Scottish Review of Books Vol. 8 Issue 3

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Scottish Review of Books Vol 8 · Number 3 · 2012 ISSN 1745—5014

Independence Yes, Nationalism No: James Kelman Votes

Kapka Kassabova I Want To Be Alone Brian Morton In Wet and Windy Argyll Paul Henderson Scott The Dictionary Makers

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Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 3

Scottish Review of Books

We have no use for emotions, let alone sentiments, but are solely concerned with passions.

Hugh MacDiarmid

Contents 4 Brian Morton It Never Rains But It Pours: TC Smout’s Exploring Environmental History 6 James Kelman The SRB Interview: Dostoevsky, Cézanne, why women are fearful of men, and the British Council 10 Brian McCabe

Thrust: A Short Story 15 Harry McGrath

Sweet and Sour: Chris Dolan’s Redlegs 16 Theresa Munoz Burmese Days: Toni Davidson’s My Gun Was As Tall As Me 17 Joseph Farrell SRB at the Theatre: Alan Cumming’s Macbeth

Editorial 20 Lesley McDowell Evil All Around: Louise Welsh in Berlin 21 Kapka Kassabova

Diary of a Writer in Retreat 22 Colin Waters What If There Is a God? James Meek’s The Heart Broke In 23 Susan Mansfield Inwards and Outwards: Victoria Crowe’s Beautiful Career 24 Paul Henderson Scott

Word Power: Scotland’s Lexicographers 25 Allan Cameron Two States: One Solution – Ilan Pappe, Israeli Dissident 26 Queequeg Crossword

19 Alan Taylor Let the Presses Roll: Remembering Arnold Kemp

Scottish Review of Books Volume 8, Number 3, 11 August, 2012 Publisher: Scottish Review of Books Ltd Registered Office: Scottish Review of Books Ltd, Anderson Strathern Solicitors, 1 Rutland Court, Edinburgh EH3 8EY Chair of the board: Jan Rutherford Directors: Tom Devine, Christopher Harvie, Leonard Forman, Jan Rutherford, Alan Taylor, Ian Wall Editor: Alan Taylor Editorial Address: 8a Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh EH2 7TH Editorial Telephone: 0131 538 8320 Editorial Fax: 0131 665 7885 Editorial Email: aftaylor2000@aol.com Howff: Staggs, Musselburgh Admin and Subscriptions: Publicity & The Printed Word, 5 West Stanhope Place, Edinburgh EH12 5HQ Tel: 0131 337 9724 Advertising: Contact Publicity, 15 Newton Terrace, Glasgow G3 7PJ Tel: 0141 204 2042 Telephone: 0131 313 1924 Email: anna.renz@janrutherford.co.uk Website: scottishreviewofbooks.org Design: Freight Design 0141 552 5303

The University of Aberdeen is a proud sponsor of Scottish Review of Books.

To learn more, visit abdn.ac.uk/srb

the edinburgh writers’ Conference, held fifty years ago this month, has become the stuff of legend and not a few myths.

It was ‘curated’, as we say in this age of weasel words, by John Calder, a scion of the brewing Calders of Perthshire, who as a publisher was responsible for introducing many great European authors to an English readership. Blessed with demonic energy, peerless connections and barefaced cheek, Calder amassed a group of writers in Scotland’s dozy capital the like of whom will surely never be eclipsed.

In his no-holds-barred memoir, Pursuit, he recalled how he gathered the throng and the near chaos that threatened to kibosh his plans. Famously, Hugh MacDiarmid denounced his fellow Scot, Alexander Trocchi, whose work he had probably never read, as ‘metropolitan scum’, while other writers argued fiercely about whether describing homosexual acts was a fit and proper subject for fiction. William Burroughs, who was among the delegates, noted that there was ‘no ostensible central issue’ at the conference, though he remembered MacDiarmid (‘a frosty old Scots poet, quite a local celebrity’) saying that people like him should be in jail instead of on the lecture platform.

This year’s Edinburgh International book Festival is revisiting Calder’s conference. Among the topics scheduled for discussion are Should Literature Be Political? (perhaps), Is There a ‘National Literature’? (it depends what you mean by ‘national’), Censorship Today (like the poor, it will always be with us), Style vs Content (a bit of both is recommended) and The Future of the Novel (uncertain – as ever). We hope, of course, that there will be some fireworks and that a few writers will take the opportunity to vent their spleen.

Otherwise what is the point of such a gathering? Whether there will be much in the way of enlightenment is another matter.

Why writers should want to get together is not entirely clear. As Kapka Kassabova writes in this issue of the SRB, what most writers really crave is solitude. There is a need for quiet, time to research, think and compose, hence the popularity of writers’ retreats. Increasingly, though, it is difficult to divorce oneself from everyday interference. What William McIlvanney once said of Glasgow now appears to apply everywhere: ‘You never know where the next assault on your privacy’s going to come from.’ One is not even assured of peace in one’s own home. Bells ring, phones go – salesmen selling double-glazing or conservatories, conmen offering irresistible deals on non-existent products – doors slam. Noise, as Joyce said of snow, is general.

Then there is cyberspace which we all have little alternative but to embrace.

Email, we’re told, is a wonderful thing, because we can contact instantly someone in the Falklands or Fiji or Falkirk. How we got by without being able to do this is beyond our ken. Nowadays, it seems, you won’t be taken seriously as an author if you don’t have your own website, tweet (or floss as we prefer to call it) daily, keep your Facebook page constantly updated and blog incontinently. To suggest that all of this is just noise of another kind is to invite derision. Thus writers who in bygone times were rarely seen in public and never heard of between books are constantly present, filling in what used to be fruitful silence with incessant chatter and humiliating and boring puffs for themselves. It’s what might be called the banality of the e-world.

Some writers, however, are resistant to all this flapdoodle. One such is Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who has never appeared at the EIBF, possibly because he has better things to do with his time. Kundera is not a fan of ebooks and has had it written into his contracts that his books should not be made available in this ghastly form. For this he is to be applauded and we hope others will have the courage to join him.

In the meantime, however, and for no other reason than because it seems such a contrast with the ethos of here and now, we would like to remind readers of the case of JL Carr, who wrote his gemlike novels (A Month in the Country, How Steeple Wanderers Won the FA Cup, The Harpole Report, etc) while simultaneously running a small publishing company which specialised in historical maps and poetry booklets.

When he couldn’t pay his butcher’s bill Carr offered by way of barter remainders which the butcher was pleased to accept. Whether he gave mince or steak in exchange we are unable to confirm.

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Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

it never rains but it pours Brian Morton

A

ll of us inhabit some nub of ‘environmental history’, whether we are aware of it or not. It has been Christopher Smout’s particular gift to humanise and bring home, in a very literal sense, aspects of what in other hands often seems a dismal science. Environmental history struggles between econometrics at one end of the spectrum and an excessive literariness at the other. To non-specialists, it can seem tangled and remote, or else caught up in a rhetoric of blame that is unanswerable but strangely paralysing and fatalistic.

The first essay in his plainly titled republished collection Exploring Environmental History suggests that Smout’s is a peculiarly Scottish gift. Not only has he knocked confidently on the oak divisions between academic disciplines, and mostly gained entrance, he stands in the same powerful Scottish lineage of syncretistic thinkers that begins even before Hutton and Miller and extends to Patrick Geddes, D’Arcy Thompson, James Ritchie and Frank Fraser Darling in the 20th century (the last of these English, but a Scot and then an internationalist by avocation). Smout is by no means a mere follower-on and re-reading these papers suggests that the most important public office bearer in our country, as it debates its future and future allegiances, is our Historiographer Royal.

Here is how his book arrived: on the first friday of July it rained hard and without pause from just before midnight and through the morning. The burn rose, as it always does, with frightening speed and by breakfast time had the colour and movement of boiling chocolate. By noon, the water was just inches below the central spar of the footbridge, our only access. We felt the vibration through our feet, and watched the water facing upstream, having been told the story of a late farmer further down the glen who’d been swept to his death by a rogue stump tossed around in the stream. We’d seen his bridge.

Could the water ever have come so high?

It had been a freak fall of rain, apparently, a hundred-year storm, but as the climate shifts similar spates are ever more probable; more important, as forestry is shaved off the hillsides they may become more intense and destructive. It’s interesting to note that

the most solidly argued rebuttal to Smout’s 2002 essay on ‘The Highlands and the Roots of Green Consciousness, 1750-1900’ relates to the relation between tree-cover, run-off, siltation and erosion, all from an African perspective.

The postman came at two, waved a padded envelope in the air and popped it into the parcel box on the other side of the footbridge. He wasn’t for coming across. I got it eventually. Even ten pages in, it became clear not just how urgently relevant Smout is, but how general the import of his work. Each essay in the book falls like a pebble, with ever-widening circles of significance. Some of this is familiar enough. Climate change has long since ceased to be a topic only for academic seminars or for patronising denials by a weatherman who told us our memories of dry, hot summers were false and wishful ones. The last several rainy years have been crash courses in hydrology, on new housing estates as well as isolated farms: ‘flood plain’ and ‘water table’ entered middle-class speak.

Sharper winds have been a reminder that in global terms our climate is not defined as particularly wet, but as notably windy; we chose to reverse the emphasis.

From our own immediate perspective in a remote farmhouse, clear-fell forestry will expose us again to snell north-easterlies which will nip the early spuds that are already this year mushy with excessive rain.

Saurian felling machines have been parked up the hill, ready to resume work when the rain eventually slackens to merely torrential. Further down the glen, closer to where our neighbour was washed away, under hills browed with commercial spruce and larch, fields long cleared of trees and hungry for fertiliser offer no shelter and only seasonal feed for cows that are kept alive on silage through long, cold springs. We’re overrun with deer, roe and what may be Sika/red hybrids, and we check obsessively for ticks.

Draw out the focus on Google Earth and the picture becomes yet more complicated.

A few miles up the road stands a small town that once boasted two dozen distilleries and a fishing fleet, but which was recently – and again – cited as an example of stagnation and decay, to the righteous fury of locals who invoke a strong sense of community. These days, the main trade at the quay is in the

timber that trundles past the house and in towers for wind farms. Tourism holds out some hope. There is an airfield that brings golfers (and houses the bodies of crashed aliens, or so we tell the tourists peering through the chainlink at ‘Area Fufty-Wan’).

On the way to it, one crosses the remains of a commercial canal and railway line, remnants of formerly burgeoning industries. At least the fields are not just unrelieved rape, the colour of mustard or of jaundice, but a mixture of barley, some oats, corners of potatoes and a good deal of black-bag silage, which is the real alien invasion into this economy.

Pass through town and up a long and winding road (in fact, Paul McCartney’s ‘Long and Winding Road’), where the verges are tagged with pink ribbon marking ‘alien’ species to be sprayed, Japanese knotweed, Himalayan balsam or that Triffid of Triffids, Rhododendron ponticum, there is a tiny village that was once to have been a great industrial city of the west, with manufacturing, a port and cathedral. It requires a further effort of refocus – Google doesn’t help, though it sometimes picks out the archaeological traces – to understand that the Scottish Highlands were not always considered sylvan and edenic but were believed to be the ideal location for big industry that needed nearby fuel and navigable or harnessable water: there are abandoned smelters and furnaces up and down the coast, and it was the dream of Scotland’s most charismatic Secretary of State, Thomas Johnston, that the country might become a net provider of hydro-electric power to the United Kingdom as a whole. The Cruachan scheme provides some of the background to Alan Warner’s recent ‘Highland’ novel The Deadman’s Pedal.

In a useful opening essay, originally given in Germany in 2005, Smout sets out parameters for environmental history as a discipline and offers some explanation of Scotland’s priority and pre-eminence in the field. Nature of early settlement, population mass, ratio of population to available natural resources all presumably have a role, as do later economic, political, legal and cultural factors. Geographical position and mixed geological identity promoted curiosity about the natural scene. Darwinism had roots in and took root in Scotland quite differently to elsewhere. Everyone understands that Romanticism marked a cusp in the evolution of Scotland’s natural environment but Romantic ideology, and the reinvention of Scotland as a place for sport, replenishment of the spirit and for observation of fragile nature, doesn’t float free of pre-existing economic necessities, which can also be divided into three: subsistence farming, aristocratic shooting and fishing, and a long-term history of industrial development, which goes back long before Johnston, with seventeenth century roots.

Public understanding of ‘environmental history’ leans heavily on boo-words like ‘sheep’ and ‘Clearances’ but lacks a matching understanding of how sheep, or deer, function in a landscape compared to cattle, or how semi-natural woodland was managed in the days before mass forestry planting and Brazilian solutions to felling. Knee-jerk opposition to forestry, hill farming and to hunting (for its opponents, shooting aristocrats means just that) is all done in the presumed and presumptuous interest of ‘the environment’, the biggest scare-word of all.

What sets Smout apart is that he replaces an emptily rhetorical question with a highly

detailed historical narrative: not ‘does the environment have a future?’, but ‘our environment has a very specific past, or pasts, and if it is to have a future we better damn well understand them’. Anyone who accuses Smout of quietism hasn’t been reading very carefully and certainly hasn’t got to the to the last paragraph of the closing essay on ‘Environmental Consciousness’ which briefly and uncharacteristically imagines a moral apocalypse that leaves the earth as bare and silent as Mars or Neptune.

Smout’s more usual style is unstrident and not always picture-postcard colourful.

In this, he is different from someone like Fraser Darling, who could not avoid getting out his water colours and shading in backgrounds even to a quantitative study of birds, deer or seals. Smout acknowledges that Darling’s scientific credentials were sometimes undermined by impressionism or literariness, to say nothing of that damnable vice anthropomorphism, as does Darling’s greatest follower John Morton Boyd. But then Darling was writing in a very different scientific and political climate than ours and it is precisely anthropomorphism or at least some version of the anthropic principle that is at the heart of Smout’s engagement with the landscape, an engagement which cannot at any point, synchronic or diachronic, be divorced from dynamic human impact.

It has always seemed to me that Darling, though a modern in many ways, a scientist and a family man, was closer in spirit to the old Irish/Scottish hermits for whom nature poetry was as much practical and ‘scientific’ as it was aesthetic and spiritual. (Our house, five miles from Columba’s alleged landing place on Kintyre, was briefly occupied by three Black Hermits, whose itinerant mission is now elsewhere.) Another rebuttal to Smout’s opening paper takes task with his tendency to ignore a traditional Celtic philosophy of nature and a long tradition of Gaelic nature poetry like Duncan Ban Macintyre’s, but it’s possible that he almost deliberately overlooks this tradition, or indeed any cultural artefact that might be subject to sentimentalisation. For all Scotland’s preeminence in ‘environmental history’, there is no triumphalism or ‘here’s tae us, wha’s like us’ in his attitude to ‘traditional’ Highland values: ‘Tiree may be a naturalist’s paradise and Suffolk a barley baron’s desert, but that is not because the Gael is more in touch with nature than the Saxon. Given the chance to make money . . . ’ Smout also notes that the ‘traditional’ Celtic love of nature is further holed by Ireland’s appalling record in matters of conservation. There is a national, but not a nationalistic slant to the work. Ironically, Darling’s principles were perhaps more easily applied in Africa, where the dynamic interdependency of human animal, nonhuman animal and physical environment retained more traditional elements.

It’s by no means news that the north and west of Scotland once supported substantial local populations at modest levels of subsistence that were sustained by what hyper-fed outsiders tended to view as indolence.

When food and energy are scarce, ‘laziness’ is a good survival strategy. But some of this recognition goes no further than a vague perception that Scotland, as well as offering affordable manses and superior schools, is also a good place to dabble in ‘the Good Life’, without much understanding of the efforts required, now and historically, to maintain it. In place of the energy-rich communities of the past, we’ve become heavily

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Scottish Review of Books

Photographer Glyn Satterley’s subject is Scotland’s shooting estates. Twenty years ago he produced The Highland Game which he described as ‘an affectionate look at a lifestyle that was becoming extinct’. In Going to the Hill: Life on Scottish Sporting Estates (Quiller, £16.99, 144pp, ISBN: 978 1 84689 118 2), he has returned to his old stomping ground and finds that while much has change much has remained the same. As Sir Michael Wigan notes in his introduction, ‘New owners have brought in new ways – and the old brigade has transmogrified.’ What has stayed as it was, however, are the activities, documented by John Buchan in his evergreen yarn, John Macnab, of salmon fishing and deer stalking, both of which are enduringly popular, not least among the new money set and ‘secretive businessmen who never show face’.

accessorised and technologically dependent (without much skill in repair and refurbishment). Even a modestly ‘self-sufficient’ smallholder relies on strimmer, rotavator, chainsaw, and quad, not so much energypoor as energy-overdrawn, and certainly less efficient than a family with a horse, a couple of strong sons, bow-saws and axes. Scaling down on gadgets requires certain compromises as regards time expended, but rapidly repays the extra effort involved. Lime and glyphosate are perhaps the only commodities that can’t be entirely eschewed, or so we argue, pretending that the sprayer hose isn’t part of our serpentless Eden.

It’s no accident that we use ‘landscape’ not just as a synonym for the physical environment, ‘natural’ or altered, but also for an art and photographic form. The latter meaning now predominates, in the sense that we tend to regard landscape as static, an unmoving tableau out of which we airbrush or Photoshop the unwanted elements; pylons, silos, wind farms. The old painters put in human figures for ‘staffage’ and scale, but they put in birds for movement, and nothing more solidly confirms Smout’s belief in landscape as a living dynamic, with manthe-animal in violent, pastoral, scientific, aesthetic or spiritual contact with other animals than his passion for birds. There is little scope for ornithology here, beyond a look at the little owl, once considered both alien and vermin, now rightly protected and working its way into Scotland, though only south of the Forth-Clyde line. The chapter on ‘aliens’ (not the kind housed at Machrihanish) is a good example of Smout’s eminent good sense in dealing with sensitive and controversial issues. Why, for instance, is ‘alien’ algae brought in with commercial ballast or bilge considered pernicious when algae brought in on the feet of migrating geese is not? Again, it isn’t merely a rhetorical question and the crux of it is whether man is accounted part of the animal kingdom, which is logical and necessary, or that he is not, which is illogical.

Smout cites Ritchie’s 1920 masterwork The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland as a key text in the evolution of ‘environmental history’ and green consciousness. Like his own work, it isn’t a charge-sheet, but the account of a complex dynamic.

Birds may occupy most of what passes

for Smout’s spare time. Trees have largely occupied his working life, often in collaboration with researchers from related fields.

There is a special lift to his prose when he discusses native pinewoods – he surprisingly makes no acknowledgement here to Steven’s and Carlisle’s equally classic The Native Pinewoods of Scotland – or the wonderful Atlantic oakwoods of Argyll which have now returned to natural growth. The afforestation of Scotland remains a controversial topic. One still encounters schoolteachers who happily tell their charges that the whole country was once covered in trees. One can’t trust the old map-makers any more securely.

Tree symbols were sometimes added later, put in without much reference to actual density of growth, sometimes, one suspects, added for decorative reasons. I have an old Argyll map that seems to show woodland that never existed, or for which there is now no evidence. We might casually assume that such a wood was hacked down by men for naval masts or spokewood or fuel, depending on its composition, but as Smout wisely points out, commercial exploitation of some Western woodlands accounts for only a tiny chronological fraction of their millennial histories. We are part of nature, and we are a guilty part of nature, but we are not the only or the most ruthless movers in the game.

On the contrary, Smout seems to suggest that our historical exploitation of wood has always been quite specialised (spokewood, tanbark, domestic fuel and ‘treen’: all different drivers of need), rationally calculated (it was often more satisfactory to import masts from the Baltic, than to produce them even semi-locally) and driven by a clear if unstated commitment to what is now buzzed as ‘sustainability’, a term that still relates to maximising yields rather than protecting ‘the environment’, however one cuts it.

The allure of birds is that they do not observe boundaries, either geographical or political. Deer and cattle can be fenced.

Birds can not. Their migratory habits are spectacular and complex. The tern you see in summer may have wintered in Africa or may be on passage from one circumpolar region to another. The blackbird you see in January may not be the same blackbird you see in June. Trees, on the other hand, seem static, monolithic (or monolignic?)

and as permanent as we allow them to be.

And yet, here is a perfect illustration of not being able to see the wood for the trees, for a forest is always a mobile thing, regenerating outside its boundaries wherever patterns of animal husbandry allow it to, and this is where the difference between cattle on the one hand, deer and sheep on the other, does make another significant difference. Smout emphasises both the exceptional mobility of pinewoods, but also their fragility, particularly in face of climate change. It may be that, left to its own device, Birnam Wood might well have come to Dunsinane, but that is to replace Shakespearean imagery with uncertain dendrology: I have a sense that oaks rather than pines are the issue in ‘great Birnam Wood’ and oaks also have a mythological significance that isn’t any direct part of Smout’s concern.

That isn’t to say that he works a specialism as carefully demarcated as a Victorian planting. On the contrary, Smout’s ‘subject’ draws on everything from literary sources on the ‘arts’ side of the quad (as in quadrangle, not bike) to dendrochronology and palynology on the ‘science’ side, but always with the understanding that both are branches of the ‘humanities’. He writes additionally about biodiversity, nature conservation, about the impact of ‘improvers’ on the Scottish environment, and on comparisons – which might seem obvious at first blush, but more subtly inflected the deeper we go – between the natural fuel economies of Scotland, Ireland and Iceland. We may all three be part of a North Atlantic system that is more than usually susceptible to vagaries in global weather patterns and responsive demographic changes, but the differences, which are historical and human as well as geological, are highly instructive and a brisk summary of how Smout’s constellation of methodologies functions.

This is great scholarship, as direct and mobile as the birds and as weighty and grounded as the trees. He doesn’t tax patience or waste paper with obsessively piled-up evidence but delivers salient points backed with representative detail. Above all, it redefines ‘environment’ not as the altar of nature worship, nor merely as the neutral background on which species plod or blossom and throw seeds, nor as something that

can only be perceived from aloft, from the bird’s eye view. It is the matrix in which we live and with which we interact. The sense I get from these essays is that land is an inheritance, whether or not we are of the class that inherits land. Smout is not, like Edmund Blunden, ‘for the woods against the world’, but he is anxious to show that the woods, as symbols of a long and complex contract with nature, are always with us, were here before us and will be here after us.

Exploring Environmental History: Selected Essays T. C. Smout Edinburgh University Press, pp256, £70. ISBN: 978 074 863 5139

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Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

james kelman: the SRB INTERVIEW

J

ames Kelman was born in Govan in 1946 and brought up there and in Drumchapel. He left school at fifteen, and was living in London when he published his first short story collection, An Old Pub Near the Angel (1973). This was followed in 1983 with another collection, Not not while the giro, and shortly after his first novel, The Busconductor Hines (1984). His novel A Disaffection (1989) won the James Tait Black Memorial prize, and in 1994, with How Late it Was, How Late, he became the first and as yet only Scot to win the Booker Prize. In 2008 he won the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year Award for Kieron Smith, Boy. He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.

Kelman met Rosemary Goring to discuss his new novel, Mo said she was quirky, at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, where his father had worked for the last eleven years of his life. Smartly dressed in crisp, striped shirt and jacket, he spoke openly and often amusedly about his writing, and his own life. His eighth and latest novel, he explained, had begun life two decades earlier as a ten-minute film commissioned by a French film company which asked eleven international writers to create a noir-type story set in a city, in his case Glasgow.

Scottish Review of Books: Mo said she was quirky is a fantastic novel.

I’m really moved by it.

James Kelman: That’s good, I’m glad.

What was the inspiration?

Initially there wasn’t any inspiration. The gist of it began about 20 years ago when I wrote a very short screen play. I was quite happy with the short film, but I wanted to do it properly, and do it as a story – as I thought a short story. But it was quite complex, so much so that it never kind of worked. I realised I would have to spend time on it, more than I had thought. So I shelved the project, but I looked at it every now and again over the years, but it was never right as a short story and eventually I realised I would have to allow it to kind of breathe properly. And that eventually became a novel.

It never stopped being complex or complicated, because you know, when you’re doing it as a film you don’t have to operate within the psyche of the character in the writing itself, when you’re doing a film you can convey an interiority, if that’s the term, but once you’re working in prose it becomes trickier.

In the novel I kept the opening the same, so the point of the drama begins with the young woman coming home from work, in a quite innocuous way for a casino worker, just sharing a cab with her friends who are fellow workers. And the opening, that fleeting moment when the taxi has to stop, and she is in her own world anyway, not quite part of the conversation with her two friends, she sees this guy walking with his pal, he bears a resemblance to her brother but she’s not quite certain, she hasn’t seen him for a few years. It just seemed better to be situated in London itself.

things – whether that’s images or sounds, very loose associations. So it is difficult, but ultimately as a writer you only have language to work in, so how do you use language to convey other forms of thought that are not just linguistically based?

Yes, that’s what I’m meaning.

Well, the thing with a third-party narrative is it allows you to be external to the character too. So at that point when you can talk about her lifting a cup and moving within that to a subjective view of what’s entailed by lifting a cup. I see that now, I’ve come to see it, as being quite in the Scottish intellectual tradition. I had written an essay at that point, 25 years ago, trying to connect the Common Sense tradition with Noam Chomsky’s work. The more into the Scottish philosophical tradition you go, well, there is a point where you reach the conflict between David Hume and Thomas Reid, to do with apprehension. I find I’m moving between the external world and the subjective perception of it. So in a way, I think the intellectual context is already there, within the Scottish Common Sense tradition, as it would be within the French or continental tradition. I can see that kind of coherence, or consistency.

Because of its size?

No, not so much to do with size. It was the feel. There were different levels. One of them would be that the guy she thinks may be her brother, it was not his home either, he was displaced.

That’s how it began. It was a difficult novel to write. Not because it was from a woman’s perspective, that wasn’t the trickiest part of it. But operating within that inner dynamic is always difficult, when you’re working within a normal thirdparty narrative but you move from there, that transition to the inner being of the central character. Which I was working on elsewhere anyway around that period, the other two novels from then were A Disaffection and How Late It Was…

Do you think it was something you were already attuned to by being brought up in Scotland and studying philosophy as you had? And also, is there anybody in Europe doing something similar at the moment?

Technically I had already been involved in attempting these things in my earlier work, even from The Busconductor Hines, that movement of the outer world and how a human being operates within it, and how a character is seen operating within it. I think in some ways, even Hogg’s Justified Sinner is operating on that level when you have these different ways of looking at GilMartin, Hogg’s central character.

But I don’t see it as a Scottish thing only. I didn’t see it then like that either.

But I do think it’s one way of seeing it, it’s a context for people in Scotland. At that time I would have equated it more with the existentialist tradition and seen it more in relation to the writers and artists I really responded to as a young artist/writer. Thirty years ago I would have been inclined more to speak about Dostoevsky, Notes From the Underground or The Devils. And I would have seen Kafka, the way Kafka worked in The Castle, very much part of this. Although the finished novel is a third-party novel, at the same time during his working processes he operated in the first person. Probably for me as a young artist I would have prefaced that by ‘of course’, because I thought that’s what Kafka would have been after, drawing together the two worlds, external and internal, that’s how I would have tried to argue it then, he wanted to put forward the one thing.

The interior voice that all of us have in our heads can’t be translated onto the page really, because it is inchoate and sometimes almost wordless. So I wonder how you create art out of an idea.

There is a point where thought itself, as you say, it’s not even to do with transcribing.

The inner musing of a human being is composed of more than language. Language will also be a part of it, but there’s other

You sometimes need that distance from your younger self to see quite what you were doing, or where it fits in.

Yeah, that’s right. But I would have seen it more through language at that point, and formerly would have seen the use of standard literary form in a sense as the objective world, the external world, and when you move into the phrases and rhythms of the ordinary language-user –

ordinary human beings, they use language that’s not standard in that sense – it is a reflection of the internal world of the human being. Third-party narrative as the external world, and the thought processes or maybe dialogue as the internal, the subjective, belonging to human beings, how we use language, perceiving the world around us. So you have the two distinctive worlds there, as the outer and the inner.

And the friction between them.

Yes. So for me, the formal issue as a young writer too, was how to marry these two, and how to get from the one to the other.

These issues are to do with theory of mind, I would say, or philosophy of mind, but are part also of literary tradition.

The closeness of the writing in this novel is fiendish really, the achievement of making it look as easy as if I feel I could sit down and write this – well, I don’t, but you know, the reader will feel this is so readable, and won’t actually see the mechanics of it. So how much do you sweat over it? Is it painful?

Well, it really is. That’s why maybe it took so long to do it properly. But you don’t want the mechanics or the nuts and bolts to be obvious to everyone. A writer friend of mine, Mary Gray Hughes, said many years ago to me, that is part of what we do. These are things for writers to enjoy or appreciate in the work of other writers, but it is like a craftsman looking at the work of another craftsman, and you do respect the way they manage to put a shelf up using only one nail! So if other people are looking at a good piece of furniture another carpenter might whisper to you, do you know the guy that made this never used any nails? You’ll go, what do you mean? Well he joined it so well that there are no nails. He only used one in the whole thing, then when he finished the joining he took the nail back out. It doesn’t stop you as a layperson enjoying the furniture, but your appreciation is slightly different from the joiner who was talking to you, that is the great craft but not for everybody to see.

It’s not the intention.

It’s that sense that it’s to be seamless, it’s to be the great illusionist. Others might know how you’re doing it, but when the thing is presented nobody should see any of that kind of thing.

Interesting that you mention Dostoevsky there. I was going to ask you a very fundamental question about the way you write – to what extent the novel is mapped out in advance, how you choose tenses and so on. And also, I think he drafted The Idiot something like eight times. Can you tell me a bit about your writing process?

Ordinarily I just begin, I work it out on the page. There’s never any plot, or anything like that, I never know what’s going to happen. I can only intuit something is maybe longer than a short story the more I get into it. And sometimes even after the third or fourth sentence I think, this is going to be quite long.

As quickly as that?

It can be. Because I know that once I begin to unpack those sentences, that paragraph

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 7

Scottish Review of Books

James Kelman: Scottish people don’t know much about their own history at all.

– nowadays the analogy would be that once you double-click on it, you find out that it’s a suitcase folder rather than just a folder of documents. And you can kind of intuit that, but not always.

So, there’s not any plot. I would have been quite happy in this particular novel if the ending had happened quite soon, and I’d had to continue beyond that. It wouldn’t have been unthinkable, and certainly wouldn’t have worried me.

So if the very last page had happened a third of the way through?

Yeah, and continuing on, it would just have been different. But the more into it I got, I realised that the ending would probably be as I suspected it was going to be, but I was prepared for something else.

I like that. You just trust your – is it your unconscious?

No, not unconscious. No, when you’re talking in these terms there’s major issues around creativity, around how we create art.

I don’t have anything against using the term the unconscious or the subconscious, but I think it’s more to do with how we order things as human beings. When you get into talking about it this way very quickly it takes you into things like creationism, and why it is there’s a need to have a belief in god, or what do we mean by providence or fate, or is it a purely existential kind of process.

It takes you into issues around determinism. But if you look on it a different way, it is a bit easier, in terms of ‘how do we create art’. I think that the

problem with writing is that because we use language, it seems to suggest – how can you say it – a kind of Platonic thing, that you are putting words to an idea that already exists. And that is a mistake.

If you look at visual arts, and how you compose visual arts, or even music, how a composer would operate, I mean if you take a piece of music, and it doesn’t have to be Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and it doesn’t have to be Miles Davis or a piece of jazz, it can be a good piece of rock music.

Once you talk in these other Platonic sort of ways you have to be careful, well, you very quickly move into absurdity. It’s like, how did Cézanne know that this painting would end in that way rather than this? It takes you into something like painting by numbers. Because the painting alters with every brushstroke. As soon as Cézanne puts in a certain colour, or moves his brush in a certain way at one end of the canvas, that will alter what he does at the other end of the canvas, and it becomes a process of pure composition. I think it’s best to think in these ways of story writing too, as a composition. So, when you get to maybe chapter eight in a novel, that allows you to go back and develop chapter three. It’s why a writer like Chekhov might say, if you’re having trouble with a story, destroy the first paragraph. What’s come out of it is the composition, and the thinking that’s begun it, seen in the earliest sentences, might be hindering the finished thing out. If you worry too much about these early ideas, you’ll put too many restrictions on yourself, you’ll stop the story breathing.

That’s also great advice for aspiring writers. I’m slightly embarrassed by using the terms unconscious and subconscious, as you talk there, because it makes it sounds as if it’s beyond yourself.

It does gives rise to that Platonic sense, you know, the idea that an idea exists, the ghost of the idea, and your words on the page will fulfil, or represent thoroughly the idea that already exists.

You’re the conduit.

Yes. And obviously many writers and artists believe that’s the case, or have thought that’s the case. When they appeal to the Muse or to the hand of god, whatever it is, they believe they’re fulfilling something that already exists.

Does that not make it harder, in a way, because then it allows something like writer’s block to come into it, because you could feel there’s something between you and something other?

Yeah, I think it does. It also stops the drama. It’s better when the drama keeps you going, you the writer, and you don’t know what will happen. When you open the door you don’t know who’s behind the door. It’s tricky, if you always know who’s behind the door, if you’re involved in that kind of plot, you’ll run into difficulties in the writing of it, because you’ll probably bore yourself.

You once said that for most men women are a mystery, and the same works the other way round. I wondered if the fascination with the

unknown was part of the challenge of writing this new novel?

What’s interesting is some of the male responses, them not knowing what’s natural. Do women act in this way? Do they feel this way? Is this how women react? These levels of anxiety? Is that how women are? So when males ask these things, implicit in that is their acceptance of unknowability. Whether or not I personally go along with that, it’s evident to me that they begin from that, because that is the questions they ask.

I don’t see anything wrong with that, it’s just that some of these things are genderbased. That’s a generalisation. In some of these obvious ways, a woman is, generally speaking in a more vulnerable position than a male, because she has to trust him. And she has to trust a male in situations where – and it’s not only in a sexual relationship, but that’s the most obvious – you have to give yourself, and you have to have faith in the man you’re entering into this relationship with, because he’s more physically powerful.

And Helen has to do that not only for herself but for her daughter. She has to put her six-year-old daughter into situations with a male who is not even her husband.

Some of her friends might say, you’ve left your daughter with this guy for how many hours? And he’s to dress her and put her to bed and to bathe her? So there’s these instances where women are more vulnerable than men, and a single mother even more vulnerable than other women, because of her kids.

You talk about how children are patted and pawed, and patronised,

8 scottishreviewofbooks.org and it’s absolutely right. I’m pretty sure I’m guilty of that myself, They’re like little animals – you forget they are adults in very small form.

Yes, they’re beings, human beings.

They’re not someone you can encroach on.

Yeah, that’s right, they have their space, and if you do, that’s what you’re doing, encroaching.

In this novel, it’s a household of very vulnerable people. With Sophie and Helen, and Mo, and Mo saying Glasgow and London are the only cities he could work and live, despite the fact he faces racism.

Yes. Helen’s anxiety also goes to that, because she’s very sensitive to the idea of going down the wrong street with her boyfriend. He’s Muslim, from a British Asian background so she’s already prepared to meet racism. And he treats it occasionally in too cavalier a fashion for her.

He’s a very likeable character.

I hope I haven’t sentimentalised him. I think he is a likeable character, but I also want an unknowability about him, because the trust from her to him has to be true. She can’t know him 100 per cent.

I began to wonder, when you talk about Helen’s brother Brian’s relationship to his father, and Helen’s with her mum, if you feel a lot of the problems that we face in society start in the family?

I suppose as a generalisation, yes. And often you might say an unjust system has unfortunately been propagated by its victims. I mean by that, an ordinary kind of working-class father will have great problems with a son who says this system is shit. A father might not want to hear it from a son, and will enter into great battles over something like that. This is probably a theme in my work, from earlier novels and stories of mine, the relationship between father and son, parents and young people.

It’s maybe too personal a question, but what was your relationship like with your father?

In many ways it was a good relationship.

It was a good relationship with me being a young artist, because he was used to young artists, he was used to old artists too, because that was part of his work – he was a picture restorer, frame-maker and gilder. A lot of his clients were artists, so he was used to them, J D Fergusson, people like that, they were people he knew – Tom Honeyman – friends of my grandfather. Of course my father worked in here for the last eleven years of his life. So that side of it was not an issue for him, being a skint young writer, or wanting to be a writer, or rather an artist.

He didn’t have a problem with that at all.

But the other side of it, he was an Eighth Army man and he’d been through all the Eighth Army battles, fought their way up through the African desert, through Italy. Then I would be a teenager, and older, talking from an anti-war position. So that became a struggle for myself and my father.

Politics was an issue. As my wife remembers well, even before we got married, it used to cause us great problems.

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 The casino in this novel stands in my mind as a reminder of chance and what a gamble life is. Was it a reminder to people that life can change on the flick of a card, or am I being fanciful?

No, I don’t think you are. That’s what Helen has to deal with in a day-to-day way. Also people working in casinos have to deal with the fact that they are on an ordinary working-class wage, they don’t earn bourgeois salaries, and they’re in touch with – acquainted with – people who are wealthy enough to lose large sums of money without worrying about it at all.

They’re in a world of alienation. They have to deal with that. That world is obviously a world I knew about as a teenager, because I used to gamble too much, as a young guy.

The experiences of A Chancer, that early novel of mine, a lot of those are semiautobiographical. So I would have been used to that myself, but not from a working point of view.

Yes, on the more painful end of it even, if you’re not lucky.

Yes, it’s not too much to say that!

When you’ve sent a novel off to an agent, or publisher, how much advice are you willing to take from them?

I am kind of happy for any response. I don’t send off much nowadays. In the past occasionally I would send an early work or a work in progress, or even a finished thing to a few people, in the early days Mary Gray Hughes but then Tom Leonard and Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, they’ve been good friends for 35 years. Also Jeff Torrington, and Peter Kravitz – Peter is another reader I trusted. It’s good to get some kind of response, because sometimes you’re not sure. You don’t even need a response, really.

It’s almost like gauging the silence!

I’ve got a good agent, Gill Coleridge.

She’s been my agent for about ten years. I feel the same with her as a reader. And my recent editors too, I think I’ve been lucky.

Not because any of them would come out and say something is not working, but the level of response is enough for me to make an inference that leads me somewhere, that will confirm something in myself, that really this is not working as well as I thought it was.

And that can happen, because sometimes my work’s on the edge, not always, but often it’s on the edge and even with people I trust, ultimately I have to make a decision myself.

Do you look ahead to the e-book revolution as being to your advantage because it’s simply all text, or to your disadvantage, because you’re so careful about the way the page is laid out?

It’s not something I’m fearful about. In terms of story-telling I think it’s probably quite exciting. For somebody who tweets or does a blog, they have to make it interesting.

It’s the same as being a good journalist, or a good feature writer or story writer, ultimately you have to make it as dramatic as you can, distinguish it from other pieces of writing, so someone will read it, otherwise they won’t.

Denise Mina said that with ebooks, she thinks it will mean more

working-class writers might get into print.

It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

It means there are repercussions for publishing, and for writers engaged in socalled literary fiction. I was in WH Smith a couple of days ago, and there are no Scottish writers apart from genre, there is not one.

You don’t find any. Even in the old days when Scottish fiction was a genre in WH Smith – pigeonholed in our own country – at least we were there in the shop.

I had a Polish publisher, but they’ve just gone bankrupt, they’ve been liquidated, all their staff made redundant. Things are in a process of real deep-rooted change, and many writers of non-genre, we don’t quite know the way things are going. It doesn’t mean writers won’t go on writing. And there’s an exciting element to it. We should worry when art isn’t alternative.

You’ve won so many prizes, and yet you’ve retained the mystery of the writer, you’ve not been sucked into the establishment as maybe you might have been in other countries. There’a strong sense of you remaining on the edge.

Do you mean in Scotland rather than the UK? Yes, I do.

In England, there’s been no prize for about 20 years, since the Booker Prize. In terms of Scotland, I think roughly speaking, Scottish writers are still marginalised in the UK. I don’t have any problem in stating that.

The issue is across the board in the arts: sometimes it’s best to look on Scotland as a colonised culture. The people who are in control don’t really know Scottish culture, although they do control it. It happens in the visual arts, as well as in literature. Not so much the old Arts Council. Individuals maybe within the old Arts Council knew something of Scottish traditions in art. I don’t think that’s applicable now.

So in a way you’re always on the periphery, Scottish writers, whether it’s Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens or Tom Leonard. They have places, but not like it would be in other countries, where there might be an excitement seeing your own artists. You’re never bothered by people saying, oh, there’s such and such, you very rarely get that here.

Would you like that?

I don’t know. It depends on the setting I suppose. It’s nice to be able to walk around, of course it is, but there is a – not a knockon effect – a kind of corollary, it’s how does a country value its art. In Scotland it’s not really valued in that way, not generally.

Scottish literature in itself I don’t think really is known. But that goes across the board. Scottish people don’t know much about their own history at all I don’t think.

That comes back to the old colonial thing of not being taught your own traditions, or being told they are secondary.

Well, there is that. There’s also the fact that to some extent Scottish history is a radical history, it’s a history in opposition to the mainstream. And radical history is marginalised, and not necessarily taught. Heroes who are radical heroes, like John Maclean, John Murdoch and Donald Macrae, James Connolly or Arthur

McManus, Helen Crawford, Agnes Dollan, they’re not really known. In other countries they would be heroes, but they’re not known in their own country, they’re radical figures politically. In other countries everybody would know who Wilson, Baird and Hardie were, Thomas Muir – or Thomas Reid, or Ferrier, or Clerk Maxwell, Hugh Miller. In Scotland they don’t know these things. They don’t know about George Buchanan, they don’t know about these great Reformation and post-Reformation figures, they don’t know about the Scottish Latin tradition.

They just seem to know these silly things, fantasies about royalty and religion, kilted super-heroes. It’s really shocking, in a way, pathetic is a better word.

I would very much like to have known Gaelic. My grandmother never passed on Gaelic to her sons, never mind her grandsons. For the usual reasons. This side of my family suffered the effects of the Clearances, from the parish of Lochs in Lewis; Keose village, where the Napier Commission was held in the 1880s.

MacKenzies and MacLennans. They went to America mainly, my grannie came to Glasgow. I’ve got a typical Glaswegian family, immigrant to the core, about 85 per cent Scottish, a wee drop Irish, maybe East Europe too, and a great-grandfather from Gateshead. I don’t know how many clans I’m associated with – Camerons and MacNicolls. MacArthurs and Macleods are there too. Hebridean, Argyll, and the north east. The Kelmans are from the Cabrach traditionally, west of Rhymie, along the poitin trail. So both shades of Gaelic – p and q.

Do you think the Gaelic strain has any bearing on your literary temperament?

It’s always interested me. I’ve always liked that side. I’ve been reading Tales of the West Highlands for forty years. The great work John Francis Campbell did, people like John Dewar, it is of fundamental importance to the Scottish and wider Gaelic traditions, tremendous collections of the old stories and tales. I suppose at an early stage reading them I was interested in the actual form the storytelling took. I liked the use of the verb, and used to relate it to Damon Runyon’s first person present-tense narratives. That for me was, yeah, this is you telling me a story. That is the foundational structure of that form. That’s me sitting down at a ceilidh at the fireside, telling a story. So when someone begins, “I am walking down the road” – once I grasped the subtlety of that, the use of the oral form, it begins in the present tense, but is of the past, that for me has been very important.

Who are you reading now?

I read for different reasons. I don’t read as much fiction as I would like to. I’ve been interested in trying to get to grips with the Scottish intellectual tradition, and how movements in thought maybe give rise to movements physically…

Scottish history is not nice history. It’s the history of subjection. We are so used to tipping the hat to our superiors. And that’s still the way things are, unfortunately. How many other countries do we know, how many cultures in the world do we know where there’s a debate about ‘should we determine our own existence or not?’ Such inferiority, it’s shocking. Independence is not an economic decision, it is a decision

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Scottish Review of Books

to do with self-respect. How we determine our own existence, this is what we do as adults for goodness sake, it’s our culture, ultimately it concerns survival. And we’ll see it literally, if the independence movement is set back again, emigration as usual, for those able to do it, spiritual demoralisation for others.

I’m hoping that they start to put some intellectual weight into it.

I think it’s up to us, up to the public, that discourse should go that way. I’m not saying it’s being deliberately manipulated, but the way the discourse is at present, it’s almost like, how many people in Scotland even know that those in favour of independence are not necessarily nationalists? Of course more so in England. It’s said of me, that I’m a nationalist. I’m continually having to deny that I am a nationalist but at the same time I am 100% in favour of independence. They don’t get it.

I was thinking there about the Edinburgh Book Festival. I am doing a reading there this year but eventually I felt nauseous about the Writers’ Conference, 50 years after the 1962 thing and commemorating that. I’ve withdrawn from it. Not the book festival itself. I don’t have a problem there. I don’t really see it as a Scottish literary festival, I see it as an international book festival that takes place in North Britain. What I really object to is the British Council and its involvement as co-organisers of the Writers’ Conference, I can’t stomach it.

Because of what they stand for?

The British Council is the British State. I

stopped being involved with them years ago. It means I don’t get many invitations abroad because they do most of the foreign funding. It turns my stomach to see them listed as co- organisers. I don’t think it bears scrutiny for long. It reminds me of 1979, when people were pushed into Scotland to take on positions of power, as in the BBC, preparing for the independence referendum, in case the Thatcher government failed to stem the tide. It reminds you of the old Russian aristocracy towards the end of the nineteenth century, pushing family members into positions of power with the radicals in case the revolution succeeds, or the defence industry and major financiers during times of war, backing both sides.

You still feel this is not an open country.

The British Council is not some autonomous, free-thinking arts body. It is sponsored by and accountable to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It’s the FCO’s cultural wing, that’s what they are, and fair enough, they’re quite clear about their remit in terms of pushing English culture and English language – although of course their charitable status has allowed them to outsource English jobs to India to save money. These are the people who are co-organising these writer debates. The 1962 thing was important in Scotland, without overrating the thing that happened with MacDiarmid and Trocchi, but it has its place in a contemporary context, not a thing we should all think was great, because it certainly wasn’t and we shouldn’t glamorise it. I don’t think either MacDiarmid or

Trocchi came out of it particularly well, to be honest about it, but there was more to it than that. There is definitely room for a healthy debate about these issues, what it is to be a writer in Scotland, to create within an inferiorised culture, the dangers of nationalism. Here’s an interesting thing.

Alan Warner and Louise Welsh, Alasdair Gray, Keith Dickson and myself were on a panel in Montpelier in the south of France two or three months ago. Each one of us favours independence, and not one of us is a Scottish Nationalist, not as far as I know.

Each of us has a different position, yet each of us favours independence.

There are all these different areas up for discussion, among people who share a basic feeling or sensibility, writers who have entirely different political positions from me, people on the right, unionists – who cares, just to see things debated properly, as an autonomous thing, where we know at the outset that it’s not being hijacked.

How can we enter into such a thing, and having all these writers coming from other cultures, foreign writers – they don’t know what they’re walking into here. They think they’re walking into a debate grounded in contemporary Scotland, but are they, I don’t think so, they’ll be attending an event co-organised by a body subservient to the British State’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, at an international book festival based in North Britain, at least that’s how I see it.

I would just go for contemporary writers.

Some of the younger short story writers I like. I can’t give you any names, also because I don’t want to, because it’s quite unfair in a way. I would like to read more contemporary prose altogether. There’s far too many projects of my own, far too many, too many stories, all kinds, novels, essays, plays. Christ almighty! And then I’ve got two grandkids.

Putting aside all your work obligations, and so on, if you could read any novel right now, who would you choose?

Mo Said She Was Quirky James Kelman

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10 scottishreviewofbooks.org

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

thrust: a short story Brian McCabe

T

hat must be it there, Julie said.

Michael eased his foot off the accelerator and leaned forward, peering towards the place at the roadside his wife was pointing to.

In her other hand she held one of the leaflets she’d picked up in the tourist office in Lochinver.

Are you sure?’

There’s the sign. Look.

Her eyesight was better than his. Without his reading glasses he had to strain to make out what the sign said, but as the car drew nearer he read the name aloud: Knockan Crag.

Julie had unfolded the leaflet and was reading it.

It says it’s a site of great geological significance.

Okay, let’s take a look.

In the car park they opened the boot and began to change into their hiking boots.

Another couple with a camper van were also getting ready, the woman taking a couple of hiking sticks from the back of the vehicle, the man donning an Australian bush hat and buttoning up a bright red fleece. Further off, a man paced up and down outside his car, holding a clip-board under his arm and talking into a mobile phone.

He looked up at the dark shape of the hill above. It looked like a fair climb. His calf muscles were still a bit stiff and his hip joints still ached from all the walking they had been doing on the holiday so far. It had been his idea in the first place – a healthy week in Assynt would be good for both of them.

Julie would have a break from her stressful job, and it would be good for his health, for his heart. Most of the walks they had done involved some uphill slog over rough paths, and at times he’d felt like a comic little Sisyphus, doomed to push the burden of his own cursed body up and up, as on Handa island, from the hand-held jetty where the boat dropped them to the viewpoint at the Stack, to see the puffins nesting in the crevices of the cliffs. Then there was the walk to the spot above the Old Man of Stoer, where they had sat down to have lunch – not too close to the edge, because Julie got vertigo looking down at a steep drop.

The hardest one for him had been the climb

to see the Clachan Falls up a rough, meandering path embedded with rocks and boulders.

He hated lagging behind his wife, having to stop every few minutes to regain his breath and because his hip joints were beginning to play up, while Julie went on, apparently taking the ascent in her stride, until she had to stop and wait for him. Certainly she was younger, if only by three years, and she was much fitter, since she swam regularly and didn’t smoke as much as him. He wasn’t yet sixty but already he had suffered two ‘minor’ heart attacks and sometimes had attacks of angina if he over-exerted himself.

At one point on the climb, his frustration had boiled over as she stood above him on the hill, hands on hips, waiting for him.

Why don’t you just go on? He’d told her. I don’t want you to stand there scowling until I catch up.

I’m not scowling. I don’t mind waiting.

You are. You do I don’t.

And he forged ahead of her, driving himself up the rocky path as fast as he could until he really had to stop.

Can you stop this? She cried, coming up behind him. Why don’t we sit down, take a break? We need to talk about this.

And they had.

He stood up and stamped his feet in his boots, adjusted his socks and tucked his jeans in at the bottoms just in case there were sheep ticks around.

Okay, I’m ready, he said.

The man with the clip-board under his arm walked across the car park to them. He had put his mobile phone into a small pouch for that purpose which was fastened to his belt, and now he held a small hammer in his hand.

Excuse me.

He held the hammer into his chest as if to demonstrate that it was not a weapon. He wore a plastic I.D. card on a ribbon around his neck.

Hello. My name is Donald McLeish and I am a Geologist, employed by the National Geology Trust. Here’s my identity badge just to show you that I am who I say I am.

He held the I.D. card out from his chest towards Julie.

As you may know, this is Knockan Crag,

a site of great geological significance. In a few minutes I am about to escort those people – with a nod of his hammer he indicated the other couple, who were locking up their camper van – on a guided tour of the site and you are welcome to join us if you wish.

Oh, really? Julie sounded guardedly interested.

Yes and it’s completely free of charge.

This is my geologist’s hammer, by the way. I won’t be chipping away at any rocks with it today – I’m not allowed to, because this is a National Heritage Site – I’ll just be using it to point out things on the tour.

Julie looked over to him and raised her eyebrows, as if to say What do you think?

I think we were just planning on a short walk, he said.

Oh, well.

Donald McLeish sounded disappointed.

If you change your mind, we’ll be leaving in five minutes or so.

How long would it take? Julie asked.

Only about an hour and a half. We’ll be walking up to the Knockan Cliff to see what is called the Moine Thrust – I’ll explain it when we get there – then we’ll circumnavigate the hill to the summit of the crag and then on to Eagle Rock, coming back round the other side and down this path we see on the right…

As he spoke he gestured with the handle of his hammer, tracing the path of the tour up and around the hill and back down to the car park.

Michael looked at his watch.

An hour and a half, that would take us up to six o’clock, he said to his wife, he hoped with some meaning, then to this geologist with his hammer and his clipboard, he said: Thanks but I think we’ll just have a quick walk and see what we can see.

That’s fine. As you wish. I’ll leave you to it then.

Now Donald McLeish sounded not just disappointed but faintly disapproving. As he walked over to speak to the other couple at the camper van, Julie turned to him.

Why don’t we do it? It’s a free lecture. We might learn something.

I don’t know. We could get round that hill in an hour at the most.

What’s the rush? I think we should do it.

Why not? It’s free.

Excellent, said Donald McLeish. I just have to get you to sign my paperwork for me, purely a formality you understand, but Health and Safety require it. Then I’ll apply some sun screen and we’ll set off and have a fine educational walk around the hill. You won’t regret it.

Michael was already beginning to. The way Donald McLeish spoke to them, as if they were small children, was beginning to get his goat, and the way he stroked and brandished his little hammer, pointing at everything he could point at with the thing, was distracting and faintly disturbing.

If you could go and foregather with the others by the start of the path over there, I’ll just finish up here and join you in a moment.

As they walked over to join the other couple, he said in a low voice to his wife: - What if he’s a nutter? What if he’s going to take us up round the back of the hill then polish us off with his hammer?

- Shh. But she smiled and laughed a little at the idea. That was good. It had been a while since he had made her laugh or smile, because of the stress she was under at work.

Her department was being ‘rationalised’, ‘restructured’, ‘streamlined’ – all euphemisms for cuts, and she was having to justify every paper clip they used in financial terms.

Nick and Val were social workers from the Wirral in Liverpool and were having a week’s holiday in the Highlands. They had rented a space on a campsite in Rosemarkie on the Black Isle and it had rained every day, so they’d decided to head west for the day where the weather was better.

How about you?

We rented a cottage in Stoer.

Julie was just about to start telling them more, when Donald McLeish came over.

His balding pate, slick with the sunscreen lotion, resembled one of the pinkish rocks smoothed by the water they had seen at the foot of Clachan Falls, his pale comb-over like the thin fronds of lichen that grew over them.

Do we all know each other? Have we done the introductions? May I ask you what you do?

Social work, us, Nick said.

We’re art teachers, said Julie.

Good. We’ll be seeing some art in a moment. Do any of you have an interest in Geology?

I did a Geology O-level, Nick said. I started the A-level but kind of …lost interest.

Hmm, I see.

Donald McLeish shook his head a little and a thin crease puckered his brow, as if losing interest in Geology was something beyond his comprehension.

Right, then I’ll just ask you to follow me.

And the lesson began with the reddish brown rocks known as Fuccoid Beds – ‘It sounds as if I’m swearing but I’m not’ – and continued with examples of Pipe Rock - ‘No, it isn’t a new Highland pop group’ – which he asked them to look at closely.

Notice anything about them?

They’ve got spots, said Julie.

Oh, yeh, like polka-dots, said Val, ‘Like me.’ She pulled the collar of her jacket down to show that she was wearing a polka-dotted shirt.

Exactly. But if we look at this rock here, which has been cut lengthwise so that you can see inside it, you can see that these ‘spots’ run through the rock, exactly like the letters running through those sticks of the rock we liked ruining our teeth on as children – you know, the kind that say ‘Edinburgh Rock’ or ‘Blackpool Rock’. These pale, tubular shapes in the rock are in fact – It’s worms, innit? Nick said. I remember that from O-level. Burrowed into the rock, before it was rock, like.’

Donald McLeish’s mouth tightened and he looked piqued at being interrupted.

Yes, indeed, fossilized worms, formed when the rock was sediment under the sea, and the lowest strata of this land we are looking at is riddled with such fossilized forms. Any questions?

How does a fossil, like … get to be a fossil.

I mean, how does it happen? Val asked.

Interesting question. Fossils can form in different ways and there are many different types of fossil …

And Donald McLeish was off on the long narrative of compression, refrigeration, desiccation, carbonization, of casts and moulds, trace fossils and microfossils, trilobites, stramatolites and ammonites. When he had finished, he asked: Does that answer the question?

Oh yeh, ta very much, said Val. Hadn’t realized it were so complicated.

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 11

Scottish Review of Books

As Donald McLeish turned to lead the way up the hill, she made a ‘sorry’ face at them, widening her eyes and stretching her mouth into a grimace.

Right, let’s proceed to what we call The Puzzle.

The Puzzle turned out to be an artificial model of a cross-section of the hill, made of strata of different types of rock. Donald McLeish pointed at each in turn with the handle of his hammer, naming each – Fuccoid Beds, Cambrian Quartzite, Pipe Rock, Salteralla Grit, Durness Limestone, Torridon Sandstone, and, at the topmost layer, last but not least, the highly significant Moine Schists.

Donald McLeish did not let the significance of the Moine Schists pass them by. He explained that in Geology in the past, rocks which lie above others were always thought to be younger than those below, but certain very important men - and they would ‘meet’ them in a moment when they reached the Rock Room - put forward the radical, even revolutionary idea that the Moine Schists were actually older than the layers of rock below them.

How could this be? Donald McLeish asked them. How could the Moine Schists, which have now been scientifically dated as being nine hundred million to a billion years old, sit above rocks five hundred million years younger? Had they moved, had they been brought here from elsewhere? Then what had moved them? This was a question that would puzzle some of the greatest minds in Geology in the nineteenth century and answering it would prepare the way for our modern understanding of the Earth’s history.

It’s the tectonic plates, innit? Nick said.

Shiftin round, like. Like at one time we was part of another continent, whassitcalled again, Avalon?

Donald McLeish’s lips puckered into a tight little smile.

Avalonia, yes you in England were part of Avalonia, but we in Scotland were part of a different continent altogether, called Laurentia – Oh yeh, I remember that, Nick said. We got that in O-level.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s walk up the path to the Rock Room, stopping at each of the ‘milestones’ which actually show us the different geographical positions Scotland has occupied from five hundred million years ago until today.

They shambled up the hill after him, Donald McLeish stopping at each of the stones and pointing with his hammer at the location of Scotland at each stage of the earth’s crust’s movements – ‘near the South Pole!’ – until Scotland and England came together, ‘colliding’ over the course of millions of years – ‘if you can imagine this taking place at the rate your fingernails grow …’

In the Rock Room, Donald McLeish told them to ignore most of the stuff on the walls – the comic strips and the cartoons and the interactive displays and the computer screen with a CD-ROM loop allowing visitors to ‘fly’ through the area and look at views – which had been used to jazz up the Geology for kids - ‘Some of us don’t really approve of this kind of thing’ – and gathered them in front of some nineteenth century photographs of the Geologists who had studied Knockan Crag, Benjamin Peach and John Horne.

These men were pioneers of Geology. It was they who proved beyond question that the Moine Schists were older than the rocks below them and that they had moved here.

The Old Man of Stoer, Sutherland.

He put the hammer under his arm and pressed the knuckles of each hand together to show how the different strata of rock had collided.

If you can imagine the thrust, both land masses thrusting against each other, all this happening at the rate your fingernails grow, causing immense stress at the place they meet – Donald McLeish’s knuckles were turning white as he pressed them against each other.

Until, finally, something has to give, and buckling takes place. The softer, younger rocks buckle beneath the thrust of the older and much harder Moine Schists…the way a snowplough curls old snow up and over fresh snow as it moves forward.

He let one hand unclench and buckle under the other fist.

And that is what we call the Moine Thrust. Any questions?

It’s the tectonic plates like I said, innit?

Nick said.

Donald McLeish looked at the man from the Wirral with an indulgent smile.

Ah yes, you know that because you were lucky enough to learn about it in Geology O-level, but you have to remember that Peach and Horne didn’t know about tectonic plates, and it was their work which led to other studies of similar movements in the Himalayas and the Alps, and all of these studies together made us understand that the Earth’s crust was a series of moving plates…think of it as a moving jigsaw, with pieces coming together and breaking apart…

Is it still moving? Julie asked.

Michael wished she hadn’t asked a question - it would take at least ten minutes for Donald McLeish to answer it. He looked at

his watch. It had taken them almost an hour to get this far and they hadn’t really started on the actual climb. At this rate they’d be on the hill for at least another hour. Donald McLeish was pressing his fists together again until the knuckles were turning white as his mouth tightened around the word thrust yet again.

The next stop was to see the art. The first was a relief sculpture on an upright piece of flat rock which had been set in the ground.

It showed a long, linear shape with leaf-like forms branching from the top.

Any idea what it is? Donald McLeish asked them.

It’s one of them worms, innit, them that burrowed into the sediment, innit? Said Nick.

Yes indeed. Donald McLeish looked disappointed. Most people think it’s a palm tree.

Oh, yeh, it does, dunnit?’ Val said.

Then, at the foot of a rough, steep path leading up the hill, they stopped to look at a larger, globe-shaped sculpture made from many layers of flat stones.

I once brought a group of fifth year boys from Ullapool High School here and I said I’d give them a fiver each if they could move it. Luckily they couldn’t get it to move an inch, but for a minute they had me worried.

He turned to Michael and Julie and asked: So what’s your professional opinion of it as Art? I quite like it, Julie said.

Michael nodded in mute agreement, and thought of Sisyphus again, rolling his stone up the mountain. Despite himself he asked: How did they get it up here?

This time the answer was blissfully short: Helicopter. And now for the highlight of the tour, follow me up to Knockan Cliff, where you can see the Moine Thrust for yourselves.

At last they were walking for more than a few yards at a time. He followed closely behind Donald McLeish, wanting to get the uphill part over with as soon as possible.

The path grew steeper and when they were almost at the cliff, he turned to look at the others coming up behind. He saw Julie stopping suddenly and reaching for the ground above as if to steady herself. She looked like a person floundering in water when they suddenly realize they are out too deep to touch the bottom, and he felt a sudden pang of concern. He called down to her.

Are you ok?

I’m sorry but I don’t think I can go on, she shouted up to him. I’ll have to go down.

I’m getting vertigo.

Ok, wait there, I’ll come back down.

Although he still felt concerned for her, at the same time he was thinking: you beauty. It was the perfect get-out clause.

Don’t worry, I’m coming!

Donald McLeish strode down the path next to him, hammer wagging back and forth in his hand, as if he could maybe chip away at her vertigo with it until it disappeared.

Now. I don’t want you to worry about it.

Lots of people get vertigo on land structures such as these. If you want to go back down, that’s fine, but I am quite a good guide, and if you like I can walk close by you all the way, I can follow closely behind you and make sure that you’re safe at every step.

No, it’s no good, I’m getting dizzy. I have to go down. Mike, you can go on.

12 scottishreviewofbooks.org No, I better come down with you.

I’ll be fine going down from here, I just don’t want to go up any further.

She apologized to Donald McLeish and the couple from the Wirral.

Na, you look after yourself like, said Nick.

Hope you feel better soon, said Val. I’ll be fine.

Would you like me to escort you down?

Donald McLeish asked.

No, I’ll be fine.

I could come down with you.

But she said he should go on, at least to the cliff, so he had to go up to see the damned Moine Thrust – it would only take five minutes, Donald McLeish assured him. Still, at least then he’d be able to go back down rather than all the way round the hill.

Part of the hill had been cut away, exposing the rocks, and various slabs of stone had been arranged to create a mini classroom, with a circle of stone benches to sit on and a kind of raised platform on which Donald McLeish could perform.

This is a hallowed place in the world of Geology. We were brought here many years ago as Geology students at Glasgow University, and we were completely blown away by what we see here, the Moine Thrust itself …

What they could see was a stratum of dark rock above a stratum of lighter rock.

Donald McLeish became more and more animated as he explained it all over again, pushing his knuckles together, pointing at the rocks with his hammer, and five minutes stretched to ten, ten to twenty.

So now you have seen the Moine Thrust for yourselves. Any questions?

They shook their heads, lectured into

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 submission.

I better go back down, see if Julie’s ok.

Of course, but before you do, I want you to come over to the rock face here and place your forefinger here and your thumb just here.

He did as he was told.

Now you can go down and tell your wife that you have held five hundred million years of the earth’s evolution between finger and thumb.

On the way back down the hill, he felt like Sisyphus on his day off, happy to be alive, and now that he thought about it, it occurred to him that although Sisyphus’s labour was endless, there always had to be the downhill stroll after the fruitless, uphill labour.

Maybe, as time went on, Sisyphus made the downhill strolls last as long as possible.

Sitting on the ledge of the car’s open boot, they laugh about the stress and the knuckles and the hammer and the thrust as they change out of their hiking boots. He turns to take her face between his finger and his thumb.

What are you doing?

I’m holding five hundred million years of the Earth’s history between finger and thumb.

As they drive away, he says: Those poor people are going to be up there for at least another hour, hearing about the plates and the thrust.

Then he looks at the landscape speeding towards them as the car accelerates, its mountains and valleys and moors the surface of a thin, fragile crust which is moving over a molten sea beneath, cracking up and drifting together, forming and reforming, all at the rate his fingernails grow.

off the page

STIRLING

BOOK FESTIVAL

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 13

Scottish Review of Books

‘A quiet publishing revolution’ The Herald ‘EarthLines is a deeply intelligent publication, sensitive to nature and culture, and it has what is perhaps the greatest quality in a magazine: curiosity.’

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INTRODUCING EARTHLINES MAGAZINE EarthLines is a quarterly full-colour, A4-sized, 64page magazine dedicated to high-quality writing on nature, place and the environment. Our focus is on a broad interdisciplinary approach to literature which explores the relationship between people and the natural world. The first year’s issues include writing

by Jay Griffiths, John Lister-Kaye, Hugh Warwick, Andrew Greig, Sara Maitland, John Kinsella, Carry Akroyd, Jeremy Mynott and Margaret Elphinstone, as well as many new and emerging writers.

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ALASTAIR MACKIE – Collected Poems (edited by Christopher Rush) ‘Mackie is one of the great figures of the Scottish Renaissance and it’s high time – long past it – that there should be a full edition. This is a book of the highest importance.’ Derrick McClure ‘A major poet, the finest Scots-language poet of his time.’ Donald Campbell Hardback, 400 pages, £22. ISBN: 9781906120627 We are grateful to Creative Scotland for a grant supporting the publication of this book

THE CARBON CYCLE, by Kate Rawles ‘Outdoor philosopher’ Kate Rawles cycles 4553 miles along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, talking to Americans about climate change as she goes. Kate’s story of the trip, constantly battling her own ideas and assumptions, helps us to cross the great divide between where we are on climate change, and where we need to be.

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14 scottishreviewofbooks.org

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

In her biography of George Mackay Brown, Maggie Fergusson says that the poet was fascinated by Sylvia Wishart and her changing moods. One moment she’d be ‘as subtle and withdrawn as the Mona Lisa’, the next ‘she was as boisterous as Eartha Kitt’. Brown first came across Wishart, who was also born in Stromness, when he saw one of her paintings in an exhibition. She was just twelve years old at the time and he described her as ‘a gifted child artist of whom Orkney will not be ashamed in the years to come’. Sylvia Wishart: A Study (The Pier Arts Centre, £25, 142pp, ISBN: 978 0 9531131 0 1) is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work, including over one hundred illustrations, virtually all of which testify to her fascination with the Orkney land and seascape and her obsession, inspired by Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, with perspective.

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Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 15

Scottish Review of Books

sweet and sour Harry McGrath

I

f sexual intercourse began in 1963, the Scottish diaspora began in 1999.

And if the former was rather late for Philip Larkin, the latter was rather late for the last great wave of Scottish emigrants who left in the post-war years and were almost past their prime before we discovered them.

Since the reconvention of the its parliament however, Scotland has been pedalling furiously to catch up. We now have diaspora engagement plans aplenty and a Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies at Edinburgh University for the parts that government-led initiatives don’t reach.

In 2009 Chris Dolan made his own remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the Scottish diaspora with a documentary entitled Barbado’ed: Scotland’s Sugar Slaves.

He sought out the descendants of Scots sent

by Cromwell to the West Indies as indentured labourers.

These were the ‘Redlegs’ who couldn’t handle the sun. Dolan’s interviews with their descendants are as fascinating for the ravished ‘Scottish’ faces as they are for the way the subjects struggle to explain their connection to Scotland and the dire conditions they find themselves in today.

This is potent stuff and it is no surprise that Dolan has chosen to return to it in a novel, albeit with a somewhat different angle. Here his protagonist Elspeth Baillie is a young Scottish actress recruited to Barbados by one Albert Lord Coak who owns a sugar plantation there. To deliver her story, Dolan uses the well-worn device of finding a manuscript in an old plantation house that does the telling for him.

If that is fairly standard, a male author choosing a young female as the chief actor is still unusual enough to require some courage. Even Lewis Grassic Gibbon ran into problems with some women readers who thought that Chris Guthrie’s frequent naked self-examinations before the mirror smacked of male voyeurism. Dolan too gives us an early look at Elspeth in the alltogether. Her patron Coak demands she audition naked which turns out to be a plot device of sorts but initially seems gratuitous and a little unnerving.

Elspeth passes the test and heads for the Caribbean. There a brief love affair with

Coak’s son George is an even bigger test for the author. Again, it is a bit of a struggle and lines like ‘she could no longer discern what moisture belonged to the shower and what was her longing for George’ are more inclined to curdle the blood than to fire it.

Fortunately, help is at hand as George makes an early exit courtesy of a hurricane and more characters arrive or develop to take the pressure off Elspeth who by now has become the female power on the estate. First among these maturing characters is Coak’s factor Captain Shaw whose great-greatgrandfather was a Barbado’ed Jacobite.

Shaw wants to create a New Caledonia free of miscegenation, a problem made more acute by the recent emancipation of slaves.

To that end, Elspeth suggests that they import women from Scotland to encourage white males to settle on the plantation and mate with them. A kind of supervised eugenic dating service ensues with tropical abortifacient potions administered when people stray from the truth.

The arrival of more women in the story not only has the paradoxical effect of taking the heat off the female lead but is also a turning point in the novel. From here the style is that of a documentary with characters assigned particular roles and driven towards what seems to be a pre-determined conclusion. Without giving too much away, it is not that far away from the relatively optimistic view of the mixed race couple who were the subjects of the final interview in the televised documentary in 2009.

Embracing the dark side of the Scottish diaspora is suddenly in vogue and may eventually offset the self-congratulatory whae’s like us school, heady and enduring though it is. It shouldn’t really be a surprise that a successful colonial power would leave a mixed legacy and there is no shortage of downside to explore. Within a few miles of where this is being written in British Columbia, there were various plans to replace local Japanese fishermen with Scots. Up the coast, a First Nations band most of whose members share the iconic Scottish surname Wallace inhabits one of the poorest postal codes in Canada.

The loss of their Indian names was the first step to removing everything else that they valued.

These are difficult things and it is to

Dolan’s credit that he has taken on the story of the Redlegs not once but twice.

The documentary is by nature more clean lined than the novel and the former better served the poor whites of Barbados. It is not just the hazards of female sexuality in male hands that are distracting, the novel is also weighed down by Scotland. Comparisons flow like – well – the Clyde. Thus yellowbreasted waders in Barbados cackled like an act Elspeth once saw in Scotland where a man tapped out the whole of ‘Scots Wha Hae’ on his chin; or the aftermath of a storm is ‘like a Glasgow barroom after a brawl’; or love comes ‘like Scottish drizzle that appears from nowhere’. While there is no lack of evidence to suggest that Scots emigrants like to contextualize things in familiar ways, it is overdone here to the point of irritation.

The author’s note at the end of the book reveals that it was conceived twentyone years ago when Dolan was working for UNESCO in Barbados. The long gestation period is testimony to the effect that the plight of the Redlegs must have had on him.

There is an occasional escapee from poverty to further complicate matters – Sir Kyffen Simpson one of the richest men in Barbados is of Redleg descent, so too Rihanna though she an Irish ‘Fenty’ – but generally speaking theirs was (and is) a desperate struggle. Perhaps an imperfect novel isn’t the wisest way to follow up a perfectly good documentary but the story of the Redlegs is one that needs to be told.

Redlegs Chris Dolan Vagabond Voices, 248 pp, £12.95. ISBN: 978 1908251077

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Katie Grant In Bed with Sean Connery Kapka Kassabova Dancing with Myself Brian Morton The Many Days of Norman MacCaig Essay Competition Winner Revealed

VOL 6 · NUMBER 4 · 2010 ISSN 1745—5014

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Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

Burmese Days Theresa Muñoz

B

urma’s boy soldiers are the focus of Toni Davidson’s sad but electrifying comeback novel. Kidnapped by the country’s national army Tatmadaw Kyi, these boys are meant to cover the lack of adult recruits.

Beaten, humiliated and given guns, the kid militia are forced to raze villages (even their own), causing a tide of broken families and displaced persons.

The title says it all. Its chillingly enigmatic phrase is lifted from a Human Rights Watch publication My Gun Was As Tall As Me: Child Soldiers in Burma by Kevin Heppner who toured the borders of Thailand and Burma in 2002. ‘This thoroughly researched report details the harrowing and malicious use of children as coerced actors in the theatre of war’, Davidson states in the acknowledgements. Theatre is a good word to keep in mind because what Davidson has written is dramatic, full-scale and alive.

What’s immediately striking is the blend of contrasting climates. The novel opens in the Alps, where the son of a famous humanitarian tries to commit suicide in the snow.

Why snow, one wonders. Perhaps it’s to provide a sharp yet comforting alternative to the dangerous heat of the Burmese jungles.

Though Tuvol lies down in the same Alpine gully in which his parents once made love, he is rescued, saved by the sharp-tongued, NGO worker Dominique, with whom he falls for and follows to her clinic in Burma.

Parallel to Tuvol’s idealistic and indulgent narrative is a vicious and mystical one.

The village in Burma’s Papen Hills is home to twins Lynch and Leer. Robust and intelligent, the long-haired boys had their tongues cut out by their mentally fragile mother.

After her death, their stooped father Verlaine raised them alone. Lynch and Leer are delightful. They are constant mirrors of each other, shrugging in unison and speaking with their hands. Davidson focuses on their collective strength: ‘The boys nodded and put their fingers inside each other’s mouths.

This was their sign of togetherness. This was what made them the same’. The village sees the twins as supernatural beings, a way of making sense of their deformity.

One day the twins’ playmate Jaffe comes back thin and scarred. Lynch and Leer welcome him home. Jaffe spills his story about

the Sa Sun Tay camp: ‘If you cried the guards would come and beat you. If you got beat you would bleed and there was no medicine.

Wounds just got worse and some of the kids got really ill. Two died.’ But Jaffe has returned with a plan. Soon a grenade whistles through the air and soldiers emerge from the bushes.

As Verlaine grimly concludes: ‘Jaffe, our son, it is now clear returned only to betray us. If you see him slice him with your panga’. Such treachery provides a shocking entry into the cruel manipulation of Burma’s national armies.

Some writers would be reticent in their depictions of violence. Not Davidson. Jaffe’s home-front attack, along with other sadistic episodes, is described with precision and intensity. There is a horrific beauty and sense of choreography in Davidson’s unsparing war visions as he counts the shots: ‘Pewle.

And so a cousin was greeted… Pewle. The old man who had begun to lose his thoughts while memories danced … Pewle. The Lew Ya sisters ran loose from their parents…’

Having fled their village, Lynch and Leer and other survivors move towards the city of Mae Rot where Dominique’s clinic is also located. Feeling too tall and wide, Tuvol is uncertain of his purpose at the clinic. He becomes a sympathetic listener to people who have lost everything, including several of their limbs. He holds a grown man, his face burnt in stripes, like a child. When the distressed Lynch and Leer arrive at the clinic, their encounter with Tuvol is filled with shouts, tension and eventually compassion. It’s such a commanding scene that one wishes the book would end there.

Essentially, Davidson has created a forlorn band of displaced people. Though from different backgrounds, his characters have similar tics and traits. Their language can be metaphorical and spiritual, as Verlaine counsels the village kids: ‘This is the forest of things, Le We, it has life in darkness and in day…’ They are also passionate and committed, seen in Dominique’s urgent whispers: ‘Come on, Tuv, concentrate. You have to listen to all this. Why is your head anywhere but here? Aren’t you tired of your own world?’

Tellingly, Dominique also advises Tuvol: ‘Everyone has a role to play. It’s the essence of survival’. It soon becomes apparent that

Toni Davidson: sad but electrifying.

‘ There is a horrific beauty and sense of choreography in Davidson’s unsparing war visions as he counts the shots: “Pewle. And so a cousin was greeted… Pewle.

The old man who had begun to lose his thoughts while memories danced … Pewle.

The Lew Ya sisters ran loose from their parents…”’

Davidson has not devised characters, but a series of roles. Everyone has a function in his wider political design. Tuvol is the uneducated voyeur, Dominique the compassionate aide, Lynch and Leer the hapless victims, and Jaffe a prime example of the widespread problem. Burma’s wretched history defines each character’s actions and outlook.

If there is a quibble, perhaps the author has tried to tell too many stories. One such character Davidson could do without is Ruess, a radical journalist and Dominique’s former lover whose field notes are inserted within the text. Ruess’s first-person observations track his experiences living in remote villages and are meant to be an example for Tuvol to live by. However, since we never meet him face to face, his scrappy notes are easy to skim past. The narrative feels heavy enough with interchanging accounts from the clinic and from the twins’ village.

Simple subheadings such as ‘Village Life and Death’ and ‘Tuvol in the Tropics’ divide the narrative as the focus swivels from person to person. Minor characters share their stories then disappear. And yet, though the affinity between Tuvol and the twins is the main thread, this is not entirely their story.

As the dedication suggests, My Gun Was As Tall As Me belongs to all ‘internally displaced people’ everywhere.

My Gun Was As Tall As Me Toni Davidson Freight Books, 240pp, £8.99. ISBN: 9780956613592

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 17

Scottish Review of Books

macbeth and madness Joseph Farrell

O

ne of the most significant trials of recent times is underway in Oslo, where the defence team of mass murderer Anders Breivik is trying to have him classified as insane, against the wishes of the accused himself.

He is boastful of his crimes, claims they were justified, or even that he was provoked into committing them by righteous indignation at the degeneracy of society. His murders, he believes, were carried out when he was in full control of his faculties, and he will not entertain the notion that he is in any way unbalanced.

His lawyers are not only doing their thankless job in defending a pitiless killer, but are in an odd way standing up for what passes as ‘common sense’ in an age which will accept the idea of evil acts but is queasy about the existence of people who can be branded evil. This outlook is justified by a circular argument. Wicked acts are committed by someone who is mad, because only someone who is mad could behave in the evil way he has.

So the creative team responsible for the National Theatre of Scotland’s very radical rethinking of Macbeth are in the mainstream when they make their Macbeth insane. They are well out of the mainstream in every other production and theatrical sense, but the underlying notion that the killer of Duncan was mad touches a chord. Of course, it is not altogether clear that the man who speaks the lines Shakespeare wrote for Macbeth, and indeed for all the other characters in the tragedy, is or is meant to be actually Macbeth himself. He may be a contemporary of ours with a ‘mind diseased,’ who has in his paranoiac psyche developed a private obsession which he has to play out by living the Shakespearean work.

It is necessary to have a good knowledge of Macbeth to fully appreciate this production. This is not a version for a school party about to embark on reading the work. Shakespeare has long since become a creator of deeply resonant myths rather than of theatrical scripts. The audience is expected to have the familiarity with the tragedy that theatregoers in ancient Athens would have had when watching a new treatment of a mythological subject by Sophocles or Euripides.

Alan Cumming: a portrait of a mind overthrown A traditional interpretation saw Macbeth as part victim, part self-destroyer, a basically good, public-spirited man who was willing to serve his king until evil, in the form of the witches, and the malice of a nagging wife preyed jointly on the malign inner force of ambition. Others saw the Scottish Play as depicting a Ceaucescu-like tyrant who mercilessly unleashed savagery on the land, a portrayal which reached its ne plus ultra in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film, when during the massacre of Lady MacDuff and her children, bodies were glimpsed literally piled up in the corridor outside the room.

There was a German production some years ago at the Edinburgh Festival set in a slaughterhouse, where servants poured buckets of blood into tanks at the front of the stage, and where Macbeth’s head was finally, contemptuously tossed in beside the human parts of his earlier victims. For others, the work is essentially a clash between forces of order and disorder, with order finally restored with the arrival of Malcolm in the play and the promise of real, lasting harmony with the ascent to the British throne of James VI & I, descendant of Banquo Whatever the identity of the protagonist in this version is, he is in a room in a mental hospital whose walls are covered with the aseptic tiles which the NHS considers beneficial for the healing process. The confined space in which he has his being is cluttered with beds, sinks, lamps, a bath, and he is under constant surveillance by CCTV cameras. The only means of entrance or exit is by a staircase leading to a door which cannot be opened from the inside. High in the wall behind him is a window from which two orderlies (Myra McFadyen and Ali Craig) look down on him and watch his every move.

These are not gaolers, but humane nurses who go about the business of tranquillising the patient with comforting words, using injections only in the last resort. In the patient’s best interests, obviously.

The only extended speech they give is the recital of the words spoken in the original play by the two proto-psychologists who observe Lady Macbeth in her sleep-walking scene. They are, in other words, not an arbitrary intrusion or a directorial addition to the action, but are Shakespeare’s creations, given a centrality and a heightened presence

they did not have in the Elizabethan age, where they were only on-lookers. Modernity prefers to seek medical solutions to moral questions as well as to physical or psychological infirmities.

No previous production has ever given such a sense of fierce, claustrophobic enclosure. When Macbeth speaks the words which open Shakespeare’s play – When shall we three meet again? – they have a resonance they could not have had in any conventional production which has the witches prancing around a cauldron, chanting their refrains and preparing to meet the newly victorious soldier. The words are spoken pathetically by the patient who has just undergone the process of admission to a hospital, who has been stripped – gently – of his own clothes and dressed in the standard outfit of the patient. He has been in some kind of fracas and has deep scratches on his chest, but in the medical unit his identity is taken from him, his freedom is restricted, so he speaks the words anxiously, fearfully to the disappearing orderlies. Am I left alone now?

Who will speak to me? Will anyone come if I call? There being no other living soul on the premises, when will the three of us converse again?

In his own being, the patient re-enacts Macbeth, the tragedy. The witches are still with him, because the witches are not weird sisters on some heath, but projections of his own psyche. Perhaps the entire action takes place in his mind, perhaps we are witnessing delusions in which the other figures are emanations created by a state of paranoid schizophrenia of the sort experienced by the brilliant, Nobel Prize winning mathematician, John Nash, who in his disordered state saw himself a player in some Cold War drama. This production shows a mind unhinged, cut off from the moorings of society. It is not an analysis of madness, but is, as much as Hamlet, a portrait of a mind overthrown, even if it is not clear that this mind, unlike Hamlet’s, was ever ‘noble’ in the first place.

Lady Macbeth is first seen in a bath shortly after receiving her husband’s letter to announce his home-coming and to tell her of the witches’ prophecies. ‘She’ reclines languidly in the water, a glass in hand, talking in the patrician, indolent tones of a banker’s

wife as she devises how to manoeuvre the pliable Macbeth. The ‘she’ needs the inverted commas because Alan Cumming plays all the parts, with only the occasional intervention of McFadyen and Craig. Other one-man performers, such as Dario Fo, strive to have the stage peopled in imagination by crowds of on-lookers or bit-parts, but however successful he is in switching part, Cumming always conveys alone-ness, with one glorious exception.

When Lady Macbeth sets out to cajole and entice Macbeth to seize the throne by murder, the two are lying on a bed, she on top and he prone beneath her. Cumming suggests seduction and femininity by a change of tone and register, by a switch of position, by having the femme fatale crawl over the body of the man who is not there until the actor stretches out on his back, permitting the ‘her’ whose existence we have to imagine to slide over him and tease him into compliance. This is acting of the highest expertise, where the actor can in turn suggest the foxy sensuousness of a Betty Davis and the prone gullibility of an indecisive but Machiavellian Gatsby.

It is easy to be convinced that this is a man who could see daggers in the air, easy to be terrified along with him by the vision of Banquo’s ghost, who comes into view wearing a nylon stocking over his face and paces about after the patient, causing him to cower under the staircase. Props are few but skilfully employed, the principal ones being the spectator’s memory and imagination. A child’s jumper dipped into the bath is sufficient to prompt recollections and arouse the horror normally provoked by the shedding of the blood of the MacDuff family. A wheelchair does service as Duncan’s throne and later, with a doll placed on it, becomes the jeering image of the emptiness of power when Malcolm finally ousts the tyrant. The most unsettling image of all is a dead crow, concealed in a wind shaft, but taken out when the witches are to make their second appearance, and then pulled apart by the patient, its bloody entrails hauled out, held up, dissected and examined for meaning.

These scenes will evoke different reactions in each individual. I once acted as interpreter for a man who had murdered the boss in the restaurant where he worked.

18 scottishreviewofbooks.org He believed he had been receiving orders conveyed by the rattle of water pipes or by scrawls on pieces of paper. He was not clear what these signs actually meant but was certain they were messages from some invisible authority and were meant for him. The consequence was catastrophe.

Maybe some such lack of definition is at the core of modern tragedy. Shakespeare’s Macbeth was a willing and conscious agent, prepared to ‘jump the life to come,’ a life whose existence he did not doubt. He made a Faustian pact to surrender heaven in exchange for wealth and power on earth.

His tragedy is that he finds he can have neither, since after his crimes his mind and conscience are tormented by horrible imaginings. Anders Breivik is similarly convinced that he was a free agent who behaved as he chose and who was right so to do, while his defenders, good men and women all, wish to view him as the victim of forces beyond his ken.

There is no respite here. The scene with the Night Porter is cut. Perhaps unremitting seriousness is a symptom of the fanatic, and might be undermined by humour. This is a deeply thoughtful, brilliantly devised production, directed by John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg. Natasha Chivers’ lighting scheme enhances the impact and Merle Hensel’s set is powerfully conceived. And then there is Alan Cumming. To say this is a tour de force is to damn with faint praise. He brings something of the Dionysiac force he showed in the NTS production of The Bacchae, and as a whole this is a performance which should rank with the legendary acting of the great Victorian actor-managers.

Cumming is alone on stage most of the

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 time, switches mood, emotion and thought process deftly, sketches in dark background colours with the skill of a Caravaggio executing a burial scene, commands attention for each tiny modulation of the inner action of an over-excited psyche and ends on a note, unusual for Macbeth, of poignancy shared with the audience when he reprises at the finale the words spoken at the opening – ‘When shall we three meet again?’ He is abandoned to an inner darkness.

Macbeth National Theatre of Scotland Tramway 1, Glasgow, Run Ended

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 19

Scottish Review of Books

let the presses roll Alan Taylor

T

hose who go in search of the archetypal Scot need look no farther than Arnold Kemp. He was, it must immediately be acknowledged, a romantic, which all true Scots are, and given, as all true journalists are, to intemperate and often ephemeral enthusiasms and antipathies. His love of the country in which he was born and bred and spent most of his working life was profound and at times pugnacious. He was argumentative, but never violently so, the kind of newspaperman who would not let the presses roll until a dispute over the relative merits of a comma and semi-colon had been settled. He liked a drink and sometimes several, which served chiefly to increase his thirst for debate. As he himself conceded: ‘The lunch break became too leisurely, too pleasurable.’ Above all, though, he was curious, interested in everything, significant or trivial, as behoves the editor of a national newspaper, but particularly drawn to politics, sport and the arts. And, like every intelligent Scot, he was perpetually in a state of confusion.

‘Like my fellow countrymen,’ he wrote in The Hollow Drum, the only book he published in his lifetime, ‘I am a confused traveller, but I travel hopefully.’ Kemp was writing in 1993 when devolution, let alone independence, seemed a distant prospect.

Separatism, as he surmised, was ‘theoretically remote’, not least because of the attitude of Scottish business community who, then as now, were fearful of any change to the status quo. With uncommon prescience, he noted the power of ‘foreign exchange dealers’ and ‘major industrial and commercial enterprises’ and the influence which they exerted over national governments.

‘Nationalism,’ Kemp concluded, ‘is no longer an adequate foundation on which to build the edifice of the state or to base a political programme. It is a matter of sentiment and identity; but its potency and its destabilising force are undeniable. A successful political Union must recognise that and find ways of accommodating it.’

It is almost two decades since these words were printed and much has changed. Politics lie at the core of serious newspapers and Kemp’s confusion was one he had to reconcile with the need to offer readers clarity and

commonsense. Personally, he was nationalist in the mould of John Buchan, believing that Scotland is a nation with ‘its inalienable rights vested in the Treaty of Union.’ If anyone told him otherwise he bridled. On the other hand, he valued the Union and embraced the European Economic Community, championing the opening of a Herald bureau in Brussels. He looked to the Balkans and was discomfited, as so many sceptics of nationalism were and are. The resurgence of Scottish nationalism in the Thatcher years and in the early 1990s troubled him.

When Kemp died in 2002 at the age of 63 the devolution project was in its infancy.

Many of the rookie parliamentarians behaved like children with attention deficit disorder and the debate over the debacle of its cost rumbled on fuelled largely by those in denial over its existence. For the last three years of his life Kemp was in exile, having been defenestrated as editor of the Herald from whose masthead he was instrumental in removing the word Glasgow in the hope of increasing its pan-Scottish readership.

In his latter years as the Herald’s editor, he had been at loggerheads with his boss, Liam Kane. Indeed, the friction between the two reached such a pass that Kemp returned one evening to the office intent on murdering Kane. Ultimately, though, it was Kane who did for Kemp.

For many his departure to London and the Observer marked the end of an era in Scottish journalism that has come to be regarded, with some justification, as halcyon.

Budgets were generous, staff plentiful and the internet and its implications lay in the future. As Kemp makes clears in Confusion to Our Enemies, a diverting, stimulating and treasurable collection of prose garnered from The Hollow Drum, the Herald, the Observer and elsewhere and edited with a running commentary by his daughter Jackie, he was an eyewitness at the journalistic equivalent of Rorke’s Drift, valiantly defending the industry in the days before it was grievously assailed. Re-reading his recollections of the Scotsman is to re-immerse oneself in a culture not far removed from that which Evelyn Waugh described in Scoop.

‘The old composing room,’ Kemp lovingly recalled in 1993, ‘with its smell of ink and lead, has gone from the industry now, but

it was a place of genuine fascination. Surely no more beautiful or satisfying machine has ever been designed than the Linotype. Man and machine worked together in harmony and the machine’s long arm, grasping the brass matrices from the pot where they had been used to mould the type and returning them to the magazine above, moved up and down in human rhythm. An often agitated wee man went round with a piece of tape measuring the set as it accumulated. On the hour, every hour, he would communicate the news that there was not nearly enough type to see the paper away in time, and some fairly desperate stratagems, for example running the same picture on different pages or putting the results of the Scotsman’s own golf tournament on page one, were occasionally used.’

The son of the playwright Robert Kemp, Arnold joined the Scotsman 1959 after an academically undistinguished sojourn at Edinburgh University. He was taken on as a sub-editor and given a berth opposite ‘a gruff old communist from Caithness’ whose punctiliousness over stories about the Soviet Union was extreme. Every night, Kemp remembered, he would send the copy boy out to the chip shop for a steak pie which, when he bit into it, spilled gravy on to the paper he’d laid out in lieu of a table cloth and which he would lick clean before scrunching it into a ball and throwing it in a bin. ‘At New Year,’ added Kemp, ‘he would bring beer into the office in an old antifreeze can and share it with favoured colleagues.’ And what, one wonders, did he offer less ‘favoured’ colleagues? (Such behaviour lingered on.

Some three decades later, when I was minding the shop, one young reporter turned up on Christmas day with a bagful of frozen chicken legs which he defrosted under the grill in the canteen and offered around. How no one died or even fell ill remains a mystery to this day).

Kemp’s early years at the Scotsman coincided with the editorship of Alastair Dunnett who, under the Canadian magnate Roy Thomson, was intent on resuscitating what had become a rather moribund newspaper serving the Edinburgh bourgeoisie, very few of whom seemed to be conscious. With nowhere for the circulation to go but up it rose from around 55,000 to almost double that. In 1972, when Eric Mackay took over the editorship, Kemp was appointed deputy editor, complementing his boss’s studied ennui with his youthful energy and irreverent enthusiasm. Mackay’s place in the annals of Scottish journalism has yet to be properly considered. In his book, Our Trade, Andrew Marr described his first encounter with him. Shown into Mackay’s wood-panelled office after a rough night on the London sleeper, Marr muttered that he wanted to join the Scotsman in the hope of producing quality journalism. ‘Quality journalism!

Quality journalism!’ bellowed Mackay. ‘Laddie, no one out there [i.e. Princes Street] is interested in quality journalism. D’you not understand? It’s over. It’s all over…’

Unlike Mackay, Kemp could write, as this collection amply demonstrates, his style – wry, conversational, characterful – ideally suited to an intelligent reading public. But Mackay and Kemp were also often at loggerheads which the older man sometimes interpreted as impertinence or insubordination. Their parting of the ways was perhaps inevitable, not least because of the gloom that descended on the Scotsman after the failure of the 1979 devolution referendum,

but it was the paper’s loss.

Kemp went west in his quest for editorial control and set about doing for the then Glasgow Herald what he’d done for the Scotsman. Based in Albion Street, in a building that recently metamorphosed into flats, Kemp was in his element, the sleeves of his shirt invariably rolled, a hand combing through his unruly thatch, wining and dining in his gregarious manner.

There was, as Harry Reid, his deputy editor, once said, something theatrical and dramatic about Kemp, as you might expect from the son of the man responsible for a brilliant stage adaptation of Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estatitis at the 1948 Edinburgh Festival. Editor and deputy made an appealing and inspired double act, one Butch Cassidy, the other the Sundance Kid. Once, when I suggested, provocatively, that Morecambe and Wise might be a better analogy, Kemp said he preferred Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, though he didn’t say which part he’d take. What Kemp realised was that the Herald (renamed in 1992) need not be a parochial Glasgow paper, speaking as it did for Scotland’s largest city which prided itself on unpretentious intellectualism.

The problem, as he undoubtedly saw it, was that there was a limit to the sales of a city-bound paper. The trick was to find readers beyond Glasgow without alienating the diehards. The Herald’s Edinburgh office in York Place was well-staffed and productive and short-term inroads were made to the Scotsman’s circulation. But if history has shown us anything it is that Glasgow and Edinburgh are temperamentally incompatible and that attempts by one to muscle in on the other are inevitably doomed to failure. In that regard, the idea of closing the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and opening in its stead a new gallery of Scottish art in Glasgow is instructive. Where our two great cities are concerned it seems it is safer – if not economically sensible – to duplicate than usurp.

The hallmark of Kemp’s Herald was its sense of self and its confident voice. In a word, it exuded chutzpah. In its heyday, when the editor was fully engaged and hands-on, he made it look and read like a newsprint version of himself. Which is to say that it was not in the least parochial or chauvinistic or too serious or too lightweight. Rather it was sophisticated, fair-minded, stimulating, funloving, invigorating, like a night in a proper pub. Good newspapers are greater than the sum of their parts. The reporting must be accurate and revelatory, the comment acerbic, enlightening, humorous. This pertains in every section, be it sport, features or business. Kemp read the arts pages as avidly as he did the football coverage. Moreover, in his bailiwick, he was forever out and about, meeting and greeting anyone he felt could help further the Herald’s cause. The irony is that the best person to do that was him.

When you received a phone call or a note saying how much he’d enjoyed a piece you glowed for days because you respected his opinion and cherished his counsel. He was a man you don’t meet every day.

Copies of Confusion To Our Enemies signed

by Jackie Kemp are available to order prior to publication in September for £11.99 including p&p (UK only) exclusively to readers of the Scottish Review of Books. Call 0845 370 0067 quoting ‘Scottish Review of Books’. Major credit cards accepted.

20 scottishreviewofbooks.org

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

evil all around Lesley McDowell

O

f all Scotland’s contemporary writers, Louise Welsh probably straddles that commercial-literary divide the best. Commercial writers may complain about a lack of literary recognition, whilst literary writers can only dream of five-figure sales, but Welsh, from her 2002 debut novel, The Cutting Room, which reached six figures, to her present one, The Girl on the Stairs, has consistently sold well. She is also a ‘Britain’s Best First Novelist’, and a winner of the Saltire First Book award and the Crime Writers’ Association Creasey Dagger. Like a Scottish Sarah Waters, she has focused both on homosexual and lesbian relationships as well as immersing herself in the distant past (her 2004 novel about Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine Must Die). Add in the crime edge, and she’s a marketing man’s dream of what a successful early 21st century writer should look like.

But, this being the early twenty-first century, consistency isn’t enough. Welsh was with Edinburgh-based publishers Canongate throughout her first four books, The Cutting Room, Tamburlaine Must Die, The Bullet Trick and Naming the Bones. Now she has moved to John Murray in London, part of the giant Hodder group, and they’re not pulling any punches: ‘Her writing has always been great,’ says the publicity. ‘But now her commercial success will be great too. New Publisher – New Strategy – New Packaging – New Marketing – New Publicity.’ John Murray may well be looking at Welsh and seeing several zeroes on the end of those sales figures, more in the manner of crime writers like Ian Rankin and Val McDermid.

But can she have the same branding effect?

Does she have true mass market potential?

In a way, I hope not. There’s always a fear that huge sales (without a TV series or major literary award to boost them) may reflect blandness, a lack of difficulty, a lack of a challenge. Welsh’s prose style may favour realism but that doesn’t mean she eschews romance; plot-led, rather than characterled, her books nevertheless play on what Janice Galloway once called a ‘bribe to the reader’. And Welsh herself knows the demands of the market as well as of literary credibility. At the end of Naming the Bones,

lecturer Murray Watson muses on the fate of the work of forgotten minor poet Archie Lunan, which also includes a sci-fi novel.

‘Christie had dismissed the science-fiction novel Archie had been writing as worthless, but the poet’s apocalyptic vision might yet turn out to be a classic of the genre, with the potential to attract more readers than the poems ever would.’

It’s rather touching then, that Welsh chooses to quote from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw at the beginning of her

Louise Welsh: doesn’t eschew romance. new novel. James was literary writer who sought commercial success desperately, who yearned to be a bestseller. With The Turn of the Screw, his 1898 novella about a young governess who becomes increasingly convinced that the ghosts of two servants are haunting, and corrupting, her two young charges, he almost achieved the kind of popularity he sought. Tellingly, it appeared first in serial form, the form so beloved by Dickens and which earned him so many devoted followers. Perhaps John Murray should have taken a chance and published The Girl on the Stairs similarly? Or would that be an innovation too far in this currently rather nervous publishing climate?

Welsh’s own ‘ghost’ story delights as much in ambiguity and the power of suggestion as James’s did. Her heroine, Jane, is pregnant – we don’t know by whom, as that information is withheld. Suffice to say, she has just moved to Berlin from Glasgow, to live with her partner, Petra. The apartment is rather cold and white, modern and characterless, and backing on to a cemetery and churchyard, as well as another apartment

block, now disused and falling into disrepair.

On her first night in this soulless place, Jane hears disturbing noises coming from their neighbours’ flat through the wall. It sounds like a child is crying, then a voice suddenly screams, ‘whore’. The next morning, she sees a young girl in a red coat cross the courtyard in the direction of the abandoned building.

‘The girl swore and turned, raising her hand as if warding off a blow.’

Welsh knows well enough how necessary it is psychologically to load the simplest of sentences, the most innocent of gestures.

And in this way she establishes the subjectivity of her protagonist: we see what Jane sees, and Jane, affected by what she has heard the night before, immediately sees a victim of abuse. When the girl faces Jane, ‘her hood conspired with the buildings shadow to hide her features’, accentuating her mysteriousness, until finally Jane is confronted with ‘spiked eyelashes, rouged cheeks and red lips, and beneath the make-up, the soft unformed features of a child.’

Girls on the cusp of womanhood have long been seen as frightening and mysterious, a mix of both threatening and vulnerable, and writers from Stephen King in Carrie to Angela Carter in The Company of Wolves, have long exploited that double-ness. Welsh adds to that sense of a girl changing into a woman, though, with the ingenious use of a pregnant central character. Jane is changing bodily, too: she is in the state of ‘becoming’, just as the girl in red is, but while she is moving into a state of grace, that of motherhood, the girl is moving into something much more worrying, into sexual activity. Jane’s sexual activity has been curtailed and legitimated, partly: she may be a lesbian (and her relationship with Petra has attracted abuse in the past, and does in the course of this book) but she is also a mother.

In the eyes of society, motherhood always wins out.

But what is the truth about her neighbour’s situation? Jane meets Dr Alban Mann, the gynaecologist father of Anna, the young girl in red, when he holds a package for her to collect. Is he the one who shouted ‘whore’ at his daughter? Is he the author of the bruise on his daughter’s face? When career-driven Petra has to leave Jane alone for a week in the flat whilst she goes away on business, Jane’s imagination is left to run riot.

Or does it? The interplay between real life and the imagined one relies on Jane’s personal interaction with the outside world.

And so, dinner with her ‘in-laws’, Tielo and his wife Ute, becomes heavy with implication about cheating; a conversation with the elderly Beckers on the ground floor reveals that Dr Mann’s wife, Greta, the mother of Anna, disappeared when her daughter was very young; the sight of Mann, conversing with prostitutes on the street, adds to his disreputable character. Adultery, missing women, prostitution: gradually Welsh builds up, not just a sense of Jane and her view of the world, but also that world itself. Berlin becomes a palimpsest, a city whose faceless buildings hide something deeper once you start to rub away at the surface.

Or are these revelations that Jane makes true ‘revelations’? Welsh is not implying that all pregnant women are crazy, full of phantom thoughts of untraceable banging in the night. But she does need an unreliable narrator to make her mystery work, and a credibly unreliable one at that. There is just enough outside suspicion about Dr Mann to make

Jane’s belief that he has done something bad to his missing wife and may be about to do something bad to his disturbed young daughter, a credible one, too. And yet, like the governess in The Turn of the Screw, we are alarmed by her increasing hysteria, sympathetic, perhaps, to her girlfriend Petra’s impatience with Jane’s suspicions. Why isn’t she thinking more about the health of their child, she demands, furiously. But Jane thinks all the time about her unborn child; she is obsessed with her growing belly.

Henry James’s popular masterpiece wasn’t just an exercise in obsession, or in readerly gullibility. It was also a debate about the nature of evil, and its attendant partner, madness (until the early nineteenth century, epilepsy was thought to be a form of madness, and madness itself a form of Satanism). James’s brother, William, was a highly respected psychologist, and the two brothers were both, in their different ways, superb delineators of the human psyche. The question of culpability haunts The Turn of the Screw – does the governess fail to protect her charges, or does she in fact, rush them to their fates? And can we always recognise evil when we see it?

Jane thinks she recognises evil when she sees it, and she trusts it as material, not immaterial. Is she right to do so? ‘Jane sat up and cradled her belly, trying to imagine the weight of it transferred to her arms.

She couldn’t believe in God, and had never really understood science. Sometimes, when it was still, the baby felt as abstract, and as unlikely, as the big bang or God and all his angels. Then it shifted, and she knew without a doubt it was there, and that for good or for bad, she would see its face soon.’ She believes evil is there in the cry of ‘whore’ of Dr Mann; she believes it is on the streets, when she interviews prostitutes about him; that it is there on the subway, when she tries to rescue Anna from a group of aggressive young men. It is no accident that she is living opposite a church, that she converses with its young priest, or that something bad should happen as a result. Jane never precisely articulates it, but she believes evil is all around her, and has been from the moment she arrived. She also believes she is the only one who can defeat it.

Just as James’s novella brought him before a new audience, so John Murray will be hoping that Welsh’s ghostly little tale will do the same for her. It is certainly atmospheric and perplexing enough to work successfully as a mystery, and profound enough about women to suggest something more than a tricky plot. There is little sign here that she is about to make greater artistic concessions to the market-place. Consistency has been her watchword for a reason: in the past, such consistency was highly valued and rewarded.

Since she first appeared on the literary stage a decade ago, however, the publishing world has changed vastly, and one-off wonders are increasing. We can only hope that Welsh’s foothold is as sure it seems to be.

The Girl on the Stairs Louise Welsh John Murray, pp288, £16.99. ISBN: 978 1848 546608

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 21

Scottish Review of Books

Leave Me Alone: Diary of a Writer in Retreat Kapka Kassabova

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!’

Emily Dickinson

A

writer is someone who is most alive when alone: I knew this to be true long before I was a writer. I knew it at the age of eight, when I was already a reader. All my life, I have wanted to be left alone with my book. My favourite time of the day as child, teenager, traveller and writer, has been when I could say ‘Good night’ and scuttle off to bed with a notebook.

Why is it, then, that thirty years later, I still struggle to be alone? That is to say, I struggle to get alone and stay alone. Always, there is noise. Always, there is someone clamouring for attention. Often, that someone is my own social ego, interfering like an ambitious parent or a party bore who buttonholes you with boozy breath.

Well hello! my social ego says… Remember Facebook? You haven’t posted anything for weeks. It’s time to tweet something – don’t tell me you have nothing to tweet – or people might think you’ve fallen off your perch. Oh, and remember all those emails that need answering. And go on, Skype that friend on the other side of the world. Now is a good time because it’s morning there. Now. Do it now. If you don’t do it now, you will sink into obscurity. You will become nobody.

Nobody, I tell you.

No! I yell. Leave me alone. Can’t you see the door is closed? I just want to scribble a little poem. Read this novel. Sit here staring at a fly on the window. Lie in the dark and breathe. Here is my dirty secret: I want to be nobody. If that’s what it takes.

But the social ego doesn’t care that too much activity makes me unhappy. That making myself available to loved and unloved ones every single day feels like I am less, not more. That my battery is charged when

plugged into silence.

No. My ego offers a twist on the Sartrian statement ‘hell is other people’: in fact, hell is the need for other people, the anxiety to be heard and seen all the time. Hell is being in the company of those frenetic Facebook friends who are perpetually logged on and posting hourly photos of their baby. Or themselves. Or updates on their ‘status’, which comes to the same thing in the end.

My social ego wants me to be in hell.

But I’ve got news for it: I am alone now.

I write this from Church Cottage, the kind of rural hideaway Emily Dickinson would have enjoyed. There are English roses on my desk, as big as heads, the kind you inhale like opium. My neighbours are dead – that is to say, they are gravestones in the churchyard next door. The church clock strikes every hour. I have no watch and no mobile reception. On the rustic front door hangs a bag printed with the Penguin cover of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. There is a heavy glass ashtray in my bedroom, a winebottle opener, a bath with claw feet, a small writing table in case I feel like writing late at candle-light, tipsy with happiness – which of course I do – in other words, I am in writer’s heaven. And best of all, nobody knows, except a couple of people in my life who do need to know, so as not to report me as a missing person.

Welcome to Clifford Chambers, a cul-desac village near Stratford-upon-Avon, where I am spending some of the summer as writer in residence for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Hosking Houses Trust. Sarah Hosking is the remarkable woman behind this cottage (literally – she lives next door), and the cottage will be her legacy: a room of one’s own for women writers who need to be alone. Sarah has a dog and a polite rooster (‘one of the nicest men I’ve met’) and is that rare kind of woman who doesn’t age because she is full of passion.

‘Please promise me that you’ll never settle down,’ she says. ‘It’s always a euphemism, isn’t it. Other people have boring grandchildren duties, and I have brilliant writers in the cottage all year round. This is exactly how I want to be spending my retirement.’

And this cottage is exactly how I want to be spending my summer, all of it – in the fertile shadow of the Bard.

I suspect that V.S. Naipaul was speaking for all writers when he said that the best of him is in the pages of his books (certainly true in his case). This is why the pages of my books is where I want to be, and where I want to be seen and heard. Not on Facebook, Twitter, lecture halls and festivals podiums.

Not if I can help it.

And therein lies the problem. I can’t entirely help it. This is an Olympic, public kind of summer, and I can’t help croaking my name the livelong day. The problem lies not just between the writer and her social ego, between our need to be left alone and our need to be seen and heard. That would be easy – talk to a therapist and meditate; or alternatively, tweet every minute, whatever.

No, there is the very real problem for a writer to be heard and seen at all, amid the cacophony of self-celebrating voices that dominate our culture. Most of them have little to say, but what they have is volume and audience. For the writer, on the other hand, it goes like this: if you are not publicly heard and seen at all, then your books won’t be either. And it is no dirty secret that every writer – with the remarkable exception of Emily Dickinson – wants to be somebody.

Preferably before they die. *** The first reason George Orwell listed in his Why I Write essay is ‘sheer egoism: desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. […] The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.’

I witnessed the embodiment of this last week, during the mammoth Poetry Parnassus gathering of world poets in London, a kind of poetry Olympiad but without the (overt) competition. Here were, in turn, some of the most stubborn, most idiosyncratic, most individualistic, most vain, most unpredictable people on earth.

Some of them were quiet, understated types, with much to say on the page – like the young Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov who lives out of a suitcase and whose poems in Remnants of Another Age get to the heart of the European malaise. Others – identities must be withheld, despite the temptation – were deluded maniacs, the kind you have to drag off the stage to shut them up.

Many of us felt ambivalent about representing a nation, precisely because it is a public, official act, in contrast with the private, subversive act of being a poet. Being a poet is a state of mind, not a state of citizenship. The Cypriot poet said to me: ‘I have a difficult relationship with Cyprus. Cyprus is the place I grew up and had to leave in order to become the person I had to become.’ He has lived in Britain and Ireland for twenty years. The poet from Sierra Leone has spent half his life in the US. The poets from Samoa and Tonga live in New Zealand. I represented Bulgaria which I left twenty years ago. This is our world and our century.

Two hundred world poets in one place felt a bit like the Big Bang. Or in the words of the curator Simon Armitage, a mixture of

‘the Tower of Babel and the Eurovision Song Contest.’ Except that you will hear Eurovision next year, but you will never hear from most of these poets again because their voices will be swamped by the noise of louder egos and larger admiring bogs. This is why it was strangely moving to be there, immersed in poetry, and feeling that what we do matters in some fragile but lasting way. I embraced the poet from Hungary (who lives in Sheffield) and the poet from South Africa (who lives in London). The Francophone poet from the Republic of Congo crushed me in a farewell hug and somewhere inside it I left a lipstick smudge on his pink polyester shirt.

Then we all went separate ways, comforted by the knowledge that, while poetry has never been in fashion, it has never gone out of fashion. Why? Because it has something to say, even if the audience is small.

You can plug yourself into the largest screen on earth and broadcast a video of yourself tweeting. Millions might hear you and see you today, and it won’t mean very much. But in fifty years’ time, a handful of people will still be reading Nikola Madzirov’s poems and they will mean as much to them as they mean to me now, which is a great deal.

And now excuse me, I must make the most of my social ego sleeping on the sofa (it’s easily bored), and use the little writing table with the ashtray upstairs. Good night.

We are the remnants of another age.

That’s why I cannot speak Of home, or death Or preordained pain. …

When time ceases, Then we’ll talk about the truth And fireflies will form constellations On our foreheads. (from Remnants of Another Age, BOA Editions, NY 2011)

22 scottishreviewofbooks.org

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

What If There Is A God? Colin Waters

W

hat are we to make of a novel that describes itself as ‘old-fashioned’?

Not ‘timeless’ or even ‘traditional’, but ‘oldfashioned’? It’s a curious adjective; some might think it pejorative in certain cases.

It is particularly strange when we see the term applied to The Heart Broke In by James Meek, a writer who has until now given the impression he was interested in writing that is edgy, uncomfortable. On the back of the book, we find it blurbed as ‘an old-fashioned story of modern times’, which it is. Does Meek’s fifth novel signal he has reached a new maturity? Or a new conservatism?

The Heart Broke In consciously, perhaps self-consciously, strives to elucidate the anxieties and appetites of early twentyfirst century Britain. At the novel’s core are two scientists, Bec and Alex. Her work on parasites has taken her close to discovering a malaria inoculation. Alex is further away from finding a cure for cancer, but he has had promising results which also suggest there may be a way to extend not only life but youth. As these two leaders in their field move slowly towards a relationship with each other, a constellation of characters shifts around them, most of whom, whether they are aware of it or not, are engaged in a quest for immortality – a form of it.

Alex’s uncle and mentor, Harry, is dying from cancer. He has a ‘desire to be literally immortal’, and hectors his nephew into trying out an untested – and futile, anyway – treatment on him, which has consequences for Alex’s career down the line. Harry is deluding himself as to the efficacy of the treatment, his hopes based more on faith than fact. The leeway he allows himself as a scientist he does not show to bearers of other beliefs, specifically his son Matthew, a committed Christian. Harry and Matthew have the sort of helpfully symbolic relationship that allows authors with a point to make to dramatize their argument. Matthew won’t let his children see their grandfather because of his evangelical atheism. Harry’s inflexibility poisons his relationship with ‘the alternative immortalities he might have claimed’ through son and grandchildren.

Meek lets that line go there, but generally is more questioning of what immortality

might practically consist of. Is it a survival of genes or of values? If you believe it comes simply through offspring, then Harry and Matthew’s non-relationship stands as a counter-argument.

Meek must be congratulated for finding a way to write about faith today that isn’t merely another spoof of believers. The Heart Broke In is a religious novel, albeit one that reads as if written by an atheist. There is a note of anxiety that sounds at moments through the novel: what if the believers are right? Typically, Meek isn’t so much interested in theology, whether God exists; he’s more concerned with whether they have an evolutionary advantage. Meek doesn’t bring it up, but one recalls the survival rates of Orthodox Jews imprisoned in the concentration camps of WW2 were higher than those of secular Jews. Unlike the bed-hopping, angst-ridden childless metropolitans featured in this surprisingly broody novel, the religious get on with having kids and passing on their values. And it isn’t as if religious impulses don’t still find a way to express themselves, even in Harry, a militant Dawkinist.

Meek explores other ways of projecting ourselves into a future we won’t be around to witness. Perhaps we should invest our hopes in continuity, in the promotion of moral standards we consider eternal, as suited for tomorrow as yesterday. Bec is briefly engaged to Val, a Paul Dacre-ish newspaper editor much given to prattling on about ‘ordinary, decent, hard-working people’ while enjoying a ludicrously privileged existence, his talk of ‘tradition, common law and the ten commandments’ somewhat undermined by his sleeping with Bec before marriage. Rejected

by Bec, he loses it, resigning his post to set up the shadowy Moral Foundation, a sort of celebrity secret police that uses McCarthy-esque tactics, encouraging targets to inform on other C-listers’ foibles or else face exposure on Val’s website, a turn of events somewhat more convincing post-Levenson.

Bec’s brother Ritchie is blackmailed by Val. Ritchie is the epitome of (sorry to phrase it this way) the meeja wanker. He is the producer of a popular reality TV programme, Teen Makeover, a cynical take on The X Factor geared for adolescents. Fat and in his forties, but also wealthy and powerful within

his industry, Ritchie at the time of the novel’s opening is sleeping with an underage girl he met through his show. Many men sleep with teenagers to recapture their youth; in Ritchie’s case, he is trying to recapture his wife’s youth. Before she retired to an afterlife as a yummy mummy, her personality was summed up in another rhyme: wild child.

Ritchie and Karin, the wife, were in a passingly popular Britpop band, the Lazygods, sharing bills with Bowie and Bono. In his own way, Ritchie is staking his immortality on art or at least fame. Desperate to break out of his ‘lack of talent show’, he wants to make a documentary about the man who killed his and Bec’s soldier father, an IRA interrogator who tortured him to death for not revealing an informer’s identity. The murderer, having served his time in prison, has found a measure of redemption as a modestly successful poet. Ritchie deploys the language of reality shows to persuade his sister to sign off on his documentary (the subject of it won’t agree to filming unless Bec forgives him). Ritchie claims it’ll bring her ‘closure’. ‘That’s not atonement,’ Bec replies.

‘It’s entertainment.’

Practically all of the characters – and it is a substantial cast – are searching for a way to extend youth and life, be it through sex, children, religion, medicine, art, building monumental towers, making money, or, in Alex’s case, through being the scientist who discovers a cure for cancer. Characters multiply like the single-cell organisms Bec examines through her microscope. The cover of The Heart Broke In is an illustration of such mono-cellular spheres, although initially to my untrained eye, they resembled soap bubbles; and there is something soap opera-ish to Meek’s manoeuvrings of his characters. As a historical novelist turning his attention to the present, he has had to surrender many of the tools that fiction set in the past can employ to generate emotion, irony, danger, and tragedy. Indebted to Tolstoy (notice Ritchie’s wife’s name?), Meek tries his best to find a way to create drama in a world where adultery doesn’t end in suicide but a marriage counsellor’s office. Along the way we have to endure some lengthy and slightly ponderous conversations where the characters lay out the consequences of the sexual revolution.

It’s quite a contrast with how Meek began his career as a writer. Then he was interested in complicating traditional narratives, not developing them. Take Drivetime, his second novel, which is structured around an increasingly surreal road trip that progresses deeper into a conflict-wracked Europe. With a hero called Alan Allen who is mistaken for someone named Gregor, you could see Meek’s influences were drawn from the satirical, low-lit, high-end of twentieth century Eastern European literature – Kafka, Nabokov, Bulgakov – as well as honouring the experimental strain of modern Scottish writing, Gray and Kelman in particular.

Propitiously, Meek’s writing career began to take off at the same time as Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting focussed media and reader attention on edgy new Scottish fiction, and Meek found himself bracketed with the likes of Welsh, Alan Warner, and Laura Hird, going so far as to contribute a story to the Children of Albion Rovers anthology that acted as a class portrait for that generation of Scottish novelists. Meek was in fact a foreign correspondent largely based in the Ukraine and Russia during this period, his geographical isolation underlining his thematic

apartness. While his first novel, McFarlane Boils the Sea, has scenes set in a nightclub (which was to become de rigueur through the first half of the 1990s but was less so in 1989 when his debut was published), its protagonist is trying to leave that world behind.

Interesting then to consider that Welsh and Warner also both have novels out this year, Skagheads and The Deadman’s Pedal, which revisit, respectively, Leith and ‘the Port’, their old fictional stomping grounds. The Heart Broke In has Scottish characters and settings too, but they’re low in the mix.

Meek confirmed and transcended his influences with his 2005 novel, The People’s Act of Love, which remains his best work.

Historical fiction can be backwards-looking in form and values as well as in setting. Meek looked beyond Tudor England and the Western Front, finding in post-revolution Siberia a time and a place perfectly suited to the spirit of his writing. It had cannibals, castration cults, and a powerfully attractive villain, a diabolical provocateur that was a relation of both Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin and Hogg’s Gil-Martin.

Given the success of The People’s Act of Love, one would not have been surprised if he returned to the historical novel for its follow-up. Meek was attracted instead to a contemporary setting for We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, a post-9/11 romance that contrasted scenes of war-bashed Afghanistan with dinner parties in north London, the hypocrisy of an age funnelled through its journalist hero’s disastrous passion for a fellow reporter.

It is curious that Meek’s fiction is more radical when set a century ago than when based in the present. A latter-day setting blunts his imagination’s radical sympathies.

The journalist in him appears, and feels compelled to make points, establish patterns, milk situations for significance. And The Heart Broke In is a journalist’s novel.

There is a procession of weighty contemporaneous themes (third world poverty, celebrity, the role of religion), emblematic characters, and scrupulous research, especially evident in the lab-bound scenes (‘the basolateral domain of the hepatocyte plasma membrane’ and so on).

While several forms of faith and morality are challenged in the book, there is one shibboleth that goes unexamined, and that is whether the novel, or at least the classic realist text, is up to the task Meek sets it. Rather than preparing readers to endure life, might not novels, ‘old-fashioned’ ones, mislead?

Traditional narratives are essentially comfort blankets, reducing our chaotic world to an understandable size, where character is consistent and comprehensible, and events have a beginning, middle, and an end which even if they’re not clear to the characters, are apparent to us. This is the faith at the heart of the novel which needs questioning; not whether religion still has something to offer or science is as prone to faith-based leaps into the dark as the belief systems it claims to trump, but whether the world is still comprehensible in the way ‘old-fashioned’ novels portray it. The James Meek of Drivetime would, I wager, have said no.

The Heart Broke In James Meek Canongate, pp551, £17.99. ISBN: 9780857862907.

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 23

Scottish Review of Books

inwards and outwards Susan Mansfield

‘

V

ictoria Crowe,’ writes Guy Peploe from the Scottish Gallery in a foreword to this monograph, ‘has quietly emerged into a preeminent position in Scottish painting’. The key word in this sentence is ‘quietly’. In an age where art all too often courts drama and controversy, Crowe has achieved her place without much of either.

Instead, she has simply applied herself with rigour and commitment to the issues which have driven her artistic practice for more than 45 years.

In this, the first complete book on her career, Duncan Macmillan traces the strands of her artistic development. What stands out most is their consistency. There are few tangents, cul-de-sacs or u-turns. She does not halt one line of exploration and suddenly begin another. Yet, over time, there is a kind of transformation. It is as if the questions she asked as a young painter at the Royal College in the 1960s are being answered in her mature work: how to create paintings which can deal with time and memory; how to bend pictorial space so that it becomes a vehicle for dreams, thoughts, imagination as well as representations of the visible world.

A Victoria Crowe painting typically starts with observation, very often of the natural world. It might contain elements of landscape, portraiture, still life and flower painting. But in her richly associative artistic language, the separate strands weave together to become more than the sum of their parts. Often, her paintings combine interior and exterior – consider titles such as ‘Within and Without’, ‘Garden Room – A View from the Interior’. She is interested in collapsing these boundaries, in looking inwards as well as outwards. It is no coincidence that she has painted portraits of leading psychoanalysts Winifred Rushforth and R. D. Laing. She is drawn to the landscapes of the inner world.

Victoria Crowe was born on V.E. Day in 1945, and was christened, in honour of the date, Victoria Elizabeth. She grew up in West London, went to Kingston School of Art at 16, then to the Royal College. She was raised Catholic, though, at the age of 21, she made a decision to turn away from formal religion.

Her concern with the mysterious and the transcendental, however, has never left her.

Her work is steeped in it, illuminated by it.

An early manifestation of this was an interest in Russian icons, which she first saw on a college trip behind the Iron Curtain in 1964. An important early picture, ‘Self Portrait with icon’, shows her at 20, staring levelly out at us, Rublev’s majestic head of Christ at her left shoulder. Icons were the subject of her dissertation at the RCA, in which she wrote, revealingly: ‘Whereas Western artists have been obsessed by the visual aspects of the external world, the Russian painters were concerned exclusively with the inner vision which the contemplation of divine beings and sacred histories aroused in them.’ If Western religious art was determined, with its vivid depictions of saints and angels, to make the mysterious visible, Russian icons did the opposite. They tell us that such a thing is impossible, their simplicity keeps the sense of mystery intact.

Robin Philipson, recently appointed head of school at Edinburgh College of Art, saw Crowe’s degree show at the RCA in 1968 and immediately offered her a teaching post in Edinburgh. Her husband, Michael Walton, whom she met as a student at Kingston, trained as a school teacher, but he too joined the staff of ECA a few years later. They settled in the hamlet of Kittleyknowe, a mile east of Carlops on the edge of the Pentland Hills. She had never been to Scotland before, but she explored her new landscape by drawing it. Always attracted to winter landscapes, she was soon painting dramatic vistas of the snow-covered moors.

Crowe became close friends with her next door neighbour at Kittleyknowe, shepherd Jenny Armstrong, who became the subject of Crowe’s much loved series of paintings ‘A Shepherd’s Life’, exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2000.

Until then, Crowe’s Pentland landscapes had been largely unpopulated, and Jenny did not particularly want to be painted, but soon she began to creep into them, a tiny figure walking with her dogs or feeding her sheep against a wide white blanket of snow. As the years passed, and old age and infirmity confined Jenny to her cottage, Crowe’s attention turned indoors. The final paintings are a series of interiors painting after Jenny’s death in 1985.

Crowe’s friendship with Armstrong came

at a crucial time. Raising two young children, and wondering how she could continue with her art, she was bolstered by shepherd’s sense of her self, the way she had made a life for herself in harmony with the landscape and seasons. It was also deeply important for her as an artist. In the ‘Shepherd’s Life’ pictures, she was bringing together objects and landscape, interior and exterior. In Greece, she had seen votives, objects hung before an icon and invested with hopes, fears, prayers, stories. In her last paintings of Armstrong’s cottage, she began to invest objects and trinkets with a similar significance; the ordinary became imbued with the sacred.

Kittleyknowe was changing: the older residents were fading, the property developers moving in. When the Crowes and their two teenage children moved to West Linton in 1990, Victoria needed a new landscape to fuel her artistic fires. An RSA scholarship enabled her to travel to Italy where she soaked up a richer palette of colours, and became absorbed in looking at the painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Perhaps, like Russian icons, these had a directness and simplicity which deepened their symbolic power. In her own paintings of this period, developments hinted at in ‘A Shepherd’s Life’ become more explicit. Her compositions become more layered, the structure softens, images and ideas associate more freely, physical space yields to metaphysical space.

In December 1994, the Crowes were rocked by the news that their son Ben, by then in his third year at university, had cancer. He died a year later. His parents coped each in their own way. Michael founded a charity, the Ben Walton Trust, to raise awareness and funding to tackle oral cancers in young people. Victoria painted. It would be trite to say that her painting deepened as a result of this tragedy, but the pictures from that time are remarkable, darker in hue than much of her earlier work, starred with flowers, dragonflies, portraits of both children; beautiful, sad, important works about the brevity and splendour of things.

These themes would continue to deepen in the years that followed. Her connection with Italy would deepen too. In 1998, she visited Venice for the first time. Avoiding the much-painted vistas of the city, she was drawn instead to the tarnished mirrors in its crumbling palazzos, the graffiti layered on its ancient walls. Always interested in notions of time, the ancient city which wears its past so easily on its sleeve enthralled her.

She acquired a studio there and still paints there several months of the year.

A long interest in botanical drawing – she took over the class at ECA vacated when Elizabeth Blackadder retired – led to a body of work titled ‘Plant Memory’ for the RSA in 2007. These works illustrate how much she has moved towards mixed-media, incorporating screen print, etching and transfer printing alongside drawing, watercolour, impressions from actual plants, and snippets from early botanical books. Writing on that show, leading botanist David Ingram suggests that her studies in the Cambridge Herbarium were not unconnected to her love of Venice: both places fed her central themes of timelessness and fragility.

Duncan Macmillan is keen to make a case for Victoria Crowe as a ‘modern’ artist, as if her credentials in this area somehow needed bolstering. He argues that her desire to paint the inner life, ‘the ever-moving point of individual consciousness’, is one of the

great engines of modern art. Certainly, the modern – if we take out, for a moment, the followers of Duchamp, intent on the individual expression above all else – is a search for meaning, for a greater understanding of what it is to be alive. In this sense, Crowe is modern indeed.

But she is also quite un-modern. She is part of a generation of artists whose training was traditional, founded on skill and genre, both of which are less than prominent in artistic education today. Like all the best artists, she bent these to her own purposes, but they were the foundations on which she built her career. And then there is beauty. Crowe’s paintings are beautiful, that much is unarguable, and that is out of step with much of what passes for ‘modern art’. As Walton writes in his introduction: ‘Being in a world where the immediate and the new demand attention, beauty is perhaps questioned as an outmoded form.’

Beauty is important to Crowe, not as an end in itself, but as a philosophical concept, connected to another very un-modern idea, the concept of truth. Speaking about painting the objects on Jenny Armstrong’s mantelpiece, she has said: ‘It was important to record the truth’. That is the engine which drives the work’s integrity. Many contemporary artists would run for cover at the notion that they might be expected to address either ‘beauty’ or ‘truth’. Artists such as Victoria Crowe don’t undertake these lightly, yet they know, like the grain of sand in the oyster shell, they must worry at them, returning to them again and again This monograph must not be regarded as drawing a line under a career, however well spent. Crowe’s work continues. She is engaged in a major commission of a suite of paintings for an Italianate house in the Borders. Meanwhile, the Dovecot Studios is currently weaving one of the most iconic of the ‘Shepherd’s Life’ scenes from a palette of natural sheep’s wool. She continues to experiment with collapsing time and space: a Pentland landscape is glimpsed in a faded mirror in her Venetian studio; a self portrait by Raphael appears next to a very real twenty-first century artichoke. The boundary lines grow comfortably fluid, between past and present, internal and external, known and imagined, the numinous and the everyday.

Victoria Crowe Duncan Macmillan Antique Collectors’ Club, 184pp, £35. ISBN: 978-1-85149-714-0

24 scottishreviewofbooks.org

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

Word Power Paul Henderson Scott

T

he editors of Scotland in Definition, A History of Scottish Dictionaries, Iseabail Macleod and Derrick McClure, have both spent most of their careers in the study of promotion of the Scottish languages, especially Scots. Macleod has worked for the Scottish National Dictionary since 1979 and from 1986 until 2002 as its Editorial Director. McClure was a lecturer in Aberdeen University from 1979 to 2002. He has written extensively about Scots and has promoted it in several organisations. The Saltire Society published editions of his Why Scots Matters in 1988 and 1997.

Their introduction to this book is a masterly summary of the issues involved as far as Scots is concerned. (Gaelic is not their subject and it has its own strong team in part II of the book). They say that the great age of literature in Scots (from Barbour in the fourteenth century to Lyndsay in the sixteenth) was brought to an end by the introduction of printing because some of the first printers in Scotland were English. Then, as they say, ‘In the eighteenth century, notoriously, a determined effort was made to excise all “Scotticisms” from speech’. Gaelic has had an even more violent history, with the defeat of the Jacobite Rising, the Clearances and the Education Act of 1872 which ignored the existence of the language. Even so its poetry remained in vigorous life.

It seems to me that this history of the neglect and the near abolition of both Scots and Gaelic needs more consideration. Was it simply that the overwhelming power and wealth of England (for a time the major power in the world) convinced the Scots that they should do their best to imitate them?

Still, as this book demonstrates comprehensively, both Scots and Gaelic have been fighting back. Ruth Williamson has a chapter on the lexicography of Scots before 1700, and Derrick McClure follows with one on the 18th. It was then that Ruddiman published a glossary of about 3,000 entries to Gavin Douglas’s translation in verse of Virgil’s Aeneid. This became a fruitful source for subsequent lexicographers, including John Jamieson, the author of the first comprehensive dictionary of Scots. Susan Rennie has a chapter on this, but she has also just published a book which is the first detailed

account of Jamieson’s life and work. She too is a lexicographer who has worked on both Scottish and English dictionaries, but she is also one of the founders of the Itchy Coo Books and she has written stories for children in Scots. Her latest book is a detailed work of research, but it is written in a fluent and lively style which makes it a pleasure to read.

John Jamieson was born in Glasgow in 1759 and grew up in a family of dissenters of the Scottish Secession Kirk. He entered Glasgow University when he was nine, remarkably early even at that time.

His first appointment was to the Secession Kirk in Forfar. After 17 years there he was appointed Minister of a Secession Kirk in Edinburgh where he served for 32 years.

His major interest seems to have been, not religion, but the Scots language. He did say that Edinburgh was ‘much more favourable to literary research’, but even when he was in Forfar he made an extensive study of the Scots spoken there. He was interested not only in spoken Scots, but in the language of Scottish literature from the earliest times.

This eventually became the content of his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language published in two volumes in 1808 and of the further two volumes of Supplement in 1825. He worked on this for most of his life, even when he was ill.

One of the early influences on Jamieson was Grimur Thorkelin, an Icelandic scholar and Professor of History and Antiquities in the University of Copenhagen. Jamieson met him in October 1787 when he was on a tour sponsored by the Danish government to investigate evidence of Scandinavian connections. Thorkelin said that he had heard Scots words on his travels which were similar to his native Icelandic. Jamieson was delighted with this evidence that Scots was more than a dialect of English. On the title page of his dictionaries he said that they showed the affinity of Scots words ‘to those of other languages and especially the Northern.’ Jamieson never met Thorkelin again but they were in correspondence for fifteen years. Another influence on Jamieson’s ideas about the origin of many Scots words was the publication in 1786 of John Pinkerton’s Ancient Scottish Poems. This included a glossary of about 1,000 words and an

Introduction which said that the Picts were a Nordic race and that their language was a dialect of Gothic.

In the course of Jamieson’s years of work on his Dictionary he met many people who, as Rennie says, ‘became lifelong supporters’ of his project.’ Among them from 1795 was the young Walter Scott . They became close friends and for years Scott suggested words for inclusion in the Dictionary. Rennie in an appendix includes a list of them of 15 pages.

On the other hand a potential rival also appeared on the scene. In March 1802 Jamieson wrote in one of his letters to Thorkelin: ‘a clergyman, a native of England, Mr Jonathan Boucher, is compiling a dictionary of old English words and had proposed that he and I should put our works together, as he wished to include the Scottish as one of the Dialects of the English’. Jamieson, who was naturally concerned that such a dictionary would harm the sales of his own, made several proposals to Boucher, but he rejected all of them and eventually died without publishing anything.

When Jamieson was ready to publish his Dictionary he failed to find a publisher. He decided to do the job himself and bought two hand presses. As he said in a letter to Richard Heber, ‘It was more than fifteen months hard labour’. The Dictionary was published in two volumes on 20 February 1808, and the Supplement in another two volumes in 1825. Jamieson also handled the sales and distribution himself. Scots therefore now had an Etymological Dictionary tracing its origin from early times. English had Samuel Johnson’s, but it was confined to current usage.

Since Jamieson, Scottish dictionaries have become more scholarly and elaborate.

The first of them, The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), was proposed

by Sir William Craigie. After his education in St Andrews University and Oriel College, Oxford, he was appointed to the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary. He became its third editor in 1897 after another Scot, Sir James Murray. In 1925 Craigie was appointed Professor of English in the University of Chicago and began working on the DOST. The Chicago University Press agreed to publish it in 25 parts, each of 120 pages and they continued until 1981. Craigie died in 1952 and Jack Aitken took over as editor.

The DOST was eventually completed in 62 parts amounting to about 8,000 pages. It was not completed until December 2000.

The chapter on DOST by Margaret Dareau is followed by one by Iseabail Macleod on the Scottish National Dictionary. She begins by saying that at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘there were gloomy views about the future of the Scots language, and indeed forecasts of its imminent demise’. Now, she continues, ‘with more enlightened attitudes to minority languages and some official support (though not enough) its outlook is not as grim as it was’. The long years of work on the DOST and the SND are perhaps an indication of belief in the value and future of the languages.

The work on these dictionaries was certainly long and intensive. The publication of the first part of the SND to the last took 45 years. Macleod says that the fact it was completed in this time was due in large measure to the almost superhuman patience of the editor, David Murison. This is something which I witnessed from year to year. I was a subscriber to the Dictionary and the ten large volumes sit on a shelf above my

desk as I write. At the time I was working abroad, but whenever I came to Edinburgh on leave I used to call on David in his office (or shall I say workshop) in George Square.

You could almost be sure that he would be there because he worked long hours and took no holidays. He even failed to turn up at a dinner held to celebrate the completion of the task of editing the Dictionary. To my mind he is one of the real heroes of Scottish cultural endeavour.

Iseabail Macleod adds another chapter on the diversity of dictionaries which have been published using the material now available in the SND. They range from an official condensation, the Concise Scots Dictionary (of which Iseabail was one of the editors) to such light-hearted books as Scoor-oot, A Dictionary of Scots Words and Phrases in Current Use. Part II of the book is devoted to Gaelic dictionaries. The authors are William Gillies, who was Professor of Celtic at Edinburgh University from 1979 to 2009, and Lorna Pike, who has been on the editorial team of both the Concise Scots Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue.

The first dictionary of Gaelic was published in 1741 by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) which is curious because one of the objects of the Society was to ‘root-out’ in the Highlands and Islands what they called the Irish language. Subsequent dictionaries were the work of enthusiasts for Gaelic. The first was in 1780 by the Rev William Shaw. He met Samuel Johnson during his tour of the Highlands with James Boswell and this encouraged him to produce a dictionary in two volumes, Gaelic-English and EnglishGaelic. In 1825 Robert Armstrong produced what Gillies calls ‘arguably the first major dictionary in Gaelic’.

Many others have followed, but, so far, nothing on the scale and professionalism of the DOST and the SND for Scots. To meet the need a group, including Norman Gillies and Lorna Pike, met in May 2002 to discuss the way forward. They agreed that there should be a historical dictionary project, to be called Faclair na Gaidhlig (Dictionary of the Scottish Gaelic Language) and the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde and the University of the Highlands and Islands should be invited to participate. All agreed and a Strategy Committee for the project met for the first time in October 2002. Work proceeds and our authors are confident that Faclair na Gaidhlig will add ‘accessibility and dignity to Scottish Gaelic as a properly respected language in the world’.

It seems to me therefore a safe conclusion is that both Scots and Gaelic, with their admirable literatures and now the support of major dictionaries, are likely not only to survive, but to flourish.

Scotland in Definition: A History of Scottish Dictionaries Iseabail Macleod and J.Derrick McClure, eds Birlinn, pp342, £25. ISBN: 978 1 90656 649 4

Jamieson’s Dictionary of Scots: The Story of the First Historical Dictionary of the Scots Tongue Susan Rennie Oxford University Press, pp303, £70. ISBN: 978 0 19 963940 3

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 25

Scottish Review of Books

two states: one solution Allan Cameron

S

ome of the best dissidents are born into archetypal families within the societies of which they will become such prominent critics. George Orwell, old Etonian and colonial official, would become the scourge of the privileged and a fierce opponent of colonialism, and yet he remained not only profoundly English, but also profoundly attached to many of the cultural trappings of Englishness. The Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, the son of Zionist immigrants to the British Mandate of Palestine before the War, was born in Haifa in 1954 just six years after the creation of the state of Israel. His family life was German, Jewish and part of the nascent Hebrew-Israeli culture that during his life would produce a new or at least renewed language and a national identity.

He grew up unaware that his birthplace had been a vibrant Arab city. His transformation into historian of the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing it brought about, campaigner for a just and peaceful solution based on a single state, and tireless critic of Israel’s war crimes was not the result of some damascene conversion, but a process of painful discovery.

Zionism, Pappé writes, was born of noble aims, but deviated from its original spirit, when it decided to protect European Jews through the colonisation of Palestine and the expulsion of its indigenous population.

Perhaps the divided mind of Zionism was there from the very start: Bernard Lazare – Anarchist, Dreyfusard, polemicist, historian and another remarkable dissident – was feted at the First Zionist Congress in 1897 and was briefly a friend of Theodore Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, but could not agree to the other’s colonial plans. Lazare proposed some kind of transnational Jewish entity to defend Jews from anti-Semitism, but, to my knowledge, that entity remained ill-defined, possibly because he died young in 1903. Like all good dissidents, he managed to alienate most of his comrades: the Zionists first, and then even the Dreyfusards, in spite of their having relied on him for the first denunciation of Dreyfus’s arrest. Lazare was not for toning down his outrage (although he did do that at the request of the Dreyfus family) and he was not for presenting simple explanations of complex phenomena. In Job’s Dungheap

Ilan Pappé: vilified and ostracised (Le fumier de Job, never translated into English), he makes an important observation on the nature of xenophobia: the anti-Semites, when behaving as anti-Semites, behave in an almost identical manner, while the victims of anti-Semitism react in a wide variety of manners: disdain, submission, anger, violence, ridicule, depression. The book sadly is no more than a series of notes to prepare a larger work, possibly of the size and scholarship of his Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes, but the relevant passage suggests that xenophobia owes its strength to its uniformity and simplicity – Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’. Of course, Lazare could not fail to realise that anti-Semitism was not an isolated case; he travelled in Eastern Europe and denounced the treatment of Jews in the Russian territories and the treatment of Armenians in the Turkish ones, thus identifying the two great genocidal crimes of twentieth-century Europe.

Pappé’s supposedly autobiographical work, Out of the Frame, is not so much an autobiography as a compendium of the author’s historical work and its political and moral conclusions. It is therefore an excellent introduction to his thought, and it does not assume that the reader has any previous knowledge of the history of Israel and Palestine. However, it does suggest that dissidents are not born but made. His career started along conventional lines, and his introduction to Arabic was through a course to prepare students for army intelligence.

During his military service, he became associated with Left-Wing Zionism and worked for Mapam, the party that represents that section of the Israeli political spectrum.

Crucial in his intellectual development was his departure in 1980 for Oxford where he studied under Roger Owen and Albert Hourani. In the late eighties and nineties, there was a thaw in Israeli historiography and it became possible to discuss subjects hitherto taboo, in particular the origins of the Israeli state and the Palestinian experience of those events. Avi Shlaim, Ben Morris and Ilan Pappé became the ‘new historians’, and Morris, whose key role in this Pappé readily acknowledges, was the first historian to concede that a mass expulsion of Palestinians took place in 1948. It may seem strange that this historical event could be challenged

– especially by historians – and it says much about Israeli society that the question could be controversial. It says even more that Morris has rejoined the Zionist camp and justifies the crimes he helped to verify.

The test of a dissident is not the thaw but the freeze that often follows it. When the Second Intifada started in 2000, Morris went one way and Pappé the other. Inevitably Pappé’s choice brought him ostracism, faeces in the post and an endless stream of death threats, some concerning his family. He is a modest man, and resents any exaggeration of his role, while reminding others that Palestinians have to suffer so much more. You sense that the principal sadness is that there has been no widespread revulsion amongst Israelis against the crimes perpetrated by their state in their name. As an Israeli, this hurts, but he is not short of explanations why this is happening. The main cause is the militarisation of Israeli society, which itself was a product of the original Zionist agenda. There are many other dissidents, but, like Pappé, they are isolated, and his few forays into the mass media have not been happy ones.

University circles cannot fail to be aware of the gravity of the human rights issues arising from government policy in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon, but it is difficult to speak out. Pappé refers to them as ‘parking lot professors’, because of their willingness to engage with him in the University of Haifa’s dark, subterranean car park. Those of us who live under less authoritarian regimes should not rush to judgement. When Mussolini, at Gentile’s instigation, demanded an oath of loyalty to Fascism in Italian universities, only eleven professors refused to take it and thus lost their jobs. Such sacrifices are not easy, and Gentile understood that the professors, not wanting to admit their cowardice even to themselves, would then persuade themselves that they had always been devout fascists.

In part, he was right, although organised anti-fascists were instructed by their organisations to take the oath, as refusal would only have benefited the regime. Anti-fascists continued their clandestine activities, but the oath did coalesce most of the waverers around the regime.

On moving to a quieter and less populated area of Israel, Pappé was greeted by a campaign of vilification, and his immediate

reaction was that he should write an equally vehement reply. His wife advised him to desist and suggested something radically different: to invite to their house anyone wanting to know what he thought and to engage in dialogue. The response was beyond their expectations. Over fifty people crowded into his home – the first cohort of what would come to be called the home university. He started by presenting two documents concerning 1948. The first was a meeting just after 75,000 Arabs had either fled or been driven out of Haifa by Israeli troops. Only a few thousand remained and their leaders had been summoned to meet Haifa’s new military commander. He informed them that all the remaining Arabs would have to move to the poorest section of the city to create an Arab ghetto, and they would have to do this in the next four days. Following their objections, he said, ‘I can see that you are sitting here and advising me, while you were invited to hear the orders of the High Command and assist it! I am not involved in politics and do not deal with it. I am obeying orders…’ When someone asked whether those who owned their houses would have to leave, he replied, ‘Everyone has to leave.’

By this stage, some of Pappé’s guests were in tears, while others wished to compare this event with similar ones in other conflicts.

The second document concerned the taking of the city of Lydda, now called Lod, and the killings and expulsions that followed.

This was particularly harrowing, because it so closely resembled accounts of Nazi behaviour during the Second World War. Ordinary people, by which I suppose we mean those who do not deal with these issues on a daily basis as can do historians, political thinkers, journalists and politicians themselves, find little difficulty in judging such acts when faced with the bare facts. Most people can empathise, and most people can draw the necessary parallels between historical events. This is why dissidents are so dangerous: they reveal facts to those who are not supposed to know them. The minutes of the meeting in Haifa were not intended for public distribution; the age of Wikipedia has demonstrated how devastating it can be to hear the voices of the powerful unfiltered by the media.

One way to keep the ears of the majority closed to reason and unpalatable truths is to keep them in a continuous state of uncertainty and fear: the outbreak of the second Lebanese war in 2006 undid most of Pappé’s modest achievements. He justifies his aims very simply and clearly in Out of the Frame: ‘Challenging by non-violent means a self-righteous ideological state – aided by a largely mute world – that dispossesses and destroys the indigenous people of Palestine is a just and moral cause.’ The simplicity of this demand is what triggers the fury, and the calm persistence of its reiteration is what exacerbates that fury.

The anarchist agitator, Emma Goldman, once delivered a rousing speech to an English audience (in Hampstead or some such troubled spot), and the polite, middle-class audience clapped half-heartedly and left in an orderly fashion. Goldman was shocked, not because she regretted not passing the night in the nearest police cell or not having her audience attacked by the American forces of law and order, as had often occurred, but because she had stumbled into a place where politics did not appear to matter. Her analysis was not entirely correct, but social conformity is a more effective deterrent

26 scottishreviewofbooks.org than repression and police violence. The strongest prisons are built within our minds and dissidents tear down those walls not by being always right but by at least challenging new mythologies that can quickly become unchallengeable.

Israel is a place where politics do matter, but history matters more, the two being utterly inseparable in that country, though the former is dependent on the latter. No surprise, then, that a leading Israeli dissident is a prolific historian, and his writing is relevant to us all because the relationship between Israel and Palestine is a magnified and brutalised archetype of the relationship between the West and the Third World.

Israel is a place where history and historical myth are too important. Israel is a place in dire need of open borders and a mixing of peoples – what Pappé would call a ‘disarming of the mind’.

Pappé’s dream of a single, secular state in which Arabs and Jews are citizens with identical rights may seem impossible, but then many of us once despaired of change in South Africa. What may surprise about

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 dissidents is that they are often co-opted by the societies they censured, as occurred with Orwell who would certainly have preferred to be remembered as a socialist and a combatant against Francoism rather than exclusively as an anti-communist. Posterity is selective, because posterity is power, but fortunately the dissidents keep coming. They don’t change the world; they stop it from hardening into immutable rock. That leaves the way open to change in the future; one can only hope that Pappé lives long enough to see at least the beginning of the change that will take generations to complete, such has been the corrosive effect of this senseless conflict on persecutor and persecuted alike.

ISBN: 9781908251022 £12.95

ThE SINS Of ThE fAThEr

ThE LOST ArT Of LOSING

by Allan Massie

by Gregory Norminton

“… has a sombre intelligence rare in current fiction … treats evanescent joys and enduring terrible questions with a patient art that begins to feel like life”

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– Guardian Review

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Ilan Pappé will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at 15.30 on Friday 24 August.

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Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel Ilan Pappe Pluto Press, 256pp, £13. ISBN: 9780745327259

Queequeg No 14

The winner of the crossword in the previous edition of the Scottish Review of Books is Jane Ann Liston from St Andrews who will shortly receive a copy of Megrahi: The Lockerbie Evidence by John Ashton (Birlinn). The prize for this crossword is Christopher Reid’s Selected Poems (Faber).

Send entries to Queequeg, Scottish Review of Books, 8a Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh EH2 7TH by 15 October.

ACROSS 1 Put everything into crude traditional song (6) 4 Scottish novelist who had most to tell, unfortunately (8) 9 Annoy crime writer, not popular with the French (6) 10 Arranges for Bush or Obama, in short, to take on Roman poet (8) 12 Willing to be gracious, although ungracious according to Pope (8) 13 Spenser thought matrimonial day “was not long” (6) 15 It may sound correct, but Shelley regarded many a ceremony to be “loathed” (4) 16 Some cleaners may throw cold water over the toilets (1) 19 Consent to get through, calling “of all-ruling Heaven” (Milton) (10) 20 Remonstrate over false witness “gone to burning hell” (Othello) (4) 23 Realm, in its prime, used energy to turn it from “a savage wilderness” (Burke) (6) 25 Prevails on one told to make judgments (8) 27 Projected moving images, although placed under cover (8) 28 Fit for attack “most dolorous” (Malory) (6) 29 Looked down on, when Des spied over one “rejected of men” (Isaiah) (8) 30 High point for two artists placed in a top tier (6)

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22 DOWN 1 Book resort for old Scottish poet (7) 2 Connect, in the future, with popular Scottish novelist (9) 3 Claim Ian caught out from Bagehot’s “mystic reverence” for loyalty (6) 5 Extra supplement for 16th century English writer (4) 6 Veer off in gale to gain some advantage (8) 7 Need to turn up at the final, although wiped out (5) 8 Struggles to play lutes on board ship (7) 11 Like 9 across, a soft scent “hangs upon the boughs” (Keats) (7) 16 A mad leading lady “always goes into white satin” (Sheridan) (7) 17 Dr Watson’s “accommodating” chap next door, got over boring hue (9) 18 Raised up, on line, before one novelist and politician (8) 19 Persuaded media boss, as required (7) 21 In consideration, have honour “mingled with surprise” (Scott) (7) 22 Drink, with little hesitation, to Nobel-winning writer (6) 24 Capital fellow pairs off with helen in the Iliad (5) 26 At this time, is taking part in the revolution (4)

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Solutions to Queequeg No 13 Across

1 Hamlet, 4 Speakers, 9 Rankin, 10 Prestige, 12 Enforced, 13 Decent, 15 Then, 16 Armageddon, 19 Endeavours, 20 Anil, 23 Lowell, 25 Antihero, 27 Passover, 28 Pagoda, 29 Evermore, 30 Versed.

Down

1 Herbert, 2 Mansfield, 3 Emigre, 5 Park, 6 Answered, 7 Elite, 8 Skelton, 11 Reproof, 14 Patrons, 17 Dangerous, 18 Ballroom, 19 Eclipse, 21 Leonard, 22 Pirate, 24 Waste, 26 Lear.

Scottish Review of Books

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012  27

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Vol 8, Number 3, 2012

rEDLEGS

by Chris Dolan

‘Wri�ng Fic�on’ by the sea…

10 - 15 September 2012 with award-winning authors

Andrew Miller & Tobias Hill

“This is a powerful, disturbing tale, written with scrupulous care both for words and their hidden meanings, as well as for the history of men and women forced to live and ISBN: 9781908251077 work for a doomed, £9.95 immoral cause.”

– The Independent

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in a dazzling, ancient white village Vejer, Andalucia Discount offered to Sco�sh Review of Books readers.

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An Lanntair Faclan: Hebridean Book Festival Creideamh: Belief

1 - 3 An t-Samhainn: November 2012 Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion Keith Ward: Why There Almost Certainly Is a God Philip R Davies: The Dead Sea Scrolls Donald Meek: The Gaelic Bible • Morag Macleod: Gaelic Psalm Singing The Seventh Seal • The Gospel According to Matthew Nosferatu • Jenny Colgan • Doctor Who John Love: Island Lighthouses and the Mystery of the Flanna Isles St Kilda Vampires • archive film + full education programme.

For updated information visit website www.faclan.org Sràid Choinnich, Steòrnabhagh, Eilean Leòdhais: Kenneth Street, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis www.lanntair.com • info@lanntair.com • 01851 703307

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 29

Scottish Review of Books

Publisher Advertisers Classified contains a listing of new titles submitted for inclusion by publishers in Scotland. Advertisers in this section are: Argyll Publishing 01369 820 229 argyllpublishing.com Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) 0141 330 5309 asls.org.uk Birlinn Ltd. 0131 668 4371 birlinn.co.uk Biteback Publishing 020 7091 1260 bitebackpublishing.com Brambleby Books 01582 715723 bramblebybooks.co.uk Brown, Son & Ferguson 0141 429 5922 skipper.co.uk Capercaillie Books 0845 463 675 capercailliebooks.co.uk Carcanet Press 0161 834 8730 Carcanet.co.uk Glagoslav Publications 020 328 6998 Glagoslav.com Glasgow Life 0141 276 9458 glasgowlife.org.uk Grace Note Publications 01764 655979 gracenotepublications.co.uk gracenotepublications.com Linen Press linenpressbooks.com Little Tiger Press 020 7385 6333 littletigerpress.com Luath Press 0131 225 4326 luath.co.uk Polygon See Birlinn Saraband 0141 337 2411 saraband.net Scala Publishers 020 7490 9900 scalapublishers.com Stenlake Publishers 01290 551122 stenlake.co.uk Steve Savage Publishers 020 7770 6083 savagepublishers.com Thirsty Books See Argyll Publishing Vertebrate Publishing 0114 267 9277 v-publishing.co.uk

ART & ARCHITECTURE Riverside Museum Deyan Sudjic with Jim Heverin and Paul Weston GLASGOW LIFE (CO-PUBLISHED BY SCALA PUBLISHERS) £4.95 PB 9781857597509 Designed by the acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid, Riverside Museum opened in 2011. This book examines the construction of the unique building, created to house the City of Glasgow’s world-famous transport and technology collections. It looks at the rationale for the overall design and the concepts behind the exhibition display. Available from www.scalapublishers.com and from the shop at Riverside Museum.

Gifted: The Tale of 10 Mysterious Book Sculptures Gifted to the City of Word and Ideas Anonymous POLYGON £9.99 HB 9781846972485 Over the course of a few months in 2011 an anonymous artist left book sculptures across the City of Edinburgh, love letters ‘In support of libraries, books, words and ideas’. In beautiful photographs and the artist’s own words their story is told completely for the first time.

Return to One Man’s Island: Paintings and Sketches from the Isle of May Keith Brockie

BIRLINN £25.00 HB 9781841589749 The book nature lovers have waited over twenty years for. In a beautifully illustrated sequel to the classic ‘One Man’s Island’, Keith Brockie revisits the flora and fauna of the Isle of May. ANTHOLOGY New Writing Scotland 30: A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening Carl MacDougall & Zoë Strachan (eds) ASLS £9.95 PB 9781906841096 This latest collection of excellent contemporary writing, from more than eighty contributors, features new work by – among many others – Lin Anderson, Ron Butlin, Valerie Gillies, Alasdair Gray, Andrew Greig, Agnes Owens, and the Glasgow comic-book duo metaphrog.

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR Echoes – One climber’s hard road to freedom Nick Bullock VERTEBRATE PUBLISHING £20 HB 9781906148539 The debut book by leading British mountaineer Nick Bullock. A prison officer for 15 years, Bullock discovered the mountains and subsequently shaped his existence around walking away from his life inside. A powerful and compelling exploration of freedom – and what it means to live life on your own terms.

The Last Burrah Sahibs Max Scratchmann STEVE SAVAGE PUBLISHERS £8.50 PB 9781904246381 Running a jute mill meant that Max’s dad was a boss, a ‘burrah Sahib’. A warm and witty look at the unofficial last years of British Colonial Life (as seen through the eyes of a small boy from Dundee growing up in the dissolving remnants of the British Raj).

Lifting the Lid: A Life at Kinloch Lodge, Skye Claire Macdonald BIRLINN £20.00 HB 9781780270470 The first forty eventful years of Kinloch Lodge on Skye and its journey from family home to luxury hotel and gourmet restaurant. With recipes through the decades from proprietrix Claire Macdonald.

The Importance of Being Awkward: The Autobiography of Tam Dalyell Tam Dalyell BIRLINN £9.99 PB 9781780270890 As he approaches eighty, Tam Dalyell looks back on over forty years as one of the most colourful and outspoken, yet deeply principled politicians of the modern era.

Way of the Wanderers: The Story of Travellers in Scotland Jess Smith BIRLINN £9.99 PB 9781780270784 This personal pilgrimage through the traditions and culture of a people for whom freedom is more important than security reveals the discrimination against Scotland’s travellers. From the author of the Jessie’s Journey Trilogy.

David Steel: The Biography David Torrance BITEBACK PUBLISHING £20.00 9781849541404 Description: The first fully authorised biography of one of the most influential politicians of the second half of the twentieth century. David Steel became the leader of the Liberal Party in 1976.

Later, Steel became the chief proponent of the merger that would see the formation of the Liberal Democrats.

Traveller in Two Worlds Vol. 2: The Tinker and the Student David Campbell LUATH PRESS £14.99 HB 9781908373328 This tells the tale of how the young American music student Linda Headlea’s unlikely marriage to the Traveller Duncan Williamson took him from the Traveller’s tent to international acclaim.

Cellmates: Our story of cancer, life, love and loss.

Claire Wilson SARABAND £9.99 9781908643179 This revealing true story tells of Alan and Claire’s experience of cancer, the eventual death of one, the grief and recovery of the other. The graphic honesty and real-time pace power you along their rollercoaster of despair and hope, denial

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Stirring the Dust Mary McCabe ARGYLL PUBLISHING £9.99 PB 9781908931030 A superb mix of historical research, memoir and narrative, convincing in its detail of the lives of the author’s and our own forebears.

CHILDREN When the Rains Come Tom Pow POLYGON £6.99 PB 9781846972065 In support of Malawi Under-privileged Mums charity, a traditional folk tale weaves through the story of three children being raised by their grandmother in Malawi. Full of dancing, love, colour and laughter.

Children’s 7+ Zoooo… Living Poetry for children Hugh D. Loxdale BRAMBLEBY BOOKS £9.99 Zoooo… is the ninth poetry book by Hugh D. Loxdale, a book of 33 short poems about animals and plants, illustrated with wonderful line drawings by the well-known artist Rita Muehlbauer. Truly a colourful collection of verse, some humorous, many adventurous, others that will make you think. Just right for children aged five to ninety five.

Iris and Isaac Catherine Rayner LITTLE TIGER PRESS £5.99 9781848950924 Winner of the 2012 UK Literacy Association Book Award, Iris and Isaac is a warm and delightfully illustrated story about friendship. When two polar bears stomp away from each other in a huff, they soon realize that being together is more important than anything else…

The Very Noisy Night Diana Hendry and Jane Chapman LITTLE TIGER PRESS £5.99 9781854306098 Little Mouse is rather scared when he hears things going bump in the night; will he be brave enough to stay in his own bed? A sweet and reassuring story that has long been a bedtime favourite for children and their parents.

Boy Who Wouldn’t Swim, The Kenneth Steven ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 9781906134723 Another adventure novel from this successful children’s author – aimed at 8-12 year olds.

A Granny Porage ABC Jean Marshall ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 9781908931085 Now children who have enjoyed Jean Marshall’s Granny Porage stories can add fun and familiarity to learing to read.

More Granny Porage Stories Jean Marshall ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 9781906134341 Three more cleverly illustrated stories for the under-eights.

Send for Granny Porage Jean Marshall ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781906134556 The latest picture book in the Granny Porage series for the young.

FICTION Land Beyond the Wave Paul Cuddihy.

CAPERCAILLIE BOOKS £8.99 9781906220686 Sequel to ‘The Hunted’, the adventure continues in 1920‘s New York where the main character although trying to lead a reformed life is drawn ineluctably into violent clashes with ethnic gangs and the assassins of Michael Collins, the Irish Republican leader, who have fled to America. This criminal underworld rubs shoulders with some shady political figures who subsequently rise to power.

The endgame is chilling as much is at stake . . . Order a copy now at sales@ capercailliebooks.co.uk and get a copy of The Hunted free The Time of Women Elena Chzihova GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS LTD. £12.90 9789081823906 The Russian Booker Prize winning novel The Time of Women tells the story of

three old women raising a small mute girl, Suzanna, in a communal apartment in the Soviet Union of the 1960s.

Memories of hardship in first cataclysmic half of the century, as well as the loss of their own children, have receded in the background of everyday worries.

Sin Zakhar Prilepin GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS LTD. £12.90 9789081823937 Novel-in-stories, Sin, has become a literary phenomenon in Russia. It has been hailed as the epitome of the spirit of the opening decade of the 21st century, and was called “the book of the decade” by the prestigious Super Natsbest Award jury. Now available for the first time in English, it not only embodies the reality of post-perestroika Russia, but also shows that even in this reality it is possible to maintain a positive attitude while remaining human.

Hardly Ever Otherwise Maria Matios GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS LTD. £13.40 9789491425127 The dramatic family saga, Hardly Ever Otherwise, narrates the story of several western Ukrainian families during the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and expands upon the idea that “it isn’t time that is important, but the human condition in time.” In Matios’s multi-tiered plot, the grand passions of ordinary people are illuminated under the caliginous light of an ethereal mysticism.

The Lost Button Irene Rozdobudko GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS LTD. £13.40 9781909156043 The novel tells the story of young student scriptwriter’s encounter with a mysterious, femme fatale actress named Liza at a vacation resort in the Carpathian Mountains in Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s. Unable to let go of his love after getting lost with her in the woods for one beautiful night, the young man’s fascination with the actress turns into an obsession that changes his entire life.

Khatyn Ales Adamovich GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS LTD. £13.40 9789491425158 Based on previously sealed war archives and rare witness records of the survivors, Khatyn is a heart wrenching story of the people who fought for their lives under the Nazi occupation during World War II. Through the prism of the retrospect perception as narrated by the novel’s main character Flyora author Ales Adamovich beholds genocide and horrific crimes against humanity.

Christened With Crosses Eduard Kochergin GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS LTD. £15.00 9789081823999 The unforgettable story of a young boy’s dangerous, adventure-filled westbound journey along the railways of postwar Russia. Based on a true story of Kochergin’s amazing life, this book depicts the awakening of artistic talent under highly unusual Russian circumstances. It is the memoir of an old man who, as a boy, learnt to find his way between extortionate state control and marauding banditry.

Sunshine on Scotland Street Alexander McCall Smith POLYGON £16.99 HB 9781846972324 The latest adventures of Bertie, Bruce, Big Lou and all the other residents of Edinburgh’s most famous address, 44 Scotland Street. Book your summer holiday now! Sunshine guaranteed.

The Wigtown Ploughman: Part of His Life John McNeillie BIRLINN £8.99 PB 9781780270869 Sensationally published in 1938, this gritty novel follows Andy Walker - a poor labourer working for a series of corrupt and cruel land-owners – from farm to petty crime and back to the soil he should never have left.

Breeze from the River Manjeera Hema Macherla LINEN PRESS £10.00 9780955961816 Breeze from the River Manjeera is the powerful and inspirational story of Neela who arrives in England as a bride for the brutal Ajay. In a personal, moving way, the novel explores the issues surrounding

the deep-rooted traditions of arranged marriages and how women like Neela struggle for independence and respect.

Can she find happiness against the odds?

The Device, The Devil and Me Stephanie Taylor LINEN PRESS £10.00 9780955961847 A novel about two strong, original women – a mother with terminal cancer and a daughter who thinks she is possessed by the devil. Lauren Walker forces herself to wear the mask of a model citizen with strict, self-imposed rules but the pressure of living so many lies finds release in self-harm and bulimia. Just as she braces herself to tell her family and seek help, her mother discloses her own tragic secret. There is no self-pity in this sharp, blackly funny, laugh-out-loud novel.

The Missing Juliet Bates LINEN PRESS £10.00 9780955961823 In spring 1958, journalist Frances Daye is persuaded to follow the trail of yet another woman thought to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia. While searching for Ania through the streets of Paris, she is haunted by memories of her past and starts to relate her own poignant tale.

The labyrinth of the beautiful city mirrors the twists and turns of the narrative as Frances wanders the streets searching for Ania and trying to make sense of her own memories.

Under an Emerald Sky Olukemi Amala LINEN PRESS £11.99 9780955961854 Two black babies are born five minutes apart in a UK hospital. Yewande is immersed in her rich Nigerian heritage and hears her ancestors’ voices – a double edged sword that heightens her spiritual awareness but alienates her sister and brings horrifying revelations about her family’s past. Mary is rejected at birth by her mother who has abandoned her African roots as she tries to blend into a small town in suburban Britain.

White Lies Lynn Michell LINEN PRESS £11.99 9780955961830 White Lies is about how we re-write history so that it doesn’t jar with the stories we tell ourselves. Eve is dutifully typing her ancient father’s memoirs of his time as a soldier in WW11 and in 1950s Kenya when the land-hungry Mau Mau rose up in bloody warfare against the colonials. With growing unease, she questions his account of what really happened. A completely different story of that time – of love and adultery – written

by Eve’s mother, comes to light after her death.

Blue Eyes Hema Macherla LINEN PRESS £11.99 9780955961861 Set in Gandhi’s volatile India, the story opens with Anjali, aged eighteen, about to be burnt alive on her husband’s funeral pyre – the fate of many widows. After a dramatic escape, things go badly wrong and she embarks on an extraordinary, often terrifying, journey of discovery.

Saleem, Anjali’s childhood friend, is entwined in her destiny. As he searches for her, he is caught up in the violence surrounding India’s struggle for freedom.

James with a Silent C Kerry McPhail LINEN PRESS £11.99 9780955961878 Kerry McPhail’s tribute to her late husband Jim is a poignant, brave and funny portrayal of his remarkable life: growing up in poverty, becoming involved in drugs on the mean streets of Glasgow then remarkably turning his life around only to be tragically diagnosed with advanced Hepatitis C. It is a love story between two exceptional people. For those with Hepatitis C and their carers, this memoir will bring acknowledgment and recognition. All author royalties are being donated to the British Liver Trust.

The Henry Experiment Sophie Radice LINEN PRESS £11.99 9780955961892 When Anna finds a little barefoot boy in a yellow mac on Hampstead Heath, she offers to walk him home.

Expecting gratitude from his parents, she is surprised to be met with hostility.

Maternal Anna and Henry’s academic father who believes that today’s children are bubble-wrapped and that boys must be trained for physical freedom and splendour lock horns as Henry’s scary trials begin.

The Making of Her Susie Nott-Bower LINEN PRESS £11.99 9780957005006 The Making of Her is the TV makeover programme that Clara never wanted to produce, featuring the one person she never would have chosen. Add to the mix an errant husband, a barefoot counsellor and a reclusive rock star with his Glaswegian side-kick, and change is inevitable. Will The Making of Her prove to be the making of them all?

Nothing is Heavy LINEN PRESS 9780957005037 Nothing is Heavy follows three characters - Beth a chip-shop worker, Amber an erotic dancer and broken-hearted George dressed in a monkey suit - over the course of one intense Saturday night. A sudden, dramatic death forces the three characters to choose between relative safety and risk. Unaware that their lives are already intimately connected by a previous tragedy, their fates collide again with completely unpredictable results.

Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe Adapted by David Purdie LUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 978-1-908373-26-7 Ivanhoe is one of Sir Walter Scott’s finest historical novels. David Purdie’s inspired reworking of its complex characters, romance and high drama is an engrossing page-turner. His armour polished, his sword and dialogue sharp, Ivanhoe re-emerges alive for the modern age.

The Roost Neil Butler THIRSTY BOOKS £7.99 PB Spectacular first fiction from young Shetland writer. ‘It’s wonderful.’ Lucy Ellmann FOLKLORE Scotland the Brave Land: 10,000 Years of Scotland in Story Stuart McHardy LUATH PRESS £7.99 PB 9781908373496 With the release of Disney-Pixar’s Brave the world’s attention is being drawn to Scotland and its fascinating history.

But Brave merely scrapes the surface of Scotland’s rich storytelling culture. With its captivating and often gruesome tales of heroic warriors in battle, bold heroines, deceitful aristocracy, and supernatural creatures this is a journey into the cultural heritage of a nation.

Arthur’s Seat: Journeys and Evocations Stuart McHardy and Donald Smith LUATH PRESS £7.99 PB 9781908373465 Arthur’s Seat, rising high above the Edinburgh skyline, is the city’s most awe-inspiring landmark. Although thousands climb to the summit every year, the history of the mountain remains a mystery; shrouded in myth and legend.

Inspired by the NVA’s Speed of Light, this is a salute to the ancient tradition of storytelling, guiding the reader around Edinburgh’s famous ‘Resting Giant’ with an exploration of the local folklore and customs.

GAELIC/SCOTS Sgeulachd Eile Mu Pheadar Rabaid Emma Thompson. Illustrated by Eleanor Taylor.

GRACE NOTE PUBLICATIONS £12.99 HB 9781907676123 Sgeulachd Eile Mu Pheadar Rabaid is the Scottish Gaelic translation of The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, a new tale written by Emma Thompson. In The Further Tale, Peter’s adventures take him beyond the boundaries of Mr McGregor’s garden all the way to Scotland. Here he meets the gentle giant Finlay McBurney, a distant Scottish relative, and in the Scottish hills his new adventure begins. Out by September 2012.

Sgeulachd Cailleach nan Gràineag Beatrix Potter GRACE NOTE PUBLICATIONS £5.99 HB 9781907676079 Scottish Gaelic translation of The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. As a child Beatrix

30 scottishreviewofbooks.org Potter had known an old country washerwoman called Kitty MacDonald, the inspiration for the twinkly-eyed washerwoman who does Peter Rabbit’s laundry.

A Tàillear à Gloucester Beatrix Potter GRACE NOTE PUBLICATIONS £5.99 HB 9781907676055 Gaelic Translation of The Tailor of Gloucester. The tale is based on the true story of a tailor who left the unsewn pieces of a coat in his shop and found that the garment had been mysteriously finished for him in the night by the secret helpers skilful little brown mice.

Sgeulachd An Dà Dhroch Luch Beatrix Potter GRACE NOTE PUBLICATIONS £5.99 HB 9781907676062 Scottish Gaelic Translation of The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Potter uses her own two pet mice, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, as models for the principal characters. The doll’s house belonged to a little girl who was her publisher’s niece.

Sgeulachd Thòmais Piseag Beatrix Potter GRACE NOTE PUBLICATIONS £5.99 HB 9781907676086 Scottish Gaelic Translation of The Tale of Tom Kitten. Potter had owned her first Lake District farm, Hill Top in the village of Near Sawrey, when she began work on The Tale of Tom Kitten. She shows Tom and his sisters living in the farmhouse and getting into mischief amongst the flowers of the beautiful cottage.

Modern Scots Grammar: Wirkin wi Wirds Christine Robinson LUATH PRESS £7.99 PB 9781908373397 Dealing with grammar in a modern way, this book gives readers an understanding of how language works. It aims to give readers confidence in using the Scots language. Accompanying schools materials are available.

A Gaelic Alphabet – a guide to the pronunciation of Gaelic letters and words George McLennan ARGYLL PUBLISHING £4.99 PB 9781906134334 Like its companion volume Scots Gaelic – an introduction to the basics, this handy book is of great help to learners and speakers.

Scots Gaelic – an introduction to the basics George McLennan ARGYLL PUBLISHING £4.99 PB 9781902831886 A new reprint of the successful Gaelic primer.

Slogans Galore – Gaelic words in English George McLennan ARGYLL PUBLISHING £4.99 PB 9781906134488 A reference guide to Gaelic-derived words in common use.

HISTORY Traditional Tales Allan Cunningham; Tim Killick (ed) ASLS £12.50 HB 9781906841089 A selection of folk stories steeped in the traditions of southern Scotland and northern England. Mixing the natural and supernatural, they blur the distinction between the oral traditions of the distant past and emerging ideas of literature and modernity. Originally published in 1822, these fascinating tales form an essential part of folkloric history.

Scotland: Mapping the Nation Christopher Fleet, Charles W.J. Withers and Margaret Wilkes BIRLINN £20.00 PB 9781780270913 Three expert authors explore the history of Scotland told from the innovative perspective of maps and map-making.

Beautifully illustrated throughout with full-colour plates.

Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire Walter Reid September 2012 BIRLINN £12.99 PB 9781843410591 The only book to give a complete study of Churchill’s relationships with his allies, both at home and abroad and the time and energy he devoted to fighting both the war and them.

Tales of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites Stuart McHardy

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 LUATH PRESS £7.99 PB 9781908373236 Jacobite influences are often found in Scottish culture. Many of their stories and legends are still told today in some form or another. McHardy examines the Jacobite tales to create a vivid historical picture of Scotland’s Stuart past.

Edinburgh’s Colonies – housing the workers Richard Rodger ARGYLL PUBLISHING £11.99 PB 9781906134785 A well-illustrated narrative of the distinctive and charming ‘Colonies’ housing of Edinburgh. Of interest to Edinburgh citizens but also to students of social and housing history.

The Clydesdale – workhorse of the world Mary Bromilow ARGYLL PUBLISHING £20.00 HB 9781906134655 A lovingly compiled story of this unsung Scottish export, the magnificent Clydesdale horse. Lovely photos, beautiful book.

Waverley Route – the life, death and rebirth of the Borders Railway David Spaven ARGYLL PUBLISHING £14.99 PB/ £20.00 HB 9781906134990/9781908931009 The story that says much about Britain’s railways in the late 1960s, and about the opportunities created by devolution of power in the last years of the twentieth century to right one of the great wrongs of the old model of London-based transport policy. A social history of the Borders as much as a transport book.

Illustrated with numerous period and current photos never before published.

HUMOUR The Satire of the Four Estates/ The Satyre of the Threi Estaits John McGrath and Sir David Lyndsay.

CAPERCAILLIE BOOKS £12.99, ISBN 9781906220679 A timely publication given the state of the Union and the questionable power of the media.

MARITIME The Golden Years of the Anchor Line Martin Bellamy and Bill Spalding GLASGOW LIFE (CO-PUBLISHED BY STENLAKE PUBLISHING) £16.99 PB 9781840335293 The Anchor Line was one of the great shipping companies of the Clyde, famed for its sleek, luxurious liners operating between Glasgow and New York. The book uses contemporary images and personal narratives from passengers and crew to give a compelling insight into the operation of this famous shipping line.

Available from www.stenlake.co.uk and from the shop at Riverside Museum.

Exodus David Hollett BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £40.00 HB 9781849270298 Between the years 1830 and 1930 emigration from Europe to North America took the form of a mass exodus.

During these years it is estimated that about 40 million people sailed from Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe for the United States, Canada, and other distant lands. The tragic story of the Irish and Scottish clearances and evictions, leading to disproportionately large emigrations from these troubled lands receive appropriate attention. One of the concluding chapters is dedicated to the loss of the White Star liner Titanic.

Back From The Brink Jamie Webster BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £9.99 PB 9780851748085 The fight to stop the closure of the Kvaerner Govan shipyard in Glasgow was the most high profile industrial campaign in Scotland since the UCS sit-in in the 1970’s. This is the inside story of that struggle, told in his own words by campaign leader, Govan’s yard convenor Jamie Webster.

Glenlee – The Life and Times of a Clyde Built Cape Horner Colin Castle & Ian MacDonald BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £20.00 HB 9780851745091 In the 10-year period beginning in 1882, 271 barques and full-riggers were built on the Clyde during which time the yards of Russell, Stephen, Connell, Lithgow and Rodger established a worldwide reputation for the construction of large sailing ships of outstanding design, quality and durability. Three-masted

barque Glenlee was one such vessel. This is her fascinating story.

Gone…

Bill Cumming BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £55.00 HB 9781849270137 Based on real people and events this is a gripping factual account of the background events and repercussions of the milestone launch of the world’s first 4-masted iron merchant ship in 1875. The phenomenal success of this large square rigged sailing-ship, named County of Peebles, prompted R & J Craig of Glasgow to launch a further eleven fabulous jute clippers.

Half of Glasgow’s Gone Michael Dick BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £9.95 PB 9780851745091 Glasgow, until recently, was a major European port and this publication describes its heyday, decline, neglect and subsequent redevelopment.

Glasgow’s Harbour’s significant contribution to the 1939-45 war effort is also covered in some detail. The book records an important part of Glasgow’s heritage and a similar pattern of change, redevelopment and regeneration can be seen in other British ports whose roots lay in the 19th century.

Truly Clyde Built William Kane BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £60.00 HB 9781849270144 Scott’s of Greenock grew from a small family business building and repairing Herring Busses in 1711 to leading the world in both merchant and naval shipbuilding to the highest standards.

The gates closed permanently in 1993 thus ending a great relationship between the people of Greenock and the Scott Family Enterprise. DVD with 2GB of documents, tables and photographs included.

Keepers of The Light Malcolm MacPherson BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £10.00 HB 9781849270113 There are well over 200 lighthouses positioned around Scotland’s breathtaking and energetic coastline. The author has captured 33 of these dramatic Scottish lighthouses in watercolour for this first volume of his original paintings.

Each painting is accompanied by a brief description of the lighthouse giving details of location, dimensions, history, and technical information.

At The Sharp End George H Parker BROWN, SON & FERGUSON £19.95 HB 9780851746104 Provides an insight into the building and repairing of ships, on the Tay, on the Clyde, on the three rivers of the northeast of England, shipbuilding labour relations, and reasons for the decline of the industry. The late George Parker, the third generation of his family to build ships, writes about shipbuilding from the “inside”.

NATURE A Handbook of Scotland’s Wild Harvests Fi Martynoga (ed) SARABAND £12.99 9781887354967 This inspirational guide is bursting with know-how on Scotland’s wild harvest, covering what, where, when and how you can use your bounty in sustainable ways – from the most useful and widespread of species to the less well-known, and from leaves and berries to saps, seeds, seaweeds, mosses and wood. Aquaponic Gardening: A Guide to Raising Fish and Vegetables Together Sylvia Bernstein SARABAND £16.99 9781908643087 Aquaponics is an amazingly easy way of gardening that is completely organic, hugely productive, resource-efficient, and there’s no weeding, watering or digging.

This is the definitive do-it-yourself manual, giving you all the tools you need to create your own aquaponic system and enjoy fresh and healthy fruit and vegetables.

POETRY An Cuilithionn 1939: The Cuillin 1939 and Unpublished Poems Sorley MacLean; Christopher Whyte (ed) ASLS £12.50 HB 9781906841034 This major new edition of MacLean’s epic work includes 400 lines never before

published, along with MacLean’s own English translation, and an extended commentary. Forty-five other previously unpublished poems by MacLean also appear here for the first time, with facing English translations.

Collected Poems Robert Rendall STEVE SAVAGE PUBLISHERS £25.00 HB 9781904246367 Although Robert Rendall was one of Orkney’s most highly-regarded 20thcentury poets, his poetry has long been hard to obtain. This collection contains his four published collections, together with many poems which were published in newspapers or survive only in manuscript. An opportunity to appreciate the breadth of Rendall’s poetic work.

The Magicians of Edinburgh Ron Butlin POLYGON £9.99 PB 9781846972362 A wonderful collection of poems

by Edinburgh’s Makar, Ron Butlin, reflecting and inspired by the City of Edinburgh.

Ragas and Reels: A Visual and Poetic Look at some New Scots Bashabi Fraser & Hermann Rodrigues LUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373342 The intricate stories told in Rodrigues’ portraits are matched by the rhythms and imagery in Fraser’s poetry. This book offers an insight into the fusion of Eastern and Western cultures in today’s Scotland. By peppering her poems with both Scots words and Indian words, Fraser demonstrates the bi-cultural nature of many of today’s Scots.

Don’t Mention This to Anyone: Poems from India & Pakistan Tessa Ransford LUATH PRESS £8.99 PB 978-1-908373-18-2 Ransford takes the reader on a journey to explore the differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’, linking the reader to a world now lost to most. These poems question what it is to be both British and Indian, drawing on the author’s memories and experiences to celebrate and uncover an ‘Indian’ self.

Earth John Hudson LUATH PRESS £8.99 PB 9781908373366 This is a beautiful exploration of our dependence on our planet. Through a variety of different poetic techniques, Hudson skilfully blends form and content to ask the perennial question: What does it mean to be human?

A Rug of a Thousand Colours Tessa Ransford and Iyad Hayatleh LUATH PRESS £8.99 PB 9781908373243 Iyad Hayatleh and Tessa Ransford create a vivid tapestry of dialog exploring their different cultural backgrounds and views regarding religion, tradition and society.

This is a powerful explanatory project between a Syrian/Palestinian poet who is now a resident in Scotland and an established Scottish poet, signifying a unity of imagination, experience and perception.

Rooster by Gerry McGrath CARCANET PRESS £9.95 9781847771162 ‘McGrath marks the arrival of a new generation of Scottish poets.’ -New Statesman. Gerry McGrath’s second book of poems paints precisely the commonplace detail of human experience. Taking inspiration from outstanding writers in Eastern Europe, Kashmir and Spain, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed A to B (Carcanet, 2008) offers a perspective that is haunting and new.

Bevel by William Letford CARCANET PRESS £9.95 ISBN 9781847771926 ‘The pleasure I have gained from William Letford’s poems…will, I am confident, stay with me for ever’Nicolas Lezard, The Guardian. The highly anticipated début collection by an energetic young Scottish poet and roofer. Dubbed ‘the future of Scottish poetry’, Letford’s readings have become a YouTube sensation. His poems are sure and strong, the words dance. Bevel will be launched from 8.30pm on 24th August at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Small World by Richard Price CARCANET PRESS £9.95 ISBN 9781847771582 ‘Richard Price is by far the most gifted Scottish poet of his generation’- The Scotsman. The fourth collection by a Whitbread and Forward Prize shortlisted Scottish poet. Small Island offers a moving portrait of love under intolerable pressure, as the poet’s partner suffers a brain haemorrhage. Price was recently chosen to represent Great Britain in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Written World project.

POLITICS & CURRENT AFFAIRS Hubris: How HBOS Wrecked the Best Bank in Britain Ray Perman BIRLINN £20.00 HB 9781780270517 For over 300 years the Bank of Scotland was one of the most admired and successful banks in the world, but its crash as part of HBOS left it reviled and distrusted, and having lost £10 billion.

What went wrong?

Arguing for Independence: Evidence, Risk and Tackling the Wicked Issues Stephen Maxwell LUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373335 By offering an assessment of the case for independence across all its dimensions, Arguing for Independence fills a longstanding gap in Scotland’s political bookshelf as we enter a new and critical phase in the debate on Scotland’s political future. With a foreword by Owen Dudley Edwards Scotland: The Growing Divide: Old Nation, New Ideas Tom Brown and Henry McLeish LUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373458 This is the follow-up to Scotland: The Road Divides, released in 2007. Five years on, and many of the conclusions reached in The Road Divides have become a political reality. Now facing an imminent referendum on the independence of Scotland, the authors focus on the changing face of politics and what this means for Scotland and the UK. Carnegie’s Call – developing the success habit Michael Malone ARGYLL PUBLISHING £7.99 PB 9781908931047 Recognising the achievements of emigré and man of achievement Andrew Carnegie, Michael Malone interviews Scots who have distinguished themselves and seeks to understand attitudes to success. He uncovers some fascinating insights into how we can develop the success habit.

Fags Booze Drugs + children – what parents need to know to keep children safe Max Cruickshank ARGYLL PUBLISHING £9.99 PB 9781906134983 The aim of this book is to inform, educate and empower parents or carers of young people about how drugs have the potential to damage their health and wellbeing. Factual, informative and rooted in years of experience as a youth worker.

Afternow – what next for a healthy Scottish society?

Phil Hanlon & Sandra Carlisle ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931054 The authors look at health and beyond health to the main social, economic, environmental and cultural challenges of our times.

The Great Takeover – how materialist values now dominate our lives and what we can do about it Carol Craig & Zara Kitson ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931061 Where do these ideas come from and what can be done.

The New Road – community renewal Alf Young & Ewan Young ARGYLL PUBLISHING £5.99 PB 9781908931078 A father and son take a journey to see some of the inspiring community action projects going on.

Scandalous Immoral and Improper – The Trial of Helen Percy Helen Percy ARGYLL PUBLISHING £9.99 PB 9781906134747 In 1995 Helen Percy, a young Church

of Scotland minister in an outwardly idyllic rural parish was raped by one of her congregation. This book is her revealing, remarkable and candid story – a beautifully and powerfully written testament to the strength of the human spirit and a burning indictment of conservative forces in Scotland’s national Church and among popularly held attitudes.

The Scots Crisis of Confidence Carol Craig ARGYLL PUBLISHING £9.99 PB 9781906134709 A brand new edition of Carol Craig’s successful exposition of Scots’ attitudes to and predilection for negativity. She offers a refreshingly different analysis of the big themes of Scottish culture. Rewritten in parts and brought up to date.

SPORT Athens to Zagreb: Hearts in Europe Mike Buckle LUATH PRESS £14.99 HB 9781908373410 A must-read for Hearts fans, Athens to Zagreb is the definitive guide to all matches played by the team in European competitions since 1958. Only the third Scottish team to enter the European Cup, this record of the team’s glorious history is told from the point of view of some of the people who were closely involved, and of course the fans themselves.

TRAVEL Scotland Mountain Biking – Wild Trails Vol.2 Phil McKane VERTEBRATE PUBLISHING £15.95 HB 9781906148522 A compact and portable mountain biking guidebook featuring 24 classic routes across Scotland, suitable for riders of all abilities. Researched, ridden and written by Scottish Mountain Bike Guide Phil McKane, each route features clear and easy to use Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 maps, detailed directions and photography by Andy McCandlish.

The East Highland Way Kevin Langan LUATH PRESS £9.99 PB 9781908373403 A new, revised edition of the detailed and descriptive guide to the route developed

by Kevin Langan in 2007. Beginning in Fort William and culminating in Aviemore, the trail forms a new walking route between the northern end of the West Highland Way and the southern end of the Speyside Way. EVENTS RON BUTLIN, the Edinburgh Poet Laureate and author of The Magicians of Edinburgh, CARLOS GAMERRO, author of An Open Secret, and ANDRES NEUMAN, author of Traveller of the Century, read at the Edinburgh Book Fringe 2012 Tuesday 21 August 2012, 1-2pm Word Power Books, 43-45 West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9DB Free admission, donations welcome.

Contact books@word-power.co.uk or 0131 662 9112 literary organisations and societies Attention all girls of slender means and any chaps who may be loitering with intent; it’s time to join the small (but perfectly formed and effervescent) Muriel Spark Society, which had the blessing of the great writer herself and which goes on its way rejoicing in her memory. For further information contact Alan Taylor at aftaylor2000@aol.com or on 07803 970344

Vol 8, Number 3, 2012 31

Scottish Review of Books

LINLITHGOW

ON ThE hErOISM Of MOrTALS

BOOK FESTIVAL

by Allan Cameron

November 2 - 4 2012 Iain Banks, Alistair Darling, Liz Lochead, Alexander McCall Smith and many more w w w. l i n l i t h g o w b o o k f e s t i v a l . o r g

ISBN: 9781908251084 £8.95

From living statues to domestic abuse in leafy Kelvinside, this collection is endlessly inventive. Fictions unfold within fictions, stories tumble into one another, lives collide in unpredictable ways and all is executed with wry and dark humour.

VAGABOND VOICES www.vagabondvoices.co.uk

M c N AU GHTAN’ S Bookshop and Gallery

Château Life

3a & 4a Haddington Place, Poetry & Writing Courses in France Creative writing & poetry courses at Château Ventenac as well as our popular retreat weeks Tutors for 2012 & 2013 include: Sean O’Brien

Patrick Gale

Anne-Marie Fyfe

Pascale Petit

Fiona Sampson

Inspiring location beside the Canal du Midi Spectacular views over vineyards to the Pyrenees Lovely gardens and pool, great food

www.chateaulifecourses.com Call Julia on +44 (0) 7773 206344 email: julia@chateaulifecourses.com

Edinburgh EH7 4AE. Tel: 0131 556 5897.

Email: mcnbooks@btconnect.com www.mcnaughtansbookshop.com

Second hand and antiquarian bookshop now incorporating new gallery space 1100 - 1700 Tuesdays - Saturdays

New writiNg ScotlaNd

30

A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening edited by carl Macdougall and Zoë Strachan ASLS

www.asls.org.uk

ISBN 978 1 906841 09 6 July 2012 £9.95 82 contributors 336 pages Paperback New Writing Scotland is the principal forum for poetry and short fiction in Scotland today. New Writing Scotland 30: A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening is the latest collection of excellent contemporary literature, drawn from a wide cross-section of Scottish culture and society, and includes new work by – among many others – Lin Anderson, Ron Butlin, Valerie Gillies, Alasdair Gray, Andrew Greig, Agnes Owens, and the Glasgow comicbook duo metaphrog.

Contributors Allan Cameron is the publisher of Vagabond Books. He is also a translator and author whose books include The Berlusconi Bonus, In Praise of the Garrulous and On the Heroism of Mortals.

Joseph Farrell was Professor of Italian at Strathclyde University. He has translated and written a number of books, including a biography of Dario Fo. His latest book is about Sicily.

Rosemary Goring is Literary Editor of the Herald and the Sunday Herald. She is the author of Scotland: The Autobiography. A novel is in the offing.

Kapka Kassabova is the author of the Bulgaria memoir Street Without a Name.

Her book about the Argentine tango, Twelve Minutes of Love (2011), was short-listed for the Scottish Book Awards. She is also the author of two poetry collections and the novel Villa Pacifica (2011). Her residency at Clifford Chambers was a shared appointment between The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (shakespeare.org.uk) and the Hosking Houses Trust (hoskinghouses. co.uk).

Brian McCabe has published several collections of short stories, a novel, The Other McCoy, and five volumes of poetry.

His Selected Stories appeared in 2003.

Lesley McDowell is the author of Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine Twentieth Century Women Writers. She is currently working on a novel based loosely on the life of a friend of Mary Shelley.

Harry McGrath is a writer, reviewer and editor. He taught at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia before moving back to Scotland where he is championing the use of the .scot prefix with web addresses.

Susan Mansfield is a writer and journalist who has been covering the arts in Scotland for the best part of two decades. She has a particular interest in literature, theatre and visual art.

Brian Morton is a writer, broadcaster and journalist whose interests and expertise range from jazz to ornithology. In the past few years he has written books on Prince, Shostakovich and Edgar Allan Poe. Theresa Munoz is an ORSAS scholar at the University of Glasgow where she has been working on a thesis on Tom Leonard. She recently published her first collection of poetry, Close.

With an amazing line-up of internationally renowned authors, exclusive performances of specially commissioned work, bespoke walking tours and topical debates, Manchester is the destination of choice for literature lovers this October.

Featuring Wang Anyi, Simon Armitage, Clare Balding, Amiri Baraka, Pat Barker, Michael Chabon, Carol Ann Duffy, Richard Ford, Iain M Banks, Mark Haddon, AM Homes, James Kelman, Penelope Lively, Jackie Kay, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Salley Vickers, Jeanette Winterson and many more.

Visit the festival website for full programme details or call 0161 236 5555 to order a brochure. www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk Sponsored by

Paul H. Scott is a former diplomat. Among his many publications is his autobiography, A Twentieth Century Life, in which he recalls encounters with De Gaulle, Castro, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark.

Colin Waters studied literature at St Andrews and trained as a librarian.

Formerly deputy editor of the SRB, he now works at the Scottish Poetry Library.

EDINBURGH TRULY A CITY OF LITERATURE

SUNSHINE ON SCOTLAND STREET

A 44 SCOTLAND STREET NOVEL

Alexander McCall Smith Bertie and friends are back for summer in the city. £16.99 hbk Available NOW in bookshops, online or order direct on 0845 370 0067 quoting SRB812

1825-ScotRevBks F\Px3 A-W.indd 1

GIFTED

THE TALE OF 10 MYSTERIOUS BOOK SCULPTURES GIFTED TO THE CITY OF WORD AND IDEAS

Gifts from an anonymous artist to Edinburgh and the world. £9.99 pbk

THE MAGICIANS OF EDINBURGH

Ron Butlin Edinburgh’s Makar pays homage to the city which inspires him. £9.99 pbk

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

02/08/2012 14:43