THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

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.

 

Corinna Campbell has followed up her magical picture book The Girl Who Stole the Stars with another beautiful picture book, The Boy Who Rescued a Rainbow. Here, Corinna takes us through the story and its message of what it means to have courage.

 

The Boy Who Rescued a Rainbow
By Corinna Campbell
Published by Little Door Books

 

 

The Boy Who Rescued a Rainbow by Corinna Campbell is published by Little Door Books, priced £7.99.

Scottish-Mexican poet Juana Adcock’s latest pamphlet, Vesitigial, is a collection of poems written after Alasdair Gray’s seminal work, Lanark. It was published in June by Stewed Rhubarb Press.

 

Vestigial
By Juana Adcock
Published by Stewed Rhubarb Press

 

Vestigial is a commissioned body of poems. How did the original commission come about and when did you write it?

I was commissioned to write a response to Lanark during the first two lockdowns, as part of the first Alasdair Gray conference and as a creative response to go alongside the academic papers. It took six months or a year to finish writing. I hadn’t read Lanark until the first lockdown. Before I’d started reading it, I’d thought about leaving Glasgow. I felt the city wasn’t working for me – typical lockdown crisis! But reading Lanark while going on these lockdown walks…the city looked completely different. I noticed things I’d never seen before. The original commission was just for one poem, but there were so many layers of stories, t was so hard to condense that into a single poem. I don’t know how anyone could have done that. It’s huge, anarchic, a labyrinth.

 

What was the response when you produced a pamphlet instead of a single poem?

I think Rodge Glass [Strathclyde University, Chair of the Alasdair Gray Conference Committee] was like ‘are you okay? Are you sure you’re not overextending yourself?’ I kept thinking, maybe I can write lots of different drafts and then choose one poem to focus on, the best one, and send that off. But I couldn’t choose. I just sent it off as lots of different poems. I presented it at the conference on Zoom, read a couple of poems, and then found a home for it a year or so later.

 

I suppose that shows just how much you connected to Lanark.

I found it really generative and it really did give me all these different ideas. It wasn’t just reading the book – I wrote to the Alasdair Grey Archive and asked if I could go. It was during a lockdown, so me for it was a huge adventure to get on a bus and go all the way to Maryhill! They were so generous. I was shown all these drafts, his own library, notes he’d added to books. If he wanted to correct something, he would add liquid paper and a Post It note, then write on that. Everything had all these layers. It connected me to a story Rodge told me – Alasdair Gray painted a mural for a church that was due to be demolished. He painted this elaborate mural, even when he knew the church wouldn’t exist for much longer. It made me think about the creative process in a different way – it’s about the process, not the end results.

 

What was it like at the archive?

It’s beautiful – it looks like it could have been his living room. There’s furniture from his flat, his original desk, bookshelves filled with his actual books. You actually feel that you’re in his space.

 

How did that feel as a writer, going into his space?

It was really somehow liberating. You get the feeling he was not some god that was out there making this consecrated art – he was a struggling artist, always skint, having to improvise with whatever elements he had around him. I was shown a notebook he rescued from a skip, this old accounting book he’d used as a sketchbook.

 

You’ve got your own collections of poetry out; what was it like, producing work written entirely after someone else? Did you feel any pressure?

I was worried I would be departing too far from Lanark. I kept wondering if I should include more recognisable elements or incorporate more classic scenes or bring in characters. But then I thought, no. What I think I’m responding to is his vision of the creative process, rather than the novel’s actual plot or its content. I was trying to get nearer to the way he thinks. I find that the most fascinating part of connecting with anyone’s work.

 

Quite often poets write in response to other poets, or poems, or artwork. What was it like writing poetry in response to a novel?

A narrative element came into the poetry, I feel. I was trying to think of poems but kept thinking about different stories. I could have kept going, writing loads of narrative poems, but I had to stop at some point! In classic Unthank style, it’s all a fight against bureaucracy and how powerless one is against the system. I did end up visiting art galleries and looking at the physicality of paintings, and thinking about the physicality of the archives though.

 

I think physicality really comes through with the different forms you use in Vestigial. ‘After Eden’ and its use of footnotes feels like those layers of Post It notes you saw in the archive. How did you find the forms you use?

There was a lot of stream of consciousness, scribbling away or typing away. Then when I’d look back at drafts I’d notice form, which I’d been thinking about a bit. In ‘My chi moves like arrows’, I use a lot of ‘<’, which looks like an actual arrow. It’s a math sign, also used in coding. When I switch my keyboard between English and Spanish, sometimes when I try and write a comma, < appears instead. So, I decided to make it part of the form, and it matches the theme of arrows, and the image of St Sebastian and his arrow wounds.

 

There are different languages at play in these poems too.

Yeah, there’s English, Spanish, a little Persian, and Dutch. It was always just a conglomeration of whatever was going on on my screen at the time. Usually when I’m writing drafts, probably half will be Spanish, some will be Spanglish, some English. There’s always an anarchy of languages going on that I have to go back and tidy up.

 

You’ve also invented your own definitions, the work is punctuated with these meanings of ‘vestigial’.

That was a last minute addition! All these poems without titles were going to be called ‘Vestigial’, but I didn’t like the word floating on the page on its own. So, I made these fake definitions and connected them to the poems. I liked the idea of creating these literary spaces where you can imagine a different reality where a certain word means something else. Similar, I suppose, to Unthank.

 

Vestigial by Juana Adcock is published by Stewed Rhubarb Press, priced £5.99.

With summer in the air there’s no finger time to turn your hand to something new – find below a recipe for a sweetcorn and cashew curry from Urvashi Roe’s Biting Biting: Snacking Gujarati-Style to test out for yourself. You won’t regret it.

 

Biting Biting: Snacking Gujarati-Style
By Urvashi Roe
Published by Kitchen Press

 

Makai Kaju nu Shaak
SWEETCORN AND CASHEW CURRY

Grilled corn rubbed over with butter or ghee, chilli powder and salt is a fantastic snack. We enjoy it often. But when you want something a bit more substantial this is the shaak to make. The cashews add such a wonderful nuttiness. My husband will eat this in one sitting if I let him.

Serves 4–6

100g cashew nuts
2 tbsp sunflower or rapeseed oil
2 tsp mustard seeds
4 tsp finely chopped green chillies
300g floury potatoes, cut into 3cm cubes
400ml tin coconut milk
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp cumin powder
1½ tsp salt
3 sweetcorn cobs, cut into 6cm pieces
3 tbsp finely chopped fresh coriander

Toast the cashew nuts in a dry wok over a medium heat until they start to brown and fill your kitchen with a wonderful nutty aroma. Set to one side.

Put the wok back on the heat, add the oil and heat for a few minutes, then add the mustard seeds and let them crackle and pop for a few seconds. Next, add the green chillies closely followed by the potatoes.

Turn the heat to low and stir in the coconut milk, turmeric, cumin and salt. Fill the empty coconut milk tin with water, scraping down the edges to get all of the coconut, and pour that in, stir and bring to a simmer.

Leave to cook for five minutes and then add the sweetcorn and toasted cashews, reserving a few to garnish. Cook for another five minutes with the lid on until the potatoes are soft, the sweetcorn just tender and the cashews a little softened.

Garnish with the fresh coriander and the reserved toasted cashews, roughly chopped. Serve as is or with crusty bread, on rice or on quinoa.

 

Biting Biting: Snacking Gujarati-Style by Urvashi Roe is published by Kitchen Press, priced £20.

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.

In June, Publishing Scotland’s #YS2022 theme is SANCTUARY.

 

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 Black and White Publishing

 

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

Click here to read an interview with Trishna Singh about her book A Silent Voice Speaks: The Wee Indian Woman on the Bus.

To read an interview with Lauren T. Davila about editing the anthology When Other People Saw Us They Saw the Dead, click here.

For a LBGTQ+ reading list for Pride month, click here.

 

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

Polaris is the latest gaelic poetry collection from Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, an ambitious collection that explores the history and languages of the UK along with the lives of marginalised communities. Here, we publish a few of the poems from the collection and their translations.

 

Extracts taken from Polaris
By Marcas Mac an Tuairneir
Published by Leamington Books

 

Am Facal

But just because I am a woman, why must I not write
of the goodness of God?
– Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

 B’ aithne dhi rùchd nan carbadan
a thàinig gus na cuirp a thogail,
am breum ag èirigh bhuapa is iad
caithte an uaighean gun chomharra.

B’ ann aig àm a cruaidh-chàis
a chuala i am facal, lìon e i
bho bhun gu bàrr,
le gràdh iol-iadhach màthar.

Bha an còmhradh sin
mar thogail uisge bhon tobar
agus, basan sgaoilte,
crom ri leacan a’ chaibeil,
b’ i am fianais a h-adhlacaidh fhèin.

Ga cumail bhon t-saoghal,
na tèarmann le trì uinneagan,
sgrìobh i fad deich air fhicead bliadhna,
a’ cumail, ma briathran taobhanach,
doib a cànain, uile gu lèir.

B’ euchd a mhair nan aoisean,
aig làmh leth-oireach a bhuin
do thè a chanadh, na h-irioslachd
rithe fhèin, creutair neo-litireach.

 

Sgrìobhadh an dàn seo às dèidh prògram aithriseach aig an Oll. Janina Ramírez fhaicinn mu dhèidhinn na mnà-ònaraine Julian de Norwich. Rè a beò, sgrìobhadh Julian cunntasan a cuid aislingean anns an leabhar aice Revelations of Divine Love, an leabhar as sine againn, sgrìobhte ann am Beurla aig boireannach.

 

 

The Word

But just because I am a woman, why must I not write
of the goodness of God?
– Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

 She knew the rumble of the carts
that came to lift the dead,
the stench rising from them,
as they were cast into unmarked graves.

It was in her own extremis
she heard the word, it filled her,
wholly, with the all-encompassing
love of a mother.

That conversation
was like taking water from the well
and, palms outstretched,
crouched into the chapel’s flagstones,
she was witness to her own interment.

Sequestered from the world
in her three-windowed sanctuary,
she wrote for thirty years,
augmenting the wattle of her word
with the daub of her entire language.

It was a work to outlive the ages,
from a hand in isolation, which
belonged to one, who in her humility
named herself unlettered creature.

 

This poem was inspired by a documentary with Dr. Janina Ramírez. Throughout her life, Julian would continue to have religious visions, writing detailed accounts of each of them in her book Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest book ever written in English by a woman.

 

 

Briathrachas
Mar chuimhneachan air Eideard Dwelly

Sa Bheurla
’s mo shùil air tighinn tarsainn
air briathar gun fhiosta dhomh,
bidh mi a’ cruinneachadh tiùrr is murag, sligean is gainmheach nam
faclan mun cuairt air,
gus drochaid a thogail thar
a’ chnap-starra ron chèill.

San fhaclair,
buailidh mi air a’ bhàrr,
gus mo bhrùthadh foimhpe,
a-steach do luasgadh nan duilleagan.
’S tric a thèid mo shlaodadh,
mar bhùidh gun acair,
gus an ruig mi an grunnd.
Mo chorragan sgaoilt’,
air mo shnàgaran, lìonaidh mi
mo phòca le neamhnaidean,
criomagan longan briste,
bleideag òir air a rùsgadh o
aghaidh ìomhaigh umha, air chall.

Sa Ghàidhlig
agus corrag a’ tarraing loidhne
gu fàth-fiata fon teagsa,
tha feadhainn dhiubh mar
smàil dhubha, còrr datha
air tighinn le gob na cleite.
Thèid an diùltadh,
na faclan nach do dh’fhàs
o bhuachair na croite, nach d’ rinn seirm ri gliong
glainne an taighe-chèilidh.

Ged nach aithnichear iad,
’s iad tha dhòmhsa gun phrìs. Na clachan-bhuadhach, obair-ghrèise an t-sìoda,
an cruan a nì an cliath
cho grinn.

 

 

Lexicon
In memory of Edward Dwelly

In English
as my eye alights
on a term unknown to me,
I gather flotsam and jetsam, grains of sand and the shells of words that encircle it,
to build a bridge beyond
the barrier to meaning.

In the dictionary,
I dive beyond the surface, propel myself below,
within the roll of the pages. Often I am adrift,
like a buoy without an anchor, until I reach the seabed.
My fingers spread,
scrambling, I fill my
pocket with pearls,
shipwrecks’ fragments,
a fleck of gold peeled from the face of a vanished bronze.

In Gaelic
as the finger draws a line invisibly below the text,
some appear like stains,
black, a surplus of ink
from the nib of the quill.
They are rejected,
the words that did not grow
out of the mud of the croft,
that did not chime, clinking
with a cèilidh house glass.

Though they are known no longer, to me, they are precious.
The amethyst amulets,
the silken embroidery,
the enamel that makes the latticework so fine.

 

Gille Grinn

Don chlann gèidh a dh’èirich suas fo sgàil
Earrann a 28 agus daoine mar Sheumas Mòr Whannel
a strì air ar son.

 

Bha rudeigin san dòigh a shuaith e
ghruaig far a bhathais is a
làmhan air a chruachan aig
cùl sluagh cloinne-nighean.

Ge ‘s bith brag a’ bhàl a sheachnas e,
no an còmhrag ’s a bhios e ’n sàs,
‘s ann ann an ceàrn ciùin eanchainn,
bhios seanais amharais a ghnàth.

Bidh an gille sin na dhannsair,
na dhealbhadair, na bhàrd,
ach bheir e ùine fhathast,
mus lìonar na tha na bhroinn de bheàrn.

 

Mar mhòran òigridh anns gach ceàrnaidh nan nàiseanan seo, chaidh mi tron sgoil fo sgàil Earainn a 28. Rugadh mi air 28mh na Samhna, 1984. B’ e àireamh a 28 air a taigh againn, is tha fhathast.

 

Fioliome Fantabulosa

For the gay kids raised under the spectre of
Section 28 and folk like Jim Whannel
who fought for us.

I vardad something in the way
she ȝooȝed her ends from her eek
cackling, lill-on-hip, ajax
a gaggle of billingsgates

Maybe the schonk of the ball
she swerves, or in barneys, battyfangs,
but in the munge of her mind,
savvies a doubt that nantie scarpers.

Mais oui, dolly may a walloper be,
a jogger, a screever in her time,
but it’ll take a longola time, no flies,
to josh up the nishta deep inside.

 

Like many young people belonging to these nations, I went to school under the shadow of Section 28. I was born on 28th November 1984. It was a number 28 on the house I grew up in and, indeed, it still is.

 

 

Geallaidhean

Brexit, nul points!

Cuine chaidh a chluinntinn,
an duine a ghlaodh ris a’ ghaoith

Is na geallaidhean air an aiteamh,
gus gealagan fhailleanachadh?

’S dòchas beag a tha sin,
nach mair ach fad ainmsir

Gus nach eil againn air fhàgail,
ach dìleas na dìle.

Cò riamh a lorg politigear,
nach do dh’inns breug?

No uas-fhlath a bha deònach,
a leantainn, làmh-fhalamh

Ge b’ e prionnsa òg alainn,
no amadan sailleach òglaidh

Na shuidhe mu dhealbh-cùil
Oir Dhè Rìoghail.

A bheil ùidh aca
an cruinnich sinn

An Downing Street,
no Taigh an Ròid,

Pàrlamaid na Brùiseil
no anns an lios-càil?

Nach iadsan an fheadhainn,
a shiubhlas first class,

A chlaonas na cosgais,
ge ’s bith am blas?

Dè an diofair dhaibhsan,
a bheil thu beairteach no bochd?

’S e bochdainn tha faisg,
tha nas buinneach thar chàich

Gu dearbh.

Nach sin an teachdaireachd
is tu brùchdadh don bhòt?

Ri car a’ mhuiltein
is an gealladh a’ tighinn dhut.

 

Coltach ris na taghaidhean Ameireaganach na bu thràithe, dhùisg mi air madainn 24 Ògmhios, 2016 le mì-chreidsinn gu tur. Bidh sinn ancòmhnaidh Eòrpach.

 

 

Voos
Owerset bi Stuart A. Paterson

 Brexit, nul points!

When’er wis a chiel tentit
whae skreigh’t et the wun

An the voo thowed oot
tae seed the snawdrap?

It’s a wee howp yon
whilk lests jist yin season

Till a we hae left’s
the bowder’s fell lealty.

Wis there e’er a politeecian
didnae lee

Nor a laird wi a likin
fur peyin through the neb?

Gin a bonnie young Prince
nor a crabbit auld taed

Baukit afore
Royal Deeside’s braw launs.

Wad ony keep mind
gin we gaithered thegither

In Downing Street
nor the Palace o Holyrood,

In wur ain kailyaird
nor in Brussels’ Big Hoose?

Ur thon no the yins
whae stravaig First Cless,

Whae pauchle their expens,
nae matter their accent?

Whit care they gif
yer mintit nor puir?

The hame-toon puirtith
owergans them a.

Richt eneuch.

Are thur no yer lairins
as ye breenge oot tae vote?

Gan heelster-gowdie
for glib-gabbit voos.

 

As with the earlier American election, I awoke on the morning of 24th June, 2016 in utter disbelief. We will always be European.

 

Polaris by Marcas Mac an Tuairneir is published by Leamington Books, priced £12.99.

David Robinson speaks to Cynthia Rogerson about her latest book, her memoir Wah! Things I Never Told My Mother.

 

Wah! Things I Never Told My Mother
By Cynthia Rogerson
Published by Sandstone Press

 

‘The end, it is near. You must come.’

The voice on the phone from California was that of Ateca, the Fijian carer of Cynthia Rogerson’s mother. The end, though, wasn’t near at all. Sometimes it was years away, sometimes just months. But each time she was summoned, Rogerson flew halfway across the world from her Highland home to her childhood one at San Rafael, half an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. It was here where her mother finally died, aged 87, in 2018. She had vascular dementia, albeit one of the more merciful versions of the disease that left her free of anger and still able to show affection. For the five years Ateca cared for her, though, conversation was starkly limited. Asked a question – whether she wanted dessert, whether she was happy – her mother’s usual response was to spread out her hands, palms upwards, and say just the one word: ‘Wah!’ She said it with a smile, as if saying: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I don’t mind!’

Rogerson chose this as the title for her first non-fiction book, she explains, ‘because it’s about accepting, with good grace, a certain degree of incomprehension. In my mother’s case, because of Alzheimer’s, and in my own because I never understood my mother.’ So while Ateca and her mother settled down to watch daytime TV, Rogerson went into her dead father’s study and tried to find words for her memories.

In the first story she wrote, her mother hardly figured. It was a memory of being 18, and coming back home, face still flushed after sex with the boy next door. Her father threw a glass of wine over her and ordered her to get out of the house. Her mother was probably there at the time, but not the way Rogerson remembers it. She was always daddy’s girl. Her mother was self-effacing, subservient, undemanding: the young Rogerson looked down on her as ‘just a housewife’, someone who loved her children unconditionally but hadn’t a career of her own.

Rogerson no longer condescends to her mother, so her memoir is in part a work of atonement. Yet it also manages to be as self-deprecating and funny as anything by David Sedaris. As Rogerson excavates her 18-year-old self, the wild and dangerous absurdities of her life rear up again: the 30-year-old man who picked her up while hitch-hiking and who lived in a foam factory; the late-night hitch to visit him when she is mistaken for a prostitute (‘Hey, you working?’). All these are, in the words of her memoir’s sub-heading ‘Things I Never Told My Mother’. And yes, there’s a massive irony here. ‘I never expressed these things to my mother,’ she points out, ‘yet here I am telling them to the whole world.’

She sent that first chapter off to her younger sister, a journalist in San Francisco, and when she got a positive response, carried on writing. Out it all poured, interspersed with scenes of visits to her gradually declining mother. The marriage in Reno when she was 22 to a handsome Irishman who claimed to be in the IRA and on the run. That first time she hitched round Europe, aged 17, when she was raped in a van in France. Life in a commune in Scotland looking after a pig called Priscilla. Riding the rails to Mexico with her brother. The drummer in a new wave band in Leeds who became a husband. More hobo holidays to Mexico. A husband who lived in the extension of their house after their divorce. An old friend who moved into her house  because he needed a room but who then became a husband. Running with her brother, stoned and naked, across California’s Highway 1. Hiding some of her father’s ashes in the flat of the woman she was convinced was once the love of his life. Somehow, hardly mentioned, there were four children, and a job teaching creative writing.

This is, as Bernard MacLaverty points out, ‘a selfie of a tearaway with a real writer in control of the chaos’. He at least knows just how good a novelist Rogerson is: far too many people don’t. This can often happen: publishing is a lottery, and although Rogerson has had five novels published and although her short stories have been broadcast, anthologised and shortlisted for prizes, her work remains less well known than it ought to be. Yet she is, as Alan Bissett has suggested, ‘Scotland’s very own Anne Tyler’.

That comparison is, I think, even more perceptive than he realises, and is more than just a similarity of style and tone. Not only is Tyler one of Rogerson’s favourite novelists but she shares Tyler’s fascination with fictional explorations of long-lasting marriage. This was the subject of her last novel, Wait for Me, Jack (2017, written as Addison Jones), which traced the slightly wandering course of true love between parents Jack and Milly over six decades. I ask how different they are from her own parents, George and Barbara. ‘They’re not!’ she laughs. ‘I only have one subject – them!’

She tells me that she’s currently working on another novel and I ask if her parents figure in it, too.

‘Yes. I can’t let them go. I’m obsessed with them.’

‘Why?’

‘They were both charismatic people, good-looking and charming and I’m susceptible to that. And they had a marriage that was full of love, though they didn’t always treat each other well, and I was fascinated by that too.’

But I wonder whether there is an even further link. Tyler’s novels often feature at least one character who is out of step with the rest of the family. Lindy in The Amateur Marriage, Jenny in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Denise in Clock Dance, Denny in A Spool of Blue Thread, boy-crazy Lily in the new one, French Braid: all are offspring or in-laws who go at least mildly off the rails, or whose parents would have worried about them, the way Rogerson’s would surely have done, if only they had known about her. And the tone with which Tyler writes about those familial black sheep – wise, accepting, stoical – is so very similar to that with which Rogerson writes about her own brushes with danger and damage in Wah!.

‘In many ways,’ says Rogerson, ‘there wasn’t any real difference between writing this and fiction – it’s the same artful shaping and framing of events in order to make an emotional impact. The only difference is that I didn’t have to make up the events.’

A worse writer would have written a more self-regarding memoir, but for someone as self-deprecating as Rogerson, that was never on the cards. ‘My aim wasn’t to impress. To be honest, I haven’t done much that is impressive – maybe nothing. But I did have to be ruthless with myself sometimes and tell the unflattering stuff.’

Did the scrapes she got into shock her, looking back? ‘Not really, because of course, to me, they are old hat. They make me smile – though I do cringe slightly when I think of my children or grandchildren reading about them. Then again, why be embarrassed that I wasn’t always the sensible age I am now? That I had a foolish youth?’

There should be a word, you can’t help thinking, that covers both love and regret. A word you could use to tell a mother whose mind is lost to Alzheimer’s and whose body is losing to multiple sclerosis, that you now realise how much more there was to her than you realised as a child and young adult. A word that marks the difference between forgetting and memory, death and life, and yet doesn’t have a trace of sentimentality about it. I think there is such a word. And by now you should be able to guess it.

 

Wah! Things I Never Told My Mother by Cynthia Rogerson is published by Sandstone Press, priced £9.99.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony is Arun Sood’s debut novel that follows four estranged friends reunited for a motorcycle trip up the Isle of Skye in the hope of coming to terms with how their lives have splintered since a transformative ride in Northern India years earlier. In remembering their pasts and looking to the future the friends explore family, friendship, race and belonging. In this extract, we introduce Rajeev Sabharwal, an anxious, expectant father.

 

Extract taken from New Skin for the Old Ceremony
By Arun Sood
Published by 404 Ink

 

Rajeev Sabharwal (Raj)

A silent sterility fell over the dusking second bedroom of Raj and Ibti’s third-floor Deptford apartment. Grey streaks of late London light added colour to porcelain walls, provoking an undefined melancholy over the failings of the powder spray paint can Raj was wielding. He was trying to decorate what had recently been dubbed “the baby room”, and previously called “the art studio”. But for every snowy ejaculation of glow-in-the-dark paint, the stencil frame of stars lifted to reveal his creations flake and flounder and disintegrate into the nothingness of the too-white walls. It seemed like a futile exercise, and Raj was glad to see Ibti’s vibrant green eyes glance around the bedroom door.

—Don’t bother too much with that, love. Just relax tonight. Before you go.

—Ach, I just wanted to get a bit done, y’know. Feel guilty as it is, leaving.

—Raj, I’m not popping anytime soon. Just go. And be careful.

—Not sure what we’re even doing, to be honest.

—Well, you can stay and watch birth partner vids with me instead then.

—God, they’re shite, eh.

—Hey, if I can get a back massage out if it . . .

Raj smiled at Ibti as she slinked back around the narrow corridor in her loose black pantsuit and headed towards the exercise ball in the small square living area overlooking cranes and KFC and, in the distance, a murky bend of the River Thames. For all his love and well-meaning articulations of guilt about swanning off to Skye, Raj was feeling more fragile about his ongoing numbness towards impending fatherhood than he was about leaving Ibti. It was the unexpected anaesthesia of it all. It was unsettling. No dread nor excitement, no fear nor quiet confidence. Nothing. Just a dull acknowledgement of what many call a miracle. The thought of Ibti glowing, happy, and plump in belly kept him going; but it had little to do with fatherhood or facing the unprecedented flurry of first times that are supposed to be exciting or scary or special or . . . something. He didn’t really feel much at all.

Raj fell back on the floor, supporting himself with one arm and using the other to gently spray a star-stencil banner onto the left shoulder of his black slim-fit shirt. It disintegrated to a stain of faded particles that would probably never wash away. He wouldn’t be wearing it to any more PR meetings at Whitehall. Tracing the outline of five forgotten points, he remembered the red stars he used to sew into vintage army jackets back at uni; the lively pride with which he espoused communism, anti-fascism and realpolitik! in the face of disinterested peers and pub-goers.

Raj brushed over the snowy particles with a nervous index finger, unsure if his guttural recoil was shaped by retrospective naïvety or a shrinking inability to reconcile his past self with who he was now. Shared homeowner in a gentrifying suburb of South London; financially secure; tenured to Her Majesty’s government; married to a brilliant middle-class Brazilian immigration lawyer engaged in social justice struggles from the NGO ivory tower of a Regent’s Park mansion. And now . . . soon-to-be father. Only the latter news had sparked unrepentant flashbacks. A pining for the irretrievable past. A hazy mist causing a cold in his soul. A malady of longing to feel life like you once did whilst simultaneously spluttering at the person who felt it.

Raj ruminated as the particles faded and freckled and streaked. A verse he once read by the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross came to mind. It described – as Raj thought, at least – some kind of temporary spiritual crisis. An emotional vacuum that was necessary for one to live through before the birth of a new belief, bond, or perhaps being:

In an obscure night
Fevered with love’s anxiety
(O hapless, happy plight!)
I went, none seeing me
Forth from my house, where all things quiet be

The sound of crushed ice avalanched into the room and Raj wiped his shirt clean. Ibti, his sublimation, called into the wilderness from the small square living area.

—Raj, come through. Made you a marg. Even did a non-alcoholic one for me!

—Thanks, ma love. You’re right. Let’s make a night of it. I’m gonna miss yi.

 

New Skin for the Old Ceremony by Arun Sood is published by 404 Ink, priced £9.99.

 

Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician and academic working across multiple forms. He was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland Mother and Punjabi father, and has since lived in Glasgow, Amsterdam, DC, and now Plymouth, South Devon. Arun’s critical and creative practice ranges from academic publications, editorials, poetry and fiction to ambient musical tapestries. Broadly, his varied outputs engage with diasporic identities, mixed-race heritage, ancestry, language and memory. @arunskisood