
as barb, guide and counterpoint. Watching
these archive recordings, it was hard not to
ask who among modern Scotland’s novelists
has attained anything approaching their
standard.
MacDougall’s commentary was augmented by a raft of contemporary writers
who had been invited to contribute their
thoughts. Throughout every episode they
appeared in such numbers it was as if someone had picked up a list of those who’ve ever
received a Scottish Arts Council grant, maybe
even just a Christmas card, and called them
all in for a chat. Liz Lochhead, William McIlvanney, Jackie Kay, Andrew O’Hagan, James
Robertson, Edwin Morgan, Anne Donovan,
Chris Dolan, Ali Smith, and many others sat
in judgement on their predecessors, showing acute awareness of the patterns of fiction
that have shaped the fictional landscape, and
of their own links to these patterns.
Whenever someone passes comment on
another person’s work, it’s inevitable that
they sound superior. One doubts whether
any of those interviewed consciously felt this
but, deliberately or not, the sense came
across of a platoon of fresh writers confident
that they are worthy of taking their place on
the same ladder as, say, Sir Walter Scott, or
Lewis Grassic Gibbon or Muriel Spark. Yet
while they reflect critically on their predecessors, who sits in judgement on them? And
what verdict would they come to if they did?
Had any of those on MacDougall’s programme been asked to dissect the content
and career of their fellow writers, one suspects the screen would have gone blank. It is
one of the more intriguing features of the
Scottish literary establishment that while it
enjoys – indeed revels in – the freedom to
write whatever it likes, it bristles like a porcupine when criticised, and scurries moledeep when asked to pass anything other than
eulogistic comment on its peers. Those
whose fiction savages the political structure
of Scotland, or pulls the rug from under hypocrites and charlatans, suddenly become
painfully sensitive when anything adverse is
said about their own work. It may be an
understandable instinct, but in the long term
it’s not a helpful one.
A backslapping culture has arisen in the
last fifteen or so years in which it is widely
assumed, and frequently reiterated, that Scotland is undergoing a literary renaissance. “We
are enjoying a golden age of literature” is one
of the most over-used phrases on the literary
circuit, dragged out at almost every award
ceremony, as judges, politicians and sponsors
hyperventilate with self-congratulation. If
adjectival excitement and hubris can sustain
a movement, then Scotland’s renaissance is
likely to outlast and outclass that of earlymodern Europe. Personally, I prefer to use the
word flourishing. But just how good are the
novelists working in Scotland today? Are they
world-class? Does their work play on a bigger
stage? And if it does not, should we care? Take
this year’s Booker prize. Of a long list of 22
candidates, not one was Scottish, despite the
fact that those eligible for consideration
included James Kelman’s You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, and AL Kennedy’s
Paradise, highly accomplished works by two
of our most respected writers.
When Scottish novelists are overlooked,
the response is one of mystification and
anger: those were my own feelings, certainly,
on hearing this year’s selection. Compared
with some of the titles that reached the long
list, and with most on the shortlist of six, Kelman and Kennedy were in a different league.
For style, depth and originality they matched
the best of the Booker nominees. For them
not to be winners is in itself no reason to
grouse. Not even to have been placed, however, is perplexing. In those years when a
Scot has reached the Booker shortlist –
Muriel Spark in 1981, William Boyd in 1982,
James Kelman and George Mackay Brown in
1994, Shena Mackay in 1996, Andrew O’Hagan in 1999 – we feel exaggerated pride. Isn’t
it curious, though, that Kelman has been the
only Scottish Booker winner in its 36-year
history? Using this as a benchmark (a dubious one, admittedly), what good is our
much-vaunted renaissance doing us south of
the border and beyond? If what we’re producing is so excellent, why don’t others think so?
Beyond the regular snub of the Booker
prize, Scottish writers, especially those published by Scottish publishers, are frequently
ignored by English literary pages. The heart
of the British literary establishment still beats
in London. By the time an author from
beyond the border comes into view, the pulse
registered on the metropolitan radar is weak,
and fading.
One thing we’ve proved very good at
recently is producing bestsellers. If
JK Rowling can be gathered under
the “Scottish” umbrella, then she
would top the list, putting Scotland
at the forefront of international fictional success. Behind her come
Alexander McCall Smith and Ian
Rankin, an outstanding double-act
in terms of Scottish sellability, followed at some distance by other
criminal talents: Christopher
Brookmyre, Val McDermid, Denise
Mina and so on.
The age-old Scottish talent for
storytelling underlies these triumphs of popularity. Yet while one
wouldn’t wish to detract an iota
from the credit deserved by such
successful work, none of these writers has produced a book that has in
any degree significantly altered the
way Scottish writers think or write.
Of the novels published in the
last ten or so years, however, a
handful have done just that, standing out as snow-tipped Himalayas
amid a sea of Lammermuirs: James
Kelman’s How Late it Was, How
Late; AL Kennedy’s So I Am Glad;
Candia McWilliam’s Debatable
Land, Frank Kuppner’s Something
Very Like Murder; Irvine Welsh’s
Trainspotting, Andrew O’Hagan’s
Our Fathers, Alan Warner’s Morvern
Callar, Ali Smith’s Hotel World,
William Boyd’s Any Human Heart,
Janice Galloway’s Clara, James
Robertson’s Joseph Knight. (Absent
from this list are the later works of
some of our best writers: Muriel
Spark, for instance, and Robin
Jenkins, whose recent novels represent a coda to these careers rather
than a further advancing of it.)
If we are to assess the fictional
state of Scotland today, it needs to
be by focusing on the best; by
ignoring the hype and the tendency
to tell ourselves how good we are,
and by looking hard at what Scottish novelists are doing. For a
nation famous for its ability to see
its own faults, we are strangely
myopic these days when it comes
to our fiction. It’s as if to take issue
with the quality of our writers is to
attack the heart of Scotland’s sense
of itself and deal yet another blow
to its battered self-image. For me,
the plethora of Scottish novels
being published and the relentless
enthusiasm that dogs each emergent writer has a depressive rather
than exhilarating effect. Maybe I
am simply too sour to embrace the
glut of self-confidence that sits so
uncomfortably with the cautious,
self-deprecating old Scottish psyche.
In the last ten years I have read
countless works of new fiction,
whether as a reviewer, or as a judge
on prize panels and the Scottish
Arts Council. What has struck me
most forcibly is that while fashion
has a huge impact on the fringes of
our literature, it does not impinge
on those who have a vision of their
own; those who, in effect, set the
trend. Only imitators toe the line.
In this country we have a handful of
originals, and a hundred times as
many acolytes who produce perfectly good, but unstartling, work.
On the evidence of the past
decade, compared with English
novels Scottish fiction is in a
healthier and more interesting
state: fresher, more imaginative,
more vibrant. It may have taken us
twenty years to reach parliamen-
tary devolution, but in terms of fiction there have been several powerful and independent parties
working steadily on their own tack,
parallel to, or even regardless of,
the political weather outside.
What is also clear, however, is
that there exists an invisible
apartheid in this country. You see it
in the way some writers are
deemed less Scottish than others:
those such as Ronald Frame, a
Glaswegian to the bone, but not of
the dark, sleazy, aggressive Glasgow
that gives such a strong setting to
so many novels, but of the douce,
introspective, emotionally seething
middle-class Glasgow, where passions may be violent, but the streets
are clean and the only low life to be
seen are privet hedges.
Or there’s Candia McWilliam, an
elegant, haunting writer, who lives
in Oxford in, one suspects, a state
of perpetual homesickness, her
geographical distance and upperclass accent setting her apart from
her less patrician contemporaries.
Allan Massie, too, largely as a result
of his unabashed right-wing sympathies and undisguised public
school background, is seen less as a
Scottish novelist as one that happens to live in Scotland. Meanwhile
the uncategorisable Frank Kuppner
works on in his inimitably powerful, sardonic style, as unconcerned
about changing his ways to fit the
season as Andrew Crumey, whose
droll and scientifically-rooted fiction distances him from the mainstream Scottish school. Such
writers are not embraced in the fold
in the way that some willing exiles
are – Ali Smith, for instance, or
Jackie Kay, who rouse no suspicions
about their Scottish passport
despite their resolve to live far away
from their homeland.
What separates the main brood
of Scots from those eyed with mild
suspicion is tone: the coolth and
restraint, the emphasis on manners
and on the unspoken in works by
McWilliam or Frame or Massie do
not suit the more robust, rugged,
transgressive or plain angry mood
of our times. Hence their lack of
imitators.
Yet for every Scottish writer who
is elbowed off the main stage,
there’s one who has come to Scotland, started to write, and never
left: notably Michel Faber, Kate
Atkinson, Bernard MacLaverty and,
of course, J K Rowling. The infusion
of outsiders into the writing fold is
one of the most optimistic signs, in
many ways, for the state of Scottish
fiction, a symptom of the confidence this country can offer, in
terms of support and inclusion.
It seems to me that the diagnosis
of the fictional state of Scotland has
altered in the last handful of years:
perhaps as recently as the day we
got devolution. And there are two
novels that, to my mind, are symptomatic of the best of what is happening in Scottish fiction. One
harks back to a history that has
nothing directly to do with us; the
second is utterly contemporary,
written in the moment to such an
extent that the whole novel takes
place in the space of only a few
hours.
The first is Janice Galloway’s
Clara. An intense, interior account
of the life of the composer Schumann’s gifted pianist wife, it is set in
James Kelman: the only Scottish
winner of the Booker in the
prize’s 36 year history.
19th century Europe and written
with little of the Scottish vocabulary that has characterised much of
Galloway’s earlier work. Yet in every
line this extraordinarily powerful,
imaginative, domestic, and daring
novel reeks of its Caledonian roots.
As she explores the feelings of a
woman forced to bend first to a
father’s will and then to a husband’s, Galloway immerses the
reader in the mental world of the
artist, in this case a musician,
thwarted and willingly warped by
the overwhelming demands of her
male loved-ones. In her psychological penetration and rigour, in her
rhythmic, musical, yet devastatingly unsentimental prose, Galloway takes the historical novel and
turns it into a masterly modern
medium.
Clara touches on many areas –
gender politics, autobiography, cultural history, romance and tragedy
– yet is never so full it becomes burdensome or loses its immediacy as
a work of pure fiction. It takes a
writer of great assurance and skill
to carry off such a feat. With this
novel Galloway has not only come
of age, but pulled Scottish fiction
up a peg in the process.
James Robertson too in his
uncompromisingly political The
Fanatic, and more recently Joseph
Knight, has raised a standard for
using a historical story for modern
purposes, while at the same time
paying homage, albeit highly critical, to our heritage. The use of old
THERE IS SO MUCH
ENCOURAGEMENT IN THE
LITERARY SCENE WITHIN
SCOTLAND, SUCH A WAVE
OF SELF-BELIEF, THAT THE
WIDER FIELD CAN EASILY,
IF NOT WISELY, BE
DISMISSED.
secrets, newly minted for our own
times, is one indication of cultural
maturity, of writers able to find the
mental space to stand back and
evaluate the origins of our society
and selves.
Pre-devolution literature had a
political urgency, and a powerful
cultural repetitiveness, one novel to
the next, which, for all the ails of
our present political climate, is now
lacking. In its place is a mood of
individuality, epitomised in the
second novel I consider emblematic, James Kelman’s You Have to be
Careful in the Land of the Free.
As with Clara, Kelman makes no
concessions to the reader. He never
has, of course. It is not his fault that
many have tried to ape his tone, his
political outlook, and his stream of
consciousness technique, ending
up with feeble or dull imitations. In
You Have to be Careful..., Kelman
has honed all of these into a mesmerising nightmare of introspection as a Scot, who has for many
years lived in America, makes the
journey to the airport for his flight
back to Glasgow. What impresses is
the steadiness of this novel’s focus,
Kelman’s insistence on living in the
skin of his narrator so fully that the
reader’s breath begins to synchronise with his. The lack of compromise in this novel’s complex,
tightrope construction, and Kelman’s insistence on giving voice to
the roller-coaster of thoughts that
run through his hero’s head, work
brilliantly, if riskily, on several levels. Not least is the sense that
although the Scottishness of the
hero is crucial to his psychology,
this novel is in many ways free of
Scotland. Its politics are universal,
and timeless. Particularly exhilarating is the ambition behind it, the
sense of pummelling an almost
indescribable series of emotions
and perceptions into tangible
shape. If ever there were a cry for
Scottish writers to find their own
path, to remain unswayed by convention or trend, this is it.
Slowly, I believe, the Scottish literary scene is widening its horizons, although you might not think
so to read The Knuckle End, the first
compilation of work by graduates
of the influential Creative Writing
MA at Glasgow and Strathclyde
universities. Much of the rather callow material in this anthology
seems rooted in what Alexander
McCall Smith has dubbed “Scottish
miserabilism”, that wilfully downbeat attitude that has dominated
the past few years, beginning with
Irvine Welsh’s groundbreaking cultural blast, but which now feels
jaded and dated.
By snail-like degrees this outlook
is evolving into a more subtle and
interesting world view. Witness
works such as Anne Donovan’s
Buddha Da, or Luke Sutherland’s
Venus as a Boy, or the postmodernism of those such as Alice
Thompson, who are as much a part
of the literary landscape now as the
new urban fiction produced by
writers such as Des Dillon, Zoë
Strachan and Colette Paul.
And there are voices as yet uncategorisable, still early in what promise to be long and interesting
careers: Andrew O’Hagan, Louise
Welsh, Ali Smith. What some in this
generation of writers lack compared with those before them is
intensity. I think it’s this intensity
that makes much of our best Scottish fiction difficult for those outside our country. There’s no
mistaking the anger in Scottish fiction – it crackles off Kelman, sighs
from Kennedy, and dances on every
word Galloway writes. Although
with Lanark Alasdair Gray became
the godfather of modern Scottish
fiction, these three are our trinity,
the closest we have yet come to
world-class.
The recognition that these, and
other Scottish writers, receive
beyond Scotland is not proportional to their talent. That shouldn’t
matter, but it does, both financially
and emotionally for the authors,
and culturally for the country. It is
painful to see such voices ignored
or undervalued by readers unwilling or unable to appreciate their
calibre. Perhaps it’s Scottish writers’ refusal to be anything other
than uncompromising that deflects
some readers. It may be no comfort
to those who feel neglected or
slighted, but in many ways the current fictional state of Scotland is a
product of a porous insularity,
which nurtures its self-confidence
but also perhaps helps to alienate it
from a wider recognition. Scottish
fiction bubbles like a bottomless
cauldron into which as many ingredients are flung as there are hands
at the pot. What emerges is a myriad of voices, loosely connected by
a quality that might be defined as
reach, or ambition, or focus.
Of course, it matters if Scottish
work doesn’t travel onto a bigger
stage, but writers seem not to let it
matter too much. There is so much
encouragement in the literary
scene within Scotland, such a wave
of self-belief, that the wider field
can easily, if not wisely, be dismissed. It is worth noting, however,
that many of the writers who reach
the London radar and the metropolitan judges’ prize lists, live in the
English literary heartland, among
them Ali Smith, William Boyd and
Andrew O’Hagan. It’s as if these
writers, in escaping a homeland for
which they harbour mixed feelings,
have diluted the off-putting scent
of clannishness that disturbs or
irritates or bores English arbiters of
taste. The mere hint of such prejudice should be enough to make
indigenous novelists even more
uncompromising. No-one should
write from anything other than the
passion and commitment to say
what they have to say in their own
distinctive way. Whether that
reaches a wider audience than their
nation is not a reflection of its
worth. The only true judge of a
novel’s quality is time, which lies in
no single reader’s gift.
While I don’t subscribe to the
view that this is a golden age for
Scottish fiction, it is clearly a time
of rare opportunity, when the steeplechase of obstacles that for generations has stood between many
would-be authors and publication
has been removed. Of the many
who are currently rushing to grasp
the chances on offer, only a very
few will attain literary immortality.
Surely that’s a healthy fictional state
for any country to be in?
Rosemary Goring is Literary
Editor of The Herald
Nerve Centre
JENNIE RENTON INTERVIEWS ANNE MACLEOD
L
ove, loss and language are the
themes of Anne MacLeod’s The
Blue Moon Book. The story
unfolds a cappella in a deft medley of voices and cameos charting
a young woman’s year-long struggle towards recovery after a devastating accident. Bereft of memory, Jess is cut off from
the past. Bereft of language, she is gradually
released from her envelope of inarticulate
pain into a dislocated world. The patient’s role
“with its inherent tensions” has always interested MacLeod. However, the Neurology
Department of a fictional Edinburgh hospital,
‘The Central’, provides a context quite different from her own speciality of dermatology,
and while researching the book she became
fascinated by the role of speech therapists,
working as they do “at the cutting edge of language, encouraging speech where illness or
accident has silenced the patient’s voice.”
She enjoyed creating the hospital setting,
with all the “richness of community” that
entailed. “So many voices. So many healthcare workers giving generously, not only of
their skills and knowledge, but of themselves. How much of their identity is
invested in their work? How much is suppressed by it? This is the first time I’ve written a largely medical story. It's unusual, I
think, in that the patient is at once centre of
the action and yet inactive. Both powerless
and powerful. She’s the moving force, yet she
may feel scarcely present.”
MacLeod is interested in the sort of event
that disrupts relationships and expectations.
This might be an accident. It might be falling
in love. In The Blue Moon Book , it is both.
While covering a Pictish Conference in
Edinburgh, Jess goes to bed with the star
speaker. Casual sex is not her style but this
encounter, passionate and tender, has
seemed far from casual. The following day
Michael is scheduled to go on a sightseeing
tour of the city. After he leaves her hotel
room, she decides to try to coincide with him
on this jaunt. It is a fateful decision, in more
ways than one. Spotting a tour bus he might
be on, she makes an awkward leap for the
platform. The bus suddenly lurches forward
and she's thrown back onto the road to be
dragged along, “helpless, head raking the tarmac, left shoe snagged in the wooden deck”.
The driver eventually stops and the passengers exit at the front. Among them is
Michael. With the efficacy of Puck’s Love-inidleness, happenstance ensures that he continues in ignorance of her quandary.
Jess is rushed into casualty and her partner, Dan, comes through from Glasgow. The
Festival is in full swing, hotels are full, and he
ends up arranging to use the room she had
booked. He goes there straight from the
Intensive Care Unit and orders a large
Lagavulin. Just as it arrives, he notices a piece
of purple foil under the bed. Compulsively
tidy, he picks it up and places it on the young
porter’s tray. He is disconcerted by the
response this provokes. Looking more closely
at the scrap of foil, he realises it is a torn condom wrapper. To cover his embarrassment,
Dan blusters aggressively about the hotel’s
standards of cleanliness. It is only later when
he is preparing to go to bed that he finally
recognises “the latex shine of used condoms
gleaming through the tissues in the bathroom’s overflowing bin”.
Anne MacLeod is interested in the sort of event that disrupts relationships and expectations.
Dan is a sports journalist who knows all
about playing away. Although he has his own
hot dalliance on the side he can’t bear the
idea of Jess doing the same but he’s enough
of a realist to face the fact that the easy banter of their early years together has dried up
and “their home had become the quietest,
least conversational house he’d ever known.”
And yet they have loved each other, once.
When Jess emerges from her coma he is devastated to find that she has lost the power of
speech, possibly forever. And what is worse,
when he visits she “lies cowering, a lump of
bruises, broken bones”, and screams the
whole time he’s there.
Months pass. Winter is approaching. Jess,
who has been moved from the high dependency unit, can now sit up in bed. She spends
her time watching orange-breasted finches in
the rowan tree outside the ward window stripping branch after branch of their red berries.
Her only word is “no”, which she imvests with
an increasing range of expressiveness, sometimes giving a hint of her old self, sparky, mischievous, funny. Sian, a speech therapist,
works painstakingly with her. One of her gambits is to make a portfolio of photographs that
might trigger response in Jess. This “Blue
Moon Book” is only one component in a healing process that is described with absorbing
insight and very movingly.
“Jess’s dilemma is that nobody’s quite sure
who she is,” says MacLeod. “In a very heightened way, her quest for identity reflects the
fact that there are always uncertainties in
how we see ourselves and how other people
expect us to be. That’s partly what makes life
so wonderfully varied and colourful, quite
apart from possibilities of sadness.” Relationship provides more than emotional texture. MacLeod refuses to be categorical about
the destiny of her characters, showing them
in different lights, refracting personalities
through the impressions they make on others. She often turns a phrase that crystallises
common experience in fresh terms. For
instance, describing Sian listening to
approaching footsteps: “She had not known
she knew them. She had not known how
completely you could deduce living flesh
from the simplest sound.”
Working most of the week as a doctor at
Raigmore Hospital in Inverness and with a
busy family and social life, it’s no mean feat
to wrestle the necessary solitude for writing.
Lack of continuity means that MacLeod often
has to “read back” in order to reconnect with
the atmosphere and mood of the work in
hand before she gets back down to writing.
“I don't necessarily have a plot right at the
beginning,” she says. “I tend to let the characters have their head.” She sees people as
“interplays” of personality and expectation.
She enjoys a broad linguistic palette. “While
I was writing, it was lovely to hear all the different accents, though that’s not something
you can necessarily put on the page.”
Tuesdays find MacLeod in her study, a
conservatory-like extension off the generously proportioned kitchen of her home in
the Black Isle, set on the top of a hill above
Fortrose. A wall of windows allows natural
light to flood in. It would be impossible to
ignore the elements here, which suits her
earthed, poetic style.
Born in Aberfeldy in 1951, she was brought
up in Inverness, second child of five. Her parents were “natural storytellers”. Both had
been obliged to leave school at the age of
fourteen. Her mother came from Northern
Ireland to the Highlands to find work.
“She became a bus-conductress on the
Inverness-Buckie route till she was old
enough to join the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary
Air Force), which is how she met my newly
demobbed father. We grew up benefiting
from their combined determination that
their children would have the education that
they never had. We always had books, always,
even when money wasn’t plentiful. I read
anything I could get my hands on. I was a
particular fan of Beryl the Peril, the Four
Marys and the Incredible Wilson.”
When she was ten she decided to give up
doing homework, sloped off to Inverness
Library instead, and spent the rest of the
evening lost in a book. “This went on for
months. Then the teacher, Sister Vincent,
wrote to my mother to complain. I’ve never
quite forgiven her.”
She intended to study maths at university,
then changed her mind at the last minute,
influenced by a charismatic physics teacher
who emphasised how important it was to do
something useful in life. No longer quite so
clear that maths isn’t socially useful, she has
no regrets that she set her sights on a career
in medicine. But her early years at Aberdeen
University were a stultifying slog, choked
with rote learning.
“I hated anatomy. That year they didn’t put
the clocks back in winter, and we’d walk to
Marischal College in darkness and come
home in darkness. From third and fourth
year on, we had more contact with patients.
People were always what I was interested in.”
Curiously, the decision to recognise writing as being central to what she is about
came much later. Married and with the second of her four children eighteen months
old, she stumbled on a poetry reading by Ian
Abbot in Eden Court. “It was an epiphany,”
she says. By this time, her younger sister, Ali
Smith, had also discovered in herself a dedication to being a writer.
MacLeod’s first collection of poems, Standing by Thistles, appeared in 1997. Just the Caravaggio followed in 1999. “At that stage I
hadn’t written any prose for about two years.
I took myself on a couple of screenwriting
courses and the plot for my first novel came
to me.” This was The Dark Ship, set in the
aftermath of the sinking of the Iolaire off
Lewis at the end of the first world war.
Until now MacLeod has been reserved
about setting a novel in her professional
milieu, but she has found a way of doing so
without exploiting information given in confidence. She is inspired by ‘Narrative in Medicine’, a movement that harks back to oral
traditions for skills of listening, appreciating
and interpreting what patients say. “Modern
medicine is a discipline that straddles both
science and the arts,” says MacLeod. “While
we must offer the best scientific knowledge
we have, we also have to find illumination in
the patient’s own story.” In the face of narrow didacticism, The Blue Moon Book is gently, firmly subversive.
The Blue Moon Book is published by
Luath Press.
Tales from Baron
BY
EDWIN MORGAN
My Visit to St Petersburg
Gentlemen – oh and ladies, please forgive me!
I have been too many years in the army.
But all that’s in the past now. Here I am
With a gathering of my friends in this good old house.
We are cosy, are we not? Let it roar outside,
Our coals and candles, sofas, drinks replenished
Are like a magic cave where all that lacks
Is tales to tell, to startle, tales to match
The flickering shadows. My mind is full,
My memories are sharp and clear, I tell it
As it was. Judge if you will, listen you must.
Truth gives a tongue the strength of ten.
Well then,
I begin! One tingling day in December
I was skelping along towards St Petersburg
On a one-horse sledge, as they do in that country,
When a large lean cold and hungry wolf
Slunk out of the forest behind me and ran
Panting to overtake us. This was not good!
I pressed myself flat on the sledge until whoosh –
The wolf leapt over me and sank its jaws
Into my horse’s hindquarters. Sorry, horse!
But that is what saved me. Now hear more.
The famished wolf went crazy, burrowing,
Munching, slurping deep into the horse
Till only its rump was showing. I rose up,
Quickly gave it the mother of all whacks
With the butt-end of my whip; the horse
Was now pure wolf, the carcass fell to the ground;
The wolf was in its harness, galloped forward
Slavering and howling till we reached St Petersburg.
The crowds that came out! You’ve no idea.
They clapped, hooted, whistled, rocked and laughed.
Great entrance to a city, don’t you think?
Frozen Music
Travelling in the wintry wastes of Europe
I found myself rattling along in a post-chaise
On a rutted road so ditched and hedged and narrow
Two carriages could never keep abreast.
One was bouncing towards me: what to do?
“Your horn! Give a warning!” I shouted to the postilion.
Well, the postilion was a sturdy lad,
Blew and blew until his lips were sore,
But nothing came out, the sounds frozen stiff
In that icy Polish air. Only one thing for it:
Necessity set my blood pumping:
I got out, hoisted the carriage on my head,
Jumped the nine-foot hedge into a field,
Jumped back on to the road beyond the carriage
That was baulked of a crash. Ha ha, I thought,
All I need now is my horses; said and done;
One round my neck, one under arm – I got them over
By the same means, harnessed them up, drove
Laughing (and sweating just a little I admit)
To reach the inn where we could spend the night.
That seems a fairly ordinary tale,
But there is more to come. My postilion
Hung up his post-horn on a hook by the fire,
And before you could say Pan Robinson
The music it had stored was thawed out, played
Loud and clear, untouched by human mouth,
A lovely merry, medley of sweet song,
‘My love is like a red red rose’, ‘Scots Wha Hae’,
‘Over the hills and far away’. I tell you
There was a tear in my eye. I called for supper,
And I blessed the horn that kept its tales intact,
Letting them out, like mine, when the time is ripe.
All Is Not As It Seems
Russia is so vast, it is unbelievable.
I got lost there once, in winter it was too.
The night was dead dark, not a light to be seen
Though I thought a village was near. Light came
Only from the snow, which was pure, thick, firm.
It was like a freshly sheeted bed
Ready to tempt me; I was tired; I yielded
To temptation, tied my horse to a pointed stump,
Lay down, well wrapped, and quickly fell asleep.
It was morning when I woke, but where was I?
Tombstones! I was lying snug between two tombstones!
It was a churchyard, and there was the church,
And beyond that the village, a dog barking,
A few early feet stirring. Was it a spell,
Had a band of sly Slav demons carried me off?
Where was the snow? Where was my faithful horse?
I heard a neighing, where? where?, looked up,
There it was, hanging by its bridle from the steeple.
The snow, ninety feet deep, had thawed overnight,
Let me down softly, inch by inch, still sleeping.
But the tree-stump I had tethered my horse to
Was the high weathervane where he whinnied and whinnied,
Kicked at the air and waited for me to act.
What a country! What weather! Not canny!
But there is nothing uncanny about me.
I took my pistol, shot the bridle in half,
Caught my horse as he clattered to the ground.
Oh, was there not some nuzzling of my neck!
Did he not push himself against me like a colt!
No longer suspended between earth and heaven
He could enjoy the world again.
Dear friends,
That world is a strange place. It’s where
Everything solid melts into air
And then unmelts again. Motto: beware!
A Good Deed
Some say Munchausen is a swashbuckler,
Too ready with knife and gun, too wild of tongue.
Dear friends, it is not for me to defend myself.
I simpy lay my life on the line before you.
It is up to you to decide. So what am I?
I was a captain in the Empress of Russia’s service.
I have killed some Turks. At the Siege of Gibraltar
I helped the British. I have killed some Spaniards.
But these were wars, where ‘Thou shall not kill’
Invites derision. I have killed some animals,
Many in sport, many in self-defence.
Munchausen
Is that bad? I think we need a referendum!
But speaking of animals: I give you a story.
I was out hunting one summer day
Deep in the forests of Lithuania
When I saw in the distance two wild pigs
Walking in line. I shot at them, but missed,
Or almost missed. The one in front ran off,
Seemingly unharmed but letting out a yelp.
The other one stood still – extraordinary –
Waiting patiently till I came up to her,
An old sow with her head down, silent.
I passed a hand in front of her; she was blind.
Her jaws still held a fragment of the tail
Her son had led her with. She stood helpless,
Afraid to move, yet not afraid of me,
Smell of man and smoking gun: I think
She sensed I was not now the enemy.
I grasped the piece of tail my shot had left
And led the creature, trotting docile behind me,
Back to her den.
Who are the cynics then?
I invented the story to appear in a better light?
Did I, would I, could I help the poor beast?
I know the answer. I’m sure you do too.
My Sojourn in Constantinople
“Anything can happen in Constantinople.”
I am told that is an old Turkish saying.
If so, I recommend it to you.
My veracity is sometimes, what is the word, impugned.
Some say, “You have smoked a hookah too many?”
Or “You have been seen talking to dervishes”.
But I have no interest in these speculations.
My business is with facts and here they are.
I was a prisoner of war to the Ottomans
But treated well. I guarded the Sultan’s bees,
Drove them to pasture in the morning, back at night.
One evening, my dear friends, I missed a bee.
Where was it? Being mauled by two black bears,
That’s where! They fought, stark mad for honey.
I knew the Sultan hated to lose a bee.
Every gardener had a silver hatchet:
I flung mine at the bears, but it flew off
On its own Turkish trajectory to the moon,
Up, up, a sickle attaching itself
To the sickle moon’s horn. I want it back!
But how? My friends, there is always a way.
In my pocket I had some seeds of the Turkish-bean
Which as everyone knows grows fast and high.
I sowed them; they sprouted; and like British Jack
I climbed my beanstalk up to the moon.
Well, that was that. I found my hatchet,
Prepared to return. But here, if you will allow me,
Is the sort of detail I could not have invented.
My beanstalk had dried, shrivelled in the sun.
I had to plait together a ramshackle rope
From straw I picked up on the moon; it broke;
Five miles above the earth I clung and crashed
In a flurry of pithless fragments; the ground
Opened as I fell into it: quite a pit!
By luck, my finger-nails were very long.
I dug myself out like a hard-working mole,
To the amazement of those who stopped to watch.
I was shaken, but pleased. The bears had shambled off.
The hatchet was a little scratched, but safe.
And the bee lived to sting another day.
My Day Among The Cannonballs
Europe is all wars. Its plains are drenched in blood.
Treaties signed, treaties broken, forgotten,
Empires bursting from the gun of history,
Empires burnt out by the fires of history –
Should we worry, sitting here at peace?
Of course not. Yes we should. I don’t know.
I know I have fought, have had allegiances,
But I am left with reminiscences,
Which are my best, least understood credentials.
Let me lay one before you. Gather round.
Come on, it’s a cracker, you’ll not find its like.
My company was stationed “somewhere in Europe”,
I don’t remember the name of the grim town
We were besieging. It was well fortified
With gates chains embrasures machicolations
Batteries redouts vigilantes and god knows what,
A bristly sort of come-and-get-me place
We had tried in vain to penetrate.
Logic, I said to myself, think logic.
We cannot infiltrate, what’s left but up
Up and over, what goes up and over?
A balloon? Don’t be silly, they’d shoot it down.
There’s only one way, and I should emphasise
I was at the peak of my physical powers –
A long time ago, yes yes I know –
I climbed up onto our biggest cannon
And when the next huge ball began to emerge
I jumped it, like on horseback, and was off
Whizzing into the smoky air. Aha,
I thought, this is how to do it! But then,
Halfway towards the enemy, I wondered:
Would they not catch me, string me up as a spy?
Not good! I must get back, but back how?
Logic again saw just one solution:
Transfer to the next enemy cannonball
Coming towards me: a delicate operation,
But I accomplished it, and so back home.
Not the most glorious of episodes,
I hear you say. Oh but it was, it was!
Was the siege lifted? I really don’t know.
Did the enemy surrender? I cannot recall.
What I remember is the exhilaration
Of the ball between my knees like a celestial horse
And the wind whistling its encouragement
And at the high point of my flight an eagle
Shrieking at the usurper of that space
Between ground and sky, between friend and foe,
Between the possible and the impossible.
I shrieked back to the wild bird in my gladness.
What an unearthly duet – but life, life!
A long walk with
Kenneth White
BY IAN
S
ome day, sooner or later, someone
will get around to admitting that
you cannot write a haiku properly
in English. It doesn’t work. The
language does not take well to syllabic verse-forms, not least when
filched from ideographic Japanese, even if we
can all count out the 17 syllables required.
What looks easy is, in fact, all-but impossible
in a culture whose poetry, whose natural
voice, is stubbornly accentual. So why bother?
Kenneth White will do you pages filled with
haiku after haiku. The little, imagistic things,
and variants of them, seem to come easily to
him. That may the problem. Put aside, for a
moment, the story of the Scots “intellectual
nomad”, the theoretical armour he calls
“geopoetics”, and the gathering movement to
grant White the sort of reputation in his
native land that he enjoys in France. Think
about the poetry.
You can sketch a lineage. There are traces
of the Black Mountain school, of late modernism, Charles Olson, William Carlos
Williams and the first culprit, Ezra Pound, his
“Imagism” and his confessedly botched Cantos. There is that declamatory style, even
when White is being self-effacing, that has its
roots in Walt Whitman. There is an affinity
with the Zen exoticism of someone like Gary
Snyder. You can hear faint echoes of Kenneth
Rexroth, catch the usual nod (in this sort of
company) to Rimbaud, the bow to Prevert.
What you don’t hear often, to take some
near-random examples, is anything that
chimes with typical British prosody. White
owes next to nothing to Auden, to the influences that shaped a Larkin, a Heaney, a
Dunn, or a MacCaig. His is what they used to
call vers libre (as in the old joke: who let it
escape?). He verges on mysticism, given half
a chance. Most recent Scots and Irish poetry,
BELL
the successful variety at least, has been fundamentally empiricist. You could call it a
matter of taste, but the difference of opinion
has sometimes resembled a running battle.
Let The Bird Path, White’s Collected Longer
Poems (1989), fall open. Here, in the middle
of the page, is stanza 6 of a poem called ‘Cape
Breton Uplight’. I cannot reproduce its scattered, unjustified lines, but they go as follows:
“At the edge of the world/in the emptiness/maintaining the relations/the primordial contact/ the principles by which/reality
is formed/on the verge of the abstract”. Any
good?
It has a certain rhetorical force, I’ll grant,
but it is a windy sort of rhetoric. It strains
after profundity, but it relies – indeed concludes with – abstraction. This is less a matter of what the poet “means” than the way
the language is deployed. It represents, it
seems to me, the pose of the poet, not the
WHITE OWES
NEXT TO
NOTHING TO
AUDEN, TO THE
INFLUENCES
ADVERT
HODDER GIBSON
1
THAT SHAPED A
LARKIN, A
HEANEY, A DUNN,
OR A MACCAIG.
making of poetry. You could live without it.
Declamatory poets have coincided rarely
with British tastes in the last century or so.
We don’t do Mayakovsky, or even Frank
O’Hara. In English – Gaelic is a different matter – Dylan Thomas was the last one truly to
pull it off, but Thomas was vastly more technically-accomplished, in a traditional sense,
than White. Proponents of the latter’s work
would no doubt say that this is entirely irrelevant, that White isn’t interested in rhyming
stanzas or pentameter, and that there is no
reason why he should be in the 21st century.
They’re right, of course. The toughness and
visual intensity of a William Carlos Williams
did not require the old props, after all. But
what does White give us instead?
One argument says that his work is of a
piece, that his “poem-books” are complemented and extended by his “prose-books”
(essays) and his “way-books” (travel-writing).
Fair enough. But if his poems are unsatisfactory affairs, composed in a style that might
have done for a San Francisco bookshop in
the early sixties but seeming hackneyed and
contrived now, then we have a problem with
sum and parts. Try this one, from Handbook
for the Diamond Country, a collection of 30
years’ worth of shorter poems first published
in France in 1983 and in Britain in 1990. It is
called ‘No Four-Star Hotel’ and its epigram
says “My neighbour was Van Gogh”. It reads,
in its entirety:
Sardines and rice
rice and sardines
with a red tomato
rice and sardines
sardines and rice
with a red tomato
It is less a poem than a gesture. You could
claim, possibly, that it is evocative or atmospheric. You could note that its imagistic style
isn’t actually modern in any important sense,
given its debt to Pound’s two-line attempted
haiku ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a
wet, black bough.”), a poem published before
the First World War. But I could make another
claim: it is lazy, empty, and not very good.
Where poetry is concerned, neither is White.
One final quotation, from a poem entitled
‘The House of Insight’, was perhaps the single
verse that sealed the argument for this
reviewer. It runs: “taking off the clothes of the
mind/and making love/to the body of reality”. It could almost be a parody, pretentious,
silly and clichéd simultaneously. White in
person is a charming and unassuming man,
but that’s the sort of stuff people write when
they are 16 and cringe over, if they are lucky,
when they are 17.
Why, then, the simultaneous publication
of three more of White’s books in English, two
from Polygon and one from Alba, with the
implicit argument that White is too important to be overlooked in Britain? He has won
all sorts of prizes in France, after all, and has
held the chair of 20th Century Poetics at the
Kenneth White will do you pages filled with haiku after haiku
Sorbonne. His International Institute of
Geopoetics (we’ll get to that) has eight centres
in various countries, Scotland included. Last
year, Birlinn, having taken over Polygon,
made it the imprint’s first act to publish Open
World, White’s latest version of his collected
poems. Some people are certainly committed to his work.
The trouble with finding an audience for
White is that it has been tried before, and not
so very long ago. It was Edinburgh’s Mainstream that published handsome editions of
The Bird Path and the autobiographical “transcendental travelogue” Travels in the Drifting
Dawn in 1989, followed by Handbook for the
Diamond Country and the difficult-to-classify memoir The Blue Road in 1990. They did
not make a great deal of difference to White’s
reputation.
In France, living these days in Brittany, he is
about as distinguished a writer as it is possible to be. Indeed, Le Nouvel Observateur once
described him as “the foremost living English
language poet”, though perhaps they meant
the foremost poet in English they had heard
of. Even here, large claims are made for him
by some of the few people who really know
his work. These days it is sometimes claimed
that he is being given, or is about to be given,
his due at last. Yet if the poetry doesn’t satisfy,
what is there for a new or sceptical reader?
White was born in Gorbals in 1936, the son
of a railway worker, but raised from his
teenage years on the west coast, near Largs. It
was in the nearby countryside that he had the
poet’s classic, mind-expanding contact with
nature, an affinity for which has been the
hallmark of so much of his writing and his
conceptual work. At Glasgow University he
gained a first in French and German and later
he did some teaching, but by the early 1960s,
as Travels in the Drifting Dawn describes, he
had made contact with “underground London” and the likes of Alex Trocchi. In 1966 he
published his first book of verse, The Cold
Wind of Dawn, yet only a year later he had
quit Britain.
THE TROUBLE
WITH FINDING
AN AUDIENCE
FOR WHITE IS
THAT IT HAS
BEEN TRIED
BEFORE, AND NOT
SO VERY LONG
AGO.
ADVERT
Chambers
He found British poetry limited
and circumscribed, prose still more
tedious. At this distance in time it is
possible to say that he made a bet
and it paid off. As a writer and
teacher France and Europe were for
him. Teaching in Paris led, in due
course, to that professorship at the
Sorbonne.
Meanwhile, his doctoral thesis
on “The Intellectual Nomad” had
also persuaded him of a Nietszchean need to wander in the
wider world. He became an inveterate traveller, a walking theory of a
sort that is, still, more French than
Scottish. That thesis was the beginning of geopoetics.
Geopoetics. We can count ourselves lucky that he did not call it
biocosmopoetics, as he once
intended. That might have scared
more than the horses. As it is,
Geopoetics – Place, Culture, World,
the little pamphlet from Alba, and
The Wanderer and his Charts –
Essays on Cultural Renewal should
probably glut most people’s
appetite for an elaborate reinterpretation of European intellectual
history that accords neatly with
White’s pessimism over the modern
world.
Geopoetics “contains ecology,
ecology does not contain geopoetics”. It does not think much of the
state we are in, culturally, and looks
for a central concern that can
reunite all strands of modern society and open up a new cultural
“space”. White believes that the
earth itself will do nicely for that.
What we have with him are meditations, spread across the range of his
work, on “the state of the human
being in the universe, the relationship between human being and the
planet Earth, presence in the
world”. He wants, he says, “intelligent”, “sensitive” and “subtle” contact between us and our corner of
the cosmos.
Along the way, White gives free
rein to his habit of defining words –
“world”, “culture”, “poetics” itself –
in ways that tend to suit his purpose. Harshly, you could also say
that he plays fast and loose with
cultural history. Fans might say he
makes brilliant intuitive leaps
across eras, disciplines and intellectual works. For my money, his
approach is a sort of pick and mix,
magpie reasoning that makes
almost any sort of thesis possible
once you have selected your vocabulary, decided who and what was
historically important, and made
the choices that will get you to the
conclusion you want to reach. It is
not as rigorous as White wants us to
think it is.
This is especially true when he
rummages around in philosophy.
He is looking for a means by which
society can enter a new era, a genuine post-modernism. He wants us
to envisage the drive of western
civilisation towards “progress”, a
notion he does not much trust, as a
metaphorical motorway. But every
thinker he summons – and he
neatly avoids those who might
prove problematical – is yoked to
Gaelic
Books
Council
this schematic and rather shop
worn notion. If the philosophy and
history of ideas teaches anything, it
is the complexity of intellectual
change. It is not a straight line
petering out in our present decadence, not a depiction of cultural
history that effectively says “Next
stop the renaissance”, or “Passengers for Descartes Central, please
have your tickets ready”.
It would have been interesting to
have seen what White would have
made of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of the history of science as a
series of paradigm shifts, of sudden
seismic movements. You could
apply the same idea to culture, after
all, but it would not have accorded
with White’s romantic attachment
– to be fair, he utterly denies
romanticism – to the figure of the
“Outgoer”, the figure on the fringes
making the deep connections with
the world.
To be fair yet again, his ideas are
not entirely without merit. It is perfectly true to say that many areas of
modern science, leaving conventional language behind, now also
talk in terms of poetics as the only
viable way to express their sense of
the universe. It is also right, in my
book, to talk of the limits of politics
as an instrument for change. But
White has arrived at a complicated
theoretical construct that will seem
attractive to some people because
of its apparently multiple applications, from art to ecology by way of
social change. Yet that, and a very
French taste for the grandiose uni-
GEOPOETICS. WE CAN
COUNT OURSELVES LUCKY
THAT HE DID NOT CALL IT
BIOCOSMOPOETICS, AS HE
ONCE INTENDED.
fying theory, is the real problem.
Geopoetics is like one of those
improbable multi-purpose tools
you see advertised on TV, the ones
that are supposed to solve every
household problem and turn out to
solve none. At his most sweeping,
White is talking about changing the
nature of human society, altering
the way in which culture operates
and is understood, and saving the
planet while we are at it. By its very
nature, his multi-purpose tool is
not going to do the jobs it is supposed to do. These unifying theories never have. Complexity, in art
or nature, always counts against
them.
Yet to be fair to White for a third
time, it works for him, at least in his
prose, though perhaps for him
alone.
Reading the theoretical stuff, that
was always the suspicion. Geopoetics seems, at bottom, like a personal credo, worked up from a
youthful fascination with the relationship the wandering Nietzsche
and the itinerant Rimbaud had
with the world, how it affected the
thought of the former and the
poetry of the latter, and how it
might be attuned to White’s own
responses. It is one man’s way of
doing art and I doubt many others
could bring the same intensity to it
after the decades White has spent
finding paths in the world. That
said, while his poetry does not convince me in anything like the way I
am supposed to be impressed, his
travel writings, his “way-books”, of
which Across the Territories – Travels from Orkney to Rangiroa (Polygon) is the latest, are a different
matter.
White doesn’t have much faith in
the novel, believing the form to be
more or less exhausted. As a rule,
I’m suspicious of the familiar claim
(can’t come up with a plot, eh?), but
I believe White. His accounts of his
many travels are, for me, a case of a
writer finding his perfect form,
insightful, personal and luminously
written. In the case of something
like The Blue Road, his account of a
pilgrimage to Labrador, it hardly
matters, in any case, that he is not
writing fiction. The book, dialogue
and all, has most of the qualities of
a novel.
Travels from Orkney to Rangiroa
is geopoetics in execution, not theory. This is where all the stuff about
the human in sensitive and subtle
contact with the world begins to
make a useful kind of sense. The
writing is tight, too, in contrast with
an awful lot of the verse. Whether in
Orkney or Polynesia, Scandinavia
or North America, White possesses,
first, the sort of eye for detail that is
an obvious necessity for a travel
writer. Yet he has something more.
It resembles the cliché of the “sense
of place”, but it is more a man’s
sense of himself in a place, attentive not just to what he is seeing
and hearing, but alert to his own
responses. The world, particularly
the natural world, seems to spread
around him. It is the real point of
geopoetics, after all.
Of Corsica: “As is probably obvious enough by this time, I prefer, by
far, real islands to imaginary
islands, just as I prefer prime documents to novelistic remakes. That’s
because the real is richer than the
imagination. The real demands
investigation and is an invitation to
sensitive knowledge, whereas the
imaginary is more often than not a
collection of stereotypes, a soup of
clichés offering an infantile kind of
satisfaction. Then, a relationship to
the real and its resistance requires
changes in thought, in ways of
being, in ways of saying, it leads to
a transformation of the self.”
He’s wrong, of course. Novelistic
invention may be “horribly autistic” – poetry isn’t so very different,
we may guess – but the glory of the
novel is the interplay between
imagination and reality. It says
something about White that he
doesn’t get this, but it is his stubborn attachment to reality that
makes him such a good travel
writer.
Even when you disagree with the
geopoeticist’s interpretations of
history, you can grant that his sense
of it is another dimension he brings
to his accounts of his journeys. In
‘Travels in a Sea of Vodka’, one of
the best pieces in Across the Territories, he writes of the great plain of
Poland, the “vast expanse of fields
that must at one time have been a
wild, wan, glacier-scrubbed wilderness – nomad lands, crossed by all
kinds of migrating peoples: Goths,
Vandals, Huns, Avars, Scythians,
Sarmatians, Magyars, Mongols,
Tartars, Slavs… Crosses all along
the road. Graveyards with myriads
of red lights flickering on the
tombs. A beetroot factory belching
smoke into the pale purple sky . . .
Night falls early on the North European Plain.”
Putting aside the fact that,
inevitably, some of the passage was
“imagined”, you can see the essentials of White’s elaborate theory
emerge from the drifts of intellectual dross. When the connections
are made between man, landscape
and history in this fashion sparks
fly. You do not have to buy the
whole geopoetics package to see it,
and it is probably best if you don’t.
The writer himself is none too
certain, in any case, that his theory
matches his ambition. In The Wanderer and his Charts he wonders,
near the end, whether “a real turning of the times” is in fact possible.
The answer from geopoetics is a
mere “perhaps”. So what does the
fuss amount to?
“At the very least,” White writes,
“it presents itself as a beautiful gesture (a final gesture of sentientintelligent humanity?) and as the
most interesting thing around.” Not
quite, but it does present us with
some of the finest travel-writing
there is around.
Gallimaufry
BY
Writing Scotland
by Carl MacDougall
POLYGON, £8.99
With Edinburgh now branded the
UN’s first World City of Literature,
MacDougall’s survey of Scottish
writers provides backing for the
cause while reminding readers
there’s more to the nation’s literature than just the capital’s contribution. MacDougall’s argument is
that Scottish literature, “our most
vibrant export”, has played a vital
role for centuries in creating, sustaining and questioning Scottish
identity. Indeed he believes it was
“the springboard upon which
devolution was built.” Writing Scotland, betraying its origins as a TV
programme, is constructed around
easily digestible themes. Looking at
one such theme, the Scots’ relationship with the land, he writes,
“Our sense of place is so strong it’s
difficult to tell if we inhabit the
landscape or if it inhabits us.” It’s
true but like certain other quirks
cited as national characteristics –
such as the so-called divided self –
you wonder whether they’re really
all that unique to Scotland. The
book is more interesting when
MacDougall or the writers he interviewed push past the formulaic
with something more personal. For
example, you get a stronger flavour
of the day-to-day power of Scottish
writing from MacDougall’s anecdote about an uncle who turned to
Burns before the Bible for moral
instruction. Points off however for
neglecting to provide an index.
The 21 ⁄2 Pillars Of Wisdom –
The Von Igelfeld Trilogy
Alexander McCall Smith
ABACUS, £8. 99
Last year Alexander McCall Smith
put out three novellas which Abacus has nicely packaged together
now in one volume as The Von
Igelfeld Trilogy The trilogy eschews
the author’s usual sleuth-style stories though the humour is identifiable as McCall Smith’s. Professor
Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld is the
unnaturally tall “author of a seminal work on Romance philology,
Portuguese Irregular Verbs.” Despite
his book’s “seminal” status and the
years of research it took to complete his linguistic epic, von Igelfeld
still suffers the indignity of seeing
his book remaindered, excess stock
sold off in bulk to a firm of interior
decorators who change the titles to
Portuguese Irrigated Herbs to be
used as book furniture slotted into
the bookshelves they install. This
slight is but one of many McCall
Smith inflicts upon the pompous
von Igelfeld in a series of loosely
connected comic vignettes that
trade heavily upon the comedy of
embarrassment, making the novellas, despite the German anti-hero,
very British. Perhaps too British.
The humour, which at times seems
almost anachronistic, appears to
have been beamed in from an
older, gentler world where much
comedy is to be had chortling at
foreigners with funny names. You
could well imagine PG Wodehouse
curling up with the Von Igelfeld
Trilogy. It’s all so gentle in fact it
makes a baby’s breath look like a
hurricane. The prose is fine, well
modulated stuff but really, anyone
enjoying this stuff and not in
receipt of a bus pass should take a
long hard look at themselves.
Gods, Mongrels And Demons
by Angus Calder
COLIN WATERS
deep enough. We are told that
‘Furry Boots Country’ means
Aberdeen but not why (the answer,
in case you’re wondering, is that
when Aberdonians ask where you
are from, it sounds like they’re saying ‘furry boot.’) Also I’m not sure
that the provenance of some of
these words is strictly Scottish. ‘The
Man’, meaning an authority figure,
is included yet is surely universal.
Still, the slang does illustrate a
number of Scotland’s cultural priorities. In the same way that the
Eskimos have a number of words
that mean ‘snow’, Shut Yer Pus
includes sixteen synonyms for
drunkenness. One is tempted to
describe the book as ‘brock’ rather
than ‘brammer’.
BLOOMSBURY, £8. 99
Second Sight
by Meg Henderson
Angus Calder doesn’t do normal. “I
want to help undermine notions of
normality,” he writes in the introduction to his wonderfully idiosyncratic biographical dictionary,
“which have contributed, over the
last couple of hundred of years, to
appalling horrors.” To that end he
has written accounts of “101 brief
but essential lives” that go from
household names – Queen Victoria,
Che Guevara – to the thoroughly
obscure. He finds room for
Wittgenstein and Marc Bolan’s
publicist, for Billy The Kid and
Winkie the pigeon, all “creatures
who have extended my sense of the
potentialities both comic and
tragic, of human nature.” Strangely
he includes Gods who, at the risk of
being obvious, aren’t real. If they’re
included, why not fictional characters? Perhaps that could form the
basis of a follow-up. On the
strength of Gods, Mongrels And
Demons, I’d buy it. Flatteringly, a
good proportion of entries hail
originally from Scotland, and perhaps in a reflection of the author’s
own political persuasions, there’s a
fair amount of unreconstructed
lefties.
HARPERCOLLINS, £6.99
Shut Yer Pus
by Scott Simpson
BLACK & WHITE, £5.99
The charmingly titled Shut Yer Pus
is a short dictionary of Scottish
slang that ranges from Arse Bandit
(“a politically incorrect and deeply
offensive term for a homosexual
man”) to Yonks (“an unspecified yet
lengthy period of time”). It’s fine as
far as it goes, though it lacks ambition and perspective. For example
‘Barry’ we’re told is an Edinburgh
expression meaning excellent.
Actually, it comes from a centuries
old Romany word ‘baary’ also
meaning excellent. One doesn’t
have to cite etymology as a hobby
to feel the author hasn’t delved
Handily, Meg Henderson has provided at the very start of Second
Sight a family tree detailing the
many generations of characters
and their relation to each other.
There’s so many of them in this
book which compresses 130 years
worth of action into 300 pages you
find yourself consulting it just to
make sure you’re not mixing relations up. As the title suggests, it’s in
part about a gift of prophecy
handed down through a family over
the ages, a family that begins the
island of Raasay finally travelling
across to the new world, to Nova
Scotia. Henderson has done her
research, which pays off handsomely in the passages about a
bomber crew during WW2.
Alias MacAlias – Writings On
Songs, Folk And Literature
by Hamish Henderson
BIRLINN, £14.99
The late Hamish Henderson is best
known as the composer of ‘Freedom Come All Ye’ but as everyone
with an interest in Scottish culture
of the past fifty years knows he was
also a fine essayist. Some of the
claims on behalf of what he did for
the country are somewhat excessive – as the introduction recounts,
he was compared to Nelson Mandela at his funeral! – yet these collected writings only confirm his
reputation as an artistic dynamo in
the post-war years. He was the first
British translator of Italian thinker
Antonio Gramsci (the introduction
to that work is included here) and
his Elegies For The Dead In Cyrenaica is often cited as one of the
finer examples of WW2’s poetry. In
Alias MacAlias he defends passionately his role in reviving the
“despised” folk tradition as “an
alternative to official bourgeois culture.” There’s a playful quality to
Henderson’s prose particularly in
the title essay, which mischievously
compares his old sparring partner,
MacDiarmid, to McGonagall.
Heartland
by John Mackay
LUATH PRESS, £9.99
“It was very easy to get romantic
here, to absorb the glory of nature,”
Mackay writes about the Hebrides.
Judging by the number of passages
given over to breathlessly describing the islands, it is indeed very
easy to get romantic there.
Mackay’s hero, Iain, left the
Hebrides in his youth, returning
only because his marriage has
broke down. In a stab at therapeutic DIY, Iain is rebuilding the dilapidated ancestral pile. If he thinks
he’s going to rebuild his life at the
same time, he needs to think again.
It’s bad enough that he’s in love
with his best friend’s wife; things
hardly improve when he discovers
a skeleton under the old house’s
floor. A combination of Changing
Rooms and Agatha Christie,
Mackay’s Heartland demonstrates
the Scotland Today presenter has a
readable easy-going prose style.
Saigon Tea
by Graham Reilly
11/9, £10.00
Saigon Tea is watered down alcohol, a tipple much favoured by Vietnamese prostitutes. Danny Canyon
has fled to Saigon by way of Australia from Scotland many years
earlier. In Glasgow, he’d been a
bookie’s runner until said bookie
discovered he’d been pinching
from him. That lead Danny to do a
runner of his own. Tied up and left
bleeding by an unknown assailant,
Danny gets a request for help
through to his hard man brother
Frankie in Glasgow, who naturally
comes to the rescue. A Scottish expat himself who has lived in Vietnam, Reilly’s comedy-thriller (think
Colin Bateman) abounds in
authentically scummy descriptions
of Saigon, a teeming city forever on
the verge of chaos.
Camanachd! The Story Of Shinty
by Roger Hutchinson
BIRLINN, £9.99
It seems likely, according to
Hutchinson, that shinty came to
Scotland, along with Gaelic and
Christianity, from Ireland roughly
around the start of the sixth century. The actual origins of the game
itself are even murkier though a
photo of a fifth century Athenian
carving reproduced in the book of
what looks like a game of shinty
suggests the sport has an ancient
pedigree. As Hutchinson demon-
strates, camanachd and Scottish
history are intertwined. It was
played at Glencoe on the afternoon
before the massacre between the
MacDonalds and their treacherous
guests. Various religious types have
tried to ban it while Queen Victoria
and Sir Walter Scott were confirmed fans. An interesting book,
more interesting than the game
itself.
The Kitty Killer Cult
by Nick Smith
LUATH PRESS, £9. 99
To my knowledge Nick Smith is the
sole practitioner in this dimension
of cat crime novels. The Kitty Killer
Kit reads like Old Possum’s Book Of
Practical Cats if TS Eliot had been
more of a Raymond Chandler fan.
His hardboiled hero, Tiger Straight,
inhabits a sin city populated by
anthropomorphised
moggies.
Homeless after failing to pay the
lease on the office, Tiger takes a case
to find the murderer of four feline
brothers killed by the poison they
used on their pest control job. It’s
not bad though one could do without the laboured attempts at novelty. One carnivore is described as a
“meatatarian” when surely, uh, carnivore would have worked better.
Mad Dog – The Rise And Fall Of
Johnny Adair And ‘C’ Company
by David Lister & Hugh Jordan
MAINSTREAM, £7.99
Lister and Jordan begin by posing a
question about Adair, the face of
violent Ulster loyalism: is he “a
mindless sectarian psychopath or
a loyalist folk hero who took the
war to the IRA’s front door”? Having read the book, I’d have to say
the answer is the former over the
latter. The authors provide an
absorbing primer of The Troubles
from the sixties onwards, the
period in which Adair and his
“killing machine”, the notorious ‘C’
Company, served a bloody apprenticeship. What’s truly interesting
however is the window it provides
into the mind and behaviour of a
murderer. One girlfriend testifies
she always knew when he’d been
out killing as he’d be so excited
when he returned, he’d wet the bed.
Also, fascinatingly, the authors’ revelation that Adair’s closest friend
was an openly, nay, aggressively,
gay man, led to speculation that
this famed hard man might have a
bisexual side he likes to keep quiet.
Equally contradictorily, while playing bass in a skinhead band (typical
lyric: “I like breaking arms and legs/
Snapping spines and wringing
necks”), Adair was also a massive
fan of reggae and in particular the
multi-ethnic group UB40. Square
that circle.
Daring to be adult
BY
T
LINDSEY FRASER
here are those in the children’s expense of what is a demanding and com- threatens the future of the Outsiders, it must
book world who become quite pelling plot. His language remains that of the be launched long ahead of schedule. The
frilly-lipped when an ‘adult poet – self-conscious in the best sense of the young warriors are dependent only on their
writer’ tries his hand at writing term, constantly nurturing both characters wits, imagination and courage, attributes for
for a younger audience. Often and ideas. Heartfelt and beautifully descrip- which the Citizens can have no understandtheir doubts are well-founded, tive, it offers a narrative path which will ing. Morgan is a verbal sculptress, creating
but in some cases (predictably those who encourage young readers into accepting the images of vivid physicality so that the world
have taken the matter rather more seriously undoubted challenges of this passionate, of the Outsiders and Citizens is entirely credible, indeed disturbingly so. The twist at the
than others) the results are what we’re all often troubling novel.
looking for in our books: a satisfying, chalNicola Morgan took some time to find her end is chilling, even on re-reading, and
lenging and memorable piece of writing. feet as a novelist for young people, but since establishes the possibility of a sequel.
Catherine MacPhail is the darling of the
Except, of course, that it’s written for chil- the publication of her first novel, the
dren.
acclaimed Mondays are Red, about a boy liv- many schools she visits in the course of her
And what’s a child, after all? Aren’t children ing with the condition, synaesthesia, those hectic schedule. Her openness and exuberjust the same as adults, but without the expe- feet have been treading ever more adventur- ance is reflected in stories which speak for,
rience amassed through having lived longer? ously and confidently. Fleshmarket followed, rather than to her readership. She is a people
Tom Pow’s foray into the world of picture an intense and dramatic historical thriller set person, and her writing is driven by her charbooks – What is the World For? and Callum’s in 19th century Edinburgh in which the acters more than their ideas. MacPhail writes
Big Day – wasn’t a million miles from the author echoes contemporary concerns about about their relationships, their kindnesses,
poetry for which he is best known. There is a the ethics of medical research through her their cruelties, their thoughtlessness and
similarity of approach, from the economy of own meticulously researched plot. Morgan’s their good hearts. She also writes about their
language to the shape made by a line of latest novel, Sleepwalking (Hodder Children’s imaginations and the battle between head,
words lying across a page. In The Pack (Ran- Books), is set in the future drawing on a wide heart and instinct. In Underworld (Bloomsdom House Children’s Books), Pow’s second range of literary influences from Orwell to bury), an outward bound trip goes horribly
novel for young people, he exposes further Huxley, with a sprinkling of Stepford Wives wrong when a rockfall traps a teacher and his
connections with his literary past, scripting thrown in. The Citizens comprise a commu- pupils underground. But what could be a
and stage managing a complex novel with nity emasculated by its desire for life to be straightforward adventure – with a tradecalm and undemanding. Drugs control emo- mark MacPhail spooky element – is given
skill and confidence.
The story is set in the future in which a tions, ensuring consistent content but no depth through the characters who share the
depleted, lawless city has fractured into excitement or joy, while the weather is pro- experience, their various personalities writ
gang-branded sectors where homeless chil- grammed to trouble the Outsiders, an under- large when under the terrifying pressure of
dren latch onto the perverse authority of the class which is tolerated only if it remains well their ordeal.
gang leaders. There is a desperation to the hidden.
MacPhail gives a resounding voice to ScotCritically, the Citizens have only limited tish children, her acute ear for their repartee
ruthlessness with which they carry out their
leaders’ business – an instinctive need for a language and it is this motif in Morgan’s story allowing some laugh-out-loud moments
structure, but a blindness to its cruelty. which is perhaps most powerful. Her argu- amidst the tension.
Bradley’s appearance in this bleak landscape ment that language is thought, and that only
The delightful, but ever-so-slightly obsesis solely for the purpose of rescuing his kid- through free use of language can the truth be sive Mr Marks is a wonderful creation, so
napped friend – Floris. Together with Victor known and understood, drives the plot in that the reader is concerned not only for
and their dogs, they have lived on the fringes which four young Outsiders are sent to infil- their contemporaries but also for this wellof the city, aware of its dangers, but under trate the world of the Citizens. Their task has meaning man whose life comes to depend
the relative protectorate of the ubiquitous been planned for years, but when illness on a disparate group of youths with very litOld Woman who offers them the
sustenance of stories and occasional nutritional support. They
remember enough of the past to
know that theirs is an unfortunate
life, but they also appreciate its values and the importance of their
friendships. Floris’ kidnapping – in
revenge for a little light fraud – catapults the fragile community into
total disarray, the loss of one of
their group rupturing any sense of
security. The dogs are essential to
the group’s social dynamic, the
relationship presented as the epitome of that of man and his best
friend. Indeed the benevolent symbiosis occasionally blurs their identities, so that they adopt each
others’ characteristics. Pow evokes
the physical, emotional and mental
interaction between youth and dog
with great clarity. Each provides a
half of their whole – so the loss of
an integral part of the relationship
is devastating.
Scabbit Isle, Pow’s first novel, was
an accomplished ghost story, but
The Pack demonstrates a deepening and strengthening of his writing and storytelling skills for 10 to
14 year-olds. He has powerful
philosophical points to make about
the nature of story and identity, and
Vivian French’s The Story House, illustrated by Selina Young, has many mansions.
of loyalty and trust, but never at the
tle in common. MacPhail’s novels are performance pieces and ideal for reading aloud,
but they offer more than passing entertainment. They hold their characters to account,
and in doing so, her readers will find themselves asking endless ‘what if?’ questions.
She doesn’t ask her readers to grow up before
they’re ready. She knows that life’s quite
complicated enough for now, thank you very
much.
Joan Lingard’s Kevin and Sadie novels, first
published in the 1970s, remain as popular as
ever for their clear sighted illumination of a
political and religious impasse so knotty that
it has changed depressingly little since. Lingard, who grew up in Belfast, focused on the
relationship between two protagonists who
practised different religions, a situation as
inflammatory as it was impossible at that
time. Kate MacLachlan’s debut novel, Love
My Enemy (Andersen Press) is set in today’s
Northern Ireland where she too grew up, and
offers a compelling companion to the earlier
work. Like Lingard, MacLachlan centres on a
love story terrorised by the cold fury of religious bigots. It is unlikely, even had she
wanted to, that Lingard would have been
allowed the graphic descriptions of which
MacLachlan makes such powerful use. But
Lingard doesn’t date by comparison. The
writing styles shed light from different perspectives, and the same lingering questions
remain at the end of both novels.
Frances Mary Hendry’s Angel Dancer (Barrington Stoke) is as small and perfectly
formed as Brenda, whose utter obsession
with ballet eventually leads to tragedy. The
reader searches through Brenda’s sister’s
matter-of-fact narration for the moment
when the situation might have been saved,
but the end seems as inevitable as it is bleak.
Set in Glasgow’s Maryhill in the post-war
years, a family buys into a child’s
obvious talent, each of them sacrificing something in order to
finance the girl’s dream. Perhaps it
all fell apart because within that
family there wasn’t the necessary
vocabulary to articulate worry; perhaps it was never meant to be, a
tenement child wasn’t supposed to
follow such a particular dream.
Slight though this book may look,
its story is heavy with meaning.
The Story House (Orion) is anything but slim, a hefty, satisfying
volume of interlinked stories written by Vivian French and illustrated
by Selina Young. There’s one for
every week of the year, with linking
stories which bring the setting – a
rickety, rambling house – to life.
French’s characteristic narrative
gaiety is as captivating as ever,
while the illustrations add their
pennyworth, and often dance off in
their own direction. It’s easy to
envisage younger children lying
tummy down with this book, salivating over its selection-box of stories (they don’t need to be eaten in
order).
As the Old Woman in Tom Pow’s
The Pack repeatedly asks her
charges, “What cannot crumble?
What cannot be burnt or broken?”
The answer, of course, is “stories”.
Reviews
THE WEE BOOK OF CALVIN:
AIR-KISSING IN THE
NORTH-EAST
Bill Duncan
PENGUIN: £7. 99
REVIEWER: RICHARD HOLLOWAY
The jokey cover and the grouchy
introduction could easily mislead
you about this book. On a first look
it appears to be a wintry counterblast to all those sunny little
books of spiritual valium that fill the
shelves in the Mind and Body section of your local book shop. Bill
Duncan despises these emotionally
glib New Age self-help guides that
promise inner-peace and off-theshelf enlightenment without hard
thought or intellectual effort. He
hates the way this mutating
transatlantic psychobabble is
threatening to crowd out the austere discipline and bracing pessimism of philosophy, so he has
decided to fight back: The Wee Book
of Calvin is the first blast of his
trumpet against the encircling
powers of blandness. He has gathered together a collection of sayings from the North-East, amplified
them with memories of his grandparents, laced them with creations
of his own, and offers them here as
a bracing antidote to the cloying
sweetness of New Age spirituality.
So one of the things you will find in
this book is an anthology of Caledonian haiku, as cold and penetrating as the psychic haar that
swirls round the Calvinist heart.
On this level the book works well
and entertainingly enough. It’s the
growl of yet another grumpy old man
at the folly and superficiality of the
day. So far, so predictable: O tempora!
O mores! But that is far from all that
this book offers. If you simply skim
through these gathered aphorisms
you are likely to make the mistake of
adding the book to the pile of Private
Eye annuals and Far Side cartoons
you keep in the lavatory to entertain
visitors. Apart from anything else,
that would be a colossal piece of
misidentification, because this is not
really a funny book. Oh, it will spread
the odd smile of recognition across
the tight fierceness of your countenance; and as you read it you are
likely to mutter to yourself Alastair
Reid’s Scottish anthem: “We’ll pay for
it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it”. But,
it would be quite wrong to add this
wee book to the joke shelf; it belongs
among the tragedies; it should be
classified under sorrow; you should
slip it in beside Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who wrote: “…it came on Chris
how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness
of the land and sky in dark autumn
evenings, the crying of men and
women of the land who had seen
their lives and loves sink away in the
years”.
I thought of those words as I read
Bill Duncan’s description of the day
he performed the melancholy duty
of going through the effects of his
dead grandparents in their cottage
in Fife: “In the darkening space I lis-
tened to the indifferent voice of the
sea, rising and falling endlessly in its
own distant narrative, perfect and
unknowable. As an hour passed in
the dying light, the texture of one
artefact and then another whispered the absence of a life uncelebrated and unremembered.”
You see, this is a book about loss,
achingly described in the six essays
that punctuate the sections that contain the aphorisms. It is for these
essays that you’ll want to keep the
book; and they’ll make you wonder
at the long Scottish love affair with
sorrow and the stunting repression
that lies at its root. Duncan has written a profound meditation on the
kind of emotional frigidity that prevents many Scots from showing others how much they love them. The
saddest and most wounding part of
the book is the final section, ‘Are You
A Calvinist?’ At the end of the checklist of identifying characteristics we
read these terrible words: “You feel
an almost uncontrollable impulse to
embrace your children, when an
invisible force paralyses your body
and senses...”
He tells us that several factors lie
behind the kind of refrigerated psyche that, almost in spite of himself,
he continues to admire in people.
He comes from a race of coal miners
and fishermen in Fife, men who battled against poverty and the elements with the weapons of hard
work and unforgiving religion.
Because they were engaged in a
relentless struggle, they could not
afford to expose or even acknowledge the existence of the gentler
side of their own nature. The price of
survival was emotional cauterisation and the bleak humour that
accompanied it. And Calvinism,
even the atheistic version Bill Duncan was raised in, was the ideal
creed for such a life of constant battle. There was no room for anything
that might weaken people in their
fight against the odds. Small wonder that the result was the evolution
of a type of humanity high on
toughness and salty durability, but
low to vanishing point on the tender affections.
Say no and the bairn will learn.
It does a bairn good tae be denied.
Well, the coal miners are all gone
and there aren’t many fishermen
left, only the hardness that enabled
them to endure their lot still survives, though it has long been separated from the social and economic
context that afforded it moral justification. Now, without any adaptive
purpose, it turns on its possessors
and consumes them. Like a genetic
defect that once had survival value,
emotional anaemia is handed
down through generations of Scots,
bleaching the colour and passion
out of life, denying them the best of
themselves, which is love and the
showing of it. Though he doesn’t say
it in so many words, I suspect that
Bill Duncan knows all this, but the
thrawn Calvinist bit of him, still half
in love with death, won’t let him ease
up and admit that, in his heart of
hearts, he’s really just a big softie.
SCOTTISH NATIONALISM
AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE
Atsuko Ichijo
ROUTLEDGE: £60
REVIEWER: PAUL HENDERSON
SCOTT
There is a substantial literature on
the nature of Scottish nationalism
and its relationship to the European idea, but this book is, as far as
I know, the first sustained and
searching enquiry by a Japanese
scholar. Atsuko Ichijo conducted
her investigation, mainly in 1994
and 1995, as a research project for
a PhD in the London School of
Economics and Political Science.
Ichijo began her investigation
with a series of long interviews
with thirty-five people in Scotland,
writers, academics, journalists,
politicians and civil servants, of
whom I confess I was one. She
describes the group variously as
the elite, intellectuals and the intelligentsia, terms which I do not suppose any of us would dream of
applying to ourselves. Towards the
end of the book she analyses opinion polls which suggest that there
already is a degree of penetration.
Ichijo’s first question was: who
are the Scots? In the case of the
Japanese she has no difficulty supplying an answer. They are people
of Japanese parents, who speak
Japanese, and, preferably, were
born in Japan. She does not make
the point, which I think a European
would add, that they look Japanese,
although I suppose that other
neighbouring people look much the
same. To the Japanese, I suppose
that all Europeans look alike. What
distinguishes a Scot? Ichijo finds the
answer in our long and distinctive
history which “has cultivated certain Scottish characteristics.”
She finds among her control
group a conviction that among
these characteristics is a belief in
egalitarianism, social justice and
the sovereignty of the people. They
believe that Scotland is suffering
from an unjust deal with England.
There is a conviction of moral
superiority among the Sccots
because they see themselves as
people with high moral standards.
When she turns to attitudes to
the European Union, Ichijo, somewhat to her surprise, finds that its
existence is more of an encouragement than a threat to aspirations for Scottish independence.
Partly this is because of the firm
belief among the member states
in the virtue of cultural diversity
between them. The Social Charter
is also seen as proof of a close
affinity between European and
Scottish, but not necessarily English, views.
I suppose that many people will
find it surprising that this intelligent and diligent Japanese
observer should reach the conclusions which are so strongly in line
with the views of the Scottish
National Party. Are these views
then so widely held among the
people she has chosen as representative of the intellectuals who
influence opinion? She provides us
with a list of the group and eleven
of the thirty-five are well known as
supporters of the SNP. But the others are academics, civil servants or
journalists whose political affiliations, if any, are unknown to me.
Certainly, the book offers strong
encouragement to those who want
to see an independent Scotland as
a member state in the EU. The
book is especially valuable as the
observations of an unprejudiced
and thorough scholar from a distant country.
ADVERT
Hodder Gibson 2
PRETTY WILD
Anvar Khan
BLACK & WHITE: £9. 99
REVIEWER: COLIN WATERS
The war of the sexes is over, and
men have won. The demand for
equality once pivoted upon women
persuading men to abandon their
historic stupidity over sex; now
women are attempting to out-daft
them. In that respect, Sex And The
City has had a calamitous effect
upon a generation of young and
not-so-young women. Thanks to
the show’s four designer-draped
harpies, a new glibness has entered
women’s attitudes to sex, as exemplified by “professional media
whore” Anvar Khan’s Pretty Wild,
“the most honest diary about men,
women and sex you’ll ever read.”
Where women once cried “The personal is political”, now it’s “If you
can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, a creed
stated aggressively in the hope you
won’t notice its defeatism. But as
Khan’s diary reveals, you can’t
defeat men on their home turf.
Pretty Wild begins on the morning of Khan’s thirty-sixth birthday
with her waking up next to a man
she discovers, to her horror, is married. So begins something of a
motif, discovering bed-buddies
already have partners. “Fidelity
must be going out of fashion. First
time I’ve been SO not with the latest
trend,” she says in the first of a
number of statements it’s impossi-
ble to hear in anything but a whiney
Manhattan accent. Khan is somewhat disingenuous, for almost
immediately she admits to sleeping
with her boyfriend’s best friend,
“the only man I’ve ever adored as a
person”, shortly before his marriage.
Looking at the unsuspecting bride
on her wedding day, Khan thinks, “I
wish her all the misery any human
being isn’t ever entitled to.” So
much for the sisterhood.
A native Glaswegian, Khan
decides to move to London to
improve her career and sexual
opportunities. “London is shagcentral… The arteries of London
fizz with five million commuters
and it is a fact you will never see the
same person twice. This is an
absolute boon to all who have no
intention of doing so anyway.” But
what does Khan want? A relationship or “sports sex”? She vacillates
between the two. “Decide on a new
set of rules,” she confides in her
dear diary. “Use men for sex only.
Dump any stand-by shag after a
few dates, this prevents you
becoming ‘involved’.”
Khan can talk the talk but, in her
Manolo heels, she can’t walk the
walk. Despite her disdain for
becoming ‘involved’, in carnal
encounter after encounter – with
Giles the dishy magazine editor,
with Nigel the tycoon, with Frank
the professor – her romantic yearnings leave her a casualty of the
behaviour she advocates and, after
the inevitable crash, bitter. As her
Carrie Bradshaw-esque cool deserts
Canongate
her, she’s left mouthing the timehonoured litany of the disappointed
spinster: “all” men are bastards, she
“hates” them, and anyway, “Has
anyone asked what they are for?”
She even, to complete the cliché,
eulogises the singleton anthem, ‘I
Will Survive,’ a song guaranteed
from its first bar to turn straight
men’s blood to cold porridge.
Men don’t see her as she is; no,
they see “an Asian Dolly Parton.”
She writes, “I have sometimes felt
so trapped in this Disney cartoon
of a body that I feel like writing to
Stephen Hawking and telling him
how much I empathise with how he
must feel. I have a mind too.”
Which earns my nomination for
crassest line of the year.
Pretty Wild contains material
that if Khan were a more ambitious
writer could have profitably been
worked into fiction. A sequence in
which men she meets while speed
dating serially humiliate her has
the potential to enlighten and for
satire. Regrettably, we live in an
Orwell-lite age that prefers the
quick fix of ‘reality’ and ‘confession’
to the hard and uncertain work of
transforming leaden experience
into fictional gold.
Far from an advert for casual sex,
Khan frequently sounds like a victim. She writes a column on how the
modern girl should never tell a man
“I’ll pay” – only to be conned into
doing just that by a dysfunctional
academic. Does this sound like a
feisty modern woman in control of
her sexuality? “The sight of a little
bag of shopping with its loaf of bread
for a small single person moves me
uncontrollably. Burst into tears. Lie
weeping on bed.” Sordid nights in a
torture dungeon (before appearing
on Richard and Judy the following
afternoon!) and a trip to an orgiastic
sex club smack less of exploration
than rudderless ennui. And after all
the quips about how “no one
deserves love”, when her recently
married lover slips the bonds of matrimony to come rescue her, she
melts into a fountain of froth.
It turns out despite her ballsy
twenty-first century woman spiel,
Khan was looking out for Prince
Charming all along. You end up
agreeing with her earlier statement:
“Women who fall in love experience a lobotomy.” It’s less The Story
of O, more The Story of Oh dear.
CHAMBERS DICTIONARY
OF LITERARY CHARACTERS
CHAMBERS: £25
REVIEWER: LESLEY MCDOWELL
What would criminal profilers make
of an individual’s choice of his/her
three most unforgettable literary
characters? What clue might that
list give to his/her psychological
make-up? They are odd questions
to ask, perhaps, but give it a try, it’s
a fun game to play. My top three
most memorable would be David
Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, the Girl
from Rebecca and Sue Bridehead
from Jude the Obscure (and Heaven
only knows what that choice says
about my psychological profile).
Literary characters are, in the
words of this edition’s editor, Una
McGovern, “the vessels into which
the ideas, aspirations, emotions
and neuroses of the author can be
poured and to which, through
reading, we add our own.” It is ten
years since the last Chambers Dictionary of Literary Characters,
edited then by Rosemary Goring,
who wrote of editing a “fictional
Who’s Who” and showed a historical trajectory of characterization,
how characters functioned in different eras. Goring also recalled
those characters who made such a
mark on the public consciousness,
like Little Nell or Sherlock Holmes,
that their untimely demises were
seriously mourned and even resisted (to the extent that Conan Doyle
was forced to bring Holmes back
from the dead).
Clearly the publishers felt that
enough new characters had entered
the public consciousness to justify
an updated volume (although not
necessarily an altered one – the previous volume contained no contribution from Susan Ferrier, for
example, and neither does this
one). So Harry Potter makes his
debut (“a bright, resourceful and
strong-willed boy, immensely loyal
to his friends, his inquisitiveness
and strong moral sense often lead
him into danger as he realises his
continuing significance to Voldemort”), a debut that will have to be
altered when the last Potter book
ultimately appears (the updated
entry on Inspector Morse segues
neatly, if a little callously, from the
last line of his 1994 entry, “This, and
his distaste for much of his job, has
meant that his need for alcohol has
seriously affected his health” to the
present “and Morse suffers a fatal
heart attack in the final novel The
Remorseful Day.”) Crime writer Ian
Rankin makes an appearance with
Inspector Rebus while new entrants
Jacqueline Wilson and Philip Pullman have two entries and five
entries respectively. The present
volume also opens with eight illuminating essays on types of literary
character – the ghost, the literary
side-kick, the detective and so on.
Ultimately, though, characters are
not about the cerebral exercising of
our “little grey cells” as Hercule
Poirot would have it; they are about
emotional pull, identification or vilification. And as such, there is something almost old-fashioned, almost
pre-modernist about the lure of the
character and indeed, about compiling a list of one’s favourites. Can
you imagine asking a French intellectual for his or her favourite three
literary characters? Or that the
resulting selection would give clues
to his or her psyche? It is a very
British, and very anti-intellectual,
sort of parlour game. Modernist and
postmodernist works have characters certainly; Leopold Bloom and
Clarissa Dalloway,
Estragon and Vladimir, Duncan
Thaw and Sammy, are all memorable characters, but they are all
from difficult, teasing, problematic
works that test our intellectual
powers as well as our ability to
empathise, and question the kind
of pleasure we take from identifying with particular figures. The
modernist agenda was not one that
placed the pleasure principle high
on its list; at least, not pleasure in
the way that we understand it, as
emotionally, or sensationally, gratifying. And there is something
hugely pleasurable for a reader in
emotional identification with a literary character; something pleasurable in protesting at the
cutting-short of a life one has come
to love through a book.
Which is why this kind of volume, the making of a simple list of
favourite or influential literary
characters, still has a place, in spite
of competition from list-making
media like the internet. The internet is part of the fragmentation of
our selves; it is the modernist
agenda made electronic, if you like,
with its cut-and-paste facilities, its
democratising view of the world
where Janey-from-Idaho’s shopping list shares the stage with Einstein’s theory of relativity. The
Internet is anti-beauty too, for
nothing will ever persuade me that
an electronic image, as pretty as
you might be able to make it, is as
beautiful as the most beautifully
bound book; and it is curiously
anti-sensory, for pages can be
stroked and caressed, held close
and even embraced. Stroking and
embracing your computer – well,
that’s a whole different realm of the
sensory altogether.
A volume that celebrates characters we love or fear or wish we were
like, and that celebrates it in book
form, not the electronic kind, is an
unashamedly old-fashioned object
that appeals to our senses and reassures us of our place in the world. If
that was all that was available to us,
it would be a dangerous thing, inviting complacency and offering little
in the way of challenge. But when
there is so much around to challenge us, a little comfort and a little
identification goes a very long way.
THE GOLDEN MENAGERIE
Allan Cameron
LUATH PRESS: £9. 99
REVIEWER: SUHAYL SAADI
Taking as its Ur-text Moroccan
writer, Lucius Apuleius’s second
century Latin story, ‘The Golden
Ass’, this novel by Isle of Lewisbased writer and translator of Italian, Allan Cameron quite simply is a
humorous, wild, uncertain critique
of the human state. Did I say simply? Be attentive.
The protagonist-narrator, a neopunk in Croydon who has just
crossed the limen of adulthood,
embarks on a zoomorphic adventure, lured by an urbane, Bacchanalian cult and in particular, by the
attractive and elusive Fotis, who is a
syncretic, post-feminist Hecate/Isis
figure. Far from entering an Epicurean paradise, however, Lucian
Hetherington-Jones begins a series
of metamorphoses. Instead of transforming him merely into an ass,
Cameron throws him through a
menagerie of shape-changes – dog,
parrot, cat, etc. – in each form,
exploring a particular aspect of
human nature and philosophy,
always with the dystopic and unbalanced spectre of religion (and religiosity) hovering ferociously, like the
ghost of Apuleius’s neo-Christian
nemesis and compatriot, Augustinian, over the “enlightened confusion”,
the multiple digressions and allusions, of his text. Each transformation results in a fresh illumination,
yet there is no sense of certainty here.
Everything, especially the consciousness of the protagonist, seems constantly in doubt, provisional. This is
no didactic self-help manual. Furthermore, the term ‘protagonist’ is
probably a misnomer in this context.
In form and spirit, The Golden
Menagerie has more in common
with the Tales from The Arabian
Nights or Aesop’s Fables than with the
well-grounded, post-Victorian narratives that (in spite of Joyce, Cortazar,
the Bloomsbury Set and the wandering bands of Magic Realists) seemed
to dominate the middle ground of
especially the Anglophone world
during much of the 20th century.
This, dear reader, makes The Golden
Menagerie (a poetic, cavalier work if
ever there was one) an exciting
prospect.
Things progress, and Croydon
Boy dances, trots, fornicates and
crawls through a variety of joys,
vicissitudes and roles (including, in
one hilarious scene, a marriage
guidance counseling parrot!). The
text declaims beneath chapter
headings such as ‘Speech Without
Thought’ and the Dante-esque
infernal ‘Nel Mezzo Del Cammin’,
until, around two-thirds of the way
through the book, the first person
narrator, becoming somewhat synonymous with “the constructed
author”, leaves off the “Carnival des
Animaux” and shifts to a series of
dialogues. Through this very human
voyage of thought and discourse,
which, plot-wise, is only tangentially
linked with the teenager’s fable, this
latter-day Apuleius explores, in
accessible and topical fashion, concepts such as the state versus indiegalitarianism,
vidual
rights,
republicanism, faith, doubt, charity,
good, evil, fanaticism, and so on.
It is important to note that
Apuleius’s tale itself was derived
from earlier, Greek, writings, but
that the African imbued it with a
characteristic satyrical style which
seems, after what must be surely
the definitive test of the passage of
1,800 years or so, to be timeless.
Cameron’s blend of erotic adventure, romantic comedy, religious
fable and rationalist discourse faultlessly employs this same type of
‘wise idiot’ voice in an experiential
narrative which overtly requests the
reader to be an active participant.
At base, as in all stories with lasting
power, The Golden Menagerie concerns itself with the comic-epic
struggle of each individual in an
incomprehensible cosmos.
Yet Cameron’s work is neither
deliberately obscure, nor is it
solemn history or pompous tract á
la Aleister Crowley. The Golden
Menagerie treads, flies, chatters and
barks that fine, aureate line between
pretentiousness and patronization
which is drawn from the fact that
the author knows his stuff and relishes the ‘telling’ of it as though he
were a reader coming across the
work for the very first time. This is
not easy to pull off, but Cameron
has done it. This is a beautiful tale –
beautiful, that is, in the old, ‘Golden
Mean’ sense of the word, with its
connotations of symmetry, elegance
and seasoned confusion – where
even an ironically bum line of poetic
preamble can connote some
poignant aspect of life.
Through this “rough and irregular odyssey of failure”, Cameron
simultaneously
dissects
and
breathes new life into an ancient
form, one that is intrinsic to every
novel, every “trash… of half-constructed truths”, that has ever been
written, from late antiquity in the
Fertile Crescent through Ibn Tufayl,
Boccaccio, Cervantes and Swift to
Sterne, Kafka, Conan Doyle,
Calvino, Rushdie and on. Reading
The Golden Menagerie, it is
required that the ‘good reader’ suspend several disbeliefs and enter a
world of ideas and incipient eroticism, which turns and moulds on a
fulcrum of rational magic. The
word ‘fiction’ is derived from the
Latin ‘fingere’, “to shape or model”.
The book is highly rewarding, in the
richness, precision and humour of
its language, the enviable lucidity
of its thought and in that classical
humanist quality it insinuates, of
simultaneous lightness and profundity, a sleight which can alter
perception. A sublimation, perhaps. Or a metamorphosis.
ODIUM
Peter Burnett
THIRSTY BOOKS: £9. 99
REVIEWER: JENNIE RENTON
Peter Burnett’s first novel, The
Machine Doctor, marked him out
as a highly gifted writer. Odium is a
darker tale, cosy as a bed of nails. It
reads like an extended panic attack.
Rubio, a chain-smoking Parisian
doctor with a penchant for noodles
and the campaigns of Napoleon,
travels to Egypt on what turns out
to be a respite-free break. We first
encounter him leaving a concert in
the Place de L’Opera with his wife,
Virginie. The ceiling of the foyer is
elaborately decorated with enamelled cupids and gods frozen in
ironic contemplation of the depart-
ing audience, whose chatter rings
in Rubio's ears like tinnitus. He
hates being trapped in the herd.
He fails to avert the dreaded
post-mortem. Intent on eliciting
affirmation that they have had a
good night out, Virginie coaxes him
into a smart bar nearby, where the
air glitters with clever commentary.
Her efforts to engage him on the
merits of the orchestra is met by
such a dearth of response that her
attention flickers around. Everyone
seems to be having a far better time
than she is. Though she must
realise that seeking emotional solace from her husband is an exercise in emotional self-laceration,
she embarks on a reprise of her
cherished theory that she could
have been a concert performer,
blaming her lack of success on her
fingers being too “short and
stubby”. Rubio's doubt is tethered
in silence. Silence can be taken as
acquiescence. Rubio feels like a
fraud. Their marriage is a hunched
shell of mutual disappointment.
At his shabby surgery, in the seven
minutes his congested schedule
affords, Rubio tries to offer each
patient a listening ear and an honest
prescription. Increasingly they turn
up with afflictions that are not physiological, begging or hectoring him
to provide a key, chemical or otherwise, that might release them from
their existential nightmares. He
advises them to cut out television or
shunts them on to the tender mercies of an analyst. During one consultation he scribbles on his pad,
“Depression as an atheism, moderns proud of their lack of belief.
Their denial of transcendence.” On
another occasion a fraught mother
tries to convince him that her baby
is suffering from depression and
requires medication. He gives the
proposition serious consideration.
In these times the contagion of
hopelessness is spreading rampantly. He suffers from it himself.
While the well-heeled citizens of
Paris void their energies on lifestyle
displays, deliver smug ironies or
congratulate themselves on their
epicurean superiority, Rubio withdraws into pessimism, a hollow
man. His marriage is over and his
friendships have turned rancid.
There seems to be nothing worth
saying, and no way of saying it if
there were. He invests his surviving
speck of optimism in the prospect
of a holiday in north Africa.
Baking grids of streets and blockhouses provide a sun-scourged contrast to the architectural vanities of
Paris, but Rubio soon discovers that
the shadows are just as harsh. Egypt
is “rich and barbarous” and potholed with menace. Hardly has he
arrived than he is mugged, twice.
First he loses his money. The staff at
the Hotel Bel Air, “the only monument to Imperial France” in Mersa,
are entirely unsympathetic. They
glare contemptuously at his
“wormy” French passport and hustle him off the premises. In the street
he stumbles to the ground and finds
himself eyeballing the rotting corpse
of a cat. He notices there is a pale
ADVERT
Luath press
patch on his wrist where his watch
once was. Astonished rather than
angry at the loss of this favourite
possession, he gets back into the
hotel through a broken back door
and within minutes finds himself
snared into a surreal chain of events.
A small boy approaches and asks
for help. He leads Rubio to a room
where his mother lies, prostrate
with drink. She rouses herself sufficiently to scrimmage a pack of cigarettes from the tangle of bed linen
and clothes and Rubio proves all
too eager to join her in her quest for
oblivion, smoking and drinking as
if there’s no tomorrow. And for her
that really is the case. Rubio makes
a foray to get some ice but when he
returns is dazed to discover that she
has died. He takes it upon himself
to return the child to his father in
the ancient city of Siwa where the
houses are carved out of the rock.
Rubio never joins the tourist contingent, that “happy sect of optimists”. Circumstance demolishes his
projected itinerary and though he
smokes his way through pack after
pack of Cleopatras, he never manages to see the sphinx. It crouches in
the desert, a petrified primordial
mystery, always just out of frame.
As an author Peter Burnett is not
in the business of fuelling hubris.
He is concerned with questions
about meaning, value and the
nature of authenticity. In Odium he
delivers a timely warning about the
consequences of materialism,
using caricature as the scalpel of
his philosophy.
NEW SELECTED POEMS
1984-2004
Carol Ann Duffy
PICADOR POETRY: £14. 99
OUT OF FASHION
edited by Carol Ann Duffy
FABER and FABER: £9. 99
REVIEWER: RON BUTLIN
Sharing the back cover with an
arrangement of female limbs tastefully framing it, the blurb to Carol
Ann Duffy’s latest poetry collection
announces that she “deserves better” than to be “considered a top
poet”. Having delivered this presumably well-meant, if rather
heavy-handed compliment, the
unnamed writer in the Observer
develops his peculiar theme: “novelists should read her. If she frightens enough of them into
non-production, she’ll sell in the
quantities she deserves.” Such, it
seems, is the measure of metropolitan literary criticism.
Born in Glasgow, Carol Ann
Duffy grew up in England. She read
philosophy at the University of Liverpool. She has been publishing
steadily for the last twenty years,
writing both for adults and children. In an art form until recently
dominated by men writing about a
man’s world from the masculine
point of view, Duffy, like Ruth
Padel, Liz Lochhead, Kathleen
Jamie and other women poets, is a
sorely needed counterbalance. Her
poetry has received many awards
including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread and
Forward Prizes as well as the Lannan Award and the E.M. Forster
Prize in America. A “top poet”, certainly – but a potential frightener of
novelists?
As is very clear from the earliest
poems selected for this collection,
Duffy’s work often has a strong
narrative drive: “After I no longer
speak they break our fingers/to
salvage my wedding ring. Rebecca
Rachel Ruth/Aaron Emmanuel
David,
stars
on
all
our
brows/beneath the gaze of men
with guns…/…You would not look
at me. / You waited for the bullet.
Fell.” (‘Shooting Stars’). Several of
these earlier poems are straightforward, rather two-dimensional
character sketch-es: “Wayne.
Fourteen. Games are for kids. I
support/the National Front. Pakibashing and pulling girls’/knickers
down” (‘Comprehensive’). As her
work has matured, however, the
characters take on more individuality: “I don’t talk much. I swing up
beside them and do it/with my
eyes. Brando. She was clean. I
could smell her.” (‘Psychopath’). A
development, certainly, but there
is still a strong sense of caricature,
rather than character. Two collections later, Duffy brings out Mean
Time which contains work of the
Leckie &
Leckie
highest quality such as: “A telltale
clock/wiping the hours from its
face, your face/on a white sheet,
gasping, radiant, yes./Pay for it in
cash, fiction, cab fares back/to the
life which crumbles like a wedding cake.” (‘Adultery’). Here she
reaches a depth of genuine feeling
that most novelists achieve only
rarely. Over twenty poems are
included from Duffy’s much
acclaimed volume The World’s
Wife. In performance, Duffy often
reads from this to great effect –
and the audience loves her for it.
Indeed the book has sold over
40,000 copies. Good on her. These
are skilfully written poems that
successfully make their points,
again and again. The only problem, as anyone who has been to
one of her readings knows, is that
Duffy is preaching to the converted – mostly women. But then,
why not?
Well, the danger is that – in these
poems particularly – Duffy’s message itself, rather than her artistic
vision, has begun to determine the
integrity of the work. Here, she is
all answers and no questions. After
a while, the poems began to read
rather like exercises, albeit brilliantly done. Whether the protagonist is Mrs Midas or Mrs Faust, the
dramatic curve is very similar and
carries, most convincingly on
every occasion, the burden of the
poet’s agenda. A truly virtuoso
series of poems that left this
reviewer very impressed, and
utterly unmoved.
The most ambitious poem in the
entire collection, certainly in terms
of length, is ‘The Laughter of
Stafford Girls’ High’. This is a story, a
short novel almost, if we consider
the timespan of the narrative, in
verse-form. Here, sadly, Duffy’s
agenda is given too free a rein at the
expense of her poetic integrity –
and we are treated to twenty pages
that just go on and on. And on. Her
usual spot-on images strain for
effect as she tries just that little bit
too hard: “a splash of a laugh/like
the sudden jackpot leap of a silver
fish/in the purse of a pool.” By the
end of the poem the women all
seem to have become lesbians, and
Mrs Mackay leaves her husband.
Mind you, such were the habits of
Mr Mackay that I’d have left him
too. To me, the poem needs some
firm editing. Half the length would
be a starting point. But then, the
same could be said of much of
Pound, MacDiarmid in English,
Browning and the poetry of many,
many other men.
Thankfully, Duffy’s gifts are usually strong enough to withstand her
lapses into ideas and dogma. As
New Selected Poems frequently
demonstrates, her imaginative
vision and her versatility with form
and image are truly those of a “top
poet”. With poetry of this order,
Duffy is too far removed from
“committing prose” – as Norman
MacCaig used to denigrate that
particular sin – ever to frighten
novelists, whatever the Observer’s
pundit might think. The closing
poems of this collection, such as
‘Wish’ and ‘Death and the Moon’,
are excellent. Let’s hope she continues to develop this area of her
poetic sensibility.
Out of Fashion is an anthology
of poems which take fashion as
their theme. Duffy has invited over
fifty contemporary poets to submit a poem of their own and also
to choose a favourite, from
another time or culture, which
looks at how we dress or undress,
cover up or reveal. It is a delightful
book which contains many fine
poems, those by Sujatta Bhatt and
Duffy herself in particular. The
favourite poems range from
Edward Lear’s magnificently anarchic ‘The New Vestments’ to several by Robert Herrick, including
his near-perfect ‘Madrigal’, closing
with the lines “No beauty she doth
miss/When all her robes are
on;/But Beauty’s self she is/When
all her robes are gone.” Which
surely says it all.
THE KNUCKLE END
Edited by Adrian Searle
FREIGHT: £11. 95
REVIEWER: CRAIG FRENCH
Groups have a sticky attraction for
writers. By necessity, writers are
solitary creatures. I would wager
there isn’t one who hasn’t at some
point envied JD Salinger his internal
exile status. Equally, because they
have to spend so much time alone
in their study and in their head,
they seek out their peers, especially
while still in their apprentice years;
like scientists, they prefer to be peer
reviewed before going public with
their fictional findings. One mustn’t forget the glamour of the group
either. I’m assuming we, as readers,
have all entertained at some point
ridiculous fantasies about tramping
the Lake District with the Romantics or necking Benzedrine with the
Beats. Yet for every Algonquin set,
there’s also a New Puritans movement, a lit-blip that usually has
more to do with mutual promotion
than mutual devotion.
The Knuckle End, doesn’t refer to
a boxer’s modus operandi though I
imagine the scrum of writers collected between its covers believe
they pack a collective punch. The
anthology harvests prose and verse
by graduates of the Edwin Morgan
Centre for Creative Writing at the
University of Glasgow, mixing
known (Louise Welsh, Zoë Strachan, Anne Donovan) and yet-tobe-known. Best to let the course’s
former professor Alasdair Gray
explain: “A joint of meat’s knuckle
end was once the animal’s knee so
has the most bone, the least flesh.
Sidney Smith called Scotland, ‘The
knuckle end of England – the land
of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.’
A lot of Scottish writing does deal
with hard people in hard situations, but you will find this book
contains a lot of tasty mental nourishment, some of it succulent.”
Being compared to a knee doesn’t
strike me as immediately promising but then a forcefully placed one
can leave you breathless. And these
writers?
In How To Read And Why, Harold
Bloom divides short story writers
into two camps, the schools of
Chekhov and of Kafka, which is to
say the difference is between
impressionistic tales rooted in a
realistic milieu, and the phantasmagorical. The Knuckle End is
largely given over to Chekhov’s children. Tales range in setting from
Glasgow’s Botanicals to Tashkent,
and take in the expected topics:
deliquescing relationships, misunderstanding children, and, as 16 of
the 26 pieces are by men, a fair dollop of male angst.
Perhaps because they are
sparser, those stories that depart
from the everyday stand out.
Louise Welsh’s wicked reworking of
the annunciation sees the angel
Gabriel rape the Virgin Mary. Shug
Hanlan’s ‘The High-Jumper’s Fear
of His Hard-on’ is a crazed warning
about the effects of steroids: “How
can handclaps make me so horny?”
More gritty yet still removed from a
recognisably ordinary setting, Will
Napier’s ‘Sidestore Indians’ is a
gleaming piece that recalls Elmore
Leonard, though I also detect a
passing resemblance between it
and a section of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
One criticism: attached to the
book is a second volume which
Adrian Searle in the first of three –
three! – introductions describes as
a “visual meditation on writing and
the creative process.” What it actually is a lot of photos of cows and
abattoirs with facile slogans
attached. “Raw emotional intensity” is superimposed over a picture
of raw meat, while “Don’t mince
your words” is coupled with meat
being, uh, minced. I trust the tyro
writers got better advice than this
on the course.
STANDING STONES:
You can see them all over the
Highlands, piles of grey,
lichen-laced boulders strewn on
the ground, slowly being
reclaimed by the land from
where they came. They are what
remain of the houses and villages
of thousands of men, women
and children who were evicted in
the Clearances, the eighteenthcentury equivalent of ethnic
cleansing. In The Glens of Silence
(Birlinn, £25), David Craig provides the words to accompany
David Paterson’s photographs,
which are eerily devoid of people. Resistance was often fierce
but inevitably futile. Indeed,
many went voluntarily so acute
was the experience of poverty.
Now the glens are being
repopulated but by incomers
who don’t need to eke a living
from the unyielding earth. They
like the views, they say, and the
quiet.
Early morning at Badbea, Caithness, photographed by David Paterson
THE GLASGOW DRAGON
Des Dillon
LUATH: £9. 99
REVIEWER: CARL MACDOUGALL
Christie Devlin is learning Cantonese. He’s a small time crook
turned big time operator, thanks to
drugs and his sidekicks, Bonzo and
Schultz, whom he met in the jail
and who now control his outlets
and supply.
He was brought up in Possil,
where his wife still teaches and
lives in Bearsden. She is pregnant
and says she sometimes preferred
him drinking. It’s easy to see why.
Devlin flares into sudden, irrational
anger. He’s a year off the booze.
Devlin loves to be in control.
Whatever he has, no matter how far
up the social or consumer ladders
he climbs, it’s never enough. He
continually wants more, not nessarily for himself, though he will
benefit somewhere along the line, if
only by implication or reflected
glory.
His 15-year-old daughter Nicole
is at a posh boarding school and is
embarrassed by her parents, especially her father. Nicole knows little
of her father’s business and plays
with recreational drugs. Her
boyfriend is at least ten and maybe
twenty-five years older and there’s a
point where his and Devlin’s pasts
merge, though Nicole is unaware of
being a target, continuing to believe
in him rather than her own experience, even as her involvement with
his lifestyle deepens.
Devlin has plans for Nicole and
his family. He’s bought a house in
Galloway and intends to move
them to his country idyll. He also
intends giving up his business, so
he needs one last strike, a big push
which will confirm his hold on the
market and boost his opinion of
himself. He is obviously unaware
that his own downfall, the destruction of his family and empire, are
being plotted, with Nicole as a key
feature in the collapse.
Devlin sends his troops round
the existing dealers. Their resolve
collapses at the mention of his
name. The one who tries to buck
the trend soon falls into line.
Devlin’s intention is to control the
west of Scotland drug scene and he
manages it so easily one wonders
why it took him so long to consider
the move, especially since he has
the chief constable, Billy Pitt, in his
pocket, to the extent that he organises a guns amnesty to make Pitt
look good in the media.
Controlling distribution is one
thing, but there’s a problem with
supply, which is why he has to take
over the market. Centralisation will
ensure a steady market, control the
dealers and maximise his profit.
The best gear comes from
Afghanistan, but the War Against
Terror has diminished its availability. The Glasgow-based Chinese
triad gangs control the supply of
Chinese White; which is why
Devlin’s learning Cantonese and
frequenting casinos and Chinese
restaurants. He wants to control
their territory as well.
His intentions don’t go according
to plan. The Chinese came to Glasgow a long time ago and have gone
about their business quietly. They
too are on the cusp of control.
They’ll work with Devlin till they
discover what they need to know to
eliminate him. And as he begins his
take-over bid, so they begin their
centralisation strategy and Devlin is
soon involved in a three way fight,
ignoring one corner to concentrate
on another and in the end losing
because he’s a victim of his past.
Devlin is so clear and important
to the story that everyone else follows in his wake, appear as ciphers,
or react to his wishes. His is the
dominant voice and even though
he isn't the central narrator, we see
everything through his eyes.
Des Dillon doesn't understand
this world and doesn’t try. Rather
than offer explanation or pointed
social comment he simply tells us
how it is, and though he does not
actively disapprove, he clearly finds
most of what he describes distasteful. He hopes we share his
incredulity and sets out to record
the characters and their environment. This is how some people live
is as close as he gets to commentary. But he can’t overcome a need
to nudge, to make sure we get the
point, to give extra pieces of information he thinks we need to identify with the story or share his
excitement that such things inhabit
the same world as we do.
He is anything but detached;
and while this gives his prose a
breathless, at times anxious quality, it also leads to overwriting and
irrelevancies. There is a surfeit of
visual elements beloved of 1950s
Beat poets and school children,
the sort of visual springboard
intended to give the words or
phrases an extra dimension or
underline their meaning. The
block capitals, bold type and
words with extended vowels –
screeeeeeeech – become irritating
and make you wish Des Dillon had
more faith in his abilities and didn’t need to resort to such hackneyed stereotypes. He could do
without them if he tried.
BUILDING A NATION:
POST DEVOLUTION
NATIONALISM
IN SCOTLAND
By Kenny MacAskill
LUATH, £4. 99
REVIEWER: ALLAN BURNETT
Now that our futuristic parliament
has finally opened its doors, the
question of how to leave behind the
five-year drizzle of muddles, fiddles
and doing-less-badly that has
dampened the sunny expectations
of devolution can be addressed.
SNP heavyweight Kenny MacAskill
believes he has the answer, and
with Alex Salmond back at the helm
and independence top of the
agenda, this book is a timely intervention for a party entering a critical phase in its history.
As deputy leader of the SNP’s
parliamentary group, MacAskill
recognises why the disappointing
infancy of Scotland’s born-again
constitution has disproportionately
damaged his cause. The nationalists, not the lacklustre Lib/Lab
administration, are most closely
associated with the fortunes of
Scottish political autonomy. If the
devolved institution is seen to fail,
the idea of Scottish independence
is weakened and the SNP lose out.
Illogical, perhaps, but true. Having
John Swinney in charge, on the
other hand, didn’t exactly help.
To get back on track, argues
MacAskill, nationalists must make
the parliament work. Holyrood is,
he insists, the only base from which
independence will be realised. We
can only assume the message is
being transmitted to Salmond in
London. The SNP must seek power
and build confidence that an independence party is fit to govern. To
do that, it needs a vision for breadand-butter issues. “Scots are aware
of the ineptitude of the Lib/Lab
Executive,” he concludes, “what
they need persuaded of is the ability of the SNP.”
Prompted by recognition that
nationalism is a broad church, and
by admiration for the blanket prosperity of Scandinavian states,
MacAskill argues that the party
must pitch itself as a social democratic one attuned to local communities and the global market. Low
business taxes, a knowledge-based
economy, progressive personal taxation and state ownership of infrastructure, schools and hospitals:
these are the hallmarks of the enviable Swedish model – a better
example than Norway because you
don’t need to keep filling your argument up with oil – that the SNP
should emulate.
Unfortunately, MacAskill never
really gets to grips with the reforms
required to achieve this. Perhaps it
is because he admires Ireland, too,
but doesn’t want to deal with the
contradictions arising from his proposed marriage of statist Swedish
social democracy and hands-off
Irish neo-liberalism. How do you
build a society that values group
success and frowns on self-aggrandisement while at the same time let
the budding Michael O’Learys in
your midst do as they please? The
Celtic Tiger has performed well for
its entrepreneurs and multinational
investors, but in terms of living
standards lags far behind the
Nordic states and with good reason.
A chapter on migration optimistically makes the case for welcoming settlers. But attracting
foreign-born citizens can be unexpectedly divisive. When the
Swedish economy sank into temporary recession in the 1990s the
presence of a large number of
recent immigrants – almost a fifth
of the population – created
unprecedented ethnic tensions as
unemployment rose and the social
security net began to stretch. A
consensus-based society works
well when times are good or there is
a high degree of ethnic homogeneity; it is much more difficult to
maintain when ethnic differences
are put under economic pressure.
But that’s not to assume MacAskill’s
vision cannot be realised through a
sensitive integration policy.
While the central themes of this
book are underdeveloped, and
MacAskill’s insistence on Scotland’s
“shared history” with England suggests he could learn more about
post-colonialism, this remains a
manifesto to inspire and infuriate;
pacey, intelligent and accessible.
Like all good political pamphlets it
is best enjoyed when read out loud.

stitch and trim test - Scottish Arts Council

Transcription

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