THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

David Robinson reads Maggie O’ Farrell’s much anticipated follow up to Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait, and appreciates its exploration of the iconic, of how art speaks to art.

 

The Marriage Portrait
By Maggie O’Farrell
Published by Tinder Press

 

For all lovers of ekphrasis, Page 337 of Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel The Marriage Portrait is a must-read. Ekphrasis is, in case you’ve forgotten your English Higher, a posh word for describing or reflecting on a work of art, and on Page 337 we come across a clear case of that rare thing, the only slightly muted double ekphrasis.

Allow me to explain. It’s 1561, a highly significant year in the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici (1545-1561). She is staying with her husband Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, in a remote hunting lodge, convinced that he is about to murder her. (This isn’t a spoiler, but something we have been told at the start of the novel.) The Duke has set everything up for his young bride to have her portrait painted by his favourite artist. This novel is, essentially, a meditation on that portrait, on what it – or any work of art – can and cannot show.

Now if, after you learnt about ekphrasis in Higher English, you went on to study the subject at university, you may have come across Robert Browning’s 1842 dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’, which is widely supposed to have been written about Lucrezia and Alfonso. And even if you have never read it, you would have noticed that O’Farrell chose its opening lines as one of her novel’s two epigraphs:

‘That’s my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive …’

The Marriage Portrait is a lot more than a nod to Browning’s poem: it takes it for a tango over every square foot of the dance floor. ‘There she is,’ Duke Alfonso says on Page 337, ‘my first Duchess’. This is, to use another show-off word, a fine example of parapraxis (or Freudian slip, as the hoi polloi might anachronistically prefer to call it). As soon as he has said it, the duke realises he has misspoken. ‘My beautiful Duchess,’ he quickly corrects himself.

An informal and completely unreliable survey reveals that this corrected remark is what most of my friends think Browning’s poem is about: a duke showing a courtier a portrait of his dead wife, lovingly mourning her youthful beauty. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. As he looks at the portrait, the duke concentrates on her inadequacies, the way she didn’t appreciate ‘my gift of a one-hundred-years-old name’, how she would  smile promiscuously at anyone in the court, not just him. As he tells the courtier

Oh, sir, she smiles, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.”

Reader, he murdered her.

So that’s the first bit of ekphrasis sorted out: all of this is revealed by the Duke to a diplomat from another court pushing the claims of another woman as a replacement bride as they contemplate the portrait of Wife No 1. (It’s a bit odd that any Duke would admit to bumping off his first wife, or even speak ill of her, while talking to a man he hopes will supply his second, but take that up with Browning, not me.) If I have spent so long on Browning, it is because his poem, itself an example of one art form transforming into another (painted portrait to poem) is now the source of a second, rarer, transformation, from poem about painting to novel. O’Farrell doesn’t follow Browning slavishly, and her range is wider, but his are the tracks she set off following, even if she chooses an altogether different terminus.

As with her last novel Hamnet, winner of the Women’s Prize and, in the US, last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award, O’Farrell brings someone from the shadows of factual history into the limelight of fiction.  Can a Renaissance princess ever really be in the shadows, you might wonder. But just read the second epitaph O’Farrell places after the Browning quote. ‘The ladies,’ writes Boccaccio in The Decameron, ‘are forced to follow the whims, fancies and dictates of their fathers, mothers, brothers and husbands, so that they spend most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms, where they sit in apparent idleness….’

Browning and Boccaccio, you may notice, contradict each other. If the last duchess were indeed confidently smiling at everyone in the court as Browning’s poem has it, she could hardly be the cloistered, surrendered wife that Boccaccio seems to be suggesting is the only possible future for a woman at a Renaissance court. The Marriage Portrait explores the tension between these two extremes through the eyes of Lucrezia, the fifth child of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519-74) and his wife Eleanora of Toledo.

As with Sarah Dunant’s impressive Renaissance-set historical fiction, the challenge here is to find a protagonist who can challenge the limitations society placed on women’s lives without dragging the novel into ahistorical feminist wishful thinking.  Lucrezia fits the bill perfectly. There’s a spark to her, an independence of mind. When her siblings’ antiquities tutor gets to that part in The Odyssey when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter in order to persuade the gods to give him a favourable wind on the way to Troy, Lucrezia winces at the king’s deceit, how he lured away Iphigenia by promising her she was to marry Achilles at the altar instead of being sacrificed there herself. None of the duke’s other daughters get nightmares from thinking of this, but none of the other children notice half as much. They’re not drawn to drawing, to art. Books don’t stick in their brains the way they do in Lucrezia’s.

They’re not as daring either. Her father, Duke Cosimo, keeps a tiger in the basement dungeons of the Palazzo Vecchio (fact), but Lucrezia is the only one of his children who dares to reach through the bars and touch it (fiction?).  Not being the eldest daughter, Lucrezia is also given greater freedom to mingle with and befriend the servants, and does this so effectively that she can even, when necessary, pass as one. To her siblings, she’s a drama queen and they wonder how she can be any other kind: she herself realizes she lacks the small talk and social graces necessary for court. Even her father fears that the marriage to the Duke of Ferrara will all be over within a month.

The story frequently switches between Lucrezia’s childhood and early teenage years in Florence and her time in Ferrara, where she increasingly realises the danger she is in from Duke Alfonso as long as she remains childless. These are the strongest scenes in the book. O’Farrell brings all her remarkable skills as a descriptive writer to bear as she shows us Lucrezia’s loneliness in a court far from her family and the Florentine palace in which she has been virtually confined all her life. In this new court, there are mocking, undecipherable asides, different fashions, incomprehensible gossip, so many new faces to remember, so many strange, echoing corners to explore, so many secrets, so many spies, so much to fear ….

I won’t reveal what happens after the twin tracks of ekphrasis merge on Page 337. But I would urge you to read the Browning poem all the same. You don’t need to: O’Farrell’s novel is complete in its own right. But do read ‘My Last Duchess’ if only to ask this question: if you yourself had decided to write a novel based on it, just how far short of a novel as wonderful as this would it fall?

 

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, is published by Tinder Press on 30 August, price £25

Across 2022, Publishing Scotland will be curating a series of online content to tie in with Visit Scotland’s Year of Stories. Each month we will share the features, profiles and interviews that you can find over on their website.

 

You can visit Publishing Scotland’s Year of Stories homepage here.

During the summer, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is BEYOND WORDS.

 

Each month Publishing Scotland will be offering Publisher Spotlights, so you can get to know some of Scotland’s publishers. Catch up with the latest profiles.

Publishing Scotland spotlight Blue Fox Comics

Publishing Scotland spotlight Kitchen Press

 

Each month Publishing Scotland will have features too, including book recommendation lists and author interviews.

Click here to read an interview with Eunice Olimide about her book How to Get Into Fashion.

To read an interview with Kirsti Wishart about her novel The Projectionist, click here.

To read an interview with Jeni Ianetta about Bad Girl Bakery, click here.

Want to know more about the graphic novel creators behind The Bold Collection project? Click here to hear more from them.

 

If you want to take part in the Year of Stories, follow the hashtags #YS2022 and #TalesofScotland, or visit the VisitScotland website.

Following on from his acclaimed Poverty Safari, Darren McGarvey explores Britain’s long-distance relationship with reality. The vocal and the voiceless and the powerful from the powerless feel ever more disconnected, and so questions of how to truly change for the better – for all – are all the more important. Read an extract below.

 

Extract taken from The Social Distance Between Us
By Darren McGarvey
Published by Ebury Press

 

To me, words are like music. When arranged in a particular way, and written or spoken with a certain conviction, an alluring harmony is produced which I find immediately arresting. What is being said, it’s meaning or, indeed, whether I agree or not comes entirely secondary to this initial capture of my fleeting attention. I am often propelled by a sudden, ferocious interest into a particular field of thought or study – not necessarily by a desire to educate myself on a specific topic, but because I am drawn to how someone writes or talks about it. Much like a great tune, which can be enjoyed without any real understanding or foreknowledge of its genre or era, well-arranged words, expressing fluent, coherent ideas, are simply music to my ears. And, to stick with the music analogy, it shouldn’t matter if the material originated in the mind of an Oxbridge graduate or a guitarist who learned their trade on the dole: if they can play, they can play.

My lifelong fascination with language and the subsequent capacity I have developed for speaking is not something I consider remarkable. Yet, as I’ve moved out of hardship and into cultural and social spheres which are dominated by the middle classes, I am increasingly aware of how surprised people are when they hear someone from a working-class background express themselves with a degree of articulacy. As a ‘diamond in the rough’, currently ascending the social scale, I encounter people from higher social classes more frequently.

Often, touring the country, I feel like a living art installation that middle-class people pay money to interact with. As I attend more events and engage in more media, I get asked more questions. Some are thoughtful. Others are personal. And some of them are downright rude. Irrespective of the quality of the question, or my enthusiasm to address it, a great deal of my time is now devoted to furnishing my various inquisitors, on social media, television, radio and even in the street, with polite and satisfactory responses. The question I least enjoy answering is also the one I am asked most frequently: ‘Where did you learn to speak so well, Darren?’ The people who ask me this question always think they are the first person to ask it. Countless journalists, public officials and book festival enthusiasts quite simply cannot restrain themselves. They don’t even realise how insulting it is to be asked such a question. What these people are really broadcasting is that they are somewhat surprised by my ability, as a working-class person, to string a coherent sentence together without soiling myself.

I have since developed a standard response to this question: a paraphrased, conversational version of the ‘words are like music’ passage you just read. I have adopted that as my go-to reply because it’s a lot easier for everyone involved if I don’t say something like: ‘Why shouldn’t I be able to express myself clearly? These are my words, too – middle-class cunt.’

 

The Social Distance Between Us  by Darren McGarvey is published by Ebury Press, priced £20.

Deception. Theft. Murder. All you need is confidence – and that’s exactly what readers explore in Denise Mina’s new novel Confidence. She tells Books from Scotland more about her new book, but also plenty of other book recommendations along the way.

Confidence
By Denise Mina
Published by Harvill Secker

 

The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?

Chicken Licken from the East Kilbride Library when I was five. We moved away and never took it back and I felt so guilty about it that I had a bit of a horror of libraries after that. Recently I was in one and they’ve done away with fines and admonishments.

It was a very good book. My mum read it to me because I was a very late reader. Spoiler: Chicken Licken was a conspiracy theorist.

 

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest book Confidence. What did you want to explore in writing this book?

Firstly I wanted to write a book for everyone who feels like running away, I wrote it during lockdown and the urge to get the fuck out of here was very strong so I wrote an escapist book, literally. I also wanted to explore the fractured way we all receive stories now, the experience of watching a series while scrolling news and playing a narrative game. I love the texture of that, the overlap and bleed and how stories meld into one another.

 

The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?

Heart of A Dog by Bulgakov. It’s about a dog being given the pituitary gland and testese of a man and becoming a half man dog. He remembers a lot of words he’s heard, mostly swearing. He gets a job as a cat strangler and the doctor who made him tries to turn him back into a dog. I loved it because Bulgakov couldn’t get published while he was alive in Stalinist Russia but he kept writing and telling his truth. It was nothing to do with the reception. His writing feels very internal and very true.

 

The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book?

I’m a pig for an atlas but good ones are hard to find these days. I have a catalogue for a show I saw at the Royal Academy in the 1980s ‘German Art in the 20th Century’ and the images are tremendous. As an actual object, my father in law used to buy me folio society books and got me box set of Graham Greene crime novels which I love.

 

The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?

My best friend from school gave me One Hundred Years of Solitude to read and although we drifted away from each other over the decades, I don’t think we’ll ever lose touch because of that book. It showed me a depth to her character I coudn’t have guessed at while we were fighting about boys.

 

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?

Jane Gardham’s Old Filth. The truth is that structure deserves to be broken and readers are delighted and refreshed when it happens. Every so often she just breaks out of descriptive proses and writes a script for a TV show. I think I had forgotten I could do that and how thrilling it is to read.

 

The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?

All historical fiction does that, but I especially love Zola. His Germinal series took me to a place I didn’t know, a time I wasn’t familiar with and is so alien it can be read as sci-fi.

 

The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?

Finishing Mel Brooke’s All About Me but I don’t want it to end.

 

Confidence  by Denise Mina is published by Harvill Secker, priced £14.99.

When Holly applies for a job at the Paradise – one of the city’s oldest cinemas – she thinks it will be like any other job, and yet… The secrets and happenings of the Paradise go much deeper than she could ever expect. Camilla Grudova talks to Books from Scotland about her new novel.

 

Children of Paradise
By Camilla Grudova
Published by Atlantic Books

 

Can you tell us a little bit of what we can expect from Children of Paradise?

It’s a novella about cinema workers and the building of the cinema as a character. I named it after the film by Marcel Carne.

 

It’s quite a different style and premise than that of The Doll’s Alphabet. How did you find writing a novel vs short stories? How did you approach the writing of this one?

I wrote this one very slowly, starting as soon as I got a job as the Cameo cinema in Edinburgh, because the building itself is so alluring, but it wasn’t until we were all laid off during the pandemic that I had enough distance from it to write about it and turn it into the Paradise. Writing short stories is a lot easier for me, a lot more natural, Children of Paradise is quite short. I don’t think I will ever write a Tolstoy length novel. Maybe if I didn’t have day jobs, I would go all Proustian, who knows.

 

You have worked in cinemas in the past – how did this influence the book? What is it about cinemas that makes them ripe for exploration?

Yes, I worked at the Cameo and currently work at a different cinema. I think because they are dreamy dying places, the pandemic really showed they are on their last legs, I like them for the same reason I like swimming pools, you get away from your phone and the world and just become immersed in an image or water. It was a literary challenge as well, how do you write a story about people sitting silently in the dark?

In general, all my work is interested in labour and money, and particularly low paid labour and the people like myself in those positions and the influence of that on the soul, body, mind, and the heart.

 

What inspired you for this book? What influences made their way in?

The films each chapter are named after were an inspiration. I try to hide a bit of each film in the book for people who have seen those films. There are not many novels with cinemas in them, but Laughter in the Dark by Nabokov, and Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen were inspirations, and Robert Coover’s A Night at the Movies and a children’s book called Martha the Movie Mouse by Arnold Lobel which had the poetic vibe I wanted to use – I like children’s books from the 90s, 70s, 80s, 50s. And of course, I was taking notes on all my cinema shifts.

 

The Paradise is a place of many secrets; the oddballs within its walls also appearing quite cryptic on the face of it. Do you enjoy building mystery and layers to people and places in fiction? How do you approach bringing such dimension to the story and its inhabitants?

I don’t think I consciously try to bring mystery, I feel myself a visual rather than psychological writer, but also especially in the UK I don’t think the upper classes think or believe that people economically below them have inner lives or souls, so it’s important for me to hopefully show the imperfect and interesting souls of these workers. I was working an event recently when a posh customer said ‘thank you for seeing me, the other bartenders don’t see me’, but really I used a mirror with hands to open a bottle of prosecco for her, like some sort of creature from Beauty and the Beast. She didn’t see me. But at the same time, I don’t want her to see me, I hate when customers ask my name, I like to be a utilitarian flaneur taking in bits and details of people and feeding it into the Literature Machine.

Also, at the Cameo I remember a colleague had a customer say to her ‘I bet you know nothing about opera’ when we had an opera screening when in fact that colleague of mine was in depth on opera research for a writing project we were doing together, but it’s almost more satisfying not telling the customer that. As a person I don’t want to be anything or anyone, a quiet servant of literature, a reader and writer. I think authors have too much of a public personality perhaps and their work is constantly being read in relation to their public persona and people get quite annoyed if there isn’t one to do that with. I think maybe also in terms of writing there is pressure for everything to be solved and wrapped up, the crime novel I think dominates the whole of fiction writing industry and there is less room for eternal and metaphysical mysteries, and even the sad little mysteries of everyday life that will forever allude us.

 

What are you reading just now?

Belladonna by Daša Drndić, The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov.

 

What do you hope readers take from Children of Paradise?

Some memorable images I suppose, maybe to sneak into their dream life. I don’t have any political or moral messages in my work.

 

Children of Paradise  by Camilla Grudova is published by Atlantic Books, priced £14.99.

Michael Pedersen’s latest book is a wonderful exploration of grief, friendship and how people shape us. BooksfromScotland spoke to him about the challenges of writing such a personal story.

 

Boy Friends
By Michael Pedersen
Published by Faber

 

This is your first book of prose, but it began as a kind of diary addressed to your late friend Scott Hutchison. At what point did you begin to think that it could be a book?

It was entirely accidental, we just lost Scott in May and I had already signed up to do this month-long residency in the Curfew Tower in Northern Ireland in July. Neu! Reekie! were curating it for the entire year. I took the hard summer month of July in one of these coastal towns, known for its barbecues and caravans – I elected to fall on the sword for the team in that respect.

I was always supposed to be there for this month of isolation, working on a third poetry collection, although not under those circumstances. I knew I was in a pretty fragile state, I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to go somewhere where I knew no-one to be alone for four plus weeks, but you fight so hard as a writer in your busy lives for these moments of isolation to create new work and I thought, well, I’ve been around people so much, it might be quite a blessing to just be around strangers for a while who have no expectations of me, who don’t come festooned in grief and ready for heavy conversations. So, I went to the Curfew Tower and I didn’t know how the writing was going to go, but very quickly to break myself out of that uncertainty I started writing diaries about what I’d been up to during the day. I thought, we’ll do some social observation stuff to exercise the writing muscle from that perspective. Very quickly, I found for me the most cathartic way to deal with some of the ferocity of Scott not being there, and those bigger questions about how life perjures, about who I was without this seminal friendship, was to just replace that for the time being with something simpler and more beautiful from my perspective, and that was just to sit and write about some of my favourite moments. I thought, as these more ferocious elements take hold of me, both physically and psychologically, just focus on some of the celebration, some of the joy of it. So almost by compulsion, and certainly quite feverishly, I started archiving all my favourite moments in this friendship with Scott.

I started with the most recent one, which was the road trip, the road trip he never came back from. Not only had they been very recent, but they were three of my favourite days that I spent in his company, so I got to sit and relish the beauty of those moments, and then after I’d finished writing about it, I found it was actually a way for me to continue talking to Scott at a time when I wasn’t ready to stop talking to him. I just went back through a kind of social history of our friendship, and it was such a healing and nourishing experience to be able to do that. But yeah, it came out in prose, which was to my surprise, and I definitely felt for a long time that this was a prose document, or a friendship archive, which I was then at a later date almost going to use as a creative database from which I could sculpt poems.

Then, every beautiful and edifying human experience I had with Scott sent me on this scavenge into friendships from earlier in my life, because there was a connectivity to them, the version of myself who I was in my friendship with Scott was fed by a version of myself who learned something or made a mistake in one of these previous friendships. There was this whole precedent of friendship that was buttressing this friendship I had with Scott. So, six months down the line I’ve got this huge document in which I can’t stop writing about all these different friends, and it just refused to be molded or sculpted into poetry. It was very stubborn, so I thought, Well I suppose I’ve got a piece of prose now. Then that was very difficult to try and find a book within it, because it was never written to be a book. It was very scattered in terms of its chronology, I was bouncing from Scott moments to moments from other friendships, from boyhood to adulthood, to casting into the future, and it would have been a very unpleasant experience for a reader to try and manipulate all these timelines into a single one. So I thought, I’m going to have to find a way to make this work, find a narratorial ark. It took years and a lot of time stepping back from it to try and see what the overall story was. So yeah, the prose element came by surprise, and I’m really thankful for that now because I’ve managed to say a lot of things more candidly than I perhaps would have done in the poems, which might have obfuscated them or hidden them behind metaphors, certainly added another layer to the writing which might have kept the reader a step back from that. This made it a terrifying book in some respects to put out, but yeah… it was prose under duress.

 

That’s interesting what you say there, about if you’d written it as poetry how some of more direct messages might have been obfuscated by imagery or metaphor. Do you think prose, for you, is a more appropriate form for processing grief?

I think it must have been, because it came out that way. A lot of the time when I sit to write poetry it’s very reactive, I’ve just consumed a lot of poetry books over a period of time, I’ve been inspired by them, I’ve found fits within them, I’ve found my own narratives within their narratives, projected my life into it in the way you do, and then I’ve got all these ideas. I came to Boy Friends quite straight; I hadn’t been able to read, or concentrate so much on reading books for the previous few weeks, so I sat down with a much more candid form of expression, and in a way it was therapeutic – not quite a version of therapy – but definitely therapeutic. I was saying a lot of things, having a lot of conversations with the page that I needed to have with myself, and could say with a clarity and an exactitude. I guess I was still dealing with the trauma of it all, so I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to explore a lot of these concepts more philosophically or poetically, and so some of the conversations came out much more naked, much more vulnerable, much more direct than I intended them to. They were definitely conversations that needed to be had, that cauterized a wound in a way that I wouldn’t have done so successfully in the poetic form, because I would have been able to hide away from myself. Prose was much more mirror-like.

 

It’s significant on so many levels, of course, that this is addressed to Scott Hutchison. I would imagine your friendship was based on so many things, but especially art – Scott himself was a special artist who also often wrote so eloquently about grief. Did writing this book make you reflect on the importance of art our lives, but most significantly in comprehending loss? And have early reactions to the book confirmed this?

I guess there were all these vicissitudes with the loss of Scott: one of them was the loss of my dearest friend, but another was the loss of an artist that I had in my life that set the standard, in a respect, that pushed me further and faster than I needed to be. I would share the stage with Scott when we would do these book launches, and he enthralled an audience, he connected to them with his language, with his candour, with his vulnerability, he split himself open and split his workings out bare and let us benefit from the mistakes he made; let that become an armory. He bequeathed to us the ability to turn his mistakes into something that fortified us. So there was the worry that I didn’t know what was going to happen to my own writing without that incentive to constantly improve myself. Not to keep up with him, but to be producing work that was worthy of being on the stage alongside him. I had to explore who I was without that and find celebration and inspiration in all that I’d learned from Scott, as well as reveries about where he might have continued to take his art and his music.

But I found that the way people reacted to the book was really beautiful. It is a book with grief squat in its belly, but it’s mainly about celebration. Ninety percent of the Scott content is about brilliant times that we had together: it’s meals, it’s holidays, it’s all of the things that made this friendship soar and made it the inspiring heartbeat it was in my life, so I needed to be authentic to that memory as well, which was dealing with the grief and being candid and vulnerable about it, but also talking mainly about all the inspiration and power and beautiful memories that Scott had given me. We got a real deluge of beautiful quotes from all these different artists and writers – a lot of the time they would give me the quote, but it was an impetus to tell me about a friendship of theirs. Two thirds of their email was their own personal anecdote about friendship and that’s exactly what we wanted the book to do: we wanted it to be a call to action to celebrate the friends we miss at a time when it is often hard to maneuver those into conversation without expectation, and all of a sudden this book seemed to be a passport to jump right into these conversations about friends. That’s what gave the book its greatest value for me, because people don’t get asked about that all that much, people don’t want to know about how two friends met in the same manner as they ask about how two lovers met, but some of these friendships are as emotionally intense, as validated, as long-lasting, and sometimes their longevity is even greater than some of the biggest romantic encounters in our lives.

 

I love that, that’s exactly the reaction I had. While I was reading the book my mind travelled back to my most treasured past friendships, but also a lot of my favourite fictional friendships. Did you have any previous fictional male friendships in mind while writing the book, and what are some of your favourite fictional friendships?

I was a sort of sci-fi and fantasy nut growing up, I loved Tolkien, he was the first writer I came across that I read everything by, and then Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, I loved Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings was this book just totally punctuated by male friendships: you’ve got Sam and Frodo at the forefront of it, Sam is the sort of loveable best friend that everyone needs, Frodo’s struggling, he’s been affected by this nefarious power, this illness, this darkness, he’s not his best self, and it requires Sam to remember the friend he was before and to stick by him with that loyalty. At the end of the book when Frodo returns to his full degree of wellness, it’s Sam he kisses on the cheek and leaves the lingering proposition that he might join him in the undying lands, it’s Sam he leaves the storybook with. So their friendship was the greatest male friendship that I had ever read. Another was the film Withnail & I, that was a huge one for me, because it was friendship at all costs, you had these two people who had clung together through love, but also through desperation. It had got to the point in their friendship where they were dragging each other down, and even though they cared for each other, even though they were inseparable, in some ways had melded together, they knew they had to pull apart or they would risk drowning alongside each other. It shows how we can grieve friends, and how often extraction from these friendships can be a break-up, a very dangerous break up for us psychologically. So yeah, Lord of the Rings and Withnail & I were two of the big ones.

 

You write a lot about Withnail & I in the book, when discussing Scott and one particular past friendship, and Lord of the Rings when discussing your childhood. In many ways the book is part elegy and part memoir. Did the act of – in your words – ‘letting the ghosts in’, force you to reflect upon your own childhood and its significant moments?

I think in these characters we all look for versions of ourselves, and I think we try and assimilate their losses to losses in our lives. I was definitely trying to validate my own loss through finding loss in literature and film, in the same way as when I was young I was looking for friendships like the friendships that I saw in books, the ones with voyages and quests and intrigue. I was frustrated with my early friendships that they didn’t live up to the expectations of those friends I’d made in books, so I think I’ve always been trying to invest the literary into real life from that perspective. It was incredible revisiting some of the early losses through the microscope of what became the most intense loss of my life, going back to even the first loss I experienced which was the loss of my hamster, which I took very hard. I was standing out in the rain for hours, I had to be pulled back in, I’d made this casket for my hamster… I had a really difficult time juxtaposing it being here one moment and not the next. It was amazing looking back on some of the humour of those losses, y’know in a sweet way how it must have seemed to the adults around me who’d experienced real loss, thinking, If this is how he handles the hamster, God knows how he’s going to handle what comes next! It feels odd, I guess, and it’s definitely a bit of a misfit, to speak about the ferocity of loss and the light coming back in reference to your first hamster and to try and deal with the same set of ingredients for the loss of your dear friend 20-25 years on, but it did provide a little bit of nourishment, it did give me hope of the gentleness returning.

Also, revisiting friendships that were lost for less brutal reasons, life pulling us apart, moving in different social circles, it growing worse and worse for our wellbeing to be around each other, but to not treat these relationships as failures but just as something that has naturally expired, which were beautiful yet ephemeral. This was really important for galvanizing my ability to celebrate my friendship with Scott. So yeah, I think I used a lot of these early losses, these older friendships and previous versions of myself almost as a cognitive and emotional apparatus to deal with the bigger, bolder, more unauthorable loss of Scott.

 

That joy, that celebration you talk about, it’s almost as if that is predicated on loss, on the eventuality of loss, like how people say it’s knowing our lives are finite that give it such meaning and significance and joy. Is that the thing above all else that you hope readers take from the book – joy?

Yeah, I mean this is about taking something really fierce, taking something that is thrust upon you, that arrives with brutality, and turning it into a companion, a bedfellow, turning it into inspiration, because the way I’m looking at it is that grief is really just the final element of love. Then taking all of that pain, all that anger and dissatisfaction in certain situations, all that unfulfilled potential and turning it into an impetus to do good, and to celebrate. I think it was testament to the way I started to write this book and that was to first hide away from the more dangerous and more nefarious aspects of grief, to focus on and distract myself with my favourite moments, but then by the end of the book it actually became a veritable way of grieving: it wasn’t me avoiding grieving, it was just me choosing to focus on the joy in it as opposed to the sting and to turn it into something that was much more long lasting. I was missing a friendship that was full of sentimentality, but also silliness and smut, and all sorts of jovial behaviour. Scott only allowed me to see the version of himself that he was with me – I was not part of the band, I was not part of his business, I was a friend who he did joyful day-to-day things with, so if I wanted to authenticate this friendship, that’s what it was. I wanted to say, here’s a friendship that changed my life, can you project your own life into it, and can this be a calling card for you to celebrate your own friendships? So to have value for a reader, I needed this to be more universal, and I hope that’s where it ended up.

 

Boy Friends by Michael Pedersen is published by Faber, priced £14.99.

Elle Nash’s stories first through small towns in the rural south, to hotel rooms and the dark places of the psyche. Follow up to her debut novel Animals Eat Each Other, her first short story collection renders the complications of working class women and their desires, exploring the conflicts and cravings within. You can read a story exclusively below.

 

‘Charlton Heston Played John the Baptist but I Remember Him as Jesus’ is taken from Nudes
By Elle Nash
Published by 404 Ink

 

 

CHARLTON HESTON
PLAYED JOHN THE
BAPTIST BUT I
REMEMBER HIM
AS JESUS

 

Once, I was given a motorised ATV for toddlers. A photo of me exists somewhere standing on the ATV in pyjamas. I tried to drive it inside my small bedroom in Georgia, the whirring mechanical sounds of its cheap battery-powered engine, the plastic wheels scraping against a wooden door. I remember there was no room in the house for anything fun. I don’t remember ever using it outside have recreated this memory from the photograph.

/

It snowed when I was eight years old. This was the first time I remember seeing snow in Georgia. I made a chubby, short snowman with my uncle who was recovering from crack cocaine. The snow was not very good. It was wet and we had to scrape the whole front yard just to get enough for the snowman. I may have reconstructed this memory from a photo also. I remember the sounds of my uncle’s voice which seemed more childish than my father’s. My father was a sergeant and so was always clean shaven. My uncle slept on our couch.

/

I’m in a bedroom, but I don’t know where I am. I am not in Georgia. Maybe I am in my grandparents’ house or maybe I am in the house we moved to in Colorado, but I was older when we moved and in this memory I am pretty young, six or eight years old. There is a lamp at the side of the bed. My dad is reading the Bible to me. He is talking about Jesus. The next day we will dress up and go to church and open presents when we come home. Twenty years later I live in Pentecostal country and my mother is reminding me that I was baptised in the Methodist church. I ask my mom what being Methodist means and she says, ‘I don’t know.’

/

We only go to church that one time, or maybe we only go to church when we spend Christmas in upstate New York with my grandparents. The church is Baptist. My grandmother hands me a fiver for the tithe. I put the fiver in the big golden plate when it comes my way and notice how all the hymns are projected on big screen TVs. We take photos at breakfast after the service, the one time we all dress up nice. A church friend tells my parents that the soccer team has uniforms now, and I wonder how my grandmother can give us all money for the golden plate they pass around when neither her nor my grandfather has a job.

/

My father invents binge watching. In the days before Christmas we go to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video (both!) and he rents a series of movies, some based on a book series called Left Behind about a man and his daughter whose family disappears in the rapture, and some about the life of Jesus. Christmas Day is filled with TV sounds, first of the local parade, then the Charlton Heston movie The Greatest Story Ever Told, the one with Sidney Poitier, then of the apocalypse and rapture from Left Behind. We watch Barabbas and King of Kings. The TV is left on all day, my father watching in the living room while my mother cooks. In Left Behind, Kirk Cameron goes to the UN and accepts the word of God. I sit on one end of the couch and my dad sits on the other, a mountain of crumpled wrapping paper—opened gifts—between us. I don’t have to read about Jesus in the Bible anymore.

/

My best friend and I drink cheap vodka in water bottles on Christmas Eve, watching Jesus movies with my parents. We are both eighteen, think we are smart enough to hide it and I’m unsure if my parents know and just let us drink, or if they really can’t tell.

/

Waiting on Christmas dinner because my dad is working. My dad is working all the time. Counting my calories then counting my prayers then counting my blessings.

/

Waiting for my dad to visit, spending Christmas in upstate New York with my grandparents and my mother. One of my last vivid memories of them. I think I am sixteen or seventeen. I contemplate throwing up the Christmas dinner contents of my stomach in the hallway bathroom but the house is old, the walls are thin, and the plumbing may not hold.

/

Drinking with my parents on Christmas Eve. Making Christmas dinner because my mom is working. The sounds of the parade on TV, then maybe football, then Charlton Heston, again, always.

/

Things I don’t remember:

• most of my presents
• family dinners
• the amount of times my dad or mom was working on Christmas or Thanksgiving
• when or why we stopped going to my grandparents’ for holidays
• when I started drinking on Christmas Eve
• the night I drank the entire contents of my parents’ fridge when I was twenty-one and my mom found out Christmas morning because I didn’t go to bed until sunrise (I do remember a couple cases of Guinness, plates of devilled eggs, pigs in a blanket, condiments, pastel Tupperware containers of vegetables pre-prepped for Christmas day; I don’t remember what the sun
• looked like as it rose, I don’t remember falling asleep on the couch as Mom came downstairs for coffee, the first awake, as always. I do remember the black garbage bag filled with empty bottles that she carried to the garage).
• how old I was when she told me ‘you’re just like your father’ as a form of punishment and the shame I felt
• when I switched from regular Coke to Diet Coke
• when I switched from beer to liquor
• why my uncle stopped coming around to hang out
• when we stopped watching Jesus movies
• why we stopped photographing our moments together, when everything good is so easily forgotten.

 

Nudes by Elle Nash is published by 404 Ink, priced £9.99.

Set in the wake of the 1746 battle of Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead – years later, he lives a quiet lift as a bookseller in Inverness. But that quiet can only last for so long, with a body being found dead by his shop. Author S.G. MacLean tells Books from Scotland a bit more about what drew her to this story.

 

The Bookseller of Inverness
By S.G. MacLean
Published by Quercus Books

 

The Bookseller of Inverness, a story of revenge and murder set in the Highlands in 1752, was a long time coming. The seeds of the idea for the novel were planted in my head over ten years ago, in the then coffee-shop in the gallery of Leakey’s, the vast second-hand book shop in the oldest part of Inverness. As I sat with my coffee and scone, surrounded by thousands of old books and warmed by the huge log-burning stove downstairs, I learned that this was the site of the old Gaelic church where, in the aftermath of the Culloden, Jacobite prisoners had been held in atrocious conditions. Many were put onto prison ships to be taken to England for trial and execution, or transported to indentured servitude in North America or the Caribbean. Others were taken out into the graveyard of the nearby High Kirk, and shot. Leakey’s, it is said, is haunted by their ghosts.

From that moment, it was impossible to disconnect the place in my mind from what had happened there. Soon afterwards, I wrote a short story exploring the idea of the bookshop and some past bookseller being inextricably linked to some sinister event connected to the last Jacobite rising. Nothing came of it.

In the Spring of 2020, I had just finished the 5th in my Damian Seeker series. The books had taken me to London, Oxford, York and Bruges, all places I had had very little knowledge of beforehand. Inhabiting them in my imagination had taken a lot of work and with each book, I felt I was getting further and further geographically and culturally from my own world. I had come to a point of wanting to write about my own place, my own history. Intermittently, I had been working on a non-crime, nineteenth-century novel based around the Black Isle, very close to where I live. Come the summer of 2020 however, conversations with my editor and others suggested that such an uncertain time was really not the right one to make such a significant shift of period or genre. My editor probed – what else did I have? What about the Jacobites? And so, tentatively, I told her about my bookseller. Very soon afterwards, my synopsis was drawn up and the book commissioned.

I had long resisted the idea of a novel on the Jacobites. Born in Inverness and brought up in the Highlands, I can’t recall a time when I didn’t know the story of Culloden and its aftermath. I’d first visited the battlefield with my father, a native Gaelic speaker who’d been born nearby. Anyone who has visited the place will know the atmosphere that envelops it to somehow cut away the intervening centuries. Anyone with an eye to the news will know that planning around it or the naming of places related to the ’45 rising remain live issues. The school of which my husband is headteacher faces directly across to the house in which Charles Edward Stuart spent the night before the battle, and the Duke of Cumberland the night after. Culloden, and its aftermath are very much part of the Highland consciousness, and for me, to embark on a novel around them was to go where angels fear to tread.

But I did embark upon it, and in the circumstances of travel and access limitations I was able to tread in my walking books or pedal on my bike to almost every place I wanted to write about. As I did so, I found myself inevitably drawn to places where my father had grown up or had first taken me to – the areas around Daviot and Dunlichity in Strathnairn, Clava Cairns and of course, Culloden itself. My main character – Iain MacGillivray – is a bookseller trying to find some way forward in his life after the devastation wrought in it by the ’45 Jacobite rising in which he had taken part. As I wrote the book, I could not shake off the consciousness of my father’s generation of native Highlanders whose lives had been blighted by having to go through a war of their own.

I returned again and again to Leakey’s for rare and out-of-print sources fundamental to my story. When the Highland Archive at Inverness re-opened, I was first through the door. The eighteenth-century manuscript records of the town gave a sense of immediacy and life to the people I was reading about. The Highlanders of the past, the ghosts of Culloden, had been real, flesh and blood characters with cares and intrigues and sorrows and laughter of their own. They came to life in my mind, and, fictionalised in the pages of my book, took their place for me once again in the town where they, and I, had been born.

 

The Bookseller of Inverness by S.G. MacLean is published by Quercus Books, priced £16.99.

There are more borders today than ever before, and James Crawford argues that our enduring obsession with borders has brought us to a crisis point, an endgame set in progress thousands of years ago. Read an exclusive abridged extract from The Edge of the Plain below, putting the notion of borders under the microscope.

 

Extract taken from The Edge of the Plain
By James Crawford
Published by Canongate Books

 

A border sits on my desk. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I’m always surprised by how light it feels. It’s roughly cuboid in shape. On five sides it’s coarse, bumpy and grey. But on one side it’s smooth, marked with splashes of yellow and orange. I bought this border ten years ago, on eBay. It’s supposed to be a fragment of the Berlin Wall. It’s very likely not. It’s probably just a lump of concrete, scavenged from a building site and daubed with paint. I feel like I can live with this uncertainty.

When the wall fell, in November 1989, I was eleven years old. I remember watching on the news as Berliners danced along the top. The same footage was played over and over as one large rectangular slab crashed to the ground. In the days, weeks and months afterwards, people came from all over the world to try to grab their own pieces of the wall. Mauerspechte, they were called. Wall peckers. For a few Deutschmarks they’d hire a small hammer and hack away.

Of course, everyone wanted the western side. There was a wall- pecking pecking order. Pieces from the west were covered in iconic graffiti art, whereas pieces from the east were just flat, grey and featureless. Enterprising East Berliners, quick to embrace their new- found access to the capitalist economy, began spray-painting real fragments from their side to make them seem more authentic to buyers. I hope my piece is one of those pieces.

Today, the Berlin Wall is the world’s most-travelled border. Bits of it can be found on six continents. They are exhibited in museums and galleries, erected on street corners. One slab is even used as a backdrop to a urinal in a Las Vegas casino. The shattering of the wall was, for some, supposed to be the beginning of the end of borders. The end of history, even. But history goes on. In fact, it has accelerated away from that moment. And borders have made a comeback. Or, rather, they never really went away at all.

One Monday morning in the middle of November 2018, a New York deli chain sent me an email with the subject ‘Avocado Shortage’. Their message explained that ‘no avocados have crossed the Mexico–US Border for the past three weeks’ due to an import pricing dispute and, rather than ‘serving a stockpile of frozen avocados and compromising on quality and taste’, avocados were ‘off the menu’. They promised to ‘alert’ me as soon as the situation changed. I have no idea how I was even on their mailing list. And I live in Edinburgh.

Two days later, the US President Donald Trump deployed 7,000 troops to America’s southern border and authorised them to use ‘lethal force’ against what he described as ‘an invasion’ of migrants. The first 400 of those migrants – part of a walking caravan of more than 10,000 travelling from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – had just arrived in the border city of Tijuana.

That same week, it was reported that North Korea and South Korea had blown up front-line guard posts all along the heavily fortified zone that has separated their two countries for seven decades, the first step in a tentative agreement to ‘demilitarise’ their border completely.

On the Thursday, the governments of India and Pakistan reached an agreement to establish a cross-border corridor to allow pilgrims to visit a sacred holy temple in Pakistan, the last resting place of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion. On the same day, in the Middle East, fighting engulfed the Gaza Strip as thousands of Palestinian demonstrators clashed with Israeli soldiers, and tear gas, flying rocks, bullets and burning tyre smoke filled the skies above an eight-metre-high, concrete ‘separation barrier’.

The week ended with the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, returning from Brussels to announce that she had brokered a Brexit deal with Europe that would ‘end free movement once and for all’.

Avocados, ‘invasions’, spiritual corridors, human caravans, separation barriers, lethal force and a British prime minister celebrating the end of freedom . . . All in just seven days in November.

I don’t think, in hindsight, that this was a particularly special week for borders. But it made me wonder, slightly more obsessively with each passing day, where borders really came from. When did they begin? How did they evolve and take root? How did they grow up into this vast network of lines – physical and virtual – running all over the earth? And why, today, are they seemingly the most volatile flashpoints for political and social conflagration across the globe? Is this just a symptom? Or could borders themselves be the cause?

A border is such a simple idea. Step across a line, whether you can see it or not, and you are somewhere else. The landscape may look exactly the same, one blade of grass to the next, but you are in another place, another country. Perhaps the people speak another language. Their cultures, practices, laws and ideas may be completely different. Perhaps you can be completely different too: who you are and how you live your life may or may not be permissible. On one side of the border may be the promise of wealth, on the other the certainty of poverty. What you read or who you love may be free for you to choose, or may be punishable by prison, even death.

It means that these lines, fences, walls or checkpoints – and the spaces they inhabit – possess immense power. Nothing is different and yet everything is different. This is, as the writer Amitav Ghosh put it in his description of the Indian Partition, ‘the enchantment of lines’. An enchantment that can be at once absurdist and fatal. I wanted to go in search of the source of this enchantment, to follow it all the way from then – whenever then was – up to now.

 

The Edge of the Plain by James Crawford is published by Canongate Books, priced £20.

Ali Millar waited for Armageddon. Born into the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the borders, her memories are populated by the vivid images about the pending Second Coming she heard of since birth. David Robinson dives into her memoir The Last Days, exploring faith, desire and freedom, in this month’s Books from Scotland review.

 

The Last Days
By Ali Millar
Published by Ebury Press

 

Like Alice’s White Queen, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have always struck me as people who would find it easy to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Because of that, I used to imagine that abandoning their particular version of Christianity would be the simplest thing ever. Leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I thought, and suddenly the world would snap back into the sharp focus of everyone else’s everyday reality. You’d no longer be an outlier. You’d be free to accept a lifesaving blood transfusion, to celebrate Christmas, study ‘worldly’ subjects like philosophy, and say cheers before having a drink. Best of all, you needn’t worry about clearing bodies from the streets in the imminent Great Tribulation.

So, when I was asked to review Ali Millar’s memoir The Last Days, which charts her childhood and adolescence as a Jehovah’s Witness in an unnamed Borders town and her subsequent rejection of her faith, I suspected I knew its story already. And frankly, because Witnesses believe that coerced worship is unacceptable to God, walking away from Kingdom Hall didn’t seem that big a deal. I was, it turns out, Very Wrong About This Indeed.

Both my parents were convinced and lifelong Christian Scientists, another (let’s be kind) esoteric American religion. They didn’t believe in doctors, medicine, hospitals: all you had to do if you fell ill was to ‘know the truth’ – that because you were created in the image and likeness of God, and because God is perfect, you couldn’t possibly have cancer, a dodgy heart or whatever ailed you at the time. Every Wednesday evening, they held ‘testimony meetings’ which mainly consisted of members of the congregation standing up and recounting how they’d done just that.

So when it comes to being dragged along as a child to ultra-nonconformist worship, I’ve got form. I’ve seen too how it can give a purpose in life to decent people who have been let down by the world, who want help to cope with fear or pain and who aren’t given to questioning. The difference between Millar and me is that, as soon as I could think for myself, I was embarrassed by my parents’ very real and unswerving faith and – to their enormous credit – they didn’t stand in my way when, as a 12-year-old, I stopped being a Christian Scientist. Truth to tell, I was never much of one to begin with.

Yet when I read Millar’s memoir, I soon realised that the small similarities with my own childhood were drowned out by the howling differences. By the time I put it down, I was positively raging on her behalf at the way she was treated by the elders of her congregation, interrogated in her home about her sex life as if by seventeenth century witch hunters. Just as damnably, their religion has cut her off, perhaps forever, from her mother’s love – to which her book is a kind of memorial.

It is, then, a powerful story and made even more so by Millar’s ability to convincingly describe both her apocalypse-tinged childhood and her anorexia-ridden adolescence. I’m no psychiatrist, so I can’t say whether the two are related, but it certainly sounds probable: in a chaotic, random world, anorexia might indeed seem like an attractive way of taking back control, even if it is only of one’s body. Because this world, Witnesses are taught, is little more than a demonic cesspit, and the five-year-old Millar learns that demons can be found in such unexpected places as second-hand books or records (on hearing this, her mother takes all her records outside the house and smashes them). Jehovah, meanwhile, seems to be letting Satan have free run of the Earth – you’ve only got to watch the news – and in most of the five-times-a-week meetings at Kingdom Hall they are told that the cataclysmic Great Tribulation is getting ever nearer. The nine-year-old Millar starts to worry that she is getting too big to fit in her Armageddon hiding place under the bed.

There’s something wrong about her, she feels. Something broken. It’s like her life is a glove that doesn’t fit. The teenage years roll in, but anorexia drives out a burgeoning interest in boys. By the time she’s fifteen, she weighs five stone and her skin is yellowing. She’s off school for a year. Anorexia, you start to realise, is a bit like her faith in Jehovah: a matter of following the doctor’s orders but not really believing them, being deceitful to reassure those who love her so they’ll leave her alone. And all the time, wasting away in both body and soul.

The real skill of this memoir is that the reader can see this wider picture even as Millar describes feelings which often might seem to contradict it. This was true even at the start of the book, when even as a child in love with the idea of a heaven in which she’ll be able to pat lions on the head, she also registers that the people who don’t turn their backs on her mum’s doorstop evangelising tend to be the most desperate and confused. There’s a subtlety about how she mentions this though: any more than a hint and it would sound like an adult rationalisation rather than anything a five-year-old might feel.

That balance runs throughout the book. Later on, there are moments when the secular world seems about to take over: John Peel, Catcher in the Rye, the first fumblings of sex, parties with boys, Malibu and Newcastle Brown. But then, because a real, lived life is chaotic, messy and unpredictable, and rarely runs straight, those roads aren’t taken. Her student days – the time of maximum freedom for most people – lead to marriage to a would-be Witness elder and motherhood. There even are times when a future as a Watchtower-toting Stepford wife looks a distinct possibility.

The end of Millar’s faith comes in a truly appalling scene in which three elders (all men, naturally, as Jehovah seems to regard women as second-rate) quiz her about her premarital sex life. On a scale of one to five, she is asked, how much pleasure did she get from heavy petting and what did it consist of? Somehow the fact that this is in her own Edinburgh living room – or in the 21st century come to that – makes it seem even more grotesque. Believe me, it gets even worse. Yet still Millar wants to stay loyal to her faith and to make her marriage work. ‘[Actually,’ one of the elders says, ‘it’s up to your husband to decide what happens next. It’s not your decision to make.’

They are wrong about that. Because by now Millar has found within herself some talent they can’t take away. Something she can use to explain why she has broken away from the faith that sustained her mother through her own hard adult life bringing up two daughters on supplementary benefit, even though the cost of doing so is being disfellowshipped – ignored, cut off, shunned – by her mother as well as by all other Witnesses. She can come through the looking glass of organised religion and write a memoir as good, and as consistently gripping, as this.

 

The Last Days by Ali Millar is published by Ebury Books, priced £12.99.

Don Paterson’s collection is named from a bar frequented by the survivors of several kinds of apocalypse and the poems of his new collection nod to a range of people and encounters, coming together to form the resulting adventurous and ambitious read. You can read a duo of poems exclusively at Books from Scotland below.

 

Extracts taken from The Arctic
By Don Paterson
Published by Faber & Faber

 

 

Air Guitar

This year we’ve had to arm his good guitar
with super-lights, harp-wire and gossamer –
but now there’s nothing at his fingertips
God only knows the chords that lie below
the vague reflexive clutchings that he makes
when I put the neck into his severed hands.

 

Letter to a Young Poet
after Ladislav Skála

We too thought our contemporaries were doing vital work.
We’d quote each other in our epigraphs as if we were Krasko.
Because the Writer’s Union had decreed a cult of youth
we were awarded the greatest prizes for our very first books.
We denounced the old and shamed them for their politics.
In our forties, half of us had given up and now did other things.
In our fifties, there were maybe ten of us left standing,
read only by each other, and living off handouts from the state.
By sixty, we had given up on the pretence
that we could understand one word of the poetry of the young.
In our seventies, we wrote very little of any actual worth
and by the time we were eighty we were all dead.

 

Copyright: Don Paterson, reproduced courtesy of Faber Published on 4 August 2022

 

The Arctic by Don Paterson is published by Faber & Faber, priced £14.99.

be/longing is a love letter to nature, and the through thread of Amanda Thomson’s life. Bringing together various elements from memory, to artwork and photography, the memoir explores how place language and family can shape us and make us who we are. Amanda tells Books from Scotland a little more about her new book.

 

be/longing: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home
By Amanda Thomson
Published by Canongate Books

 

Can you tell us a little bit of what we can expect from Belonging?

be/longing is a mixture of writing about nature, reflections on family and memory, and thinking about all the things which make places feel like home, and the things and people that make us who we are. If the book is part memoir, it’s also part biography of Abernethy forest, where I live. Abernethy forest is a huge area of remnant Scots pinewoods, which holds many rare and endangered species, and I write about Abernethy to think about what we mean by ‘home’, and what it is to long for a place, and what it is to belong.

 

You previously wrote A Scots Dictionary of Nature – how did you find the process of approaching and writing this book in comparison to this other style of non-fiction?

This book took far longer, but some of the chapters were written at the same time as pulling together the Scots words that make up A Scots Dictionary of Nature. In fact, it was writing the first book that sowed the seeds for this one, in that it was coming across Scots words that reminded me of my grandparents and that made me start to wonder more about them and other family members no longer with us. It was exciting and challenging putting belonging together, weaving together the threads of these different elements I found fascinating, thinking about our identities, tying past to present and personal to broader histories and experiences.

 

What is your own relationship to nature and the world around? Is it something that’s been present from a young age, or developed over the years?

I’ve always been connected to nature, beginning to birdwatch in my early teens, and starting hillwalking with a club in secondary school, but even before that, we would always go out on family walks, and though I wouldn’t have labelled it ‘nature’ as such, my childhood experiences were about being out and about walking or on my bike, going ‘up the glen’ or ‘over the hills’.

 

Nature as both a topic and genre acts as a great lens to explore a range of topics from the personal to political – how did you find telling your own story through with nature as a through thread?

It was interesting to do and I hadn’t set out to do that at first, but our connections to nature are so personal. At the same time, extrapolating personal experience to these bigger concerns and sometimes fears that we have about the world and where it’s going felt like something important for me to try to do. And also, when writing about nature, I start with writing about my experience of what I notice, and what it makes me think about, so it felt like a natural form for the book to take.

 

There are a lot of notions of memory and recollection in be/longing, particularly fitting for a memoir. How have you found your own relationship to memories shift as you worked on the book? Was everything vivid or did some re-emerge throughout the process that caught you by surprise? Or reshape how you look back on memories?

I’m surprised at how much I’ve forgotten, or more, perhaps, how fragmented memories are, and how much they are dictated by the photographs that we come across and return to, or the stories that are repeatedly told. It was lovely to go through a lot of family photographs with my mum and we’d compare memories, hers from an adult’s perspective, mine originally from when I was a child. I was reminded of some things that I had forgotten, and, in speaking with my mum, learned things about my grandparents and their generation that I had not known before. It’s nice to know now that in belonging, their ordinary lives are remembered in some way.

 

Your include a lot of Scots words and their definitions throughout – are there any particular favourite words or turns of phrase that you just particularly enjoy or think captures a nice feeling or sentiment?

I’ve loads, but a nice feeling or sentiment?

Flochter – to flutter, or to give free vent to joy

Flichtering-fain – throbbing with happiness

Weel-willed – kindly

 

What inspired you for this book?

In Scots pinewoods, the dead trees are an important source of nutrients for the living elements of the forest, and provide micro-habitats for its species. The idea of the continuing importance of what has gone before to the present, and acknowledging that ongoing influence, was something that I wanted to explore in relation to nature, but also, then, in thinking about my own history and family, race and identity. I also held questions about the identities we perhaps each hold in a myriad of ways, and what it means to belong, and, perhaps, what might stop us from belonging. I think there’s also something about getting older that makes us reflect back, but I’m also interested in what it is to take the time to pay attention and to notice what’s around you, and that’s what’s at the core when I write about nature.

 

What are you reading just now?

I’ve just picked up John Wilson Foster’s book Pilgrims of the Air, beautifully published by Notting Hill Editions – it looks like it will be a fascinating and thought-provoking read on the decline and extinction of the passenger pigeon in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century.

 

What do you hope readers take from be/longing?

I hope readers find the book thought-provoking and find interest in all kinds of ways – whether it gets them to consider their relationship to their own past, or reminds them of people no longer with them, or they learn something about Abernethy forest, or Culbin in Morayshire, Mingulay, Cape Town or the other places I encounter in the book. Hopefully readers will like how I’ve written about nature and what’s around us, and perhaps think about it a little differently. Also, perhaps, to think about what it is to make and to have a home, who makes us who we are and maybe, how lucky we are to live in Scotland – for all its faults, it’s an amazingly stunning country, and we should cherish it.

 

 

be/longing: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home by Amanda Thomson is published by Canongate Books, priced £16.99

As part of the Year of Scotland’s Stories, we are running a series of Responses on BooksfromScotland, commissioning writers to respond to books from the publishing membership, engaging with work in different ways. For July, and our theme of ‘Beyond Words’, music writer and editor Arusa Qureshi heads to The Arches and its history in Brickwork, celebrating the vibrant world of live music.

 

Brickwork: A Biography of the Arches
By Kirsten Innes and David Bratchpiece
Published by Salamander Street

 

Buildings and physical spaces can often hold more weight in our lives than we realise. They may be structures with a purpose, bricks and mortar shelters and meeting places, but they can also be the birthplace of communities, creative havens and personal sanctuaries for those looking for a sense of belonging. Never has this been more true than over the past two years, when we were suddenly unable to set foot in these buildings that we call our second homes, be they music venues, clubs, theatres, or arts hubs. The longer stages remained empty and audiences isolated, the more it felt likely that we could lose these spaces for good. The Music Venue Trust’s Save Our Venues campaign, which was launched in an attempt to save hundreds of grassroots music venues around the UK, was a good indication of the dire situation facing not just one sector, but many others too. The thought of not being able to accidentally discover your next musical obsession in your favourite venue or to dance with your best pals in a 100-capacity sweatbox felt all too devastating.

It was during one of these periods of immense frustration and sadness that I happened to first pick up Brickwork. Kirstin Innes and David Bratchpiece’s biography of The Arches highlights exactly how much a physical space can mean to the people working and interacting with it, and why it becomes so much more than just a building. For many, those railway arches underneath Glasgow’s Central Station will always be synonymous with the best of Scottish arts and culture and what belief, perseverance and a little bit of anarchy can accomplish. By expertly piecing together varying accounts from artists, audiences and ex-staff, Innes and Bratchpiece (also two former employees) invite you to step into this slightly mad world and get immersed in the conversations and memories of those that knew and loved it.

We’re told first-hand tales of some of the venue’s famous visitors, like a young Banksy, Lily Savage and Daft Punk; memorable exhibitions including the Fotofeis porn exhibition of 1998; increasingly regular raids and police visits; general chaos like the time they had to fashion a wooden dance floor with no notice to satisfy Building Control, who refused to grant a licence for a Slam night without one; and of course, how The Arches was likely where the famed ‘here we f***ing go’ chant originated.

When the closure of The Arches was announced in 2015, I was towards the end of my undergraduate degree and I distinctly remember the uproar from all sides; the petition that was signed by what felt like everyone I knew, the famous faces that tried to urge the government to step in and the overwhelming melancholy within the arts community. I was too young to visit The Arches in its heyday but I’m still incredibly grateful that I experienced

at least a few years of gigs and club nights and could understand the magic and DIY-spirit that was encapsulated within the space. At the time, The Arches’ demise felt avoidable and it’s somewhat cathartic to be able to read narratives that echo this sentiment in Brickwork, knowing that our anger was justified. The way that Innes and Bratchpiece weave together the different conversations to emphasise the celebratory, welcoming atmosphere of The Arches is balanced well with honest thoughts on its closure and the disappointment that was certainly shared across the board.

For almost 25 years, this building housed world-class theatre, art, club nights and a very specific kind of local hedonism that inevitably brought people together. As Innes and Bratchpiece say in the book, ‘The Arches was where Glasgow came to play, and the stories about it are legendary.’ It feels special to get such a personal insight from notable figures like founder Andy Arnold, DJ and Arches patron Carl Cox and the first Arches artist-in-residence Al Seed, among others. But above all else, reading Brickwork makes you feel like you were privy to a pretty remarkable period in Scottish history, even just as a punter. On a personal level, it also makes me wish I had been able to spend just a little more time there, soaking up that brilliant atmosphere that people still talk about to this day.

In some ways, lockdown was probably the best time to read Brickwork because it reminded me of the true value of physical, democratic spaces like The Arches. They’re not just buildings, but places where strong, vibrant communities are created and built upon; where truly mind-blowing things can and do happen, and where you can so easily find your tribe. It reiterated to me what was at stake as our venues lay empty and how easy it is for resources to disappear without a trace, especially without the backing of those in positions of power. Many talk of how The Arches got away with so much in its mission to constantly push the boat out, and that may be true but in reading the various narratives in Brickwork, it seems as though that energy and sense of defiance has been kept alive by those that had any connection to the venue. Brickwork may be the story of a failed experiment but it’s also the story of a legacy that continues to inform and influence the most exciting elements of Scotland’s cultural landscape.

 

Brickwork: A Biography of the Arches by Kirsten Innes and David Bratchpiece is published by Salamander Street, priced £12.99.

The Year of Stories x Books from Scotland response strand was inspired by Fringe of Colour’s series, which you can read more of at fringeofcolour.co.uk.

All Wendy wants to do is drive the 255 bus around Uddingston with her regulars on board, top up the milk, and just be fine. But without her mum around anymore, there’s no one to remind her what needs done. But she’s ready to step out her comfort zone, and that’s where Ginger comes in. You can read an extract of Elissa Soave’s debut novel below.

 

Ginger and Me
By Elissa Soave
Published by HQ

 

Prologue
Present, Polmont Prison

They kept asking me why I was outside her house that day, and who was with me. I tried to say I would never harm Diane, I loved her. And I mean I loved her, not just the writing. Though I do love her writing too. The way she can squeeze the juice out of a metaphor, take you back to being eight years old with a sound, or a smell. Make you cringe. Or cry. It’s genius, and I know because I’m a writer too. Just because I drive a bus, it doesn’t mean I can’t write. I’m even in a Writers’ Group – though they don’t always appreciate how good my stories are. One of the things I tried to tell the police was I’m a writer like Diane, that’s what we’ve got in common, but they wouldn’t listen. They arrested me and told me anything I said would be admissible in court, even though I loved Diane. I can’t speak for Ginger, I can only tell you what I told them – I’d never hurt Diane. That didn’t stop them putting me in a police car and taking me to Motherwell Police Station, practically via the same route as the 240, which was not my favourite route to drive at the best of times. I don’t know where they took Ginger.

Next day, they took me to court. They woke me up at seven with a bowl of Cheerios and a cup of lukewarm tea.

‘Do you have someone who can bring you some clothes?’ It was the same policewoman from the night before. She looked more feminine than I’d imagined female officers looked, even with the uniform. Her hair was tied back in one of those low buns but you could tell she would be pretty when she took it down. I wondered if she had a female sidekick, like Scott and Bailey, or whether she was more the lone wolf sort of detective, like Vera or maybe a brilliant female Morse.

‘Wendy. Wendy!’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘You’ll need clothes for court this morning. Is there someone we can call to bring you in some stuff?’

The only person would have been Ginger so I shook my head.

‘Where are my own clothes? Someone took them off me yesterday but I don’t have a lot of jeans so I’d like them back.’

She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Those are evidence now, Wendy. You won’t be able to wear them. Look, don’t worry, we’ll find you something here.’

‘What about my phone?’ I called after her. ‘They took that off me yesterday too and I really need it.’ But I don’t think she heard me because she didn’t turn round.

I got changed in the toilet next to my cell while the policewoman stood outside. I wasn’t too pleased with the skirt and sweatshirt combo she’d brought me but I wasn’t in any position to argue, and at least they more or less fitted my long skinny frame. I washed my face in cold water, and risked a look at my morning-after self, surprised that it still looked like me. My forehead deep and broad, dominating over narrow eyes, still dull mahogany and revealing nothing. My pale skin remained so, though there was faint bruising on my right cheek, which must have happened the day before. My nose was long and straight, my dad’s nose, but my smile was terrible, like I’d spotted someone across the room that I had to pretend to be pleased to see.

‘If it pleases Your Honour this has all been a big misunderstanding,’ I said into the mirror. I leaned in closer and turned my head to the left and right. My lank black hair was unaffected by a night in the cells. It was still in more or less the same style I’ve always worn it – a bob to my shoulders – though I had let Ginger cut the fringe a bit shorter recently. I wasn’t sure about it but she said it would balance out my huge, shiny forehead and she was usually right about that sort of thing. I patted my hair down ten times on each side before smoothing it against the back of my neck. ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear Wendy,’ I whispered to myself. They were my mum’s words. Just as well I’ve never been the kind of person to put much store in looks. I left the bathroom counting backwards from twenty under my breath to keep me steady.

They put me in a small, windowless van with three other women and took us to Hamilton Sheriff Court. The skinny girl curled in to the front seat raised her chin at me as I got on so I sat next to her.

‘I’m Wendy,’ I said. ‘What are you going to court for?’ But she didn’t answer. I really wanted to tell her that these weren’t my own clothes, I wouldn’t have chosen a skirt for one thing, never mind pairing it with trainers. I could tell she didn’t want to talk though and, to be fair, she probably thought I was some sort of criminal, so I just sat and bit my lips and tried not to think too much about where Ginger and Diane were now.

When we got to the court, I was assigned a duty solicitor called Mr Cameron. He was a small, V-neck jumper kind of man and I could imagine him cutting his grass on his weekends off, or going on mini-breaks to do nothing in Dunkeld. He shook my hand sweatily and told me we’d ‘be up in five’. If you’ve watched as many courtroom dramas as I have, you might have the idea that a courtroom is an impressive place, dark wood lining the walls and men in wigs milling around with folders of important papers. The room they took me into was about the size of my living room, and the only people in there were me, Mr Cameron, another lawyer sitting across from us, and the judge. It was all over in a few minutes – they charged me, Mr Cameron said I made no plea and moved for bail, the other lawyer opposed it while they ‘made further inquiries’, and the judge said I’d be taken to Polmont Prison ‘forthwith’.

The judge left the room and I watched as Mr Cameron got up and shook hands with the other lawyer. He walked back to me and said, ‘We’ll renew our motion for bail in a week but don’t get your hopes up.

 

Ginger and Me by Elissa Soave is published by HQ, priced £14.99.

Is reconciliation possible, even after so much time? That’s at the heart of Iain Maloney’s In the Shadow of Piper Alpha, exploring the devastating aftermath of the deaths of over 160 men on the Piper Alpha platform in 1988. You can read an exclusive extract at Books from Scotland below.

 

In the Shadow of Piper Alpha
By Iain Maloney
Published by Tippermuir Books

 

 

Incheon Airport, Republic of Korea, June 2013

 

I need to run.

The ground beneath my feet, granite hardness, taut muscles stretching out, flexing and tiring before the next flight, eleven hours of stasis, the world circling below, night and day passing. Already the fatigue like mercury in my veins. My hand against the shower wall, I grabbed an ankle and pulled, feeling the strain in my thigh. Maybe I could run through the terminal, run against the travelators, run from gate to gate tracing the outline of the airport. The urge like electricity. Run.

Maybe not. With terrorism and whatever’s going on with the North, someone running could be a threat. The firepower on display. How did people ever get used to being around guns? I asked Ash, she’s American, she should know.

‘You rationalise it, Carrie. You push it aside, try not to think about it. Humans can get used to almost anything given enough time. Given enough pressure.’

Pressure turns carbon into diamonds; given enough time anything can happen.

She was dozing in the lounge. She could sleep anywhere and in Seoul they made you comfortable. Each time I came through Incheon I thought about moving to South Korea. I loved Seoul, loved the food, Seoul food. I could live on samgyetang chicken every day for the rest of my life, but I could never leave our home in Hawaii, the house I shared with Ash, the view of the sea from the front, the mountains at the back. For the first time in years I had a home, a fixed centre even when I was in Japan, in the Philippines, in Chile doing my research, when Ash was in New York. There was always a conference, an invitation, a seismic event. Jetsetters, both of us. But Hawaii was our heart. Where we met. Where we fell in love.

Take this time. She’d been in Hawaii, I’d been on Aogashima, a volcanic island south of Japan. So we met in Tokyo, her direct, me by taxi, boat, aeroplane, my suitcase snaking behind me on a broken wheel, then onto Incheon, Amsterdam then Aberdeen. Scotland. Home.

From Hawaii to Scotland, every way is the long way round.

I wrapped up in a fluffy white towel, fabric-conditioned into cloudlike softness, and towelled my short red hair, pulled on cargo pants and a strappy top, gave my hair a quick muss with mousse, spiking it loosely, dumped the wet towels in the basket and swung my new backpack into place. It didn’t sit right, too high up my back, the straps too narrow.

It was a birthday present from Ash and I didn’t like it. I hadn’t been ready to call time on the last one, a khaki canvas bag I’d had since I was a PhD student in Durham sixteen or so years before, a present from a girlfriend, Anna. It was stained and smelled of rot and damp, the stitching frayed, but it had circumnavigated the Pacific Ring of Fire, scaled active peaks, been buried in ash and was once stolen by a boy on the back of a motorbike in Vietnam before being dumped minus valuables in a puddle. We’d been through a lot together and when Ash presented me with this new backpack…over the years I’ve become good at suppressing emotions.

She gave me a sleepy smile, ‘Hi.’ Her long auburn-tinted hair was all scuffed around by the chair. I loved it when she was relaxed and scruffy, when sleep brought her to my level of grooming. She was my first partner of either sex whose fashion sense wasn’t some variation of ‘grunge’ or ‘nerd’. She was a lawyer, expensive suits and salon hair. Me the scientist, practical hair, tomboy clothes. Somehow we worked.

‘Feel better?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’ll be fine.’

‘I swore I’d never go back.’

‘You swear too much.’ She sat up and lifted an eyelash off my cheek. I blew it and wished. Kissed her, the scent of her, coconut.

‘Let’s find our gate.’

Ash would be asleep before we crossed Chinese airspace. She viewed sleep like an accountant views money: profit and loss. Long-haul was her way of making up the deficit. Some parts of life are worth sleeping through, she’d say.

I can’t sleep on planes so I had prepared ahead, my backpack full of work- related good intentions. Papers to read, marking, draft correspondence, funding applications. One thing they never tell you when you start out in academia: for every rung on the ladder you climb, the level of correspondence doubles. I spent more time writing unfortunately at this time…than I did talking to my PhD students. I padded down the aisle, slipped my laptop and folders into the seat pocket, wrote a post-it to-do list and thought how much more organised my life would be by the time we landed.

They closed the shutters and turned the lights off, like it was nap time. In the window seat, Ash took a Valium with her wine and closed her eyes. The aisle seat was taken by a middle-aged Japanese man who plugged in his iPhone headset and also fell asleep, little trills of maybe Schubert counterpointing the thrum of the engines.

The carbonara sauce sitting badly in my stomach, not mixing well with the coffee, I opened two files on my laptop. The first was my paper for the conference at the University of Aberdeen. The paper was fine and if it were to be delivered anywhere else I wouldn’t even look at it again. Aberdeen was where I’d been an undergraduate, where the oil industry was everything and the oil industry reps, many of whom would be in the audience, would be asking questions, hostile, loaded questions, about my conclusions.

This wasn’t an average conference. This wasn’t an average paper.

Aberdeen was where I grew up. Where my father was.

 

In the Shadow of Piper Alpha by Iain Maloney is published by Tippermuir Books, priced £9.99.

Seasonality journeys through the year, looking at British wildlife across the seasons, and also about our own relationship with it. Ian Parsons writes exclusively for Books from Scotland to tell us a bit more about the heart of the book, the changes of the seasons, and introduce readers to his work.

 

Seasonality: A personal account of nature through the seasons
By Ian Parsons
Published by Whittles Publishing

 

Seasons come and seasons go, in an uncertain world, the changing of the seasons, from spring to summer, to autumn, to winter and then back to again to spring is a reassuring constant. Each season brings with it its own beauty, a beauty that we can immerse ourselves in if we allow it. These last few years have proven to many of us how important it is to let wildlife into your life, to watch it, to listen to it and to enjoy how it makes you feel.

Spring is a month of renewal, from tree leaves bursting forth out of their tightly packed buds through to the liquidity of morning bird song, the nature that surrounds us seems extra busy in the spring time. There are many indicators that spring has arrived, from the fluttering of butterflies, to the blossoming of trees, but for me, my favourite sign that spring is here once more is the return of the swallows. The swallow is a bird that doesn’t know what winter is, joining us in April after an epic migration from southern Africa it spends our spring and summer with us and then departs, as our summer ends, to head back to the southern hemisphere to enjoy its spring and summer.

They are beautiful birds and I love seeing them that first time again, cutting graceful arcs through the sky as they return here to breed. But it is when they come into perch that you can really see their beauty, the blue/black plumage on their upperparts has a glorious iridescence that reflects the spring sunshine in dazzling brilliance. Their forehead and throat are blood red in colour, adding to their beauty; these are birds that are well worth looking closely at. Before long they have settled down to start to breed, often returning to last year’s nest site. As they start breeding so spring slowly slips into summer.

The British summer can be a fickle thing, idyllic days under clear blue skies can be followed by sodden ones under drab grey clouds, but whenever the sun shines you can find a fantastic and beautiful symbol of the season, butterflies. A butterfly fluttering by is something that always brings a smile to my face, they are beautiful insects and no summer would be complete without them decorating the day. Some species are restricted in range, but others are much more widespread, species like the Painted Lady and the Red Admiral are well known and common and then of course there’s the fabulous Peacock, a butterfly that as it flashes its wings it makes eyes at you. These insects are very fond of the buddleia we have growing in the garden, the long flowering spikes as popular with them as they are with us.

Butterflies though are somewhat ephemeral, and as summer draws to an end, as the days grow shorter, so they begin to dwindle. But don’t despair, colours are still aplenty in the autumn and one of the most beautiful displays in nature is about to begin.

The show of autumn colour put on by our trees is rightly famed, suddenly the greens we have grown accustomed to become yellows, oranges and reds. Not all species do this of course, but those that do, do it wonderfully. From the Field Maple highlighting itself in yellow to the Rowan glowing orangey red, our gardens, towns, parks and the wider countryside can take on a whole new palette at this time of the year. Of course, the trees aren’t doing it for our benefit, it is a process they go through to reclaim and recycle the goodness from their leaves before they discard them, the colours we see are a byproduct of this process, but what a byproduct they are! Autumn colour is a show to enjoy, but like the butterflies of summer it too is ephemeral, the leaves soon drop and as they do so winter joins us once more.

Winter is a season that can sometimes be described as bleak, and when the weather rages it can seem so, but there is beauty in the winter just as there is in the other seasons of the year. A twinkling coating of frosty ice crystals transforms even the drabbest road verge into a magical looking place, cold and crisp mornings may mean wrapping up and scraping the windscreen, but that shouldn’t lessen their beauty. Flocks of birds visit garden bird feeders, bringing with them an opportunity for people to appreciate their feathered beauty close to.

My favourite winter visitor is the Fieldfare, a large species of thrush that joins us from Scandinavia and Russia each winter, seeking our milder climate and the red berries of the hedgerows and gardens on which they feed. They are beautiful birds and always a pleasure to see, but it is their wonderful cackling call that I most enjoy, an almost other worldly laugh that says winter to me whenever I hear it.

The seasons are full of beauty, most of it close to our homes and my new book Seasonality is my own personal account of the journey through them each year, a guide to the wildlife of the seasons. It is about what I see, what I hear and what I feel as I observe the ever-changing beauty that surrounds us all.

 

Seasonality: A personal account of nature through the seasons by Ian Parsons is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99.

The Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán, traversing late 20th-century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th-century picaresque. You can read an exclusive introduction to the first chapter below.

 

The Forgery
By Jennifer Croft
Published by Charco Press

 

My name is José Federico Burgos. I’m a painter. I make copies of Renaissance paintings and the occasional forgery. I’m sitting on the edge of the highest wall on the property. I’m going to jump. I’m going to do it any second now. The dawn cold numbs my legs as they dangle over the abyss. The streetlamps are starting to turn off as the sunlight peeps over my shoulder. Sunbeams cut through the haze lying over the hamlet. I hear a cockerel’s cry, but it must be miles away. This yellow morning light might be the last thing I see.

Now that it’s getting brighter, I look down and try to calculate, again, the consequences of my fall: the wall is about six metres high, but then there’s another fifteen- or twenty-metre slope of scrub and stone. The branches should help break the fall, but there’s always a chance I’ll crack my head open on a rock and be left paralysed. Not that I have any alternative. Going back to that house would be worse than plunging to my death.

I shift my weight over the edge and my buttocks begin to slip. No going back now – I’d have to hang on with both hands and one of them is already broken, cradled against my heart, smashed to pieces. I jump, pushing hard away from the wall, and scream in mid-air. It’s a short, dry scream, and it reaches me as if someone else had screamed it. My nerves stand like barbs, registering the details of each millionth of a second. I can’t feel the wind, just a force sucking at me like a dark mouth; the gap between my body falling and what it falls away from, along with my stomach. Like when you go over a dip in the road at full speed. Then my feet hit the ground and my whole weight comes smashing down. I may not weigh much, but six metres are six metres, and gravity does its work. My legs spasm and an electric shock runs up my torso to my arms. My head snaps back, although not too hard. Then immediately, movement. I’m dragged down through the stones and branches, skidding head- long between hard clods and rocks. I can’t keep track of the scrapes and blows and grazes. In the cloud of dust I’m raising, the distance feels much further than I’d calculated. An eternal expanse in which everything crunches and cracks and rolls and rips, but I can’t be sure whether what’s crunching and cracking are branches or my own bones and flesh. I feel a stab in my side, a twinge that could just as well have been a thorn or something piercing deep into an organ – who can say, the pain is the same. Flesh or bone? is the only thing I can think. Flesh or bone.

Finally, I come to a halt. My blood beats in my temples, in my hands. I’m conscious. Stunned, but conscious. My hand! I think with a start, as though anticipating a pain that then instantly erupts, my right arm twisted to one side like a piece of spaghetti. My whole body is spaghetti-soft.

I open my eyes, or it feels like I open my eyes, into the gradually dispersing cloud of dust. I’m very close to the edge of the road – surely someone will see me, someone who’ll pick me up and take me to hospital, or call an ambulance. It’s just a question of waiting. Waiting and managing the pain. Staying very still so the pain doesn’t take over my thoughts. Then I really would be lost. It’s odd, the pain isn’t localised in my broken arm any more, nor in my scrapes; it’s a dull throbbing that envelops me entirely. Like a speaker muffled by a cushion.

I hear the drag of footsteps along the ground, to one side of my head. I can’t turn to look. A force like a hand is stopping me. From the footsteps, I deduce that there are two people,

but all I manage to see is the toe of a shoe. It’s a leather shoe, a very fine one, perfectly clean, not a single blade of grass clinging to it.

‘You won’t be able to play with those clubs here. You need a five-wood titanium head, so you can lift it with those flimsy little biceps of yours,’ I hear the closer voice saying.

‘I’ve ordered some Dunlops, but they haven’t arrived yet. Once they get here I’ll give you a run for your money, you’ll see. It won’t do you any good trying to measure the course with your architect’s eye,’ the other replies, with the harsh accent of an old-time rancher.

The man in the clean shoes crouches down beside me. ‘Let’s go. Leave him, he’s alive,’ says the man further off. ‘Did you see him jump? I think he’s one of ours.’ ‘What else is he gonna be, man. Come on, take your shot and have done with it.’ I hear the click of a lighter, then smell tobacco.

‘Hey, kid… Kid, can you hear me?’ the man by my side insists. I catch a momentary glimpse of his face: his wide bald head, his curly eyebrows and impish eyes.

‘Hang on in there, they’re on their way. We can talk when you get back,’ I hear him say. He gets up and walks off.

‘Yeah, get some rest in the cemetery!’ his companion says, and they both laugh heartily.

‘Bet you anything I’ll make the next hole in three, tops.’

‘You serious? With your arthritis? I’d bet on Miracle that you can’t.’

‘That horse is past his prime. And you’d gone grey before he was even born…’

I hear the clean sound of a ball being putted. The voices grow distant. I struggle to turn over but can’t manage it. What they’re saying makes no sense, there’s no golf club here or anything like it, it’s a patch of wasteland by the side of the road and I’m in urgent need of some- one’s help, someone who can call an ambulance.

My head finally frees itself of the weight that had kept it from moving, but there’s nobody there. I’m surrounded by spiny shrubs, dry earth. Below me, a few metres away, I can just about see the black strip of asphalt and the gutter alongside it. I hear the roar of a large engine. The pain stirs. It’s a shot that shatters every nerve, a lightning bolt into an old tree. It doesn’t even leave me time to scream. The pain immediately absorbs all my strength and I’m unable to endure it. It’s about to annihilate me when something surges from within my own mind and sucks me into its tiniest corner. A dark, quiet box where time stands still.

 

The Forgery by Jennifer Croft is published by Charco Press, priced £9.99.

Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, but to some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. The story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance and global consequence, one that Murray Pittock dives into with great detail across its history in his new book. You can read an extract below on Books from Scotland exploring the classic Auld Lang Syne.

 

Scotland The Global History: 1603 to the Present
By Murray Pittock
Published by Yale University Press

 

‘Auld Lang Syne’, now often accounted the second most widely used song globally after ‘Happy Birthday to You’, has a much longer history since it appeared in Robert Burns’ version in 1796. Sung in benefit concerts and entr’actes from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was also inscribed on a snuff box given to George IV on the occasion of the royal visit to Edinburgh in 1822 when the king also enjoyed a ‘gala performance’ of Rob Roy Macgregor, or ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

From 1818 at least, it was sung at Burns Suppers, first appearing in Philadelphia. The radical Andrew White, transported for his part in the 1820 Rising (discussed later in this chapter) referred to it as a New Year song as early as 1822. Used in political discussion in England from the 1817 Pitt dinner and in Continental opera, ballet and drama in the 1820s, by 1850 it had become – like ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the Queen’ – a national song, performed on social occasions to express Scottish nationality on British ceremonial and imperial occasions. In the 1830s it was being sung by enslaved people in the Caribbean, and from at least 1852 was being played when British ships left port; by 1864 at the latest it was also used in ceremonies when ‘regiments bade farewell to their old colours’.

Used in the United States by Union troops in the Civil War and during Lincoln’s funeral, and in British politics as a political anthem associated with W.E. Gladstone, it was also the subject of a statue erected in Central Park in the 1860s and provided a reference point in Victorian fiction and popular culture. In 1877, Alexander Graham Bell used it to demonstrate the telephone, and it was one of the first songs recorded for gramophone in 1890. In 1892, the Burns scholar James Dick termed it the ‘most widely diffused song in the civilised world’, and by this period it was regularly being played as a New Year song on both sides of the Atlantic. It subsequently became a song of the Scout movement, and was played at graduations in the US and Asia, where it was played at the British exit from Hong Kong in 1998, and can be heard signifying closing time in Japanese bars and supermarkets.

‘Auld Lang Syne’ is also played at funerals in Taiwan, as well as providing the closing ritual for millions who attend Burns Suppers worldwide, as it has done since at least 1890. Translated into many languages, it even made a brief appearance as the national anthem of the Maldives, as the Burns scholar Morag Grant informs us. Auld Lang Syne’ was popularized as a New Year song for radio by Canadian musician Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York from 1929, and later emerged in transmuted form in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen among many others.

The song has made repeated appearances in American cinema, most often in a romantic context with a New Year reference – Holiday (1938) is an early example. Such repeated uses in modern culture demonstrate ‘Auld Lang Syne’’s symbolic power, conveying over-whelming sentiment in a language not quite like English, where the characters do not always know what the words ‘even mean’ and some-times say so. (‘Old Long Since’ is not an adequate translation and ‘Old Long Ago’ is not either; nor is it useable English. Scots allows for the use of a double intensifier, and ‘syne’ itself has multiple meanings, which allow the term to have an evocative ambiguity as well as a quality of positive nostalgia unavailable in short English words.) In films such as When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Sex and the City (2008) the song has played out as a moment of romantic climax and change, symbolized in the changing of the year.

From It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) onwards it has also been a Christmas song. Less positively, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ has been used to reference the loss of the antebellum South. The Cameron family in D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation (1915) reflect the core Scottish martial values of bravery, chivalry and openhearted decency trans-planted into a defence of white supremacy in the Confederate states before, during and after the Civil War. The ‘Little Colonel’ Cameron is presented in the film as the chief defender of racial politics against Black rights and miscegenation who keeps the world of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ alive in his bravery and resourcefulness in founding the Klan. The myth of the ‘Celtic South’, argued for in the historian James Michael Hill’s Celtic Warfare (1986) and still widespread today, was deeply reinforced by Griffiths’ film, originally to be titled The Klansman. Convivality, fraternal organizations (Grant argues that the crossing of arms which closes communal singing of the song derives from Masonic practice), social occasions and nostalgia for friends and the happy years spent with them are not always positive emotions, but Burns’ version of this ancient – and in his day Jacobite – Scottish song in praise of a lost past (as all pasts are) is in many respects the signature tune of the Scottish brand.

 

Scotland The Global History: 1603 to the Present by Murray Pittock is published by Yale University Press, priced £25.

Patrick Jamieson discovers two impressive debut novels from two of Scotland’s most successful comedians.

 

Meantime
By Frankie Boyle
Published by Baskerville

The Black Dog
By Kevin Bridges
Published by Wildfire

 

In a publishing climate dominated by celebrity memoirs and political diatribes, you could be forgiven for approaching the debut novels of Frankie Boyle and Kevin Bridges with an air of cynicism. Meantime (Baskerville, July 22) and The Black Dog (Wildfire, August 22), both written during lockdown and published this summer, have been granted pre-ordained status as major literary events thanks to the reputations of the two beloved Scottish comics. Thankfully, neither make any apologies for this, and within just a handful of pages it becomes clear that these stand-up comics are more natural authors than most influencers or stale politicians.

Of course, this should come as no surprise. Since the New Wave in the 1950s and 60s, stand-up comedy has increasingly become a narrative artform anchored by storytelling. The performance of a stand-up comedy routine requires many abilities familiar to the novelist: a sensitive consideration of audience, a sophisticated understanding of structure, and the ability to elicit pathos. More and more comics play with the rules and expectations of the form in a manner reminiscent of post-modern literature, while the authored personas of many comics speak to a deep sensitivity for character and an ability to blur fiction and reality so characteristic of much contemporary fiction. In fact, it’s a wonder more haven’t taken to writing novels.

All of these traits come to the fore in Meantime and The Black Dog, which offer different but equally impressive examples of comic-authored debuts. In Meantime, the drug-addled Felix McAveety teams up with his unstable neighbour Donny and dying crime-writer Jane Pickford to try and solve the murder of his friend Marina. Traversing post-referendum Glasgow in a haze of valium, LSD and whatever else they can get their hands on, the three unlikely PIs uncover a chain of lies and deception reaching out from local independence groups through youth centres all the way to the pharmaceutical industry and police force. Throughout, Boyle illustrates a genuine gift for imagery (‘I opened the curtains and watched a seagull laugh across a shock of morning sky’), and in the hilarious McAveety, his characteristically crushing social observations are given new life. Like with Boyle’s stand-up, however, this critique is often undercut by an implicit self-effacement, as shown in an interaction between McAveety and his therapist:

‘You’re swearing a lot lately.’
‘Maybe Scottish people have been imprisoned in the English language and we are trying to blow our way out.’
‘Yes… Scottish people weren’t all Gaelic speakers, you know.’
‘I know everybody needs to feel like they’re right all the time, but I’m often wrong, and I’m okay with it.’

Boyle is unafraid to approach the bigger topics with the kind of balance and self-awareness often absent in the age of social media, though – like McAveety – he often hides this behind a front of humour and cynicism. Like the most effective stand-up comedy routines, it is only when the novel ends that its deeper message becomes clear: set against the polarizing backdrop of a referendum during which ‘everybody felt like they were right’, the fatal duplicitousness and mind-bending punchline of Meantime shows that, for Boyle, the ability to admit to being wrong is not only acceptable, but potentially life-saving.

Meantime is a cerebral novel, and Boyle makes no qualms about that. In a move reminiscent of Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, McAveety continually worries that his life is part of a simulation. A funny and familiar expression of drug-induced paranoia, it also winks towards the authorship and construction of a novel that is complemented by its deconstruction of the crime fiction genre and deep concern with the notion of truth. All assumptions are questioned, and a running theme of rewriting history is surmised when McAveety notes, ‘Describing fiction as history and vice versa was very much Donnie’s vibe. Maybe it made sense, or as close to sense as we could make.’ For Boyle, there is no truth, only the performance of truth, and in fiction as on stage, he takes this to extreme and sophisticated lengths for great comedic effect.

While less feverish and fast-paced, the Glasgow constructed in Kevin Bridges’ The Black Dog is too written with the familiar ease of the local, drifting between the worlds of two men: college student and Morrisons shelf-stacker Declan, whose dreams of being a writer appear to be halted by a combination of depression and a run-in with a local gangster, and James Cavani, a successful writer from the same area who has returned home from the US to care for his sister. The stories of these two men are set on an unlikely collision course and Bridges reels in the reader with an impressive pacing that belies a debut—this is clearly a comic well-versed in structure. The novel moves comfortably between vernacular and standard English narration, exhibiting the same balance between authenticity and universality that undercuts so much of Bridges’ comedic appeal. His is a voice sensitive to pace, informed by the natural rhythms and schisms of speech, and his dialogue – especially in the character of Doof Doof, Declan’s philosopher-come-greenskeeper sidekick – sparkles with the wit and character of the best comics’ social observation:

‘You’d be surprised how fucked up some people feel, Declan. Embrace the sadness sometimes, man, get to know it, it’s normal, man, it’s human. Remember it’s your heed, it’s your home, your home game, don’t let it be an away game, man, a tough place to go, fucking Tynecastle or somewhere.’

Bridges’ novel is no doubt a more straightforward story than Meantime, but The Black Dog, too, explores questions of authorship and the distinctions between truth and fiction. ‘The Black Dog’ is the name given to Declan’s script that he sends to James Cavani, a script he hopes depicts ‘real life shit’, ‘all the frustration, the anger, the confusion, whatever it was […] authentic, propelled by real-life energy, real experiences.’ Declan’s approach to writing is a cypher for Bridges’ wider feelings about art and stand-up comedy. It is precisely the magic of Bridges’ comedy – his ability to mine the humour in the everyday ‘real life shit’ of working-class Glasgow – that gives life to The Black Dog, and he is acutely aware of this, drawing a fine line between fiction and real-life experience that gifts his characters a familiarity and compels us to invest in their story.

Both Meantime and The Black Dog draw us in like the setup of a great joke, hit us with the punchline, but do so in ways characteristic of each comic. Meantime is a jet-black hallucinogenic noir full of biting cynicism, blacker, ironically, than The Black Dog, which for all its vivid representations of the everyday struggles of working-class life and open intention to ‘embrace the sadness’, has earnest hope pitched firmly at its centre. Yet much like Boyle’s stand-up, if one is willing to chip away at the brash exterior, what is revealed is a genuinely tender portrait of apathy, loss and redemption not unlike Bridges’ work. Closing the book on Meantime and The Black Dog, what we are reminded of is not just the ways in which the formal boundaries between stand-up comedy and literature often dissolve under closer inspection, but that at their heart both art forms are concerned with the same thing: the tragicomedy of human experience. So sit back, open a can or order a takeaway, and enjoy these two entertaining rides. It’s fucking life, man.

 

Meantime by Frankie Boyle is published by Baskerville, priced £14.99.

The Black Dog by Kevin Bridges is published by Wildfire, priced £20.

Stuck at home during lockdown Esa Aldegheri revisited her memories of a road trip from Orkney to New Zealand and put pen to paper. Free To Go is an excellent memoir that explores both those events, and she written exclusively for BooksfromScotland about what freedom and constraint mean to her.

 

Free to Go
By Esa Aldegheri
Published by John Murray

 

When I woke up on the 1st of February 2020 I didn’t know that by evening I’d have planned out a book on freedom and constraint, borders and connectedness, motorbike journeys and motherhood. All I knew was that the insides of my eyelids felt they had brambles for capillaries, and that my stomach was twisting in knots of deep apprehension.

I was hungover from having raised too many parting drams outside the Scottish Parliament the night before, at a defiant gathering of people who sang and wept as the United Kingdom left the European Union and took Scotland with it. I was sick with worry and fear for the future of my Italian-Scottish family and many others. As the day jangled on, my anxiety clotted into anger, then urgency: the need to weave a story to help navigate times of increasing restrictions, where wide horizons and the freedom of adventuring were somehow in dialogue with borders, restrictions and fear.

Between mugs of restorative coffee, I turned to what I knew: my own memories of open borders, when I drove a motorbike halfway across the world with my husband. I planned to juxtapose the vast freedoms of a motorbike adventure with the limitations on free movement brought by Brexit. Of course, another thing I didn’t know was that in a few weeks my Brexit worries would be eclipsed first by the catastrophic impact of Covid in Lombardy, where my Italian family live, and then by the pandemic lockdowns in Scotland.

Free to Go evolved during months of claustrophobia and fear when my main escape was into memories of free travel, and as my mind flitted between memories and reality the book shaped itself around the twin strands of freedom and constraint. The adventure of travelling is narrated in the past and progresses geographically, following the motorbike journey from Scotland to New Zealand. Remembered journeys are interwoven with a narrative in the present tense which is anchored to the cycle of seasons through one year of pandemic restrictions.

At first I thought it would be simple: then, freedom; now, constraint. But as the book grew, I saw that these two strands are so closely woven that one never exists without the other being close by. The motorbike journey featured many constraints – from visa refusals to physical attacks and almost being deported – which enraged me and made freedom of travel shine all the brighter. Over a year of pandemic living I found new ways to regain a sense of freedom, and those discoveries delight me still.

Delight and freedom, constraint and rage recur throughout Free to Go. A lot of the rage comes from the fact that I travel this world as a woman – and in my experience it is a world which often assumes that women drive pillion, both on motorbikes and in personal relationships. Far too many men have interrupted me, when I started telling them about Free to Go, with variations on “Oh, how nice – a view from the pillion!”. No, pal. Just – no.

This is also a world which I travel as a white woman with a strong body and a Good Passport, accidents of birth which mean that I have liberties which many, many others lack. Writing Free to Go made me appreciate just how much the freedoms I enjoy as a traveller – to go where I decide, to leave if I want to and return safely home – are extraordinary and precious. I would like to see more travel writing which celebrates the delight of moving with curiosity in the world while also acknowledging that not everyone is equally free to go.

The process of bringing a book into the world also confirmed that, to me, writing is in itself a freedom. As a child in Italy I learned a song with the refrain i libri sono ali – books are wings – and I found this to be true, in the sense that writing Free to Go freed me to fly across the world through words, away from the suffocations and fears of lockdown. Writing is also an act which takes memories, thoughts and stories out of my mind and sets them free into the world, like birds. Who knows where they will roost and nest – what an amazement, thinking of that. What a delight.

 

Free to Go by Esa Aldegheri is published by John Murray, priced £14.99.