It’s not just humans that are social animals, and Whittles Publishing have just released a book that celebrates the marvellous mongoose. Here, the authors tell us about the social lives of these great creatures accompanied by some brilliant photographs.
Mongooses of the World
By Andrew Jennings & Geraldine Veron
Published by Whittles Publishing
Photograph by Julie Kern
There are 34 species of mongooses that are spread across the two continents of Africa and Eurasia, on which they live within a wide variety of habitats, from open savannah to dense rainforest. Yet very little is known about these fascinating small carnivores. Apart from a few species that live in Africa, such as the endearing and very popular meerkat, most mongooses are rarely seen in the wild, and several have never been studied by scientists.
Do mongooses live in groups, like a pack of wolves, or do they live on their own, like the solitary cats? In fact, most mongooses are solitary, but several species live in social groups, which highlights the extraordinary diversity of social organisation that exists within this group of small carnivores.
Twenty-three mongoose species live mainly solitary lives, with males and females defending separate territories and only coming together for a short time to mate, a few days at most – just a mother and her offspring will spend any significant time together, up to six months or so, and the father is not involved in their upbringing. Recent field studies, however, have revealed that some solitary mongooses may form groups when there are very abundant food resources, such as human garbage dumps. And one species, the yellow mongoose, usually forages alone during the day, but several individuals will sleep together at night in the same den and may cooperate with each other to raise their young.
Photograph by Kalyan Varma
Eleven mongoose species live in groups, ranging from 3 to 30 individuals and comprising adult males and females, and their young. These mongooses display many social interactions and individuals in a group will work as a team to raise their offspring, often babysitting, feeding and grooming pups that are not their own. They also cooperate with each other to detect predators, such as jackals, snakes and raptors, and will sometimes bunch together to drive away large dangerous animals. The meerkat and the banded mongoose are undoubtedly the most well known of the social, group-living mongooses.
Why do some mongoose species live in groups, whereas others do not? Cooperative hunting is a common explanation for why large carnivores, such as wolves and lions, form social groups: several individuals, acting together, can bring down prey larger than they could kill on their own, which can then feed the whole group, including any dependent young. But mongooses rarely work together as a team to capture prey that is larger than themselves. Instead, it seems that the availability of food is one of the prime driving forces for mongooses living in groups. Many solitary mongoose species include a large proportion of small vertebrates in their diet, such as small mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds, and usually, there is just not enough of this type of food in their foraging area to feed several mouths at once. Also, one mongoose foraging alone is less likely to scare away a mouse or a lizard than a large group thrashing through the undergrowth. In contrast, social, group-living mongooses mainly eat invertebrates, such as insects, which can be very abundant in some habitats and are much less sensitive to disturbance by several individuals foraging together; invertebrates can also quickly replenish an area after they have been harvested. So for social mongooses there is enough food to go around for the whole group, and having another individual beside you while looking for food does not completely ruin your chances of finding a meal.
Photograph by Emmanual Linh San
Predation risk is another instrumental factor for driving sociality in mongooses, particularly in open savannah habitat. Mongooses are quite small animals that are vulnerable to large predators, such as larger carnivores, snakes and raptors, and a mongoose moving around in open habitat is particularly at high risk since it is much more visible to preying eyes. Being in a group can then be beneficial through coordinated vigilance for an approaching predator, and group members take turns to go ‘on guard’ to watch for predators by standing on an elevated structure, such as a termite mound or tree. This individual gives a specific call, the ‘watchman’s song’, to inform other group members which mongoose is on guard duty, and upon sighting a predator, it will then give a specific alarm call. This guarding helps reduce mortality within the group, since several dedicated eyes are scanning the horizon at all times. This vigilance system demonstrates the high levels of cooperation and communication that have evolved in social, group-living mongoose species.
The range of social organisations within the mongoose family is quite remarkable and is just one of the fascinating aspects of this amazing group. You can learn more about the natural history of mongooses through reading our new book on these intriguing animals.
Photograph by Emmanuel Do Linh San
Mongooses of the World by Andrew Jennings & Geraldine Veron is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99
In his book The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution, Scott Hames explores the relationship between Scotland’s cultural conversation and our political and constitutional changes. It’s a great overview of modern Scottish life and will inspire a growing list of books to read! Here Hames discusses how James Kelman uses voice.
Extracts taken from The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation
By Scott Hames
Published by Edinburgh University Press
In a set-piece irresistible to cultural critics, the state opening of the new Scottish Parliament found its ‘truly electric moment, the moment everyone remembers’ when the new intake of MSPs joined in Sheena Wellington’s recital of ‘A Man’s a Man For a’ That’. ‘Part of the frisson’, observed Douglas Mack, ‘doubtless derived from the fact that this old song gives voice to a radical egalitarianism of a kind not usually associated with royal opening ceremonies.’ With its noisy contempt for elite prerogative, Burns’ song is difficult to square with the sanctifying presence of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles, who ‘sat in respectful silence, listening to lines about rank being merely ‘the guinea’s stamp’, about ‘yon birkie ca’d a lord’, about the ‘tinsel show’ of wealth and privilege’. This awkwardness extends to the well-scrubbed parliamentarians, solemnly crooning vindication of their ‘toils obscure’ for the television cameras, ventriloquising the disdain of the powerless.
But as nobody in the chamber (or watching a recording) could mistake, in the moment of song these rhetorical glitches are as nothing – so much ‘a’ that’ to triumphantly set aside. The contradictions of the scene are flushed away in the sensuous mutuality of collective singing. In releasing the sound and experience of latent togetherness – the force of ‘unisonance’ described by Benedict Anderson – this song-pageant manifests a condition of national co-presence emblematised by voice; and on terms far exceeding those of the Scotland Act 1998
. . .
In a 1995 article, Dorothy McMillan notes the authenticating appeal of demotic experience in the ‘new’ Scotland: ‘some engagement with the folk or the people has generally been found necessary in the construction of a notion of nation and it is, of course, in the urban discourses of James Kelman and his disciples that most critics north and south of the border have found the new centre of Scottishness’. Michael Gardiner’s 2005 primer on Modern Scottish Culture installs Kelman at the heart of cultural devolution: ‘dissatisfied with being politically silenced in the 1980s and 1990s, [Scots] had to find a creative solution [. . .] Kelman’s rise came at a time when Scots were literally finding a political “voice” in the form of the new Parliament.’ But Kelman’s best-known novel underscores the limits of conceiving voice as a channel for transmitting ‘given’ identities into pre-constituted representative space. Gardiner’s reading of How late it was, how late as a ‘direct representation of devolution’ therefore strikes me as antithetical; on the contrary, Kelman’s most celebrated novel is forearmed against intercessionary mechanisms of power, and pointedly refuses to conceive power as representation on the devolutionary model. Instead How late constitutes voice as the medium of being, and pungently insists ‘there’s a difference between repping somebody and fucking being somebody’. As in much of Kelman’s fiction, the narration seems to directly embody the subjectivity and ipseity of his characters – of The Busconductor Hines we are told ‘his language contains his brains and his brains are a singular kettle of fish’ – in language which is nonetheless saturated in class, place and Balibar’s ‘common acts’ of exchange.
With extraordinary immediacy How late seems to enact rather than describe the drama of Sammy’s inner life as he navigates the living moment, but in a relational idiom which de-centres his self narration into a form of reportage:
‘Quiet voices quiet voices, he was gony have to move man he was gony have to fucking move, now, he stepped back, pushing out the door and out onto the pavement he went left, tapping as quick as he could, keeping into the wall. He hit against somebody but battered on, just to keep going, he was fine man he was okay except this feeling like any minute the wallop from behind, the blow in the back, the quick rush of air then thud, he kept going, head down, the shoulders hunched.’
This hyper-naturalist effect cannot but flirt with the positivism of ethnographic writing; words that seem to ‘precipitate the culture they purport to describe’. Yet they also, in Kelman, enregister the particularity of the individual’s lifeworld and his freedom from what ethnographic writing (and parliamentary displays of identity) would reify as ‘given’. Sammy is an unemployed ex-convict who wakes up on a patch of Glasgow waste ground, unaccountably assaults some undercover police officers, and is blinded soon after they take their revenge. How late conveys, with overpowering intensity, his efforts to navigate this predicament, one compounded by the disappearance of his girlfriend and acute police interest in friends Sammy may or may not have met during a drinking binge he cannot remember. As he navigates various circles of bureaucratic purgatory, moving from police custody to doctors’ offices to charity clinics via the state social security apparatus, Sammy encounters lawyers, fellow prisoners and his young son. But he remains utterly alone in his struggle, and insists on a personally authenticated confrontation with state power: ‘He had nay intention of using a rep [lawyer]. [. . .] Nay cunt was gony get him out of trouble; nay cunt except himself.’
How late it was, how late is a heroic monument to the freedom and resilience of the individual subject – if any contemporary novelist ‘backs Descartes’, it is Kelman – but the fiction of psychological immersion he achieves is largely divorced from recognisable Scottish society. Traces of contemporary Glasgow are few and cursory, with the important exception of language: the medium of this character’s psychic being, mobilised as a literary device which seems to embody rather than signify social rootedness. In ‘obliterating’ the universalist third-person narrative space from which his characters might formerly have been ‘fixed’ as objects – their lives and speech rendered as mere sociological facts by an external, ‘colonising’ Standard English narrator – Kelman’s narrative experiments severely attenuate the ‘interconnected’ spatiality of the national imaginary. In this respect his narrative experiments aim to realise subjectivity rather than nationality, and his influence on the contemporary novel is not confined to Scotland.
The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation by Scott Hames is published by Edinburgh University Press, priced £19.99
Jill Weber and her husband Kirk helped found the Greater Ontario House of Prayer in Canada, and she served as its Abbess for 17 years. Jill is now the Global Convener of the Order of the Mustard Seed, a lay ecumenical religious order, and in her book she explores the many ways we can have a relationship with God.
Extract taken from Even the Sparrow: A Pilgrim’s Guide to Prayer, Trust and Following Jesus
By Jill Weber
Published by Muddy Pearl
My friend Sue is a cheeky Brit with a silvery pixie cut. Thirty years in Canada and she’s stubbornly held on to her posh London accent. She is equal parts fierce and tender. We first meet at a retreat where we are assigned as roommates. We hit it off from the get-go, never realizing how tightly our lives would be wound together over the next decade and a half. It feels like we are a string of Christmas lights, and when we each get plugged in, we light up!
My relationship with Sue really kicks into gear one day over coffee. ‘So our House of Prayer is trying to figure out how to grow in mission and justice, and it occurs to me that rather than reinventing the wheel and starting something up, maybe I should just chat with you. Can I follow you around a bit?’ We’re sitting in a local coffee shop. Sue is nursing her tea with milk. Her gaze is both sharp and warm. ‘I’m not sure that I will be particularly helpful,’ like a true Brit, she is self-deprecating. ‘But if you would like to come and be with us that would be just fine.’
That Sunday I find myself outside the local homeless shelter and rehab centre where Sue serves as chaplain. A handful of smokers loiter outside – they stare at me as I approach. I take a deep breath and run the gauntlet to the front door.
The staircase leads downstairs to the hall where the chapel service is held. It smells vaguely of sweat and something else, slightly sour and undefinable. ‘Glad you could come!’ Sue beams and shows me around. ‘Here is the kitchenette, there is the ratty little storage closet. And here is my office. Probably a good idea to leave your valuables in here.’ On her door is a painting of Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip, sitting at her booth with a sign that says, ‘The doctor is in.’ There is a line through the word ‘doctor’ and the word ‘chaplain’ has been written in instead. ‘My daughter painted that for me,’ Sue laughs.
Some of the residents arrive and briskly set up chairs and put Bibles and songbooks onto them. ‘We use songbooks and they choose the songs. It’s important that they choose – there is so much going on in their lives that they can’t fix, where there aren’t choices and options. Mostly they like songs that they heard at their parents’ funerals. Those are the ones that they remember.’
‘Number one! I want number one!’ Jackie’s hand shoots in the air. She’s quick on the draw, so we sing number one, which is ‘Amazing Grace’, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.
I spend the first year hiding behind the coffee table. It provides a safe distance from this group of unkempt strangers but also gives me an opportunity to meet each one of them as they line up for cup after cup of coffee, which they take with spoonful after spoonful of sugar.
They arrive hungry and, before long, I am spending the week baking in preparation. The treats are well received, especially the cupcakes decorated as spiders and hedgehogs. I become an expert forager, gathering leftovers and snacks for our little flock.
…
‘Is there a full moon tonight? Everybody’s restless.’ It’s just one of those days when everything feels out of joint. One of the congregants is particularly agitated and while Sue attempts to speak, he lurches out of his seat. Swaying on his feet, he mumbles an invocation, sweeping his arms towards the four directions of the room. The crowd loses patience and begin to heckle.
Sue breaks into the rumble.
‘No one gets kicked out of my chapel!’
Cowed, the crowd quietens.
Sue then waits until he finishes, gently encourages him back to his seat, and proceeds with the service. I’m in awe. She may look like a tiny Englishwoman, but I see through her disguise. She’s really a Jedi.
I become Sue’s Padawan, her apprentice and shadow. Making coffee. Setting out and stacking chairs. Following her around. Watching everything she does and chatting with her about why she does it that way. Over the course of the next few years I get an indispensable education. How to cultivate safe, welcoming and inclusive space. How to honour the dignity of each individual and how to coax them to share their gifts with each other. I am wrecked for ‘regular’ churchy church.
…
I am dropped off in a neighbourhood that seems to be very much on the wrong side of the tracks. The front door opens to a hall where a bunch of scruffy men are sitting at tables, clutching coffee cups. ‘Here is where we have the soup kitchen and food bank,’ my host is showing me around. ‘Over there we have laundry machines so people can do their wash for free. And we’ve got a clothing bank as well, mainly for the men. Socks are always in demand.’
At the entrance of the prayer room there is an ancient and wispy woman swaying back and forth to the music. She has the gentle and vacant look of someone with dementia. Inside, a few African American children are playing tag amongst the seats and someone is passed out on a pew in the back. On the platform one of the singers is nursing her baby as she sings into the microphone. The singing is interspersed with rap and spoken word.
With a sigh of relief, I settle into a chair. Best pick a wooden chair, don’t know what crawly creatures might be living in the padded ones. My heart feels at home.
Even the Sparrow: A Pilgrim’s Guide to Prayer, Trust and Following Jesus by Jill Weber is published by Muddy Pearl, priced £12.99
In 2016, there was much debate over Ellie Harrison’s art project The Glasgow Effect. Now, with the project completed, Ellie has written a book about her experience of that year, her thoughts on why she started the project, and how she feels now about what she learned throughout the process.
Extracts taken from The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism and Carbon Footprint
By Ellie Harrison
Published by Luath Press
Anger and frustration were two of the overriding emotions provoked by The Glasgow Effect. People have every right to be angry in a world where the richest 1 per cent own two-thirds of global wealth and the richest 10 per cent cause half of global carbon emissions (which actually includes nearly all of us here in Scotland where we’re using three times our fair share of the world’s resources every year in order to fuel our carbon-intensive lifestyles), when all the while the ‘people who are poor and powerless bear the brunt’. People have every right to be angry at those in power who are doing nothing to remedy this situation – putting their own selfish interests above all else.
It was alienation, anger and frustration that pushed me into creating The Glasgow Effect in the first place. It was a scream, which was then amplified by the city. Enough is enough, we cannot go on like this! At the very start of 2016, the vitriolic response to The Glasgow Effect became a signal of the direction our world was heading towards.
. . .
This is where we come back to the arts. If art and cultural participation are also seen as ‘middle class things’, then that really is ‘robbery’ from the working classes, as these things can and should offer the antidote to consumer culture – a forum for free ideas and discussion away from the marketplace. It’s using your brain for something challenging like writing or reading, or making or viewing art, which enables you to start to see it as your most important asset, which makes it easier to turn away from drugs and alcohol and to protect it at all costs. ‘Your Health Is Your Wealth’ as Cathy McCormack so wisely said, mentally and physically. And as I discovered in 2015 after breaking both my arms, your health is also your ‘mobility’.
. . .
In the dark days of The Glasgow Effect, when I was cycling through the pissing rain and cursing out loud, or getting stuck in (self-)destructive Facebook wormholes, or waking up in the night with extreme anxiety and ‘home sickness’, I found it hard to remember any good things about this city. I forced myself to think hard. Back to the Scottish Government’s protection of the NHS in comparison to the Tories in England (which had come to my rescue on several occasions and no doubt will do again), to the fact that (unlike England) we still have publicly-owned water, to the free higher education, to the relatively cheap living costs (compared to London), but it was also the huge amount of free culture that I kept coming back to as the one reason why I had stayed here so long.
I kept meticulous records of every meeting, cultural, political or social event that I attended in 2016. There were 571 in total, most of which were free (funded with public money), meaning my annual bill for ‘entertainment’ came to only £129.50, about £2.50 a week. We must create a culture where all these brilliant events are seen as being there for everyone, they must be accessible and inclusive and inviting so anyone can go along. As well as that ingrained class prejudice, there’s a real structural barrier in the form of a shambolic and overpriced privatised public transport system, which means that for many people it’s simply impossible to get into the town, let alone home again, in the evenings. Not only have we created ‘food deserts’ through our failure to address our public transport crisis, we have wilfully created ‘cultural deserts’ as well. It’s no wonder our educational attainment is so poor. Both Carol Craig and Cathy McCormack argue that most poverty in Glasgow is ‘more psychological and spiritual than material’. And because ‘Inequality in arts participation is most closely associated with education’, another vicious circle has emerged.
All of these behaviours – eating unhealthy, expensive processed foods, smoking, drinking, other ‘mindless consumption’, not being able to cycle and rejecting art and cultural participation because ‘it’s no for the likes of us and it’s crap anyway’ – serve to entrench inequalities and reduce well-being amongst the most deprived people in the city. And this ‘aggressive philistinism’ is also potentially shutting people out of a fast-changing ‘labour market’ too, as the skills acquired through a creative education become those least at risk of ‘automation’ and are therefore the ones most in demand in our new ‘knowledge economy’. Likewise, Darren McGarvey and his followers’ resistance to applying for public arts funding for their work is also exacerbating inequalities. One of Loki’s many pieces about middle class people includes the line ‘they can’t be that creative, they’re all subsidised with public funding’. As well as his stated political reasons for not applying for public funding, it is clear his resistance is also about pride and the stigma of accepting any money from the state. It shows the extent to which the poisonous rhetoric of the right-wing media from the ’80s onwards (like the ‘NHS’ insult that I remember from the playground) has created deep shame in accepting welfare payments or other public funding. Neither of these things are a ‘begging bowl’ and if working class people just stand aside and let the city’s growing middle class population cream off all the public money, then they’re actually just helping to maintain the status quo.
The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism and Carbon Footprint by Ellie Harrison is published by Luath Press, priced £9.99
Good conversation needs good listeners too, but oftentimes, and for various reasons, that skill can allude us. This short story captures this problem excellently, and comes from a brilliant new collection from a new publisher. BooksfromScotland is excited to see what comes next from The Common Breath.
‘Good Listeners’ by Brian Hamill
Taken from Good Listeners
By Alan Warner & Brian Hamill
Published by The Common Breath
Sitting there and doing nothing – he was just staring out the window. It was still a fair distance home, so no point in being impatient about it, the bus would stop as many times as it had to and people would get on and they would ask the driver stupid questions, does this one go to the hospital son, and people would be getting off and asking the driver stupid questions again, as if he gives a shite what happens to you once you step off the ledge, and so the thing would crawl all the way to the right stop, the right street, and that would be that. And tired anyway, too tired to get annoyed, because it took energy to get annoyed and he had none, it was these morning starts that did it, the body held up fine but just a weariness, that feeling in the head, his brain going slowly, as if everything was happening underwater, and affecting the eyes, his eyes that were starting to drop and it was only the early evening.
He became aware of a new noise, in between the sounds of the engine, of people coming in and going out, and the hissing of the door and the wind outside – somebody had started to speak. There had been no talk when he got on. One of those good journeys where there aren’t any folk that know each other, so it stays quiet, tranquil, everybody sitting alone and just shutting up. But now there was this guy, talking steadily, giggling, bits of it could be heard as he droned on and on.
Turning to look down the bus and seeing the guy immediately, the mouth going a mile a minute, stopping only to grin, wink, enjoying his own joke, before going on with the stupid, shitty story. Something about a phonecall, an argument – it being easier to pick up the words now that the fucker was in view.
And who is it he’s talking to?
The girl of course.
The girl that he must have turned round in his seat to start a conversation with, as she’s in the one behind – surely if he had known her, he’d be sitting on the one next to her, if they were friends or whatever. If they’d had relations. Then surely they would have been nestled in together.
As it is the guy’s in front, she’s stuck facing him, and the pair of them are only a few rows away, so that he can see them without it being immediately obvious he’s watching. Which is fortunate. It’s a nice sight. Her wee slim shoulders, the back of her neck, and soft brown hair. Then there’s the guy, who shouldn’t even be twisted round like that, shouldn’t be pestering an innocent lassie; and just the look on his daft fucking face, as he’s leering right in at her, the wee bastard.
Grim.
Continuing to watch them, casually. No need to try and disguise it too much – the guy didn’t look like anything to worry about. He would keep an eye on them in fact, openly, to make sure there was nothing untoward. These young girls, alone, he had heard stories of what can happen. And there’s something about the way the guy was facing her, something in his expression. It doesn’t sit right. The annoying thing is, he had actually noticed her as well when he got on – not having any sort of a good look, but just the passing acknowledgement that the seat was occupied as he went past, and that the occupant appeared to be non-male. It was just the shape, the way she sat, her thin neck, you absorb these things in a split-second, without even glancing really. Yet that’s where it had ended for him; she was keeping herself to herself so he did the same. It was a bus, it was a Tuesday, he wasn’t going to slide up next to her as if they were in a fucking cocktail bar.
But this young gun had. Ok.
Rubbing his eyes briefly, then staring over at the two of them. So either the guy had only got on at the last stop, or worse, he’d spied her and moved over from somewhere else just to give her the chat. She is on the inside seat – is her head actually resting on the glass? It is tilted to the side. And the guy, on the opposite seat in front, turned right round with one leg sticking out into the aisle.
Hard to tell if she’s replying to him. Her ponytail twitches about at the back of her head, but that’s just the motion of the bus, probably. And even so, it proved nothing. She could be uncomfortable. Frightened, even. Considering getting off and walking, or waiting on the next bus, praying that one would be free of such perverts and psychotics. Maybe she’s terrified, hating it, pinned into the wall and desperate for somebody to come over and stop him.
The bloody patter the guy was coming out with, it was not real. That feeling of being embarrassed – for him – of getting a hotness about your own fucking ears and face, and then shaking the head and having to look away for a minute: this, for a person not even known to yourself. Crazy. That’s how fucking bad it was, it was just awful, what he was saying and how he was saying it. That the cunt could keep a straight face!
And there’s no way in this world she doesn’t know what he’s up to. It was impossible not to, an absolute impossibility, there was not a fucking mammal on land that couldn’t have, no no no.
No.
These are the times where it’s good to not be a girl, to never have to put up with this kind of rubbish, this transparent insulting fucking nonsense. He’s looking right at her, this young deviant, right now, for God sake, his head getting ever closer. The eyes he keeps giving her, it’s obvious to the point of being quite threatening. How could she not feel threatened? The beady eyes, moving about on her, burrowing into her – even he could see that and he was rows further back.
If only a message could be relayed to the guy somehow. Maybe to his phone, or into a fucking earpiece, something inreal-time just to say to him, to tell him, so that he would know: LISTEN, YOU’RE DOING TERRIBLE MATE, TERRIBLE, SHE’S EMBARRASSED, AND WE’RE ALL EMBARRASSED TOO, COZ YOU’RE GIVING US A BAD NAME HERE. TOO, TOO BAD. SERIOUSLY NOW, JUST FUCK OFF, OK, LEAVE IT. LEAVE IT AND COUNT YOURSELF LUCKY. OK? FUCK OFF.
But still they’re chatting, at least he is, when a group of new people come in, some going upstairs, some sitting down here. This big, heavy-looking older woman parking herself in the chair in front – he has to move out to the aisle seat just to keep a bloody view of them, on account of this old dame’s giant head with the hair all piled up and this hat perched on the top of it, looking absolutely ludicrous, really, but thankfully able to see them again . . . and having to blink and strain the eyes for a second to be sure, to see it clearly, but aye, it’s there, it was happening, the bastard had snaked his hand over the top of the seat and left it dangling down on her side. Fucking unbelievable! The fingers, so close to her, it was an invasion, but more than that – we were now nothing but a pot hole away from full fake-accidental hand-to-tit contact.
It is too much.
Too far.
He takes a long breath in.
The bus, swaying round corners, but managing to hold the handrails and get down to where they are, and seeing her wee face for the first time, she was quite young as expected, and so saying to him: Right, RIGHT!(to get him to look up, then going on: You leave the lassie alone, right? RIGHT? Don’t give me any shite – and actually having to shout a bit coz of the engine noise – Don’t even try it, you never came on with her, you’re annoying her and you’re annoying me, so go, go wait at the door, you’re getting off the next stop.
The guy’s eyes are opened wide, he tries to laugh, then his mouth moves in response, these words he’s saying, he’s trying to excuse himself, to plead maybe, but there’s too much feeling boiling up for it even to be listened to, nothing is being heard, nothing, there’s just no point to it, whatever daft shite he was saying, it’s only sound in a vacuum; but he’s talking faster and faster, he’s desperate to be listened to. Instead, moving forward quickly to grab a handful of the Bastard’s t-shirt, trying to pull him off the fucking seat since he wouldn’t stand up, but then she says something too and that seems to work, he reacts to her words and starts to rise, slowly, he’s whispering, holding his hands up like he’d a gun pointed at him. The grip of the t-shirt released accordingly. The guy squeezes out, taking care not to make any contact, and goes on down to where the door is. When he gets there he gives this look back, this nasty look with the lips moving again, and there’s a second or two when the thought passes through – the thought that maybe he shouldn’t be getting off so lightly. Maybe he is getting off way too light here. And there’s still time. The driver was not slowing.
But it’s the bloody tiredness.
It’s there again, he can feel it, there in his arms, his shoulders, his eyelids and the sides of his face, even down to his knees and his hips, like he was an old man, ready for the fucking glue factory, and is this guy even worth it anyway, really, when he had already shit himself and went to leave, he was nothing, the guy, in fact he was worse than nothing, he wasn’t anything, a non-person, a non-entity, a fucking waste of skin, you could go on and on about such a guy, but why even bother.
And anyhow: the girl.
He turns and smiles, and she starts speaking now, so the smart move is to sit down, to listen, because she can’t be heard as it is, so noisy on this bus, these fucking sounds, all of them, and all at the same fucking time, it’s just too noisy, it is.
I know, she says. I know.
And I’m sorry about that, what I had to do there, but I could tell he was over trying his luck. I saw you were sitting minding your own business when I got on.
He was ok, she says.
The hiss of the doors again, and that moment, the sweet, sweet beauty of it, when, even without looking, the guy can be seen, having almost forgot him as soon as he was out of sight, but then from the corner of the eye, down on the pavement, his stupid, sickening face, the open mouth, shouting something or other, and the bus pulling away, so slow, the old bus, it’s glorious that it’s so slow, really drawing it out, the engine roaring, stuttering, with him in beside her and the youngster stuck outside. He smiles out at the guy, who is making a gesture with his phone in his hand, waving it around, but it doesn’t deserve a glance really, he just looks so wee and pathetic out there, this young buck, the bold one, no longer important enough to stare at, not even to smile at and shout, enjoy the walk home, fucker! Bye-byeeeeee.
The guy disappears, lost from view.
And here he still is. Right in front of the lassie, smiling.
Her hair is red, it’s red! It had looked brown but now he’s that close and it’s red, the strands so light that it’s hard to believe he couldn’t tell before. She seems to be sort of grinning too. There’s this expression on her face.
Oh, he was ok, was he? Well maybe he was but still, that’s how it starts,eh?
She nods. She just nods. Blinking her eyes a couple of times as she does so, and he notices how long her eyelashes are.
What a situation to be in.
Sitting on the chair that had been his, the young guy’s, but with the hands holding firmly to the top of it, not draped over on the other side. Her side. Not to be going about it like that; that may have been the young bastard’s way of behaving, but it certainly isn’t his.
I’ve seen him on here before, you know, doing the same thing with other people, other girls, you know, trying that old carry-on.
She shrugs, glances at the mobile she has slid out of her trouser pocket. The screen is dark.
You off home then?
Aye. She doesn’t look up. And thanks.
Or it sounded like she said thanks, but her voice was that quiet, so quiet it was hardly a noise. It’s tricky to know for sure.
He lowers his head, just a bit closer in, so that the next thing she says will definitely be picked up.
Did you say thanks there? Was that it?
RIGHT.
The shout so loud it made him jolt in his seat, almost losing his balance. It was another voice, coming from further up the bus. He turns his head sharply to see the speaker.
Somebody standing in front of the back window. Right at the centre of it, the end of the aisle. A man. It had been a man’s exclamation, and it’s a man’s shape now approaching, the light from the window strong on either side of him as he begins to move down the aisle. Squinting to try and see the face but it’s not clear; too much in the shadow.
As the person gets closer he speaks again.
You can leave the lassie alone, RIGHT? Don’t even give me any shite. I saw you going over there and making her pal get off.
He feels himself start to smile as the guy continues. It was unbelievable. Yet this was his life – these moments, these interactions, he doesn’t look for them, they seem to just seek him out, every day, on the bus, wherever he goes. What to do? Evidently this confused person thought he was up to the same disgusting game as the youngster had been.
It was wrong to think that. And to say it, with the bloody lassie in earshot. Trying to catch her eye, but she’s pretending she can’t hear it, she’s keeping her head to the front. Something about that makes him feel so sad and sorry, that she should have to be frightened like this. There was nothing to fear for her, not with him here. Nothing at all.
The new fellow is close. He’s definitely bigger than the young guy was, and still talking on and on, fucking blabbering away; more words, and more eyes looking over, more things being said. None of it is really being heard. The sound is hitting his ears, but he is closed off to it. Inside. He is closed off inside and that’s why there is no need to be frightened.
That’s what these youngsters don’t understand. These fucking idiots he has to deal with, time after time, again and again and again. He sighs.
The bus shakes slightly. He feels the drift of air from one of the side-windows, then the girl’s hand tight on the cuff of his jacket briefly, before it slides back off. That she had touched him – she had actually reached out her hand and made contact with him, and yet he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t even look. Because of the situation. Because of this new guy, who was within an arm’s length. Right fucking there. Occupying the portion of space at the edge of the seat. Blocking the way. Just that alone was threatening, the guy being there, it was a threat.
The tiredness is all gone. He feels like stone. And still this guy speaks. Watching his mouth; the teeth and tongue as they move around. The saliva on his lips. So close now.
Slowly standing up, and looking straight into the guy’s eye. He stares directly in the fucking black dot in the middle of it; right there and nowhere else. The dot staring back. It moves from side to side, shuddering, not remaining still, but continuing to gaze out from the head, returning the look.
The talk keeps going too, but he can sense the guy is backing off. There is suddenly some distance between them.
Another hand is on his wrist.
And he hears nothing.
‘Good Listeners’ by Brian Hamill is taken from Good Listeners by Alan Warner & Brian Hamill is published by The Common Breath, priced £7.00.
10 years ago, Jo Clifford premiered her new theatrical production The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven where biblical stories are reimagined by a transgender Jesus. Its staging caused a storm amongst theatregoers and beyond, some seeing it as too controversial, many others welcoming its message of love and acceptance. Stewed Rhubarb have published a 10th anniversary edition with the full script, plus reminiscences of those involved or inspired by its various productions across the world.
Extracts taken from The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven
By Jo Clifford
Published by Stewed Rhubarb
Jo Clifford
I remember that on that occasion 26,573 people signed an online petition asking the City of Edinburgh Council to ban the show; and a lonely man with an array of placards that told us THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH keeping a lone vigil outside the Traverse. I remember the bedraggled protestors outside the venue in Belfast, who had brought along a loudhailer, and a man with bagpipes to try to silence my voice.
I remember the man who filmed himself sitting in his car outside St John Chrysostom’s Church in Manchester, a bit bewildered because he was the only one trying to protest against me when ‘the show so clearly breaks the canon law of the Church of England,’ he said indignantly, holding up his well-thumbed leather-bound copy. He’d posted the video on YouTube and the next one to come up was from an evangelical group in America expressing their disgust at the show. ‘And this’ said their commentator, ‘This is the demon responsible for it.’ And up came my picture, and I understood that for many people I am evil incarnate.
Which is strange, given that the show celebrates love. I can’t begin to understand the reasons for the hatred the show provokes. I worry about the dangers my sisters have faced in Brazil in their courageous resistance to censorship. I love the fact they have taken the show in a completely different direction from ours.
We now have two productions: one for theatrical spaces, and one for everywhere else. We can now perform the show absolutely anywhere. And I hope we can continue to do so. We have filmed the production, so that people can see it in private in those many countries where it is dangerous to see it in public.
Right now, we are preparing to perform in Brussels; later this year, it will be in Glasgow again, to celebrate the show’s tenth anniversary. I don’t know what will happen next. I never have. I never thought the show would last so long, or so many people would see it, or that through it I would come to see myself as a performer.
I’m proud of it. Of all the one hundred plays I have written, perhaps it’s this one of which I’m the proudest.
And I think it may be doing some good in the world.
Rachael Rayment
Director of the original production
I was drawn to the play because it was so profoundly personal and intimate. For me, the play was about Jo, her Christian faith, her relationship to Jesus, the teachings of the Gospels and a defiant public expression of self. The very act of performing it was, as Jo herself says, a confrontation and exorcism of shame. At its core, it touched upon a deep sense of sacredness, humanity and compassion that was universal.
I didn’t have to be trans, or Christian, to understand and be deeply moved by it.
Susan Worsfold
Director, designer and founding director of Queen Jesus Productions
Queen Jesus is a work of devotion. Of devotion to ourselves and to being present with one another. To commune. It is constantly evolving, changing and deepening, dependant on where those of us who create it are in ourselves and where the audience are in their lives. To witness this is an ongoing journey and a continuous barometer of where the personal present meets the politics of its time.
. . .
We don’t bring a play, we bring a world. How we are with one another, how we consider one another, how we love one another directly impacts on how we open the doors to ourselves and to the audience.
This is always the time. This is always the place. This is always where we meet each other.
Chris Goode
Artistic director of Chris Goode & Company
The first time I saw Queen Jesus, live and in the flesh, was in 2013. Jo had come to be part of a mini-season I’d programmed at a now-closed (and much-missed) little indie theatre in Exeter. I didn’t know her too well back then, but we were proud to have her with us, and thrilled to be bringing Jesus to town.
. . .
Constantly oscillating between fragility and robustness, there is a level of presence in Jo—a fierce vibration of energy and psychic sensitivity—that feels almost supernatural, but is also profoundly human. Not a transcendence, but a kind of transpondence: a remarkable alertness to the signals alive in the room, the traces, the ghost whispers, invisible but palpable as a prickling on the skin, a shimmering in the mind. This mode of presence is the very essence of theatre as a social and political and spiritual act: but I’ve seldom seen it enacted, embodied, with such absolute fidelity.
What I remember just as clearly, though, is Jo staying with us in the tiny flat that we’d rented down the road from the theatre; the conviviality of decent wine (she insisted on that!) and good companionship, generous laughter and unguarded conversation. And behind it all, the smell of fresh-baked bread, specially made for the evening show. I think perhaps only a female Jesus—a grandmotherly Jesus—would bake her own bread.
Fiona Bennett
Minister of Augustine United Church, Edinburgh
The first time I encountered Queen Jesus was through reading the script. Our church (Augustine United Church in Edinburgh, where Jo is a member) planned to put on a performance of Queen Jesus as part of Pride. Given the horrific hatred Queen Jesus has received in Glasgow, Jo wanted me, as the minister, to read the script before we put it on. Reading the script, as someone who wrestles with and interprets scripture all the time, was delightful. Jo’s sense of the nuance, honour and tension in the Biblical stories is very good, but reading the script is only a shadow of encountering it in performance.
For the Pride performance, we sat in a huge circle and Jo enabled us to meet Jesus in a new yet very familiar way. I have seen Queen Jesus performed five or six times now and each time is for me a fresh encounter with the living God.
What is amusing about Queen Jesus is how conventional it is! Queen Jesus offers us teaching and stories very much along the lines brother Jesus did. But her identity as a transwomen (and the glorious craft in the words and performance) make the story intimate, relevant and alive. After the first time I saw Queen Jesus performed I described it as a ‘devotional’ piece, which in my mind is just exactly what it is. It is an expression of Jo’s heartfelt spirituality and sits on the cusp of theatre as liturgy, inviting the audience to taste God’s love and hope as Jesus revealed.
James T. Harding
Publisher, editor and designer for Stewed Rhubarb
I was raised by a recovering Catholic who sent me to Protestant Sunday schools and told me it was all nonsense each week when I returned home. The results of this were an aesthetic appreciation for ceremony, a tendency to question authority, and a snooty distain for the type of evangelism that waves a tambourine. In other words, little more than spiritual trappings.
I have been blessed to see Queen Jesus in several of its different incarnations. It has changed much over the time I have been a part of its congregation, both in text and in presentation, but one thing has remained constant: the queer people in the audience. Sometimes it’s literally the same people, who I recognise in the crowds at the book launch, the church, the festival, the theatre. Always, however, there is a glint of solidarity in people’s eyes, a glimpse of a spiritual queer communion which is quite different from the community feeling of a pride event or the party atmosphere of a club.
This, for me, is the power of Queen Jesus incarnate: a spirituality which does better than merely tolerate queer people, it makes the queer part of us a source of spirituality and wisdom.
The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven by Jo Clifford is published by Stewed Rhubarb, priced £10.99
Rose Ruane’s debut novel, This is Yesterday, tackles how women define and express themselves, the consequences of both action and inaction, and the soul-fatigue caused by carrying around baggage from the past. Lee Randall reviews and finds a novel with much emotional resonance.
This is Yesterday
By Rose Ruane
Published by Corsair
Billed as a story ‘of a woman’s relationship with her art, her body and desires, her memories, herself,’ Rose Ruane’s debut novel, This is Yesterday, mines themes familiar to fans of her previous work across a range of media (performance, sculpture, drawing, video, and writing). These include emotional manipulation, self mythology, and the idea that a part of us never entirely grows up.
Here, Ruane probes questions that are certain to resonate with contemporary readers: Who has the ‘right’ to create art? Is there a statute of limitations on mistakes made in youth? Whose version of history is the version? Is anyone truly unloveable? If we lack purpose—any kind of purpose—what’s life for?
The novel kicks off with an abrupt wake-up call: ‘The phone ringing in the dead of night can only mean sex or something terrible. Or maybe both. Even in the deep sludge of sleep her body registers shock. Cold sweat and a kick in the chest.’ Peach is summoned to a hospital where her elderly father, suffering from Alzheimer’s, lies in intensive care, badly injured after being struck by a car.
We’re plunged into a family drama seen from Peach’s perspective. We discover she and her older sister, Bella, haven’t been alone together in 25 years. They are apparent opposites: Bella’s a mildly famous internet lifestyle guru, married to a man Peach disdainfully labels ‘part sperm donor, part hedge fund.’ They have twin daughters and financial security.
At 43, Peach knows what she doesn’t want, but has been less successful in identifying and achieving her heart’s desires. Her whole life ‘has felt like grieving for a better person she never became. . . . Peach never wanted to be called wife, she never wanted to be called Mum; but she always wanted to be called important.’
She has abandoned a promising career in fine art photography, ‘dumping art before it had a chance to break up with her.’ For a decade she’s worked as the gallery assistant for a man who ‘spends the first hour of his day doing yoga and meditating and the next eight throwing tantrums a two-year-old would consider needlessly dickish.’ Where Bella is beautiful and glossy, Peach is perpetually disheveled, seen swiping at the red wine stains peppering her coat as she tumbles into the ICU.
They are joined by younger brother Greg, an outdoors-loving, ‘adequate and practical’ bloke who has been most actively—and resentfully—dealing with their father’s increasing incapacity. Eventually their mother and her second husband arrive, rounding out the family unit and ratcheting up the tension.
Peach is ready for a rapprochement; she longs for one, but the siblings instantly fall into familiar patterns—all angles and sharp corners, glancing off each other without connecting, too afraid to speak honestly. This depiction of the push-pull of familial love/resentment hits the mark.
Push-pull effects characterise the novel overall, seen in the way it ping-pongs between present day and the summer of 1994, the fateful year when long-hidden secrets and sexual tensions crested, then burst like a festering boil, fracturing the family. Everyone blames Peach for what happened. She blames herself most of all, and we discover how the burden of guilt corroded her self-esteem, impeding her progress at every level—professionally, emotionally, intellectually.
The push-pull effect is also there in Ruane’s use of language, an unsettling profusion of short sentences and fragments. The narrative judders and jabs. For example: ‘After that they could not fudge and demur. Worst suspicions confirmed. Dad’s dissolution had a name. A prognosis. They gathered round the luminous blue scan as a consultant pointed out dirty thumbprints on the creamy cauliflower of their father’s brain.’
This technique mimics Peach’s inability to focus in the throes of a crisis, her skittish brain obsessively returning to its memory bank, searching for information to help her process how the past led them to this present and how they became the people they are now. Such language recreates the clicking of a camera’s shutter, capturing life in small, frozen bites. It is often distracting and distancing and may frustrate some readers.
Ruane is notably insightful about the female experience of sex, with all its confusion and ambivalence. Describing Peach’s first time, she writes: ‘No, she told herself; I’ve let him start, I’m losing my virginity: it is happening now. I might as well go through with it. She wondered if there was something wrong with her that she should be so practical in the throes of her first fuck.’
Sex and desire are complicated, and Ruane captures the how and why of that perfectly. Peach thinks: ‘All she wanted was for someone to hold her, to make her feel lovely. Not lovely even—just all right, a miracle of sufficiency.’ At various points we see her as both hunter and prey, victim and antagonist. Her vulnerabilities are never far from the surface.’Peach realised he had been checking her out to see if she would do, whereas now he was checking Bella and Magda out so see who he would do. Peach held Nick responsible for the pain of her own crass thoughts.’ And Ruane excels at conveying how women squander themselves emotionally, giving us a satisfying fist-pump of a scene when Peach ends a relationship by calling out her lover’s emotional cowardice.
Ruane’s Peach is someone you’ll want to shake and cuddle, sometimes simultaneously, for This is Yesterday conveys the messiness of real life—as well as its poignancy.
This is Yesterday by Rose Ruane is published by Corsair, priced £14.99
We all know and love Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, Sherlock Holmes, but Robert J. Harris may love him more than most! He has been writing the brilliant Artie Conan Doyle Mysteries for a while now, putting the young author through a series of adventures perfect for young sleuths. We caught up with Robert J Harris to talk to him about his latest mystery.
The Artie Conan Doyle Mysteries: The Scarlet Phantom
By Robert J. Harris
Published by Floris Books
For those who are still unaware (for shame!) could you tell us a little bit about the Artie Conan Doyle mysteries?
The premise of the series is that Arthur Conan Doyle, while still a schoolboy in Edinburgh, has a series of adventures which will later inspire him to create the character of Sherlock Holmes and write those stories which would make him the most famous character in literature. In the course of these adventures he gradually acquires the skills of a detective and takes his first steps towards being a writer.
You’re on your third mystery now, The Scarlet Phantom, could you give us a hint of what to expect?
I pride myself that the mysteries Artie has to solve are worthy of the great Sherlock Holmes himself. In this novel he is presented with a series of seemingly impossible crimes committed by an invisible thief who walks through walls and disappears at will. It will take all his courage and ingenuity to crack the case along with his friend Ham, new friend Peril Abernethy, a girl scientist, and young actress Rowena McCleary, who returns from the second book in the series The Vanishing Dragon.
You’ve written a number of novels for adults and children, and you like to tackle characters from history. What do you like about continuing to explore characters that already exist?
My first two solo novels concerned the teenage adventures of Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare, which was an exercise in imagining what they would have been like as young men and inventing adventures for them set against an accurate historical background. Working with existing literary characters is a very similar in that I have to accurately represent the world of the original stories.
I see myself in a position rather like that of a folk musician who works in a certain tradition, carrying on and maintaining interest in that tradition while enriching and adding to it. In my case I see myself as carrying on in the particular tradition of the Scottish adventure story, which can be traced from Sir Walter Scott on through Robert Louis Stephenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan right through to Alistair Maclean.
As well as reviving John Buchan’s classic hero Richard Hannay in two new adventures, the Artie Conan Doyle Mysteries allows me to approach Sherlock Holmes from a new and entertaining angle. Having honed my skills as a mystery writer in the Artie series, I am excited to now be working on a brand new Sherlock Holmes novel which is to be published by Polygon in September of 2020. Watch out for that!
Your novels are action-packed and full of adventure. What do you think is the key to a good pageturner?
In order for a novel to be a page turner it is not enough to just have exciting action and cliffhanger chapter endings. Readers actually have to care what happens next because they have been drawn into the story and are engaged with the characters.
Have you ever solved any crimes or mysteries in real life? Or do you keep your adventuring to the page?
I did many years ago use deductions worthy of Sherlock Holmes to discover where my wife had misplaced the spare car keys (They were in a tray of children’s paints on top of the fridge.). Other than that my adventures are strictly literary.
What novels inspire you in your writing?
The novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan and John Dickson Carr. My World Goes Loki trilogy was inspired by the comic fantasies of Diana Wynn Jones. I have also written a teen science fiction novel inspired by the stories of Eric Frank Russell which I am sure WILL BE PUBLISHED ONE DAY!
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m reading Night at the Mocking Widow by Carter Dickson, which is a pen-name of my favourite mystery writer John Dickson Carr. In non fiction I really enjoy Tom Holland’s histories and am now reading his latest Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind. In comics I’m reading Injustice 2 from DC. I am totally in love with the whole of the epic Injustice series. And no, I won’t call them graphic novels. There’s nothing wrong with reading comic books.
What other books do you always recommend to young readers?
I always recommend the hilarious Dark Lord: The Teenage Years by Jamie Thomson, Frozen in Time by Ali Sparkes, and Red Fever by Caroline Clough, a gripping post-apocalyptic adventure for younger readers.
Do you know what’s next for young Artie? Are you allowed to tell us?
We don’t have a fourth adventure scheduled as yet, but I have some ideas about what will be in it. It will be a little different as this time Artie and his friends – Ham, Rowena and Peril – will be working as a team right from the start. This opens up a wide range of possibilities for investigation and adventure and will allow me to try the characters in new combinations.
The Artie Conan Doyle Mysteries: The Scarlet Phantom by Robert J. Harris is published by Floris Books, priced £6.99
David Robinson takes a look two new historical thrillers, and appreciates their masterly world building and page turning plots.
The Crown Agent
By Stephen O’Rourke
Published by Sandstone Press
Death in the East
By Abir Mukherjee
Published by Harvill Secker
At the end of Ian Rankin’s latest Inspector Rebus novel In a House of Lies, there’s a brief mention of the notorious nineteenth century Edinburgh murderers Burke and Hare. The former was, of course hanged, and his skin forms the binding of a notebook on display at Edinburgh’s Surgeons’ Hall Museums. But Hare is the interesting one. In exchange for giving evidence against his friend, he was released. According to Rankin, Rebus and Wikipedia, he fled south, someone blinded him and he spent the rest of his days begging.
The fact is, nobody really knows what happened. The story of Hare’s blinding may only be, as historian Owen Dudley Edwards has argued, a Victorian morality tale to prove that, in Rebus’s words, ‘nobody every really gets away with it’. But novelists were never going to leave such a fascinating vacuum unfilled. Five years ago, for example, Scottish journalist Peter Ranscombe’s debut novel Hare imagined him not only living on for decades but playing a vital role in the American Civil War.
The latest novelist to work Hare into his story is Stephen O’Rourke, a Greenock-born lawyer (a QC, no less) whose first novel The Crown Agent introduces us to disillusioned doctor Mungo Lyon. It’s 1829, Burke has just been hanged, but because of the revulsion against Lyon’s mentor, Robert Knox (who bought the bodies Burke and Hare supplied him for use in anatomy lessons), he is unable to practise as a surgeon. When the Lord Advocate asks him to turn detective and find out more about schooner Julietta, which has been found adrift on the Firth of Clyde with all of her crew dead of yellow fever, he agrees immediately.
Already the reader knows that some sort of game is afoot, because the novel’s prologue had a lighthouse keeper being murdered in the middle of a storm just as he was about to light a beacon to help a stricken ship (the Julietta?) a mile off Cumbrae. Three days later, a customs officer disappeared from Campbeltown, so perhaps the Julietta had been smuggling something from the Caribbean. But what?
Second question: whatever the illicit cargo, where was it landed? Third, whom did it benefit? Lyon has to work out whether any of the four main landowners on that part of the coast were involved, and if so, why. Fourth question: who are the four men pursuing Lyon right from the start working for? Fifth: can Hare – whom Lyon meets in Greenock at the start of his mission – really be trusted?
The Crown Agent has its roots in a short story O’Rourke submitted for a Daily Telegraph competition in 2012. It won, and from the novel one can easily guess what the judges saw in it. O’Rourke writes well, the plot has an engaging complexity, and it is generally free of anachronisms (although I’m not sure whether Lyon’s family home in Edinburgh’s Morningside Place would have been built by 1829). Generally, though, he is spot-on: the Glasgow Lyon passes through is already booming, even though steel and shipbuilding haven’t yet arrived, and the onward journey to Greenock is possible by steamship but not (yet) by train. The journey across from Edinburgh is still most comfortably done on the canal that Burke and Hare came over from Ireland to dig, so Lyon does just that, ‘drifting asleep to the clop of Clydesdales hauling me west’ with his pistol in his medical bag next to his bunk.
Night Barge to Falkirk. At this early point in the story, that would have made sense as a title – indeed, I’d like to have had more quiet moments like that, where we could get to know Lyon better. Because when the plot starts again it’s as loud, insistent and colourful as a cinema advert. Lyon – who boasts early on that he ‘can amputate a limb in 48 seconds with the patient unconscious, slightly longer if not’ – will get plenty of opportunities to do just that in a storyline that, as well as everything I’ve already mentioned, also takes in kidnapping, insurrection, a masked ball, murders and deaths galore and trawlerfuls of red herrings. It’s a rich mix, but if you love unadulterated adventure stories, Mungo Lyon could be well worth following.
The year after O’Rourke won that Daily Telegraph short story competition, another Scot won. Abir Mukherjee turned his winning tale into his debut novel A Rising Man, which went on to win yet more awards. I haven’t yet read it, but now want to, because his fourth – Death in the East – is one of the most enjoyable historical thrillers I have read for a long time.
In the books, Mukherjee pairs Captain Sam Wyndham, who becomes a detective in Calcutta after surviving the First World War, with Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee (or “Surrender-Not” as he is invariably called by imperialist Brits). It’s after World War One, Calcutta has only relatively recently lost its status to New Delhi as the capital of the Raj but is still its main economic hub, and Gandhi’s campaign for independence is about to begin. A fascinating time, and an intriguing place, both barely explored by crime fiction.
In relation to crime novels set in the present, those set in the past always makes me think of that great line about Ginger Rogers having to do everything Fred Astaire did ‘except backwards and in high heels’. If it’s hard enough to get the present right, it’s even harder to bring the past to life, and populate it with characters who don’t feel as though they are our contemporaries. Racist attitudes being what they were in the early 1920s, you might briefly wonder whether Wyndham is just being a bit too ‘woke’ for his own good in his friendship with Banerjee. Or vice-versa, come to that: wouldn’t Bannerjee’s affection for Wyndham be similarly unlikely?
The trick Mukherjee pulls off is to make those questions irrelevant, so convincingly does he write about character, and so subtly about his book’s historical setting. It helps, of course, that Wyndham isn’t your traditional Raj stiff upper-lipper, but at the start of this book a paranoid opium addict undergoing detox at an ashram in the Assam hills. As for Banerjee, that nickname is just about perfect: yes, it’s racist not to call him by his proper name, but there’s a certain implicit respect in the nickname too.
Although half of the book is set in 1922 Assam, Death in the East actually gains a lot of its impact from the story of a murder in the East End of London in 1905, where Wyndham served as a constable. When the main suspect turns out to be Jewish, a great deal of what Mukherjee wants to say about racism in the Raj already applies here in anti-semitism stoked by Daily Mail-type newspapers (I caught myself thinking what a great name – Harmsworth – he had invented for one such hack before I realised that, of course, he hadn’t.) The murder victim is a former girlfriend of Wyndham’s and his attempt to solve the case reveals a great deal about his character, not all of it to his credit. On top of that, the case is a classic locked room mystery, which turns out to be mirrored in a similar one in Assam. So: not just excellent characterisation and historical credibility (and, I should add, witty narration too), but bravura plotting as well.
In interviews, Mukherjee has admitted that his Wyndham and Banerjee books owe a great deal to Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels or Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series in which good men uphold systems they don’t believe in. He’s right: they do, and yet his pairing of detectives from such different backgrounds allows for an even greater degree of cultural and political understanding. But those are the standards by which Death in the East should be judged, and it more than matches them. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if it goes on to win the McIlvanney Prize as best Scottish Crime Book of the Year at 2020’s Bloody Scotland. Yes, that good.
The Crown Agent by Stephen O’Rourke is published by Sandstone Press, priced £14.99
Death in the East by Abir Mukherjee is published by Harvill Secker, priced £12.99
Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin / Christopher Whyte is a poet in Gaelic, a novelist in English, and the translator from Russian of the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). After teaching at the universities of Rome, Edinburgh and Glasgow, he moved in 2006 to Budapest where he writes full-time. His sixth collection Ceum air cheum / Step by step, with facing English translations by Niall O’Gallagher, is published by Acair, and has been shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book for the Year 2019. This is his poem in the latest New Writing Scotland collection, Sound of an Iceberg.
‘Mo Shearmon’ / ‘The Way I Talk’
By Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin / Christopher Whyte
Taken from Sound of an Iceberg: New Writing Scotland 37
Published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies
MO SHEARMON
Mo shearmon siùbhlach struthlach deifreach,
’na ruith gu cabhagach mar an t-uisge
an dèidh da dhoineann bualadh air bearradh àrd
fad uairean, ’s e sireadh gach beàirn is sgoir,
dèin’ air a bhith tèarnadh, a bhith
sgaoilte ann am mìltean dhe chuisleannan
beaga, drillseanach, nach cuir cnap-starra
bacadh fada orra – far an tig stac gu oir,
bidh an t-uisge gu h-obann a’ stealladh
mar gum b’ e falt fuamhair a bh’ ann,
ach leis a’ cheart ghluasad mhì-fhoighidneach
a bhios aig boireannach ’s i tilgeil
a pailteas chiabhan ri taobh
a thuiteam ’nan eas dhe bhoinnean
do-àireamh, làidir, leanmhainneach –
theireadh tu nach fhliuiche idir a bh’ ann
ach sreangan, ròpannan anabarrach tana,
cho tana ’s gum bi sèideadh beag gaoith
a’ fòghnadh gus an toirt às a chèile –
no dh’fhaodadh iad a bhith
’nan cùirtear a tha ceiltinn
chan eil dòigh air nochdadh
ciod e ’n seòrsa thaisbeanadh,
am mireagach no gruamach no co-measgt’ –
mo shearmon a shiùbhlas cho grad
nach bi gu lèor a dh’ùin’ agad
airson freagairt a chruthachadh nad inntinn,
feumaidh greas a bhith ort
ma tha thu ag iarraidh a ghlacadh!
Mo shearmon a tha mar bhòcan beag crùbte
a gheibh a-steach do chùbaid
nach bu chòir neach eile seach am ministear
a bhith ’na sheasamh innte,
le aodach sìobhalta, oifigeil a’ mhinisteir air,
tha e sealltainn dìreach coltach ris
ged a smaoinicheas an coithional
gu bheil e mar gum b’ ann air seargadh –
b’ àbhaist don mhinistear a bhith coimhead
beagan na b’ àirde – agus fhuair
am bòcan gruag bhreugach a dhinn e
sìos air a cheann, bhon a tha fhios ann
falt nam bòcan a bhith cleiteagach, pràbhach
mar nach biodh riamh falt a’ mhinisteir
’s e nochdadh anns an eaglais air Di-dòmhnaich
agus, san tiota a thòisicheas am bòcan a’ bruidhinn,
cha bhi ach treamsgal gun chèill
a’ sileadh a-mach bho bhilean sgabach
do bhrìgh ’s nach eil na bòcain
eòlach air aon chànan daonnda
ach draoidheachd shònraichte a bhith orra –
is ciamar a dh’fhaodadh draoidheachd phàganach
a bhi èifeachdach san eaglais air Dì-dòmhnaich? –
san tiota seo, nochdaidh am ministear
am measg a’ choithional
gun aon chòmhdach air a chom
rùisgte mar san latha a thàinig e dhan t-saoghal
agus bidh e a’ ruith ’s a’ ruith às an eaglais
suas air a’ chnoc a tha faisg oirre
fo mhaoim gum faic an sgìreachd uile
cho crìonach neo-theòma ’s a tha a cholann
’s a bharrachd air sin cho beag ’s a tha a ——
(aon fhacal air a dhubhadh às an seo)
ach air cho clis, grad-shiùbhlach ’s a bhios am ministear
a’ ruith dh’ionnsaigh na coille taobh eil’ a’ chnuic,
fo ionndrainn do bhrìgh ’s gu bheil e cinnteach
nach bi e tachairt ri drathais no briogais
air an crochadh gu dòigheil air geug beithe
no sgithich, mar as àbhaist dhaibh bhith crochte
ann am preas-aodaich farsaing
san dachaigh chomhfhurtail aige –
aig a’ cheart àm, bidh am bòcan a’ leantainn air gu socraichte
treamsgal an dèidh treamsgail a’ tighinn bho bheul
cha robh fhios aige idir e fhèin a bhith
cho sgileil anns an òraideireachd,
tha ’n coithional a’ fàs beagan an-fhoiseil
b’ àbhaist droch latha no dhà a bhith aig a’ mhinistear
cha bhiodh e an còmhnaidh ag ràdh
rudan reusanta no loidigeach
aig amannan bhiodh e doirbh dha-rìribh
aomadh no brìgh a shoisgeulachd a ghlacadh
no aon seagh a b’ fhiachail a tharraing a-mach aiste
ach an-diugh tha e dìreach air a chuthach –
bidh am ministear bochd a’ faighneachd dheth fhèin
am bu chòir dha, ’s dòcha, dàibheadh dhan lochan
ach tha uisgeachan an lochain uamhasach fionnar
b’ fheudar dha snàmh gu tìr is a liubhairt fhèin
mu dheireadh thall – air cho bun-os-cionn,
dian, clisgeach ’s a bhios am ministear fo oillt
a’ saigheadh air adhart ’na dheann-ruith,
cha ruig e ’m feast’ an luathas a th’ aig
Mo shearmon a bhios uaireannan mar fhiadh sgeunach
nach fhaicear ach plathadh dheth am measg nan duilleagan
leis cho meata prìobhaideach ’s a tha e
agus an uair sin, gun rabhadh idir, mothaichidh tu dha
a’ streup suas air a’ bhràighe
is smaoinichidh tu gum faodadh sin a bhith ’na aisling
bhon a tha am fiadh cho mòrail, rìoghail, coileanta ’na mhosgladh
gach ball dheth a’ co-oibreachadh le chèile
mar gun robh e ’g itealaich an àit’ a bhith siubhal,
creididh tu cuideachd gum b’ fheàrr math dh’fhaodte
nach robh sin ach ’na aisling bho nach bitheadh
modh no inneal ann an uair sin
beud no aimhleas a bhith beantainn dha,
bhiodh e do-ruighinn do-leònadh do-chiùrradh
mar gach rud a chruthaich mac-meanmna
no a thugadh dhuinn ann am bruadar,
cho iomlan, cuimir, do-chlaoidheadh –
agus their thusa riut fhèin:
“Chan eil mise creidsinn ann an Dia sam bith,
chan e Crìostaidh no Muslamach a th’ annam,
cha bhi mi toirt mo thaic do ghin dhe na seann-teagasgan
mu bhodach aosta, fòirneartach
no mu na h-àitheantan a sgrìobh e sìos
gu bhith gan leantainn leinn
no mu na peanasan sìorraidh
a tha a’ feitheamh oirnn
mur a bi sinn strìochdail gu leòr” –
ach their thu cuideachd gur dòcha sin
am faireachdainn a bhiodh aig Dia fhèin
an uair a chruthaich e creutair ùr de fheòl ’s de fhuil
gu bhith ga shuidheachadh am bad àraidh dhen t-saoghal
Mo shearmon gun fhios dè cho fada ’s a tha e dol a bhith
’s dòcha gun tèid mi air adhart
gus am faigh Alba neo-eisimeileachd
aig a’ cheann thall agus
“Abraibh rium! Sibhse aig a bheil
dlighe air inntreachdainn sa bhùth bheag is crois
a chur sìos ri taobh na beachd as fheàrr leibh
eadar ’s gu bheil sibh gealtach no dàna!!
Ciod e an àireamh bhliadhnaichean as fheudar traoghadh
mus tig an latha miannaichte sin?”
Mo shearmon a bhios ’na dhearbhadh nach eil
coltas sam bith ann gu bheil
an cànan seo fo smachd a’ bhàis
a dh’aindeoin na their a’ chuid anns an dùisg
a’ Ghàidhlig gràin no gamhlas, a bha co-èigneachadh
ar pàrantan is ar seann-phàrantan
gus a mùchadh ’s a dearmad,
a dh’aindeoin linn sàrachail fadalach
nuair nach ceadaichte a h-ùisneachadh san oilthigh no san sgoil,
sam bruidhneadh na fir-teagaisg
eadhon air cuspair Gàidhealach sa Bheurla,
ar cànan fhìn a dh’fhàs ’na adhbhar-maslaidh,
’na chomharradh air bochdainn’ is ainfhios
na feadhna chleachdadh ann an cagair e –
smaoinichidh mi air cruinneachadh sgoilearan
bliadhnaichean air ais sa Phòlainn, ann
am baile ris an can na daoine Szczecin
baile Pruiseanach a bh’ ann ron chogadh,
Stettin an t-ainm a bh’ air, bha suipeir
fhèiseil, mheadhrach a’ dùnadh na còmhdhalach,
òigear ann, ’s e Sasannach, bha ’g obair
ann an oilthigh san Eadailt, mar a rinn mi fhìn
is mi ’nam òigear, ach nuair a chaidh mi null
a bhruidhinn ris, an ciad rud a thuirt e,
b’ e Not many people speak that language
agus chuala mise mo ghuth fhìn ag ràdh
gu soilleir, stèidhichte, a’ toirt
a thruime sònraichte ri gach aon lide
I – just – haven’t – got – the – time
dh’èirich mi air ball is chaidh mi thairis
gu na boireannaich Phòlainneach nach bitheadh,
bha mi cinnteach, claon-bhreith dhen t-seòrs’ ac’
’s nach iarradh orm bruidhinn mu dheidhinn cuspair
a bhruidhinn mi mu dheidhinn cho tric san àm a dh’fhalbh
’s gu robh e faisg air sgreamh a dhùsgadh annam –
nuair a sheall mi air ais, cairteal uarach às a dhèidh,
bha an t-òigear a’ coimhead orm fhathast
iongnadh air aodann, theireadh tu
gun d’ fhuair e dìreach sgealp air a ghruaidh
agus smaoinich mise nach robh teagamh ann
nach e dreuchd a tha a’ beantainn ruinne fhìn
barrachd foghlaim a sholarachadh do luchd na Beurla
Mo shearmon aig nach bi ach fìor-chorra uair
an aon mhaille eagnaidh, mhion-chùiseach a bhios
uaireannan aig mo leannan ’na ghnìomhachadh –
cha bu chaomh leam sibh a bhith gam thuigsinn ceàrr,
faodaidh a’ chùis gu lèir a bhith air a coilionadh
ann an ùine ghoirid cuideachd, mar an turas sin
a bha sinn còmhla nar suidhe aig cuirm-bainnse
is bana-charaid ghràdhaichte air pòsadh aig a’ cheann thall –
theab sinn gach dòchas a chall oir bha
uimhir a chompanaich air a bhith aice, cuid dhiubh
geanalta gu leòr ach cuid eile nach gabhadh
creidsinn gu robh i comasach air feart thaitneach
no tharraingeach sam bith fhaicinn
ann an uilebheist dhen seòrs’ ud – chan ann
mu dheidhinn gastachd no ciatachd a tha mi bruidhinn
ach mu eileamaidean nas bunailtiche riatanaiche
mar, dè cho tric ’s a bhios cuideigin ga nighe san t-seachdain
air neo, gu leòr a mhion-airgead a bhith ’na phòcaid
gus dà chofaidh a phàigheadh, gun iomradh air notaichean –
bha feasgar àraidh ann a thàinig esan dhachaigh
cha d’ fhuair sinn bloigh de chadal gu trì uairean san oidhche
’s e bruidhinn is a’ bruidhinn mun chùram a bh’ aige
air sgàth na bana-charaid ud – ach a nis bha coltas ann
a h-uile rud a bhith air a seatlaigeadh gu dòigheil,
mo leannan riaraichte mar a bha mise,
sinn nar dithis beagan nar misg, ris an fhìrinn innse
ged nach robh na mìlseanan fhathast air am bòrd a ruighinn
ach bha am fìon a dhòirt iad nar gloinneachan
blasta gu h-ìre nach fhurast’ a chur an cèill –
thuig mi bho mar a bha e sealltainn orm
cha duirt mi facal is mhair esan cuideachd ’na thost,
lean mi e gus an taigh bheag aig na fireannich –
b’ e taigh-òsta anabarrach rumail is spaideil a bh’ ann,
suidhichte am meadhan pairce mhòir, agus na caibeineidean
san taigh bheag aibheiseach mar gach uidheam eile,
thachair a h-uile rud gu luath snog, bha sinn fortanach,
cha d’ rinn neach eile ar ruighinn fhad ’s a bha sinn ann –
an dèidh dhuinn an t-èideadh foirmeil aig a chèile
a chur gu mionaideach air gleus, mar a bha feumail,
chaidh sinn air ais gus an talla mhòr
far an robh a’ chuideachd uile ’na suidhe –
ach ’s ann mu dheidhinn maille shònraichte a thig air
am mòmaidean ainneamh a bha mi ’g iarraidh bruidhinn,
neo-ar-thaing gu bheil sinn air uimhir a bhliadhnaichean
a chur seachad le chèile, mar as trice is esan
a stèidhicheas ruithim an t-sùgraidh,
chan eil mi cinnteach carson a tha sin a’ tachairt,
’s a’ mhaille ud a’ misneachadh faireachdainn annam
cho anabarrach tlachdmhor ’s gu bheil e an impis a bhith pianail –
faodaidh an ceart ruithim a bhith uaireannan aig
Mo shearmon mar chuthachd aighearach nan gobhlan-gaoithe
ann am baile beag san Eadailt air barr cnuic
le bòtharan corrach, caola ’s na taighean cho faisg
air a chèile, bidh tu ri plosgartaich mun ruigear leat
mu dheireadh an sguèar a dh’fhosglas air a’ mhullach –
mothaichidh tu gu h-obann dha na gobhlanan-gaoithe
gan cur air bhoil le camhanaich an latha
dìreach mar a bhios a’ chlann a’ ruith
a’ glaodhach ’s a’ brùchdadh a-mach
sna deich mionaidean mus tèid iad dhan leabaidh
an nàdar fhèin a’ fàsgadh bhuap’
gach aon luirg air smioralas no guaineas,
a’ cuimhneachadh mar a bhrùthas neach spong
gu teann eadar a mheuran gus a h-uile
boinn’ a fhliuich’ a dh’fhanas innte fhuadachadh –
na gobhlanan-gaoith’ gu trang a’ figheadh sa chamhanaich
lìn aibhisich len goban, a’ glacadh
snàthainnean an dorchadais an siud ’s an seo,
chan e na cuileagan no na meanbh-bhiastagan
itealach eile a cheapas iad, ach cinn
sreanganan na duibhr’ ag udal san adhar,
iad gu dìcheallach a’ saigheadh
eadar nam bunnacha-bac, a’ teannachadh
na lìn ud anns an tèid an’ oidhch’ a ribeadh
gu mall rùnaichte dh’aona-ghnothach,
plangaid dhubh a’ teàrnadh oirnn uile
a cho-èignicheas eadhon an fheadhainn as buaireasaiche
’s an-fhoiseile dhen chloinn a ghèilleadh
ris a’ chadal a dheòin no a dh’aindeoin
ged nach do dh’fhàs iad fhathast sgith dhe
Mo shearmon . . .
THE WAY I TALK
The way I talk moves, streams and urges,
rushing along like water when a storm
has beaten for hours on a high ridge,
seeking out every gap and notch,
aching to descend, to be scattered
in thousands of small, gleaming
rivulets no obstacle can hold back
for long – where a crag reaches an edge
suddenly the water spurts
like the hair of a giant,
but with the same impatient gesture
a woman has tossing her mass of hair
to one side, so it descends
in a waterfall of countless
drops, powerful and insistent –
you would think it wasn’t wetness at all
but cords, unbelievably thin ropes,
so thin a gust of wind suffices
to dishevel them – or else
they could be a curtain hiding
who can tell what kind of a performance,
comical or tragical or both –
proceeding so fast
you won’t even get time
to form a question in your mind,
you’ll have to put your skates on
if you want to catch up with
The way I talk like a little hunched goblin
who somehow managed to get into the pulpit
where no one else but the minister
has any right to go,
wearing the minister’s fine, official garb
and looking very like him
even if the congregation have the feeling
he sort of shrank –
the minister generally looked
that little bit taller – the goblin also
got hold of a wig he pushed
down onto his head, because everyone knows
goblins have shaggy, unkempt hair
such as the minister’s would never be
when he appears in church on a Sunday
and, as soon as the goblin starts talking,
nothing but senseless drivel
comes from his scabby lips
given that goblins are incapable of speaking
any human language whatsoever
unless under a particular spell –
and how could a heathen spell
work in church on a Sunday? –
at that very moment, the minister
appears in the midst of the congregation
naked as on the day he came into the world,
he runs and runs out of the church
up onto the hill close by
terrified that the whole shire will see
how withered and uncoordinated his body is
and besides that, the smallness of his ——
(one word has been crossed out)
but however nimbly and speedily the minister
sprints towards the wood on the far side of the hill,
filled with melancholy because he knows only too well
he won’t come upon a pair of trousers or underpants
hanging tidily on the branch of a birch tree
or an ash, the way they usually hang
in the spacious cupboard
of his comfortable home –
meanwhile the goblin chunters on determinedly,
more and more rubbish coming out of his mouth,
he had no idea he was such a splendid orator,
the congregation is getting a bit restless,
from time to time the minister would have a bad day
the things he used to say weren’t always
reasonable or logical, at times
it was extremely difficult
to grasp what he might be getting at
or extract any worthwhile meaning from his preaching
but today he has really lost the place –
the poor minister is wondering
if maybe he ought to dive into the loch
though the water is tremendously cold,
he would have to swim to the shore in the end
and hand himself over – however helterskelter,
headlong the panicking minister is
as he shoots onwards like an arrow in his flight,
he’ll never match the speed of
The way I talk, at times like a shy deer
you only catch a glimpse of through the foliage
because it is so withdrawn and private
and then, without warning, you see it
climbing up the braeside
and you tell yourself it could be a vision
because its movements are so majestic, kingly, consummate
all of its limbs working together
as if it were flying rather than running,
and you wonder if it might be better
for it to be a vision, because then
there would be no way or possibility
for harm or malice to reach it,
the deer would be inaccessible, invulnerable
like whatever the imagination produces
or something we see in a dream,
perfect, shapely, invincible –
and you say to yourself:
“I don’t believe in any kind of a god,
I am neither a Christian nor a Muslim,
I don’t support any of the old doctrines
about a venerable, violent old man
or the commandments he wrote down
for us to follow,
or the eternal punishment
waiting on us
if we are insufficiently obedient” –
but you also say that maybe this
was how God himself felt
after making a creature of flesh and blood
to set down somewhere in the world –
The way I talk, without anybody knowing
how long it is going to continue
maybe until Scotland finally
achieves independence, and:
“Tell me! You who have the right
to enter the little cubicle and put
a cross next to the policies you favour
however courageous or craven you may be!!
How many years still need to pass
before that longed for day arrives?”
The way I talk which proves beyond question
death is not going to triumph over this language
whatever people who regard Gaelic
with distaste or detestation may say,
the ones who forced our parents and grandparents
to suppress it and neglect it,
all through endless, oppressive years
when it couldn’t be used at school or at university,
when teachers would use English
even for discussing Gaelic topics
and our language was a source of shame,
a symbol of poverty and ignorance
for the people who spoke it in a whisper –
it makes me think of a conference
I attended years back in Poland,
in a town they call Szczcecin,
a Prussian town before the war,
Stettin was its name then,
the whole business concluded
with a joyous, festive dinner,
there was a young Englishman who taught
at a university in Italy, as I had
when I was young, and when I went over
to speak to him, the first thing he said was
“Not many people speak that language”
and I heard my own voice saying
firmly, steadily, giving due weight
to each single syllable:
“I – just – haven’t – got – the – time”
I got up at once and went over
to the Polish women who I was sure
wouldn’t have prejudices of this sort
and wouldn’t ask me to talk about something
I’d been asked so often in the past
it simply made me feel sick –
when I looked round, a quarter of an hour later,
the young man was still gazing at me
with a surprised expression, you would think
someone had just struck him on the cheek
and I decided there was no question about it,
it’s not a job we have to take on,
educating people who promote English –
The way I talk, which very, very rarely
has the same detailed, punctilious slowness
my partner occasionally has when making love –
I wouldn’t want you to get me wrong,
sometimes the whole business is over
in a very short time, like the day
we were both sitting at a wedding lunch –
a dear woman friend had finally married –
we practically lost hope, because
she had been with so many guys, some of them
perfectly acceptable, but others
there was no way you could grasp how she could possibly
find anything pleasing or attractive
in a monster of that sort – I’m not
talking about manners or looks
but about basic, indispensable things
like, how many times in the week somebody washes,
or having enough change in their pocket
to pay for two coffees, not to mention notes –
one night my partner came home,
we didn’t get a wink of sleep till three in the morning,
he kept on and on with how worried he was
about our woman friend – and now it looked
as if everything had got settled properly,
my partner was as pleased as I was,
the two of us slightly tipsy to tell the truth,
even though they still had to serve the puddings
but the wine they poured into our glasses
was excellent in a way I can’t describe –
I realised from how he was looking at me,
and followed him without saying a word
to the gents’, he too was silent –
it was an unusually spacious and posh hotel,
in the middle of a big estate, the toilet
cubicles were as huge as everything else,
we got through it neatly and quickly, we were lucky,
nobody else entered all the time we were there –
once we had adjusted our formal clothes
with due care, we went back
to the big hall where everyone was seated –
but what I wanted to talk about was
the particular slowness that comes over him
in certain rare moments, even if the two of us
have been together for such a long time,
generally he sets the rhythm of our lovemaking,
I couldn’t actually say why this happens –
that slowness awakens a sensation in me
so acutely pleasurable it almost hurts –
sometimes there is that same rhythm in
The way I talk, like the exultant craziness
of swallows in an Italian hilltop village
with twisting, narrow lanes and the houses
so close to each other, you are spluttering
before you finally reach the square
that opens at the summit – all of a sudden
you notice the swallows going crazy in the twilight,
just the way children will run around
shouting and exulting in the ten
minutes before they get into bed,
nature itself squeezing out of them
every last trace of energy or mischief,
making you think of how you squeeze a sponge
tightly between your fingers to expel
every last remaining drop of moisture –
the swallows busy weaving in the dusk
a huge net with their beaks, catching
the strands of darkness here and there,
it’s not midgies or other flying
insects they intercept, but the ends
of threads of darkness floating in the air
as diligently they dart back and forth
between the eaves, intently weaving
that net tighter, gradually and deliberately
so the night can get trapped in it,
a dark blanket descending on us
that forces even the most tempestuous
and restless of children to yield in the end
to sleep, even if they’re still not tired of
The way I talk . . .
translated by Shuggie McCall
‘Mo Shearmon’ / ‘The Way I Talk’ by Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin / Christopher Whyte is taken from Sound of an Iceberg: New Writing Scotland 37, published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, priced £9.95
For over 10 years The Big Issue magazine has asked some of the best known figures in sport, politics, business and entertainment to talk about their younger selves and to offer advice to that person they once were. Here we share extracts from interviews with two of BooksfromScotland’s favourite writers, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin.
Letter to My Younger Self: 100 Inspiring People on the Moments That Shaped Their Lives
Devised and edited by Jane Graham
Published by Blink Publishing
Val McDermid
At 16 I was preparing for my Oxford entrance exam. I was very driven and pushed myself in everything. I played hockey for the first eleven in the East of Scotland. I played guitar and sang in folk clubs. I won debating prizes. Everything I did, I wanted to do really well.
I was very much of the working-class generation that thought education was the key to doing well in life. My parents were bright people who passed their exams to go to high school but they had to leave at 14 because their families couldn’t afford it. They never got to reach their potential, so they very much encouraged me not to be trapped by circumstances. But my parents had mixed feelings about my going to Oxford. It was a long way from Kirkcaldy – the only time we’d gone to England was a weekend in Blackpool. And it was a long way intellectually as well. So I think they were really a bit nervous for me, as well as very proud. But I think they saw that I was always going to go my own way.
I became aware when I was at Oxford that I was drawing a line between my past and my future. I couldn’t articulate this when I was 16, but I think I wanted to spread my wings because of my sexuality. There were no lesbians in Fife in the ‘60s. I knew I felt different, and quite lonely, listening to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell on my own, feeling that sense of both alienation and unhappiness. I thought my difference must be because I wanted to be a writer. If lesbians aren’t visible in your culture – on TV or in books and films – it’s very hard to come to that understanding by yourself. I’d spend hours walking with the dog along miles of coastline – days full of nothing but me, my dog and a book.
I did go out with boys. That’s just what you did. I went to parties, did the illicit drinking, a wee bit of smoking dope. On the face of it, I was the life and soul, but I knew I was going through the motions. The music I was listening to was a far better reflection of how I really felt. And I was singing in folk clubs, where you’d meet people hanging out in the back room – people like Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty. It wasn’t glamorous at all, but I was playing with people who were serious about what they were doing. If I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have liked to be a musician.
. . .
If I’m honest, I’m still a bit wary of the world and I still hold back a bit. Many women struggle to let go of that imposter syndrome; waiting for the moment when they turn round and say, ‘It’s not really you we wanted!’ When I went for my Oxford exam, the woman asked me how long I’d lived in Shetland. My heart contracted in my chest and I thought, ‘They’ve got the wrong person. It should be a lassie from Shetland sitting here, not me.’ I almost shouted, ‘I’ve never been to Shetland!’ She said, ‘But it says here you went to Fair Isle Primary School.’ I said, ‘That’s just a name!’ That was a terrible, terrible moment, and it’s never quite left me.
*
Ian Rankin
At 16, my life was all about rock music and books – I didn’t go out much. I grew up in Cardenden, a very working-class mining village with no private housing. I was surrounded by family – an uncle over the back fence and an aunt two doors along – so every move was monitored and you couldn’t get away with anything. Even if you didn’t feel like you fitted in, you had to look like you did because you didn’t want to get beaten up. I was happiest staying in my bedroom with my hi-fi and my records, writing painfully bad poetry about a lovely young woman who wouldn’t look twice at me.
I was painfully shy around girls. I still remember that crippling embarrassment of the two-month run-up to Christmas at school, when you stopped having PE and started having dance lessons. All the boys lined up on one side of the room with the girls on other side, and you had to pick a partner and spend the next 40 minutes dancing the Gay Gordons with them. You had to hang back to let the roughty-toughty kids get their first choice, because if you picked their favourite you’d get a kicking at playtime. It was nightmarish for everyone involved.
. . .
I think the teenage Ian would be dumbfounded by how his career has gone. If he dreamed of writing, it was as a literary novelist, not a guy whose books you’d buy in an airport bookshop. He’d want to be studied at university or as a set text in schools. I’m not sure he’d have wanted to be a wellknown popular writer, and I’m still not sure I’m used to it now. I might look quite relaxed on TV, but it’s taken me 20 years to get there. When I first went on The Review Show, I was an absolute bag of nerves.
Letter to My Younger Self: 100 Inspiring People on the Moments That Shaped Their Lives, devised and edited by Jane Graham is published by Blink Publishing, priced £16.99
All royalties from the sales of this book go to The Big Issue.
Floris Books are well-known and loved for their beautifully-illustrated childrens’ books, and they have another stunner with Little Pearl by Martin Widmark (and illustrated by Emilia Dziubak). It’s a tale of sibling love and adventure with gorgeously-surreal artwork reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Let BooksfromScotland introduce you to this magical tale.
Extract and illustrations taken from Little Pearl
By Martin Widmark, illustrated by Emilia Dziubak
Published by Floris Books
Daniel loved it when his parents were out, because Grace came over and told him bedtime stories. Her tales were the most exciting ever.
‘Please…’ he begged, when she was tucking him in, ‘just one more.’
‘OK,’ she agreed, ‘but then you really have to sleep.’
On her finger was a ring with a big pearl. She held it up close, and began: ‘A long time ago, when I was younger than you, when every day was as bright as this pearl, something strange happened to my big brother Tom. At first, all I knew was that he’d disappeared…’
Tom wasn’t just my brother, he was my best friend. We did everything together. He always looked out for me. He carved two wooden flutes: one for me and one for himself. We made up tunes and played together.
And then one day in the middle of winter he was gone. There was no trace, no clue of where he might be. Every night I cried myself to sleep, and dreamed of him and his music.
On a cold, snowy morning, I wanted to escape the sad house. I took my red sledge to Tom’s favourite hill. As I started down the slope, the sledge quickly picked up speed, and soon it was plummeting so fast my tummy tingled. Then it hit a little bump on the hillside.
I flew into the air and the sledge shot off through the trees. I skidded into an icy tunnel, sliding faster and faster until I couldn’t tell up from down.
Little Pearl by Martin Widmark and illustrated by Emilia Dziubak is published by Floris Books, priced £12.99
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland and is a current Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh. Her chapbook, Faces That Fled the Wind, was picked by Camille Rankine as the winner of the 2018 BOAAT Chapbook prize and we are delighted to share some poems from that collection with you.
Poems taken from Faces That Fled the Wind
By Alycia Pirmohamed
Published by BOAAT Press
Ways of Looking
Every prayer is a heron at first glance,
the marbled neck of someone
indistinguishable from this house.
Every figure wildreed unbelonged cursive
is a morning’s mound of sugar.
This mosque is a wood
where I sit cross-legged,
alder straight.
Where I mirror my mother’s
twenty-year-ago askings.
This mosque is a cut of apple—
I mistake each slice for a mouth
—I mistake the back of every head
for my father;
red gala, ambrosia, faces arranged into
holy sorrows.
He is here with cloves packed
into his wounds.
I am here because there are wounds
packed into my wounds.
In my language, every line is a fallen thing.
In my other language,
.
Mother’s
I am imagining again,
her story
of resin and cassava,
thin blood,
and flight.
It is mine, too,
like mirrors
inherited only
from mother, to mother,
to daughter—
eventually.
That smaller
tether
in every cell,
a helix of hushes,
sweet, tart
grapes on the vine.
All of the firsts
accruing in a body,
one voice
splitting into its Februarys
and its silences—
first dab of oil,
first whole nutmeg,
first unknotting
of adolescent hair—
first heartache,
its spectrogram passed
down,
whale song
from chest to chest,
an echo slickened
with rain and salt
and habit.
Hawwa is Creating Her Garden
Before her, the clay
of evergreen and juniper and oak.
Hawwa drinks sweet water from the well
studies the spine of each tree,
kisses each face
she finds in the river.
Hawwa is this garden. Look closely
at the rosary beads that glisten
like blackberries
on the bough.
Hawwa is olivine
and zinc,
she has planted seeds beneath the highest point
of the sun
and unfolded her body
onto the earth. She rises
like an eagle,
and laughs like a wasp.
Hawwa loves many things, and what she loves
she gives a name—the birds
that ki ki ki
are northern flickers. She cracks open a
pistachio
and delights in its snap.
Hawwa is heart and animal and breast and god.
Faces That Fled the Wind by Alycia Pirmohamed is published by BOAAT Press.
Your home is supposed to be your sanctuary, the place where you are most relaxed, most safe. But what if you have the neighbour from hell – literally? In his latest thriller Anthony O’Neill gives us a page-turning cautionary tale on getting exactly what you wish for.
Extract taken from The Devil Upstairs
By Anthony O’ Neill
Published by Black and White Publishing
Cat had been trained to deal with difficult people – to charm them, establish a rapport with them, manipulate them. She was proud of her record in doing so. And she backed herself to get results now.
The following evening she raced home from work and changed into her running gear. She felt slightly out of shape – moving in, setting herself up, then adjusting to Moyle’s routines had all taken their toll – but she knew she still looked OK in Lycra pants. She tied her hair back in a swishy ponytail. Even considered stuffing her bra.
Then she sat in her armchair, trying to read a book about Julius Caesar, and waited for Moyle to come home.
Frustratingly, it wasn’t until ten p.m. But when she heard the kah-lunk of the building’s stair door and clap clap clap of his boots on the granite steps, she was ready. She took a deep breath and started down the stairs past the malfunctioning light.
She met him for the first time outside the door to Number Three.
‘Hi,’ she said as brightly as possible, thrusting out a hand. ‘You must be Dylan.’
He had unruly shoulder-length hair, a lank beard, a bloodless complexion and ruthless dark-brown eyes. He was wearing an inflexible scowl, a dog-collar tattoo and a leather jacket over a ragged T-shirt bearing the words HOUNDS OF HADES. He couldn’t have looked more like a hard rocker if he’d stepped off the cover of a death metal magazine.
He accepted her hand with a desultory shake but was still giving her a million-mile stare.
‘I’m Cat, Cat Thomas,’ she went on, still smiling. ‘I’m living in Flat Five, right beneath you.’
He continued looking at her blankly.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself earlier,’ she said. ‘But I think you were away for the first few weeks I was here. This is really some sort of place, huh? So atmospheric – I love it.’
He finally seemed to have realised she was talking to him. ‘Cat,’ he said. ‘Thomas Cat. Tom Cat.’
‘Yeah!’ She laughed, as though nobody had ever made that joke before. ‘Catriona actually, in the Scottish style, but where I grew up no one knew how to pronounce it, so I shortened it to Cat. Tom Cat, yeah.’ Another pointless chuckle.
Moyle continued staring at her. His eyes roamed her body, but he didn’t look impressed.
‘Oh, well,’ said Cat, ‘better be on my way. It was great to meet you.’
She turned away and started down the steps. But almost immediately turned back. Because now came the ‘afterthought’.
‘Oh – Dylan?’ And when he slowly rotated back in her direction: ‘I don’t know if you’re aware, but apparently there’s nothing insulating the space between our two apartments – just empty air. So I can hear everything. Everything. And, you know, I’d really appreciate it if you could be mindful of that. At night, I mean. The boards in your place creak. The pipes clang. The doors bang. And sometimes I find it a little hard to sleep. Which is a problem because I’m settling into a new job and . . . well, you understand.’
She’d said it all with upraised eyebrows and the sweetest of smiles – completely unthreatening and non-aggressive, just a new friend asking for a favour.
But in response Moyle’s forehead furrowed, as if he was struggling to work out why she was bothering him with such trivia. And finally:
‘American.’
He said it as though he’d belatedly recognised her accent. As though it explained everything. As if her nationality were some sort of disease.
Cat could only laugh politely, treating the reaction as a joke, then turn around, head down the stairs again, and go out for her run.
But as she scaled the hills of Ravelston – half-heartedly, and absurdly late at night – she had a terrible feeling in her gut. A sense that her charm, her wiles, all her strategic manipulations, had come to naught.
And so it turned out to be.
That night she lay awake in bed, hearing the klunks, the creaks, the kee-wahs, and the shhhhhhhhhhhh of the hissing pipes. If anything, the noises were more insistent than ever. She slept in fits and starts, drifting in and out of psychedelic dreams, her solutions becoming ever more biblical.
The Devil Upstairs by Anthony O’ Neill is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £12.99
Ailsa has had a difficult young life, and when she rescues two selkies from some bloodthirsty raiders she finds that becoming their guardian only adds to the dangers she faces. Caroline Logan’s debut fantasy, The Stone of Destiny is a rattling good read, and in this extract we find her at the beginning of her adventure with the selkies, but still haunted by her past.
Extract taken from The Stone of Destiny
By Caroline Logan
Published by Cranachan Books
In her dream, Ailsa could see a golden-haired woman with a crown of branches. The woman held out her arms.
‘Come to me, my child,’ she whispered.
When she didn’t move, the woman’s face became angry. ‘You’ll never escape.’ Behind her, four large wolves appeared with glistening fangs.
Ailsa turned and ran through the forest, the wolves hot on her heels. She could feel their breath on the backs of her calves. Suddenly, there was a thud and the sounds of pursuit ended abruptly. She stopped and waited. Then she heard it.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Throughout the woods, the footsteps echoed. Ailsa turned to run again but realised her feet couldn’t move. When she looked down, they were encased in mud. It shifted around her legs as if alive; creeping up her skin and clothes, gnawing and sucking. Her heart beat wildly in her chest as she struggled to wrench herself free.
I’m going to die, she thought as she sank further into the ground. She tore at the dirt in front of her face, scrambling to find purchase. Her breath came out in desperate sobs but the mud continued to crush her body in a vice grip. As it pinned her arms, she looked up for someone, anyone, to help her.
That’s when she saw them.
Two large, red eyes glowing from between the trees.
*
Ailsa woke with a gasp, and sat up to remove the blankets that had become tangled around her ankles. She’d had the same nightmare many times before; the blonde woman was a new addition, though. She had probably seen her in the inn somewhere. Ailsa leaned against the headboard and allowed herself to wake up fully.
Although the dream left her with a residual feeling of terror, she felt strangely hopeful. Today, they would be travelling to Dunrigh. She had often wondered what it looked like but had decided not to risk venturing too near in the past. Ten people and a goat in a wee village she could handle. Thousands of men and women, packed closely together, watching and gossiping? She’d have been hounded in the streets if she were lucky. At worst, a mob would have lynched her on the spot. Regardless, she was curious about Dunrigh. There must be something worthwhile about the city, if so many people decided to stay there?
The mouth-watering smell of bacon drifted up to her nose through the crack under the door. The light peeking in through the little window told her that it was just after dawn. No doubt it would be a grey, dreich day, as usual.
Ailsa heard a faint whistling sound coming from Harris and Iona’s room next door. Unsure of who or what was making the noise, she rose to investigate.
The siblings had not locked their door, either in carelessness or anticipation of her visit. Inside, she found a narrow room, a twin to her own. The fresh smell of sea salt and citrus wafted about the room. Hers probably smelled like sweat; she hadn’t bathed last night.
Iona must already be downstairs. Harris, however, was still fast asleep and seemed to be the source of the whistling.
He snores? Ailsa grinned to herself. She’d have to file that useful information away for later. Stepping fully inside Harris’s room, she closed the door quietly behind her. Leaning against the door, she studied the unconscious lump in the bed.
He’d managed to find an undershirt and trousers to sleep in. His messy hair curled around his face, which had formed an unpleasant expression: his mouth was hanging open and drool was pooling onto his pillow.
It was still hard to believe that only yesterday she’d witnessed Harris change from a cute, injured seal into the slevering man that slept before her. She wondered, not for the first time, how his transformation actually worked.
Then, thinking about how infuriating he had been the night before, she stepped around the foot of the bed, creeping quietly across the rug-covered floor. Peering down at his sleeping form, she couldn’t contain her smirk.
Beside the bed, a glass of water sat on top of a side table. With nimble fingers she lifted the tumbler from its place and held it in one hand.
Let’s test some theories.
Ailsa dumped the water on his face.
Harris thrashed and, still half asleep, let out an almost scream. He wiped the water off his face, spluttering in surprise.
‘Sorry, Harris,’ said Ailsa in a honeyed voice, mischief glinting in her eyes. ‘I just wanted to see if you would turn back into a seal.’ She backed away from the bed.
He squinted groggily around the room until his eyes fixed on her.
‘YOU!’ he growled, sitting up. He would have looked menacing, Ailsa thought, if not for the hair plastered to his forehead and the lines his pillow had left on his cheek.
‘Obviously, I was wrong.’ Ailsa’s attempts to stay out of his reach failed when Harris dived towards her with a wail of fury and they thudded to the floor.
‘Let me go,’ she protested. ‘I’m sorry I got you wet!’
She tried to escape his grasp, but he held on strong.
‘Here, you can have some,’ he grumbled, shaking his hair at her. She grunted and pushed at his chest, but he just grinned wickedly.
‘You deserved it, you wretch.’
‘Don’t dish it out, lass, if you can’t take it.’
‘What in the Hag’s name is this?’ Iona shouted, appearing at the door. She towered over them with her hands on her hips, glaring down at their entangled bodies.
It was Harris who started giggling first. With one look at the hair streaked across his face, Ailsa let out a quick bark of laughter. With a gasp, she covered her mouth with her hand. She got up, adjusted her clothes and then marched from the room.
‘See you at breakfast,’ Ailsa threw over her shoulder.
What the hell was that? Ailsa thought. She would need to be more careful. She couldn’t afford to start liking her new companions—and that was a very bad idea. Because when you like people, they have the power to hurt you.
When Ailsa was young, other than her brother, Cameron, she’d only had a few friends. He had alternated between playing the doting older brother and wanting nothing to do with her. The best days had been when he let her tag along on adventures with his friends. The neighbourhood children were talented at sneaking away from their parents and didn’t have the same prejudices. Ailsa had spent her summers wandering around the woods, playing bandits and maidens with a gang of youths, long before the forest embodied her fears. The children knew their parents disapproved of Ailsa, but this had only made her friendship more appealing. They used to hide her round the back of their cottages and feed her treats like a pet. Then, when they played their games, she was always a lovely, good, faerie princess or a wicked pirate queen with her motley crew of cutthroats and scoundrels. Cameron had loved to parade her around them.
But it all came to an end the spring her mother died. Then Ailsa became a wandering orphan: an outsider not tolerated by the villagers. Afraid she would hurt him next, her brother had been taken away and sent to live with distant relatives. She still remembered the sorrow in his panicked eyes as he was led away from the cottage, kicking and screaming her name.
Later, towards the end of that summer, Ailsa returned to her house to find the door kicked down and the walls smashed. She gathered up her belongings, including a few of her mother’s trinkets, and moved on to the next town.
Even now, she couldn’t bring herself to think of the only other time she’d had a friend. He didn’t deserve to be remembered.
If you start to care, you’ll be disappointed when they leave. You can only rely on yourself.
The Stone of Destiny by Caroline Logan is published by Cranachan Books, priced £8.99
For Philip Marsden, the Summer Isles were a place of personal significance, a calling card to his imagination. In his latest book, The Summer Isles, he writes of his journey to the islands up the west coast of Ireland and Scotland. He explores how mythologies of places are created, and in this extract contemplates the importance of the Selkie while moored beside the island of Jura.
Extract taken from The Summer Isles
By Philip Marsden
Published by Granta
Map illustrations by Emily Faccini
Something made me turn. A head in the water, just a few yards from the boat’s quarter – two big eyes, whiskers, pale blotches on the neck. A grey seal. We looked at each other. It was hard not to read in its gaze a sense of surprise, an anthropomorphized reaction to this intrusive form in its bay: Who are you? What are you?
Seals were always selkies here, along the Atlantic coast. They led semi-human lives. They lived in their own world beneath the waves, one that mirrored that of people’s above. They were capable of human speech and human emotions, and they had underwater houses with doors and windows, the same as us. Once a year, they gathered at a place off the Donegal coast and elected from their number a leader a selkie king. Sometimes they could be heard singing of the seal city underwater, its coral gardens and its mother-of-pearl facades. To those who heard the song, it had a hypnotic effect: a delicate air, and words which spoke of a place ten thousand times more beau- tiful than the sky. The selkie world was a version of the otherworld.
Selkies could make near-seamless appearances on land. Female selkies would slip out of their sealskins and take on the form of women and sleep with men. Male selkies would also take on human form and father children. They might take those children back to the sea, or they might leave them on land. You could never be sure which were the selkie children; they might be very good at swimming, or very small, or ‘very sharp indeed at the learning . . . particularly at the Hebrew’. Then one day they’d just disappear. There were whole families in Ireland and Scotland who were known to have the seal blood in them, and the Scottish folklorist John Gregorson Campbell speaks of the Clann ’ic Codrum nan ron of North Uist, ‘the MacCodrums of the seals’, so named for their seal ancestry.
In the 1950s, David Thomson travelled in the west of Ireland and Scotland gathering selkie stories. In the tender account of his journeys, The People of the Sea, he tells of meeting a man of the road down in Kerry who was descended from seals. ‘The seals are a class of a fairy,’ explained the man. ‘They come out of the north of Ireland, from some place by the County Donegal.’ He then told Thomson about a boy who, collecting kelp one day, stabbed a seal. The boy watched as it turned into a red-headed man and ran away. Years later, when the boy was a man, he was fishing near Tory Island. When he went ashore, he saw that red-headed man, and the man said ‘thank you’ to the boy for what he’d done years earlier. He’d been freed from his seal-state by the stabbing.
Thomson not only recorded the habits of selkies and their place in the world, but also the relish with which their antics were told. The selkies could be malicious or a threat, but they were also characters, recalled like any old-time village eccentric. He remembered one man in north Mayo telling a selkie story: ‘Do you remember the seal we met outside chapel? You remember how it was walking like any dog.’ He said that someone hitched it up to a cart and put it in a hay shed and it spoilt the hay – no cow would touch it. It was Finoola Finney who drove the seal, he recalled, and she was a girl who was up for ‘any mad thing’ – and the man laughed so much that for some time he was unable to finish his piece.
Thomson heard another account of a man travelling to the annual fair in Belmullet. He was late and all the currachs had already left to cross the estuary. So he sat on a rock, feeling sad. A seal came up and addressed him by name. The seal said he was also going to the fair. So the man jumped on his back and they swam out to cross the tide. They were joined by other seals, all going to the fair. When they reached Belmullet quay, the man jumped off and waded ashore, then turned to thank the seal. But he was gone. Instead he saw ‘a fine gentleman’. ‘I am the seal,’ said the gentleman. The man took him to the pub and they drank rum together. Rum was the ‘seaman’s drink’.
The selkie stories were sustained on these coasts by the constant presence of seals. Some strange congress takes place when you look at a seal, some hint of recognition, reinforced by the sense that it appears to be mutual. In many places, seals were believed to be fallen angels, the ones who, expelled from heaven, fell into the sea. But it was less their angelic nature than their human habits that were recalled again and again. Seamus Heaney said of the seal belief that it represents ‘the old trope of human beings as creatures dwelling in a middle state between the worlds of the angels and the animals.’ Yet shape-shifting is less about affirming man’s separation from the beasts than the possibility that we remain a part of them. It implies a world in which the boundaries between things do not – or should not – exist. It is the same parallel country of fairies and angels, the spirit world, into which we might occasionally glimpse or even travel. We might be locked within our frames, within our own mortality, but a bit of us remains mobile. ‘Of bodies changed to other forms I tell,’ Ovid declares in the opening line of Metamorphoses, and goes on to make the case that our souls are essentially fluid, and ‘adopt / in their migrations ever-varying forms’. Introducing his own version of Metamorphoses, Ted Hughes reflects on the moment of transition, repeated in each of the poems: ‘Ovid locates and captures the peculiar frisson of that event, where the all-too-human victim stumbles into the mythic arena and is transformed.’ The tales might be salutary, cautionary or retributive, but they hold out the promise of transformation – and transformation answers to that perennial itch at the core of our condition: the dissatisfaction of being, and the promise of becoming.
The endurance of the selkie myth can also be explained as an example of the poetic faculty, where everything can be revealed by finding its parallel. It comes from that strange region of cognitive territory where the chaos around us is briefly ordered by analogy, and the analogy grows into story and the story evolves and mutates into myth, a species in itself, both true and untrue. Selkie belief is a measure of the abiding need for such ambiguity. We might think that belief means certainty, but it doesn’t – it works better as the accommodation of paradox. Seals can be people and people can be seals. That’s it.
In the Ordinalia, a series of medieval mystery plays written in the Cornish language, there is a discussion about the question that lies at the heart of Christianity, the same question that has vexed and divided Christians for 2,000 years: how can Christ be both mortal and divine? The Cornish play has an answer:
Look at the mermaid
half fish and half man.
God and man clearly
To that we give belief.
I woke in the night and lay listening. Every ten seconds came the sound of a wave being dumped on the beach. I went up on deck. The boat had drifted round to face north-west. Not a breath of wind. My masthead light was glittering on the water. Over the Paps a large moon was half-hidden in shreds of cloud, and I listened to the anchor chain below, mumbling as it dragged its links over the sand.
I became aware of another sound. It was coming from the skerries. I realized that it had been there on the edge of my sleep for some time. I focused the binoculars: in the moonlight, a jagged silhouette of rock, a black void, and, above the water, three softer shapes. The moonlight on their backs gave them a roundness, the sort of shape that only animate things can hold. Seals. The noise they were making was part foghorn and part wolf-howl – and for the briefest of moments, I thought I understood what it meant.
The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden is published by Granta, priced £20.00
David Robinson has appreciated William Dalrymple’s writing on India for a long time, and in reading Dalrymple’s latest book, he finds a writer as insightful, probing and as gripping as ever.
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
By William Dalrymple
Published by Bloomsbury
The reviews are all in for William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, his history of the rise of the East India Company published last month: I’ve read as many as I can find and they are uniformly excellent. Amidst the panegyrics, there’s not a whiff of criticism. The opening sentence of the author’s note at the end of the book – ‘William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians’ – stands unchallenged.
I’m old enough to remember when that wasn’t the case. In the Nineties, no-one thought of him as a historian at all. He was a travel writer, and had been ever since he left Cambridge and headed off in Marco Polo’s footsteps from Jerusalem to Kubla Khan’s Mongolian summer palace for his prize-winning 1989 debut In Xanadu. India had already a hold on his imagination, but he would never have thought of himself as its historian.
All that had changed by June 2003, when I met him for the first time to interview him about his book White Mughals. It had just won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year, and as one of the judges, it fell to me, sitting in the sunny garden of his Queen Anne cottage in Chiswick, to tell him that he could soon expect to be £10,000 richer.
White Mughals is the story of the love between an East India Company representative in Hyderabad and a Mughal princess at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning off the nineteenth. Not only is it a great story in its own right but it broke new historiographical ground. The relationship between James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair-un-Nissa, Dalrymple showed, reflected the times they lived in. Long before the unbridled racism of the Raj, there was ‘a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas’. Interracial love stories, such as Kirkpatrick’s were part of this and far more common than previously thought.
Back in 2003, Dalrymple didn’t know that White Mughals would go on to be picked by the Richard & Judy Book Club, doubling its sales to 200,000, or that Bloomsbury would woo him with oodles of money for a six-book deal. In fact, at the time, writing history books about India looked like a shortcut to penury. But like his literary hero, Bruce Chatwin, who walked out of a well-paid job at Sotheby’s for the uncertain life of a travel writer, Dalrymple was determined to defy the odds. He spent four years researching and writing the story of Kirkpatrick and Khair-un-Nissa, remortgaging his house and running up a £27,000 overdraft. The day before I met him, his exasperated bank manager had told him he was going to stop honouring his cheques.
It didn’t come to that. On the same day he met the bank manager, he was told that his book had won the £10,000 Wolfson History Prize. The next day, thanks to the Scottish Arts Council, he had twice that amount. A corner had been turned.
That visit to Chiswick taught me a lot about William Dalrymple. First, that he is excellent company: bright, breezy, funny, charming, ferociously committed to his work (‘That’s Daddy’s girlfriend,’ his seven-year-old daughter told me as I examined a portrait of Khair-un-Nissa on his living room wall). But even if White Mughals hadn’t taken off, he told me, he wouldn’t have stopped writing about Indian history.
Over the years, I’ve either interviewed him or heard him talk about nearly all of his books about India. His pitches for them are irresistible. For The Last Mughal (2006), he basically gave a condensed version of the opening page: a secret burial on a rainy September night in Rangoon in 1862, when the last descendant of Ghengis Khan, Tamerlaine and Babur in a lime-drenched plywood coffin in a pauper’s grave, without either a ceremony or a gravestone. ‘There will be no surviving vestige,’ wrote the supervising British officer, ‘to mark the remains of the great Mughals.’ Sounds like a good story, I said feebly when he’d finished. ‘It’s a f****ing great story,’ he replied, throwing back his head and laughing.
For Return of The King (2012), I met him in a pub near his East Lothian family home, and over fireside whiskies he told me a condensed version of the First Afghan War, the greatest British military disaster of the nineteenth century, when a whole invading army was all but wiped out. This time, his research – there’s always plenty, usually involving a whole array of hitherto untapped sources – had more than a whiff of danger. He showed me pictures on his phone of the rear window of the taxi that picked him up at Kandahar airport. It had been shattered by a Taliban sniper’s bullet aimed at the back of his head. Had the taxi not had another layer of bulletproof glass, he would have been killed. As I listened to his tales of travelling deep in Taliban territory with a GPS alarms in case he was taken hostage, I couldn’t help thinking how, when he finally gets round to writing his memoirs, they’ll be far more gripping than those of any other historian I can think of.
In each of these three books, you may have noticed, Dalrymple has confined himself to a relatively small and manageable chronological canvas – Hyderabad 1795-1805, Delhi 1856-8 and Afghanistan 1839-42. The Anarchy is different, sweeping across the centuries from the East India Company’s relatively poor and occasionally piratical beginnings in 1599 to its military dominance of the subcontinent in 1803. This is a huge challenge to any historian, especially when most of his readers won’t know anything about key events (hands up those who know what the 1765 Diwani was or why Mughal Emperor Shah Alam was blinded and his family raped), or even the basics about regional rivalries at the time. Thanks to his sparkling narrative skills, Dalrymple passes the test with ease.
The dazzled reviews The Anarchy has received are mainly variants of Maya Jasanoff’s assessment of White Mughals, that Dalrymple ‘researches like a historian, thinks like an anthropologist and writes like a novelist’. All the ones I’ve seen accept his central thesis, that the British domination of India began with ‘a dangerously unregulated private company, headquartered in one small office five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate creditor – Clive’. Drill down even further, and you learn how corporate greed on this scale was possible in the first place, and how the company’s success owed less to its competence than to the tax-collecting powers granted by the Mughals (the Diwani) or loans from Bengali bankers. The fighting, of course, was mainly done by Indian sepoys, but the ones serving this new, massively rich multinational were often paid four times more than the ones fighting against them. Money talks, and in the story of the British conquest of India, it talked louder than almost anything else.
No-one looted more money from India than the Englishman Robert Clive, who became the richest man in Europe on the back of his victories. No-one conquered more of India than the Irishman Richard Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington’s elder brother, all but forgotten now even though his battles won more of India than Napoleon’s won of Europe. Yet the Scots were up to their oxters in the commercial pillage of India too: the first three Governor-Generals were Scots, as in 1759 were almost a third of the EIC’s staff, and (by 1795) one in every three officers and six in every eleven of the company’s British soldiers.
The Dalrymples were there as well, just like the Frasers (ancestors of his wife Olivia, whose mastery of painting Mughal-style miniatures rivals her husband’s skill in explaining Mughal history). In 1754 Stair Dalrymple came out from the family’s North Berwick home and was one of the 126 prisoners of war who died over three days in the Black Hole of Calcutta atrocity two years later. By then Alexander Dalrymple was already working for the EIC in Madras and later, as a celebrated geographer, returned to work as its chief hydrographer in 1771. In 1780 a Lt James Dalrymple (1757-1800) was badly wounded and taken prisoner at the battle of Pollilur against Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1780, the biggest British defeat in India. Along with his cousin Sir David Baird, he was kept as a prisoner of war for 44 undoubtedly horrendous months. Both fought at Srirangapatna in 1799, by which time Dalrymple was a Lieutenant-Colonel. Tipu Sultan was killed in that battle just 300 yards from where the two Scots had been imprisoned.
I mention James Dalrymple only because William Dalrymple doesn’t say so much about him in The Anarchy. But he did in White Mughals, where he pointed out that James was married to a certain Mooti Begum, a Muslim princess and the daughter of the Nawab of Masulipatam in eastern India. Together they had five sons and one daughter. I don’t know exactly how that family tree leads back to North Berwick, only that it does. That 18th century Scottish-Indian marriage was part of the wider background story for White Mughals, the book that turned William Dalrymple into a historian. Whether as a travel writer or historian, he excels both as a stylist and scholar. Mooti Begum Dalrymple would, I think, be very proud of him indeed.
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple is published by Bloomsbury, priced £30.00
In the quiet wee village of Skerrils, Callum and his friends are desperate for excitement and adventure. Little do they know that some all powerful nature spirits are just about to grant them their wish . . .
Author Alan McClure gives us a lively reading of the first chapter, below. We hope you enjoy it!
Extract taken from Callum and the Mountain
By Alan McClure
Published by Beaten Track Publishing
Callum and the Mountain by Alan McClure is published by Beaten Track Publishing, priced £8.99
As the nights get colder and darker, it’s time to coorie in! Beth Pearson, in The Coorie Home, has some excellent ideas on living in a beautifully-cosy fashion whether you’re in a city tenement or a country cottage. Here she chats with illustrator Alison Soye about front doors.
Extract taken from The Coorie Home: Beautiful Scottish Living
By Beth Pearson
Published by Black and White Publishing
Northern Irish illustrator Alison Soye, who stays in Edinburgh, is known for her fascination with beautiful front doors. As we wandered through a wee back street between Bonnington and Broughton, she explained what intrigues her about them and what she has become aware of through her art and her photography.
What intrigues you about front doors, specifically in Scotland?
How people ‘dress them’ in different ways – painting their doors, adding beautiful door numbers, creating leading lanes and quirky gates. I also love how the doors are often adapted to seasons and events – for example, Christmas and autumn wreaths, Halloween decorations and even balloons for birthdays. I feel that in a lot of areas in Scotland people take pride in their front doors, as it’s their one way to make a leading impression on their home.
What do you think you can learn about a person from to their front door?
I think you can learn a lot about a person’s creative mind by how their front door looks! For instance, they might have a really bright,colourful paint colour on their door if they have a loud personality. A traditional doorway might show a person appreciates the history and heritage of their country. An uncared-for doorway, and peeling paint, might show that a person perhaps cannot afford or doesn’t have the time to maintain it. Or perhaps it is just not a priority! You can sometimes see the opposite of this in the pride lots of retired people take in maintaining immaculate doorways and front gardens.
What have you learned about Edinburgh and Scotland from studying and photographing doors?
I have learned how traditional and historical Edinburgh and Scotland might have looked as many of the doors have been so well preserved. I have also learned how buildings and doorways are very important in establishing a sense of pride in homes, businesses and historical, national buildings.
How do you think someone could at a low cost improve their front door?
Paint. Natural seasonal wreaths – holly, ivy, pine cones for Christmas; red and orange leaves and acorns for autumn; fresh green leaves for spring or summer. Simply keeping the front door clean and clear of bins or debris can also make a big difference!
Photography by Ciara Menzies.
The Coorie Home: Beautiful Scottish Living by Beth Pearson is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £14.99
A night in with a dram and a book: what’s not to love on darkening autumn evening? And so Canongate and Balvenie Whisky have joined forces on an excellent collaboration, Pursuit: The Balvenie Stories Collection, bringing together some of the hottest writers around to write tales – fiction and non-fiction – of determination, achievement and perseverance. Here we have Sara Collins’s contribution, an affecting story on how it feels to leave home behind.
‘State of Emergency’ by Sara Collins, taken from Pursuit: The Balvenie Stories Collection
Edited by Alex Preston
Published by Canongate
We loaded the car and drove into the hills. We packed the radio, because we needed it; and nappies, because we needed them, too. We took fifty US dollars per head, which the law allowed us, but not much else, because this is the story of the things we didn’t carry and, since it was Jamaica in 1977, we didn’t carry much. By this time the State of Emergency was already seven months old; there had been an outbreak of political violence in the lead up to the elections – the beginning of a long national nightmare – and my parents decided we had to leave.
The prime minister, Michael Manley, had promised to smash capitalism ‘brick by brick’, and I guess you could say we were getting hit by all those flying bricks. We drove all night, until below us the place we’d come from was nothing but a black shadow sinking into the sea, caught in the first glaze of sunrise, and, even though we loved that old landscape and all its green undulations, we didn’t look back. We were ironing ourselves out of it, getting the hell away.
I want to tell you how, after you’ve left a place this way, you may find yourself needing to write about it, keeping in your rearview a litany of things you don’t remember, with as much choice in these things as you might have about falling in love. How when you start writing, you’ll find yourself coming full circle to the same emergency. The same words leaping around you eager as dogs: curfew-gunman-garrison-gun. How I read books because those words were caught in my head like a line from a song.
*
We flew to Grand Cayman: my parents, my three brothers and I. We got ourselves a room of our own. Two beds, two crocheted bedspreads, one bassinet. My Caymanian grandmother, whose house it was, had a habit of jabbing at my skin like it was something she forgot in the oven. ‘You caught the sun,’ she’d say, as we both surprised ourselves with the discovery that she’d have loved me better pale. My mother worked night shifts. During the day my brothers and I tried to prise her eyelids open while she slept. I stared at myself in the mirror with her nurse’s badge pinned to my T-shirt and her white cap perched on my afro, imagining what it would be like to be a woman who worked. One of our neighbours, a man named McDoom, who ran a bar called Club Inferno in a place called Hell, brought us gifts of food. Baskets of yams. Green bananas.
Finally we could afford the rent on one half of a shared duplex, where one night we built a bonfire in our backyard and my brothers and I raced each other around it, thin and barefoot, singing: Run from Michael Manley! Run from Michael Manley! We were finding our feet (limping, yes, but standing), my father working again as a barrister, picking up the threads of his old life, so we could afford to fill an old barrel every couple of months. Packs of Jacob’s cream crackers scuttled like crabs under lace-edged underwear (the ‘good’ kind that wouldn’t shame you before the eyes of ambulance-drivers), Johnson & Johnson talc, bags of cornmeal, tins and tins of sardines. The barrel would stand in a corner of the kitchen filling up slowly until the lid sat snug on the final item – perhaps a navy-blue tin of Danish butter cookies – and then it would be dispatched to my Jamaican grandmother, who was one of the things we’d had to leave behind.
*
You could spend too much time trying to understand what led to those hardscrabble years, but it boils down to the same story everywhere, doesn’t it? The machinations of men. I understood nothing at the time about what we were doing or why we were doing it. I was a child and these were not childish matters. The PNP and the JLP were at war and it turned out there wasn’t enough country for the both of them. It turned out there’s no such thing as an easy passage.
In April 1978, there was a concert in Kingston – the One Love Peace Concert – an attempt to stitch the two sides together, would-be murderers with would-be murderees: Bob Marley on stage, joining the hands of the two reluctant leaders, the two pale kings – Manley and Seaga – buckra men in a country that had taught itself those were the best kind of men to be. Bob telling the people to come together. And maybe for a moment they all believed him, they believed in the possibility of peace, they left behind the light poles and dirt patches and bullet-wounded walls of the old garrisons. There was a frenzy of dancing; they seemed happy as cult members. Bob telling them that things would be all right. You could almost believe it, too, if you went and watched it now, if you didn’t already know the future, if you didn’t know that sometimes it seems the State of Emergency was the only thing that lasted. By the date of the peace concert, I was already gone, already watching the unfurling of a country that would never belong to me.
*
Jamaica was the place that had caused all this. It was seven years before we could go back to visit. Summer. A break from school. All six of us in the rented car. Twisting this way and that for a backseat view of the things we had abandoned, noticing everywhere these quick currents of memory I couldn’t quite grasp. There were so many things around me I didn’t know that I’d forgotten. The car pushing inch by inch through street vendors, who cried out and waved bags of just-roasted peanuts, peppered shrimp, fried fish and bammies. Their hands slipped like fishes past the glass. I had never seen this kind of urgency to sell something before, this way of pushing the thing at you, so you had to take it or be hit with it.
We started going uphill: urgent noises from the clutch and engine. After a time there seemed to be a bar or church every hundred yards; then women, straddling the roadside with children on their hips, who, when they heard the car, stopped and shifted to the side, without looking around. But sometimes there was no one for miles. Only the orange groves, or the small, ramshackle, apparently deserted buildings. Wood, zinc, sturdier houses sitting proudly beside concrete cisterns. Corner shops. Burglar grilles. Chain-link fence after chain-link fence.
Then, finally, Lambsriver. My grandmother’s tiny flat-roofed house: the walls blue-green inside and out; the floor that thumped underfoot; the yellowing crocheted curtains; the smell of wood. She came out onto her porch, plaits battened down under a head-tie, and watched at arm’s length as we poured ourselves out of the car. We were shy of each other, but my brothers and I trailed her through her garden. Breadfruit and mango and banana. More trees than flowers. We followed her to the outside kitchen, leaving all our questions hanging. A pot of goat meat ticked away on the stove. She’d baked toto, and as usual with anything that delicious we gave each other the eye, the starting signal for our usual backwards race to be last to finish, and, after we had, we peeled mangoes with our teeth and threw the skins into a pile under the tree, raising up a cloud of flies. We took our long, brainless pleasure in the food. I liked the way this grandmother looked at me. As if I was something you could be proud of. Then we heard our mother calling out urgently from the house: ‘What is all this? What is all this?’ And when we rushed inside we found her standing dumbstruck before Grandma’s wide-open wardrobe, pulling out bars of unused Ivory soap, tins and tins of talcum powder. Cotton nighties unfolding like white birds. My grandmother watched my mother from the doorway and, when her smile came it came slowly, like something that had been waiting a long time to be seen.
*
I want to tell you how lonely it must have been, to be the one left behind, curating the contents of those barrels, waiting to show us when we came.
*
How each person’s perseverance is only after all the simple matter of an accumulation of breaths.
*
How these small acts of perseverance hardly ever add up to something history cares two figs about.
*
How we left her that day, too, and drove back down to our hotel, and my brothers and I squeezed onto the concrete balcony and elbowed our way to the railing, so we could perch on the bottom rung and look out across the sand and whisper about the tourists, glossy with tanning spray, beating back against the currents of dark water swelling around their waists.
*
How that last image is a palimpsest. Faint beneath it are men on ships, and fainter still the traces of all the bad things that followed them.
*
How sometimes I hate the whole notion of endurance, mainly because it is the trick that hoodwinks us into staying in place.
*
How breath is the only tool with which we fight extinction.
*
For a long time I didn’t have the money or time to return, but, ten years afterwards, I travelled the Caribbean with a friend. Jamaica was on our list. We hitched a lift from Kingston to Montego Bay and waited in town for the Lambsriver bus. Shabba Ranks blared from a nearby sound system and I wandered over to a cart offering cigarettes for sale, negotiated a Benson & Hedges and a lit match from the woman tending it, standing to one side away from the crowd to smoke, wondering if anything would ever stop me feeling always and forever a visitor everywhere, but especially here.
A slight, dark, gap-toothed man slotted himself into the space between cart and wall and hugged the cigarette-seller from behind. She kissed her teeth. ‘What you troubling me fah? You nah see me working?’
But he spun around, addressing himself to the small crowd of us leaning against the wall. ‘You see this woman? Me love her bad, you see! Me love her bad!’
You couldn’t help but grin, and when I looked at the woman she was smiling too.
My friend and I, the people leaning against the wall, the music, the cigarette-seller’s lover, the way she laughed, leaning over the cart towards him, like she was peering into the bathroom mirror to paint her face. Here was a country. The place where, for me, desire had outlived memory. I felt my love for that whole place stir then; I felt love, like breath, conspiring with muscles and lungs and heart. I felt it as a thing harder to endure even than the history that had led to it.
My friend and I took the bus to Lambsriver. My grandmother had sprained her wrist, but she’d still been cooking all morning. I made her sit at the table and, as I tied a makeshift sling across her shoulder, she spread the fingers of her good hand wide across the wood and seemed happy. I would have known what to say to her had the country not snapped itself in two, leaving her on one side and me on the other. I had one of those cardboard disposable cameras with me and I took a picture of her before I left, a snapshot that could not yet reach across the space and time between that moment and the one when I would find myself, about ten years later, driving slowly through her village, knowing that she was dying, when my memory of her sprained wrist and her joy about the sling would rear up at the sight of her little house, and I’d sit beside her holding her hand and trying to conjure up some important thing to say, when the woman my mum was paying to look after her rattled the Dutch pot in the sink as if impatient to see the back of me and it would strike me that it was too late for the thing I wanted: Gran’s approval, or at the very least, her forgiveness. As if guilt was the only thing I had to show after going out into the world, and coming back.
Pursuit: The Balvenie Stories Collection edited by Alex Preston is published by Canongate, priced £12.99
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