Shona Sandison is back in a second outing from author Philip Miller. The intrepid reporter, newly redundant, is unsure of her next steps when she attends a friend’s wedding. In this extract, she comes across something far worse than the drunken banter at the reception.
The Hollow Tree
By Philip Miller
Published by Polygon
It was time for her to sleep.
She draped the mislaid jacket on an empty chair, then headed up the two flights of stairs to her room. Her legs ached. There must be a lift, she thought. She paused on the worn red carpet of the first landing. The little pebble had shifted in her pocket. She took it out. In the glow of the wall lamps, she could see it was green – green as a broad bean, streaked with a kind of silver. It was impermeable, complete and smooth, like a tiny planet plucked from deep space. She decided to keep it.
She reached a long, dimly lit corridor that smelled of lemon carpet cleaner. The noise of the party receded into distance and night. Some doors had names painted on them: HUGHES, ELIOT, WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, PATERSON, BERRYMAN, MORGAN. Her bedroom was untitled. It was just room 27. She leaned against the wall, fishing out her key card.
But she did not open the door. She was suddenly distracted by a stream of sharp air against her face. A chill. She looked to the end of the corridor. A fire door was slightly open, and, beyond it, a metal staircase. What was out there? The battlements, the flags and the towers. The view across the darkness of Argyll.
Pale light fell on her door – it came from across the corridor. A door was ajar. She thought she heard something: a clumping noise, footsteps, a kind of moaning. But she could not tell where it was coming from.
‘Hello?’ she called tentatively. She looked left and right, but there was no one around – just the distant bass thump of a song pulsing from the bar.
Shona moved a step forward into the open room. The door, she noticed, had a name printed on it: SORLEY MACLEAN.
She saw a bed and a faint light from the bathroom.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Anyone here?’
She thought she heard another moan, and then a deep, long sigh. Raucous laughter suddenly rang out from downstairs.
She took another step into the room. The bed was made, a backpack on the floor beside it. A book lay open on the dressing table. It had been ripped; half a page hung loose and jagged like torn flesh.
With a kind of mental flinch, Shona realised something was on the bedroom floor. She moved closer and could see, spelled out in pebbles and stones, the words: THE RIGHT PATH.
They glimmered with liquid. She bent down and touched a pebble with a fingertip, which suddenly darkened. It was blood.
There was a clanging noise from the hall – the rasp of metal on metal. She moved out to the hall as quickly as she could. In the doorway that led to the roof, something like a ribbon fell into view. It pooled on the floor in a puddle of shadow. She moved to the stairs, as if in liquid, as if in a dream.
There were smears of blood on the wallpaper, lit by a skelf of light. The air seemed to move, like the shimmering around a bonfire. On a metal step lay a pair of silky suit trousers, empty and collapsed. On the next step up, a single sock. Shona moved up the staircase, and the night air was suddenly upon her face, a breeze pulling at her hair.
She reached the top, the battlements low, no higher than her waist.
‘There is no time,’ a flat voice said.
She looked to her right, and a naked man stood at the edge of the tower.
His white skin glimmered in the light thrown from the garden, from the hotel, from the moon. He was looking out into the night, to the dark mountains and the invisible sea.
Shona found herself unable to move – one hand was on her stick, the other was outstretched, as if she needed to hold the air. She saw her fingers, her hand open, clutch at nothing.
The man turned around. His hands were dark with blood.
On his chest was a tattoo that dropped down from his shoulder blades to his waist: a circle of the letters of the alphabet in deep black, and the numbers 0 to 9. Yes on his left shoulder, No on his right.
‘Say yes to no,’ he said, arms outstretched.
‘No,’ she said weakly.
He nodded. His eyes closed.
He cannot fall. She felt a deep surge towards him.
‘Hey, pal, come on, why don’t you come to me? Come down, come inside,’ she said, in the warmest, most reassuring voice she could muster.
His lean naked body stood between battlements. His face was blank, his eyes closed. She realised it was the pale man who had been drinking alone at the bar. It was Viv’s friend.
‘It’s Dan, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Ask Sorley,’ he said. He opened his eyes. They looked past her. Then he stepped back, into space. Into the night. He dropped from view.
Shona hurried to the edge and saw the end of his fall, the tumbling over, the hurtling into darkness.
There was a loud, wet noise – of solidity meeting softness, of a sudden human breakage. A brief silence – as deep as a sea – and then shouting and a single yelping scream.
His body lay face down, tangled and broken on the hard stone. He was facing the cold earth, the line of the neck dislodged. Legs and arms askew, like the broken branches of a leafless tree.
The music played on, for a while, as doors opened and people gathered. Then the music stopped. And then there were human voices, and the sounds of the deep night, and the murmuring of a small group gathered around the body of Daniel Merrygill.
The Hollow Tree by Philip Miller is published by Polygon, priced £9.99.
James Oswald’s Inspector Maclean has been solving crimes in Edinburgh for a good few novels now. As the thirteenth book in the Inspector Maclean series hits the shelves, we ask the author how he keeps his writing exciting.
For Our Sins
By James Oswald
Published by Wildfire
How to keep things fresh after your series hits the terrible teens.
For Our Sins is the thirteenth book in my Edinburgh-based Inspector McLean series. As I write this, I am nearing the end of the first draft of an as yet untitled book fourteen. A fifteenth book is in the very earliest stages of gestation deep within the little-used recesses of my brain. That’s a lot of stories for one beleaguered detective inspector to carry, so just how does an author go about keeping the books fresh and interesting after writing so many?
The short answer is I wish I knew! Perhaps it helps that Tony McLean as a character has been with me a very long time now. His first appearance in one of my stories goes back as far as 1992, when I was trying to carve out a career as a writer in comics. I invented him as the policeman who could see ghosts in what was a somewhat gothic, Edinburgh-set tale that 2000AD magazine decided was not up to scratch. I suspect they were right.
McLean came into his own in my first published novel, Natural Causes, but that wasn’t the first book I’d written, nor Tony’s first outing in prose fiction. He’d appeared in a couple of other rubbish novels by then, and a half dozen short stories I’d written to try and get an idea of who he was. Some of the other recurring characters first appeared in those short stories too, like Grumpy Bob, Dagwood and Chief Superintendent Jayne McIntyre.
In short, before Natural Causes came out, I had known McLean for a long time. I’d established a lot of the dynamics behind his team, his private life, his past and the kind of Edinburgh in which he lived. That’s probably the only reason I was able to take the success of the first novel and build on it as swiftly as I have done. While Natural Causes and The Book of Souls were both already written when a publisher picked them up, the eleven books that follow on from them (with a twelfth in progress) have all been written in the past ten years.
It’s not easy though, as that number creeps up, to keep things new and interesting. I’ve introduced more characters – Madame Rose, Emma Baird, Mrs Saifre and Janie Harrison to name just a few – and we’ve said goodbye (or good riddance) to some others. Each book is its own story, with new villains and supporting actors to drive the thing along, too. It’s important with series fiction to strike that balance between the old and the new – enough explanation to keep first time readers up to speed without boring those who’ve been along since the start of the ride.
I made the mistake early in the series of trying to stretch a significant plot arc over more than one book. Emma, Tony’s long-suffering partner, went travelling (possibly accompanied by the soul of Tony’s long-dead fiancée, but let’s not give too much away), and was out of the picture for almost all of books four, five and six. She sent him postcards from all parts of the globe, which kept him sane and maybe protected him from the worst kind of temptation, before reappearing at the end of The Damage Done just in time.
It was the kind of story arc that works well in comics, where the episodes arrive every month or week. Less successful when played out over almost two years and three books, I had many complaints about the unresolved plots and managed to annoy quite a few readers. Lesson learned; series fiction might mean recurring characters, but each book needs to be its own thing.
I’ve always had the main arc of each book told from McLean’s viewpoint, with occasional short scenes from the point of view of the victim or the killer just to break things up a bit. One other way of injecting a little novelty into the stories is to tell them from a different point of view, and so I decided to introduce a second narrative character – Janie Harrison – in All That Lives. Without too many spoilers, Tony’s missing for a large chunk of the second half of that book, so it was kind of necessary.
Nobody complained, and I found I quite liked writing for Janie, so I gave her even more to do in For Our Sins, including a memorable scene with a rather too handsy senior officer. It helped open up the story to new ways of telling and gave me a different perspective to work from. I should probably have done it earlier.
But in the end, the best way to keep a series fresh is both the simplest to say and the hardest to carry out. Try to write the best book you possibly can. If readers enjoy what you’ve written, they’ll keep on coming back for more.
For Our Sins by James Oswald is published by Wildfire, priced £20.00
David Robinson is impressed by the ideas, language and storytelling in Ajay Close’s latest novel.
What Doesn’t Kill Us
By Ajay Close
Published by Saraband
The most shocking moment in The Long Shadow, ITV’s recent drama series about the five-year hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, comes (spoiler alert) right at the end. Peter Sutcliffe has been caught, tried and sentenced and the police inquiry into what went wrong is just beginning.
Two officers are shown into the major incident room. Pinned to the wall in front of them are over 30 photofits, dating back to 1972, based on descriptions given to the police by women whom Sutcliffe had followed, attacked or left for dead. The colour drains from the investigators’ faces as they realise that nearly all of them are, very clearly, the same man. ‘Some of the women weren’t listened to,’ the (female) policewoman explains.
What women can, should, and actually did do in a society in which they are not being listened to is at the heart of Ajay Close’s novel What Doesn’t Kill Us, which is set in West Yorkshire at the time of the Ripper murders. Like David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, it takes the core of the case and gives it a fictional spin: this time into a story, not of police corruption but of feminist radicalisation. In Close’s novel, as a man the media have called the Yorkshire Butcher carries on his killing spree in the background, the women in a feminist collective at 109 Cleopatra Street, in the inner Leeds suburb of Chapeltown, are working out how to fight back.
But how? This, remember, is the Seventies. Sexism isn’t just everyday but everywhere institutionalised. Benny Hill is on the box, Bernard Manning at the microphone, and builders wolf-whistle and catcall passing ‘dollybirds’ without a second thought. No-one seems to know any lesbians, and women at work are tolerated at best and ignored and insulted at worst, all fading to invisibility in middle age. Young or old, violence against them is commonplace. ‘What do you call a woman with two black eyes?’ goes one so-called joke of the time. ‘Nowt. She’s been told twice already.’
Liz Seeley, a policewoman who is a lowly part of the hunt for the Yorkshire Butcher, moves in with the Cleopatra Street collective in Chapeltown after she has been given a black eye by her boyfriend. There, she meets the kind of people she had never met before – most prominently, the charismatic, self-assured feminist intellectual Rowena, who is the other pivotal figure in the novel.
While a male detective interrogates errant husbands about their use of prostitutes (‘It’s all right, we’ve all done it’) in the living room, Liz is in the kitchen talking to their wives; a compromising enough job made unbearably so, and then she is tapped up by Special Branch to report on anything illegal her new flatmates get up to.
And there is, potentially, a lot to report. As the Cleopatra Street commune fleshes out what feminism ought to mean, Rowena makes the case for meeting male violence with a violent response of their own. Of course, they will lead ‘reclaim the night’ marches and lead demonstrations outside cinemas showing porn, but why shouldn’t they go further? What’s wrong, for example, with a bit of revolutionary justice against the local pimp? Or a carefully targeted firebombing? (Close’s 2015 novel A Petrol-Scented Spring deals with the repercussions of one such Scottish suffragette’s arson attack.)
For me at least, What Doesn’t Kill Us would fall flat on its face if it didn’t also show the excitement of ideas, if we couldn’t see why, looking back, Liz would see the year she lived on Cleopatra Street as the happiest of her life. This is where, though keeping quiet about what she actually does for a living, Liz finds togetherness, where her feminism blooms, where the balance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be shifts and the potential for a more fulfilling future comes into focus. More than that, it becomes obvious. In one speech, Rowena asks a crowd of women to put up their hands if they have ever been raped by a stranger. Five do. No-one raises their hand when she asks if anyone has been raped by someone they know.
‘”Let me put that another way. Have you ever had sex with a boyfriend, or husband, or just a male friend, when you didn’t want to?”
An electric shock ran through the room. So many hands.’
The speech Rowena goes on to make, like Gloria’s ‘It is impossible to be a woman’ monologue in Barbie, has a power that is rooted in specificity, and indeed impossible to argue against. But Rowena takes the fight against male violence even further. If men won’t change, women should cut themselves off from them. The Lysistrata solution. No more (straight) sex.
Until I read the Afterword of Close’s novel, I’d never heard of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists or the arson attacks on local sex shops at the time. Ditto with the Political Lesbianism pamphlet on which Cleopatra Street’s ‘Whose Side Are You On?’ pamphlet calling for a sex strike is clearly based.
Conveying the excitement of such ideas, and what they are a reaction against, is hard enough; showing how and why they mutate as part of the commune’s group dynamics is even harder. Somehow Close manages to do both at the same time as well as – and this is the really tricky bit, the fourth ball to juggle – indicating how easily those ideas might stray towards the absurd, as when Rowena indicates that a truly feminist collective wouldn’t have a male cat as a pet, never mind accepting as a commune member the mother of a young boy. One final point: although Close, like me, has probably spent more of her life in Scotland than her native West Yorkshire, she has its speech patterns and slang down to a tee. I have rarely (if at all) seen this done better.
She has the Seventies down pat too. Many of us who were young then look back in embarrassment at some of the attitudes we then had, even if we weren’t completely racist or male chauvinists. And without for a second suggesting that gender equality is even close to being achieved or that relations between men and women are hunky-dory, it would be hard to argue that both are vastly better than they were back then.
As well as telling a good story, What Doesn’t Kill Us made me think. Who or what, I wondered, made the biggest positive difference in relations between the sexes between then and now? Was it a woman, and if so who? A politician I’ve heard of like Barbara Castle, wielding power through legislation? Or – and this is the thought I’d never had – a feminist in a Leeds commune drawing a revolutionary line between what she would put up with and what she no longer could?
What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close is published by Saraband, price £10.99.
Len Pennie is an up-and-coming poet worthy of your attention. Her focus on feminism and celebration of the Scots language give her poems both a wonderful playfulness and a frank, honest look at the world around us. She is also a brilliant performer of her work with a growing online following, and we hope you enjoy this taster from her first collection, Poyums.
Poyums
By Len Pennie
Published by Canongate
I’M NO HAVIN CHILDREN
I’m no havin children, A’m gonnae hae weans;
an ye’ll can ask whit A cry them, no what are their names;
an they’ll be gettin a piece, no a wee packed lunch;
an they’ll be haein a scran, no having a munch;
they’ll fanny aboot, they willnae waste time,
an when they scrieve their wee poyums, A’ll mak sure they rhyme.
A’m no havin children, A’m gonnae hae weans,
who’ll be gowpin an bealin when they’ve goat aches an pains;
an instead of don’t worry, A’ll say dinnae fash;
instead of stand your ground, dinnae take any snash;
ma weans’ll be crabbit, no in a bad mood;
and they’ll greet, no cry, when their day isnae good.
A’m no havin children, A’m gonnae hae weans,
wae a prood ancient language crammed in their wee brains;
an whenever life tells them their English is bad,
A’ll tell them the hassles that their mammy had,
an A’ll say ma maw’s words till the day that A’m deid:
Ye’ll be awright, hen, ye’ve a guid Scots tongue in yer heid.
Watch Len perform I’m No Havin Children
I’m no havin children- a poyum by Len Pennie (youtube.com)
LITTLE GIRLS
The little girl stands on a knife-covered ledge,
Dancing till blood starts to drip from its edge.
She’s been licking her wounds since the first time she bled,
Getting judged for each thought she commits in her head.
She’s been starving herself since she started to eat,
Connecting the dots of her heart’s every beat.
She’s been swimming from fishermen hiding their net,
And running from wolves that deny they’re a threat.
And the men chime in, ‘Silence girl, don’t make a fuss,
I’d never do this, it’s not all of us.’
To drown out her sorrow, the male chorus sings,
‘It’s only a few, you’re imagining things.
You’re making this issue seem worse than it is;
It was only a comment, a gesture, a kiss.
It was meant as a compliment – please take a joke,
Don’t bite the hand groping you, savour each poke.’
And the girl learns the axis on which the world spins
Is powered by people who relish their sins.
So, she keeps her head down and she learns how to live,
To be quiet and not take much more than they give.
Cause the fragile knife edge she must constantly walk
Dictates every word she’s permitted to talk,
Each mouthful is measured, each glance not too sly,
Lest she melt off her wings just from touching the sky.
And she’d love to exist as the person she knows
Lives inside of her mind, but her agony grows.
As she slowly but surely resigns herself to
Being smaller and using far less than they do,
Being meeker and not taking up too much space,
Being careful to always remember her place.
But the little girl vows that the curse will be broken,
She’ll break down the barriers, leave them wide open:
For the daughters of little girls you wouldn’t hear;
For the children of women you silenced with fear;
For our mothers we’ll sing till the screams rip the air;
We are the little girls you couldn’t scare.
Watch Len perform Little Girls
Little Girls- A poyum by Len Pennie – YouTube
THE MUSE
Gin A scrieved ye, they’d cry me a liar; gin A sung ye,
A’d be telt A’m wrang;
A poyum wid seem convolutit, an ye sure wouldnae fit in a sang.
Yer image wid bleed through ma canvas, an charcoal wid smudge
oan yer hert;
A cannae find words the way you can; A wouldnae ken whaur
tae stairt.
A sat doon tae scrieve ye a poyum, an A didnae ken whaur tae
begin,
Ye’ve scribbled aw ower ma sketchbook – maisterpiece wae the
lines coloured in.
The poetry breenged out ma coupon, the leid flew awa fae ma
tongue,
Cause A dinnae hae words tae describe ye; the wee sang ae oors
lies unsung.
A dinnae hae words fur a sonnet, when ye’re here A ken not
whit tae say;
Ye’re infinity aw in an instant, worth much mair than some auld,
cheap cliché. A am bound by the words that A’m lackin; ma poyum’s aw A hae
tae give, But A cannae find words tae write ye, no lit you can mak poetry live.
And yer haunds craft sic beautiful music, and ye capture ma soul
in a sang,
Yer harmony played oan ma hertstrings, and ye write like ye’ve
never been wrang.
I hope ye enjoyed ma wee poyum; it’s no much but it’s aw that
A’ve got;
A could scrieve till aw words loose their meanins, dae ye justice
A simply could not.
So, A’ll gie ma wee hert tae the paper, fill the page wae the
words that A choose, Ye’ve inspired much mair than a poyum, noo ma smeddum cries
you its new muse.
Watch Len Perform The Muse
The Muse- a poyum by Len Pennie (youtube.com)
ADDRESS TAE THE LEID
Fair fa your honest, sonsie face,
wha hinks ae Scots as a disgrace!
A leid that’s meant fur lesser hings,
No there tae lairn:
A leid well-kent by mony fowk
That does nae hairm.
Ahint keyboards the wee troll hides;
Abuin yer soul the hatred bides;
Yer words are nocht but draps ae rain
Agin ma heid,
Taks mair than dubs aw filled wae pish
Tae droon me deid.
We ken the rot yer souls contain,
Wan single leid within yer brain;
A look upon ye filled wae shame,
But dinnae fash,
The Scots leid maun strive oan in spite,
Ae aw yer snash.
Then, word fur word, Scots willnae dee:
Ma time and tongue aw A can gie,
And gie it aw A will until ma final breath.
Oor poyums will be said by bairns
Lang past wur death
Is there that troll wha sneers in shame,
Or cries me mony a hatefu name,
Or seeks tae cause me muckle pain
Fur whit A dae,
Looks down wae sneering, scornfu view
On whit A say?
Poor devil! See him ower his screen,
His grammar neat, his English clean,
He fechts fur country an fur queen,
But doesnae see –
If abdy’s gonnae look his way,
It isnae me!
But mark the chiels wha speak the leid,
Wha ken it’s livin, never deid,
An ken it’s fit fur aw the time,
No special days;
An sees the puir wee hypocrites,
Oan 25ths and Hogmanays.
Ye Pow’rs wha’re wae me every hoor,
Gie me smeddum that ye cannae smoor,
Auld Scotland wants nae linguaphobes
Wae a hatefu heid;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
Follae ma leid.
Watch Len perform Address Tae The Leid
Address tae the Leid- a Poyum by Len Pennie (youtube.com)
Poyums by Len Pennie is published by Canongate, priced £14.99.
In 2023, The Kavya Prize was awarded to unpublished writers of colour who are Scottish by birth, residence or inclination. BfS are thrilled to share some of the writing that was recognised by the judges. Here we publish extracts from the joint winners’ pieces.
Q Mannivan
An Extract from The Physics of It
You’ve been thinking of old homes lately: You’ve been thinking of old homes lately:
an insatiable loneliness, Delhi in an an adolescent insomnia, your mother
air-conditioned bedroom with large putting you to sleep (despite her own
windows overlooking parched fields that desires for rest), in a single bed against the
shimmer in the June heat. You’re eating a wall in a small room lit ochre by an old
spicy paratha (the cook was trying to kill incandescent bulb hanging from the centre
you) on the edge of a bed (two separate of the ceiling, naked and round. She
frames wedged together, creaky), watching stacked pillows on the other edge so you
a cowherd graze livestock between wouldn’t fear falling. You wondered how
incomplete brick homes that remained, one falls (asleep), the physics of it – why
forever, incomplete. This memory too is an otherwise reliable gravity, when you
incomplete. These homes no longer exist. needed it most, ceased to exist.
You’re dressed in her clothes, she brought Amma sang the Kanda Shasti Kavasam, an
you your red plastic plate along with hers old Tamil hymn to the gods that began
and sat next to you with her brown hair in with a desperate prayer to protect a child:
two low pigtails, wiping her washed hands its body, its eyes, and its skin. She sang it
on an ex’s oversized boxers that she’s with a high tone rocking back and forth,
wearing, dipping into mango pickle your patting you softly on your arm over your
mum packed for you on every visit home favourite blue chequered blanket. Amma’s
(whatever home meant to you then). a lot like her. Consistent, warm, safe.
The cows moved as one: fluid, trickling The song moved to more violent threads. It
through the landscape, flowing to the asked that the gods protect your arms, your
corners and then back to the source again. cheeks, your inner organs, your neck, and
The sight vaguely resembled a lava lamp your teeth. It moved viciously, violently,
spread out flat, like mercury toy gifts that alongside this honey soft whisper, the
came heavy with the fear that should the tender eyes that your mum’s singing
glass break, should the liquid metal do brought even when loudly sung. Every
anything but remain distant and note echoed as if arriving tired and weary
inaccessible, if it were to cease being from a long journey, from a place a great
visual and turn tactile, you would be distance away, unreachable but for this
sullied. moment.
There was that familiar silence between us The room, once familiar, took different
after a difficult night, the kind of weight shapes and assumed different colours, as if
that knew separation was inevitable but the night itself was reshaped by her voice.
also that we didn’t want to leave, that Towards the end, the hymn prays for
should the quiet have its moment then, we ghosts, devils, strangers, and bad men to
would have another day; two frames fear you. ‘Make them all afraid of me /
wedged together, creaky. You remember Make them roll on the floor in fear / Make
this but you cannot remember her, at least them shout loudly and get mad / Tie them
not as well. tight / Break their hands and legs.’
It’s 2022 and the University College Union It’s 2020 and you’re one among many at
(UCU), the primary academic trade union night time at India Gate, New Delhi, a
in the United Kingdom, is failing in its towering monument underneath which a
bureaucracies, the NHS is in crisis, the PM ceremonial flame has burned for decades
is xenophobic, autumn is fading into mourning the India-Pakistan War, around
winter, and the Queen is dead. You are at a which thousands of protestors have
UCU rally at the Dundee City Square, gathered to oppose an Islamaphobic and
speaking amidst colleagues gathered from discriminatory citizenship act. The flame
Palestine, Egypt, Azerbaijan, and even mourns only the Indian soldiers killed. The
further, England, and they ask you to demonstrators read part of the Indian
speak about what a university is, what it Constitution out loud, asking what it meant
means to you. You pause and wonder. to be a citizen of a country, this country.
A few days later, you’re invited to debate A few days later, the police wise up,
with a professor from Westminster against station themselves a mile before the
a BBC journalist at Parliament Hall in St protest site, and detain you before you
Andrews, Scotland. The topic: This House even arrive. They lift you (one per limb)
Believes that the UK Must Impose straight out of the rickshaw while the
Sanction on Rwanda. You and your partner media takes photographs, and deposit you
are arguing against the motion and your into their van. You start an Instagram Live
case is easy – sanctions without a viable stream, and ask a policewoman in broken
opposition party that can assume power Hindi, ‘Where are you taking me?’ She
are historically and logistically ineffective, says nothing. You ask her if she has a
they affect working class people, and they notice justifying the detention. She smiles.
seldom force regimes with control over ‘You’ll see in a moment.’ You smile back.
resources to cease this control. You have no control, and you’re afraid.
You perform an arrogance you learned as It’s your first time in police detention, and
an undergraduate debater, to conflate, a friend who’s a lawyer joins you inside
stretch, logicize, and analyse every after failing to convince the station
possible angle and also be funny. You say: officials to release you. He came largely
‘Well now that the monarchy is losing since his girlfriend insisted he leave his
steam, its public funds should be workplace and offer me help, although he
repurposed for Rwanda and other African knew such detention rarely lasted for
countries affected either directly or longer than until evening. You’re
indirectly by European imperialism. These powerless in the face of this love and deep
are not ‘aid’ packages, but reparations.’ down, there’s guilt and uncertainty.
You pause after the statement, for dramatic Everyone is worthy of love, yes, but not
effect, but receive hesitant applause amid everyone is worthy all the time for all love.
looks of dread. You realise that you failed You wonder – whose love is it that holds
to notice a member of royalty seated in the your safety? Yours, his, or his girlfriend’s?
crowd who then, in not altogether You remember feeling that yours was a
unexpected anger, scowled at you for the collateral safety: a lucky privilege,
rest of the night. You lose the debate. unearned, undeserved, and passing.
Jinling Wu
Extract taken from Cocoon
You are a little surprised to see her at the reading of your own book. She comes in late and sits in the last row. She is in blue jeans and a white shirt with coffee in hand, like an ordinary housewife. Only when you look at her delicate intelligent face, you recognise her. Until a decade ago, she was one of the most important writers in the publishing world, the kind that made plain paper expensive. She has ten books under her belt. Every single book is a bestseller. It was rare for a writer to have this kind of energy and consistently outperform her peers. You are, unfortunately, the kind of writer who started many titles but never finished a single book. But you do read ferociously. Hence it was convenient for you to become a critic. Now you have finally accumulated something that resembles a real book with many small pieces you have written for papers throughout the years. But you know that it is broken from within. The only reason it is being published is that you are living in a good time in an affluent country and there are sufficient resources to satisfy your needs to be seen. It will never become a hit in the market. In a few years, you will find it in a deserted corner of a second-hand bookshop for 50p but looking new. Considering your advanced age, it is likely to be your only book. Now you see your favourite writer in your own book launch in your home city. You do get something good in life after a long lonely journey, don’t you?
You two live in the same city, you in your small apartment in the city centre, she in her mansion in the suburb. The last time your paths crossed was ten years ago at an event at a book festival while she chatted about her latest publication. You sat in the audience, unknown. Then everyone heard about her affair with an old-time friend. It didn’t surprise you, that a charismatic writer would have an affair. The scandal itself didn’t really affect her pathway to the market. You imagined she would come up with something about a modern-day witch hunt, a poignant albeit sexy new romance, or a soul-searching personal tale. But instead, nothing has come out under her name ever since and she has been completely invisible for a decade. Yet she is here, at your book launch. You would not trade such an opportunity for a lottery win. You read the piece you feel most proud of and wait for curious inquiries. There are quite a few questions but none from her. You are a little disappointed but not at all surprised.
You are surprised to see her at the afterparty, though. She stayed because she was spotted by a nosy agent at the reading and became as involved in a long conversation. You brave yourself to talk to her and you dare to ask her if she remembers your name from the paper. She confirms that she has read your reviews of her books. You are thrilled to know she remembers you. You force yourself again to ask if you could sit down with her to have an exclusive interview. She considers it for a minute and agrees on the condition that you two will chat, but whether the content can be published will depend on how it goes.
You are thrilled to be able to see her again. The ordinary days of the next month are suddenly filled with excitement. You treat yourself with glittering things you usually find no reason for. You even giggle at the bus driver’s bad joke like a teenage girl. It feels nice to be giddy and alive.
You carefully dress for the meeting. When she shows up, you are so nervous that you spill the tea on your dress. She comforts you with a gentle squeeze of your hand. You are moved by the ordinary side of her, far from the intimidating arrogance and narcissism she is famous for and has been much criticised for. You carefully take in her look with her pearl drop earrings, pink silk blouse, and soft white leather shoes. You imagine your readers will be interested in these details. Her skin is so supple that she would look a lot younger than you without the white hair. You start your interview by asking how life has been for her in the last ten years. ‘Like everyone else: with some joy and a lot of worries.’ You ask what kind of worries and she brushes it off with a breezy ‘like everyone else’s’. You feel the urge to quickly change the topic as her gaze drifts away to other people sitting in the tea room. You ask whose books she is currently reading. She tosses out a few foreign names you have heard about but have not read. Then she mentions another few you have read and loved, too. You push further to ask about her relationship status. She refuses to provide any substantial details other than that she is still with the same person. She is most enthusiastic about her recent travel. She depicts her trip to a hot chaotic Mediterranean city with ordinary words but they make you feel like you are traveling with her. You can almost breathe in the unpleasant vehicle exhaust, feel the frustration of not knowing when to cross the road among the chaotic traffic, and then get totally carried away by the orange blossom and magnificent architecture after entering a narrow door opened up on one side of a small lane. Your eyes become the state-of-the-art movie camera on a meandering dolly. You are absorbing the visuals with the highest definition and a soundtrack that is masterly created. You do not doubt that you are in a movie with the most exciting screenwriting behind it. The screening stops when she gets tired and pauses to sip her tea.
You think it is probably a good time to ask the difficult question: Is she still writing? Why is she no longer publishing? ‘I don’t feel the need to write on paper.’ She says, ‘I talk more nowadays, to my friend.’ You do not seem to understand it. So you decide to share the ailment that has bothered you for decades and ask her advice on how to stay productive as a writer. She looks at you in your eyes for a beat and says slowly: ‘I see you made a lot of effort for today’s interview and I thank you for taking me seriously. But do you take yourself as seriously as me, or any of the other strangers you write about?’
Her question catches you off-guard. You are flustered and excuse yourself to the restroom. In the restroom, you examine yourself in the mirror. You have the same bob cut as you had twenty years ago because you are afraid of looking edgy or simply different. You wear a dress with too many colours that make you look like moving wallpaper. You paint blush on your cheek to please your guest but in fact, you are more animated when you are not in makeup. You’ve cocooned yourself into a cliche. Your writer’s block is not a block. It is a hideaway. It lets you make yourself invisible. You struggled to be seen by others for so many years. But the reason for that is you do not wish to see yourself. You choose your shelter in the darkness. You approached her for the light but you have been burned by the light she exudes.
When you get out of the bathroom, you see her paying the bill. She needs to catch dinner with her partner. You squeeze her hand to thank her for meeting you. Her hand is cool and soft; it doesn’t burn.
After the meeting, you take a detour to visit your favourite bookstore to pick up the expensive notebook you’ve always wanted, thinking maybe the book you just published will not be your only one in this world.
The Rituals of Eating
Lao Zhuang is a chicken farmer. He doesn’t eat chicken. In the same town, the pig farmer Da Liu doesn’t eat pork. Da Liu’s brother Xiao Liu, a beef farmer doesn’t eat beef. When the three farmers meet, they eat vegetarian meals. In the poor old days, they used to eat vegetarian meals because it was too cold to go spearfishing in the river in winter. Their wallets have bulged up since two decades ago. Nowadays, they drive tough off-road cars and wear expensive fur coats. But they can not make themselves eat the meat that comes out of their own farms. They don’t trust meat from any other farm, either.
In the restaurant, the three farmers are waiting for their lunch. When the waitress comes in to serve their usual vegetarian meal, Lao Zhuang sighs. Da Liu asks what is on Lao Zhuang’s mind.
‘My daughter is coming back from the UK. I don’t know what kind of food I can give her to eat.’ Lao Zhuang’s daughter Xiao Zhuang resides in the UK. It will be her first visit in a decade.
Da Liu nods sympathetically. Xiao Zhuang is the pride of the town. She is the only person from this town who has made it to one of the best universities in this country.
‘I know a place’ said Xiao Liu.
At dinner time, Xiao Liu drives them to a cottage near the ravine. Near the road, there is a sign that says ‘wild chicken feast’ next to a photo of a colourful bird. A crow perched on the eaves flies away when the car roars in.
They sit down. An old lady serves them tea. There is no menu on the table.
‘We only do chicken hotpot. Would you like it very spicy, medium spicy, or mild spicy?’
‘Very spicy,’ said Lao Zhuang.
The old lady retreats to the kitchen.
Half an hour later, a fragrant boiling dish is served in a polished copper pot. Chopped chicken with bones pops up and down in the rich brown broth strewn with red chilli peppers and coriander leaves.
Lao Zhuang lifts a piece of chicken with his chopsticks and sends it into his mouth. He chews carefully. After that, he selectively eats more vegetables than chicken.
After dinner, they take a stroll to visit the chicken coop. Under the dim yellow light, three striking chickens with iridescent sheen are resting in the coop. Lao Zhuang walks close and looks carefully at the chickens. The chickens stare back at Lao Zhuang.
Lao Zhuang’s face sinks.
‘What’s wrong?’ Asks Da Liu. ‘
This is a scam. They are not real wild chickens.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You see, when I look at them, and they look back at me, there is no suspicion, no disease or anger in their eyes. They are not afraid of me. They must be expecting me to feed them and caress them.’
Da Liu nods. He is impressed by Lao Zhuang’s knowledge.
‘This is not acceptable. I will go back to ask for a discount to get some of your money back.’ Xiao Liu is indignant.
‘No need to hold grudges. It is bad for business.’ Lao Zhuang pats Xiao Liu’s shoulder.
Xiao Liu scratches his head for a second and puts up his forefinger: ‘How about eel? Rice field eel is the best.’
‘Don’t you worry about the fertilisers and insecticides?’ Said Da Liu.
‘There is a way to deal with it. You leave them in clean water for three nights before cooking. It will clear out the toxin.’
The next day, Lao Zhuang goes to the market and buys a bucket of eels. He transfers the eels to a bigger bucket at home and adds clean water. He puts the lid back and leaves a small gap for air.
At night, Lao Zhuang’s wife wakes up from sleep to go to the bathroom. She screams when something clammy crawls onto her feet. Lao Zhuang is woken and rushes to the bathroom. He finds nothing suspicious and blames his wife for the false alert. Then he goes to check the basket. The lid is still on, but the bucket is empty. He realises the clammy thing that crawled onto his wife’s feet was the eel from the bucket. His wife dreads the clammy creatures wandering around and leaves home to stay with her parents. Lao Zhuang lies awake in bed waiting for the eels to return. But they never come back.
Earlier in the issue, we published the joint winning pieces of the 2023 Kavya Prize. Here, we present extracts from two highly commended pieces.
Theresa Munoz
Extract taken from Hummingbird
I’m in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, northwest of the Canadian Rockies. We’re in the desert, with lime green cactai and signs of rattlesnake warnings.
There’s six of us: my partner, his sister, her husband, my sister and her husband. We’re at a winery in a picturesque town called Oliver. We line up for a selfie with the desert in the background; the sands are dark red and mud brown, like roadside pottery. The winery also has luxury rooms and an outdoor pool with teal-coloured water that ripples. It’s one of those places where every detail is minutely curated, down to the crispy sourdough toasts you eat in between wine tastings.
In a few days, my partner and I are getting married in front of my family and our friends. We had our first wedding in Edinburgh, Scotland, where we live and work. Tipsy from the tasting, I go into the gift shop. That’s where I see it, a small stuffed hummingbird. It’s shiny as a dragonfly, green like old velour tracksuits and with a barn red chest. His eyes are little apple seeds. I buy it for my Dad, because I know he loves hummingbirds and would imagine, in his way, this inanimate object having a kind of inner life. My only worry is a forecasted storm coming from the north, blowing though our lakeside wedding in a few days’ time. This day was almost exactly two years before my Dad dies. Now I miss having worries like that; simple and selfish.
***
The summer before lockdown my dad dies from complications of lung cancer, which he had been battling for over a year. One Thursday in August, in the ward at Surrey Memorial Hospital, he is given the news (falsely optimistic, in turns out) he may only have a few months left. His doctor is a kind Turkish man, and who holds his palm. Dad takes a minute to digest this. His eyes briefly go upwards, his black hair falls like a drifting leaf across his forehead. He grows thin, like a melted candle. ‘I understand’, he says. ‘Oh boy, oh boy’, he says, in that gentle way he has.
It’s a very beautiful day outside, which is frustrating. The doctor leaves and it’s just my Dad and I. I stand over his bed and feel bad for crying. Dad smiles at me and says ‘ow’ as my tears fall on his snowflake-patterned gown. He says suddenly, ’When I go, I will always be with you’.
‘Dad, I think that’s from the Lion King’.
He pauses for a second. ‘Oh yeah’, he starts laughing. And we laugh some more.
***
During the time my dad is ill, I travel multiple times from Scotland to Canada, drinking coffees and eating pallid sushi in airports, looking hopefully at departure boards. That summer in Vancouver, I stay with my parents at home. I also stay some days in the hospital when he contracts an infection. Dad moves around the building like an envelope, from ICU where he was first admitted, to a private room, and then to a recovery ward, where he is expected to come home. I ride the escalators up and down the hospital, waywardly following teams of serious-faced medical staff, like the rear of a parade.
I sit with him and chat, bending his straws to his sparkling water. I bring him outside food everyday. I try to bring things he’ll eat: soft shrimp dumplings, spicy fried rice, fluffy pancakes with maple syrup, pretzels slathered with cheese and tomato sauce. Like everything with my dad, the food is a mix from two continents; the polemical of sweet and fluffy, syrupy Canadian food; to tried & true ethnic delicacies. His favourite drink becomes a caramel iced coffee, which is probably feeding the cancer, but he smiles and says ‘ah’ after he drinks it.
Night is quieter. Night times in the hospital is like living inside a robot. All kinds of beeps and wires and the whole building buzzes with a kind of sad, frantic energy.
***
The next day, the Friday, he eats a tiny bit of soft taco. My mom is there as usual. Dad tells me to go home since I’ve been there all day. He says ‘Be safe, I love you’. He sometimes gets a bit stressed if there are too many people around, so I agree to leave. Okay, Okay, I say to no one in particular as I walk to my car in the corner of the parking lot. I sit for awhile, for no real reason.
I don’t know how I missed being there when he died. It seems like a cruel twist of fate, since I had been there all summer. On Saturday, I wake up get a phone call from one of my sister’s. She says that the doctor has changed his mind; Dad may only have a few days. ‘You should come today’, she says.
I drop my phone after we click off. It gets lost in the white bed sheets, which fold like an ice cave. I have this resistance to go to the hospital, unsure of what I will find. Finally we leave. My husband and I stop for gas, and he gets out the car to pay. My sister calls. I notice there are three missed calls while we were driving because the phone was on silent. She says, ‘I’ve just been to see Dad’. Me: how is he today? She pauses for a long time. She says, ‘You don’t know’.
And she tells me Dad passed away, maybe an hour ago. She says it really fast, or maybe I just hear it fast; there is lots of blood rushing in my ears. I’m still sitting in the car. And everything in my vision tilts sideways, the hoses of the pump, my view of the car wash windows; my entire sightline in fact goes into slow, gesticulating atoms, the whole world just hums.
***
The first six months of grief is what I want to talk about. That’s because the first six months are the worst. What people don’t tell you is that grief is an occupation, full of questions and trails. It’s akin to taking on a new hobby, or rather, a passion; you end up devoting a considerable amount of time tending to your grief.
After the funeral, to which only his very loved ones came, I feel very numb. Afterwards, I watch seals play in the harbour of Horseshoe Bay, looking at their dark button eyes. I ask my partner when Dad will be back. I am fully convinced that this is a possibility. I imagine that Dad is just on a trip, maybe circling the globe on a cruise ship and will be back soon. Sometimes my partner kindly says ‘Christmas’, which is just a few months away. Most often he’d promise, ‘soon’.
***
When we get back to Edinburgh, I’m someone else. I like watching car chases and crashes on tv. I like the feeling of spinning. I like crossing the street at the wrong time, I liked going for runs in Holyrood Park in the dark, I like to drive fast down the motorway. I feel closer to the world in a way I haven’t for some time. Taking the train, I get wildly excited about seeing deer rush over a field, or a rabbit trampling over heather in the fields – this to me feels exciting, the evidence of blood rushing in one’s body.
I feel drunk all the time (though I’m not). I laugh harder, I find things funnier, at times I laugh at other’s jokes hysterically and friends smile at me nervously, like what is the matter with you. People tell me their grief stories too, after finding out I lost my dad. I don’t notice the tears until they drip off my chin. I feel the sun to be brighter when it creates bars over my window. I’m intrigued when I get blood taken; for the first time I don’t look away from the plunging syringe. I feel the seasons change – I begin to notice the leaves gathering at my doorstep and when the tap water tastes colder and buzzes in the mouth.
I’m not sure why I feel so emboldened. For the entire time my Dad was sick, I felt like I was living under a lid, trying to keep everything under control. Now that I knew the worst could happen, I no longer cared.
Tae Song
Extract from 1986
Cho Sanghoon & Park Youngho
February 2013: The Demilitarized Zone
Sanghoon Cho slowly yujacha from a tumbler as he peered through the lens of his camera. Before him was the stretch flat land that divided the peninsula, the south behind him and the north on the horizon. The air was cool and crisp.
Two red-crowned cranes and their adolescent chick descended from the sky and landed on a patch of snow. Grus japonensis. Graceful ballet dancers who always knew how to avoid landmines. Sanghoon smiled. The second crane family he had spotted since six a.m. that morning.
Sanghoon adjusted the focus of the lens. He heard the soft crunch of snow and he looked up to see a water deer staring curiously at him from about two metres away.
‘궨찮아, 궨찮아, I won’t hurt you,’ he told the deer. As he took another sip of his yujacha, the water deer seemed to scoff at the fact that Sanghoon was not sharing his citrusy tea. Sanghoon’s mobile phone began to buzz and the water deer scurried away.
‘Ah, 미안해,’ he called after the deer. Sanghoon hastily silenced his phone and returned his attention to the cranes.
Through the lens of his camera, the family of cranes came into sharp focus. He began to snap photos, one after the other. As Sanghoon watched the chick closely follow the steps of its mother and father, his mind wandered to Halmeoni. As a boy, he watched in amazement as her nimble fingers folded a crane from a single square of paper.
‘We were taught these in Japanese school,’ she told him. Halmeoni explained that in those days, everyone went to Japanese school where they called the teacher sensei, had Japanese names, and sang the anthem of the rising sun. Sanghoon still felt puzzled by Halmeoni’s memories. Although she taught Sanghoon how to fold paper cranes, the taste of barley and millet still made her cry and she broke out into a huge grin when presented with a can of Spam.
The chick began to squawk and Sanghoon zoomed out his lens to see that it was being approached by a large, grey, bouncy shape. Far too big to be a duck, too short-necked to be a goose, and the way it toddled along meant there was no it way it was hawk. The creature was about a meter tall, with a strong, round body and wings too fragile to take flight. It had a curved beak with a black tip.
No, impossible.
The creature that Sanghoon was watching looked exactly like a dodo. Raphus cucullatus.
Completely forgetting the crane family, Sanghoon zoomed in as closely as possible and began to furiously take pictures of this mysterious grey creature. The creature waddled absentmindedly around the crane family until Sanghoon paused to rub his eyes in disbelief and confusion. When he peered through his camera lens once more, the creature was gone.
When Sanghoon would later show the photos to his professors, they would laugh in his face and tell him it was a poor attempt at a hoax.
‘Ah, that’s a good one! You almost got me, Cho Sanghoon!’
When Sanghoon would insist on the veracity of the photographs, he would become the laughing stock of Seoul National University. Sanghoon’s academic colleagues tsked and jabbed their fingers at the same detail in the photos over and over.
Come on, daehaksaeng. Even if it was a real dodo, it would never wink at the camera like that.’
May 2014: Bukchon Hanok Village
Every time Park Youngho checked the news, the situation became increasingly horrifying. Although the nation was initially told that the children had been rescued from the ferry, it was later revealed that nearly all the children were still trapped inside. Hundreds of parents gathered in a school gymnasium. Screaming, sobbing, fainting. Parents throwing punches at Coast Guard officers. The Vice Principal of Danwon High School found dead. Families screaming to the sea. The first bodies returned to shore covered in white sheets. Parents shrieking in the identification tents. He couldn’t get these images out of his head.
Youngho weaved through the narrow alleys of the hanok village, the roosters scuttling behind him. A flurry of cherry blossom petals and crimson leaves fell onto the cobbled path.
‘Park Youngho, wait for us!’ chirped the bejeweled rooster.
Cafes, sujebi restaurants, stationery shops, and displays crammed with earrings and phone charms whizzed past his peripheral vision. Youngho could not remember the exact location of the old wooden door engraved with a turtle, but today he had to find it.
The door he was searching for appeared recessed in a brick wall, with no other shops around it. Before he could knock, a voice said:
‘Please come in, Park Youngho.’
The door creaked open. Youngho looked down at the roosters. They shrugged.
Youngho entered a large room with pine floors and pine walls. Seated at a table on the floor was a woman in a blue robe.
‘Are you a mudang?’
The woman nodded.
‘Why do you seek my services?’ the mudang asked.
Youngho was unsure of how to respond. The mudang patted the cushion next to her, and the roosters scurried over to it and made themselves comfortable. The mudang stroked the feathers of the stone rooster, her eyes fixed on Youngho.
‘Please have a seat.’ The mudang motioned to the cushion on the opposite side of her table.
Youngho sat cross legged and gazed at the curls of incense surrounding the room.
You seem troubled by intrusive thoughts,’ the mudang observed.
Youngho nodded.
‘Here, have a refreshment.’
The mudang passed Youngho a Chocopie and a can of Chilsung cider. Although this wasn’t the type of snack he’d expect to get from a mudang, he bowed in thanks, opened the can, and took a sip.
‘He’s upset about the Sewol-ho,’ the stone rooster told the mudang.
‘Yes, I can see that,’ the mudang agreed. ‘Park Youngho, you are not alone in this feeling. 우리 나라 사람들이, we are all grieving. You know that, right?’
Youngho felt tears in his eyes.
‘For some of us, this is a new pain. For others, this may bring back painful memories,’ the mudang continued.
Youngho gulped hard and tried to avoid the eyes of the mudang.
‘Perhaps for you, Park Youngho, it is a tortuous combination of both.’
And for the first time since the ferry disappeared beneath the waves, Youngho began to sob. He cried because he didn’t understand how God or Joseph Smith or Instructor Jeon could allow a world to exist where three hundred kids could die in the blink of an eye. He cried because the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Everlasting Pastor’s manifesto lacked an explanation as to what the children did to deserve this. He cried because there was nothing he nor God nor Joseph Smith nor Instructor Jeon nor this shaman could do to bring those kids back. He cried because God, Joseph Smith, and the Everlasting Pastor had taken away his little brother and even though eight years had passed, it still hurt so much.
The mudang sat patiently as Youngho weeped, stroking the roosters with fingers covered in gold rings. Three hours would pass until Youngho felt too exhausted to cry any longer and when he emerged onto the streets of Seoul, the sun was beginning to set. The roosters pecked at Youngho’s shoes and began to lead him home.
Jenny Colgan is one of Scotland’s most prolific novelists. BooksfromScotland caught up with her to chat about her latest release, The Summer Skies.
The Summer Skies
By Jenny Colgan
Published by Sphere
- Congratulations on the publication of your latest novel,The Summer Skies. How do you greet each new publication day? Does the writing life still give you butterflies?
Actually for me it’s usually a day before, if someone gets one delivered early or they’re early out on the shelves- there’s always one somewhere- and I’ll hear from people and that’s exciting/ terrifying! But it’s always lovely to have a shiny new book out there. They never quite feel like mine. Normally I also look at the acknowledgements to see if I’ve missed anyone out. I have always missed someone out. Then the publishers send me a box of them, and half of it I leave outside the door so people from the village can come and help themselves, and half go to the cleaners at the local hospital. Nurses get lots of presents, cleaners not so much and they work so hard.
- Can you tell readers what to expect fromThe Summer Skies? What prompted you to write a stand alone novel rather than carrying on with your various series of books?
Well I always like to have a new story to come to. I was in the Museum of Flight in East Lothian with my son and saw information about the women who flew tiny planes between the Northern islands of Scotland and I was instantly very very interested in that, it seemed interesting to me. We took a plane to Barra, where you land on the beach, and that was very exciting.
- You have a foreword in your book where you warn readers that the flying information inThe Summer Skies is flawed. What are your thoughts on balancing research and keeping a story roaring along?
Oh I know, piloting is SO difficult to understand, I didn’t realise how complicated it is before i got into it! I did have lovely pilots helping me out but yeah, I constantly sacrificed good flying technique. The story and the characters are far more important! What happens in the novel is more or less possible given the laws of physics, just highly unlikely. I don’t know why I’m apologising, I took my kids to the last Fast and Furious film and they flew a car to the moon.
- Your books are usually described as comedy romance novels, and, in the last year, romance has really rocketed in attention and sales. What do you love about the genre? And why do think it’s having a particular resonance at the moment? Why do you think it works so well on social media platforms too?
Love stories are incredibly important stories we tell about who we are and what made us. Choosing who you’re going to spend the rest of your life with is one of the most important decisions you will ever make. And I think post lockdown was really interesting because if you had a partner you spent so much time with them and either thought, yup, this is cool, or no, this isn’t enough, and if you didn’t, quite a few people decided they wanted one. SO I think that’s why it’s particularly popular at the moment, but it’s always been popular. Romance outsells crime 2:1. It doesn’t get half the attention though! Also I write kind of feelgood novels and I think they’re popular for obvious reasons. The real world is quite scary enough. But also I think the news focuses so obsessively on the terrifying and the worst case scenarios whereas I think loads of people are like the people in my books- decent people doing their best. The news is worse than real life and my books are maybe slightly nicer in that they always have happy endings, but they’re both valid ways of looking at the world!
- There has been such a groundswell that there are now going to be two romance festivals in Edinburgh this year, and you’re involved in them both. Do you think festivals that welcome romance readers and writers are a long time coming?
OH I hope so, and I hope we manage to reach out to readers that maybe feel snooty literary festivals aren’t for them, because this really is for all kinds of reader.
- The first festival coming up is First Dates, in conjunction with Lighthouse,on the 25th June, where you will be headlining. Are you looking forward to it? What are your thoughts on their tagline, taken from Adrienne Maree Brown, ‘Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom’?
That is a brilliant line. I am very excited about the First Dates festival and I am so thrilled we are partnering with Lighthouse, who as well as being a brilliant bookshop, are about love in all its forms; diverse, queer and inclusive, and there is that side to romance too. It is absolutely not just boy meets girl, we want to welcome absolutely everyone.
- Later in the year there will be another women’s fiction festival run in conjunction with The Edinburgh Bookshop in October. Do you have any clues yet on those festivities? Anything that you’re allowed to share?
Only that it is going to be fun, informal, lighthearted and you should definitely come.
- It was also really lovely to see how booksellers reacted to The Christmas Bookshop novel, particularly John Kay’s in Victoria Street renaming themselves for the festive period. How do you feel when bookshops get behind your work in that way?
It was one of the most amazing things of my life. Loads of people I know would go up for a look or people would send me pictures. I walk my dogs down that street every morning and I would go and look at it more times than you can imagine. I have about 1000 pictures of the dogs posing in front of it! I don’t normally write about ‘real’ places, so to actually see it there was a huge highlight in my career.
- And I expect there is no resting up for you. What’s next for you writing-wise?
I am writing a book about knitting, even though I am very bad at it and can’t heel a sock properly. Althought to be fair I am better at knitting than I am at flying planes, so it’s definitely worth a go.
The Summer Skies by Jenny Colgan is published by Sphere, priced £14.99.
If you’re travelling around the Scottish islands, a trip to Iona Abbey is a must. But if you can’t make it in person, you can at least sample the food they offer visitors with this marvellous cookbook. Below is a recipe of their scrumptious chocolate pudding.
Iona Abbey Cookbook
By Anja Jardine
Published by Wild Goose
Chocolate puddle pudding with orange and cardamom
(optionally GF and DF)
Another Abbey favourite – I inherited the recipe when starting to work as the cook. I have since added some orange zest and cardamom to the mix, which makes it taste a bit more exotic. Leave these out if you want the original flavour. Best eaten freshly baked from the oven!
Serves 4
The sauce:
90g soft brown sugar
25g cocoa powder (not drinking chocolate)
200ml hot water from the kettle
The cake:
90g salted butter (or dairy free spread and a good pinch of salt)
90g caster sugar
Zest of one medium large washed orange
½ tsp of freshly ground cardamom seeds (slightly more if already ground)
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
25g cocoa (not drinking chocolate)
90g self-raising flour (wheat or gluten free)
Preheat oven to 180 C (350 F) static/160 C (325 F) fan/gas 4-5.
Grease a 16 cm diameter/length deep (leakproof) baking tin or ovenproof dish.
Mix all the above ingredients together for the sauce in a jug or bowl. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugar with an electric whisk on highest speed for 2 minutes until pale and creamy. Add eggs, one by one, then the vanilla essence, orange zest and cardamom, while mixing.
Put the mixer aside.
Sieve flour and cocoa into the bowl, then fold into the mix with big movements, using a spatula or spoon, until just combined. Turn into the prepared tin.
Pour the chocolate sauce over the sponge mix, put into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
Serve immediately with yoghurt, ice cream or cream.
Though best served straight from the oven, if you would like to pre-make it and reheat it later, use only half of the sauce for baking, and reheat for 10 minutes in a preheated oven at 150 C (300 F)
static/130 C (265 F) fan/gas 2 with the rest of the sauce poured over it.
The Iona Abbey Cookbook by Anja Jardine is published by Wild Goose, priced £16.99.
James Crawford explores the places others overlook in his latest book, a book that is both fascinating and beautiful. Here, he introduces us to his aims in making his journeys and writing his Wild History.
Wild History: Journeys into Lost Scotland
By James Crawford
Published by Birlinn
How can history be wild? Well, in one sense, it can’t. Wilderness – true wilderness – means somewhere unaltered by human activity. Today, very few wild environments can be found anywhere on Earth. And arguably, even where they can, the scale and extent of human-influenced climate change has filled the very atmosphere, or seas, or soils around them. This is the product of the Anthropocene, the ‘human time’ – the name that has been given to our newest geological era, conceived to acknowledge that the presence and influence of people is no longer just something written on the surface of the Earth but has become woven irrevocably into the very fabric of the planet.
Scotland long ago lost any claim to true wilderness. Since the end of the last Ice Age, some 10,000 years ago, this land has been moved through, occupied, cut up, cut down, dug out, built on and entirely changed. No parts – even those areas that are perceived as the most ‘extreme’ or ‘remote’ – have been left untouched by people. What has happened to our landscape is an accumulation. Of interventions, of events, of life. It began with hunters stalking their prey north and killing and cooking on land that we now call Scotland. In the process they left behind simple piles of shells and bones in rubbish pits known as middens – fish bones, deer antlers, hazelnut kernels. The scorch marks of the millennia-old fires that they lit, the hearths that they gathered around, have persisted, in the depths of the loam, all the way up to the present day.
As time passed, these traces – so faint and fragmentary at first – built inexorably. Much was destroyed or erased or lost. But not everything. The not everythings from one era merged with the not everythings from another. The fires stopped moving, the walls around them grew solid, the accumulation intensified and accelerated. Ploughshares started to rip up the ground. Axes – and a colder, wetter, windier climate – began to clear the forests. Bit by bit, communities overspread the land, turning the wilderness to their own ends.
The result is that, today, we live entirely among the physical impression and presence of the past. Often it emerges in the shapes of our towns and cities; in the ways our fields look; in the bare reaches of our sheep-wandered hills and moorlands. Just as before, so much has been destroyed or erased or lost. But at the same time, the list of the not everythings from successive periods has grown vast. Some have even been afforded special status, segregated from the present to be offered up as preserved, curated ruins and tourist attractions; even adopted as national icons. A handful receive millions of visitors each year.
But the majority do not. Rather, they exist in a state of continually fading obscurity, spread out across those parts of the landscape which people once knew, but now, largely, don’t. They are what this book is about. The un-curated and the ignored, the unfiltered and the abandoned. Those places that are not wilderness, but rather feel post-human: the shadows of people’s lives in the landscape, sometimes growing faint, but still persisting. They are what I mean by ‘wild’ history. History set adrift, let loose, let go. History, in some sense, set free. Just there: overgrown, overlooked – and increasingly untamed.
A few years ago, I began travelling out into the landscape to see some of these sites for myself. They include a 2,500-year-old hole in the ground found on a lonely knoll in Sutherland, leading down into what may be Scotland’s oldest surviving basement. Colossal ancient border markers delimiting the boundaries of long extinct kingdoms. Drowned roads and fading drove roads. Beached shipwrecks and rhododendron-choked modernist wrecks. Medieval deer traps and prehistoric cattle ranches. Lost valleys and lost villages. Pictish ‘cities’, Viking boat-burials, a shrine to the goddess of winter and a stone circle surrounding a three-millennia-old lightning strike. A Roman signal station, a concrete hermit’s castle and the regrowing ruins of a cathedral made of trees. A moorland on the cusp of the Highlands that once served as a surrogate for Gallipoli. Five miles of beach and tidal sands studded with the bone-bleached uprights of over 2,000 wooden poles.
Perhaps more than anything else, I want my book to be an invitation. An invitation to see for yourself just how much of the past still lives with us in the present. An invitation to explore the unexplored and make pilgrimage to the lost and overlooked. An invitation to ‘use the country itself, as its own map’ – and to see where it will take you.
Here are some of the places you can discover:
Clach na Briton, Glen Falloch – a colossal ancient border marker delimiting the boundaries of three long extinct kingdoms
Tigh na Cailleach, Glen Lyon – a still active shrine to the goddess of winter
Hermit’s Castle, Achmelvich Bay
Cracking Souterrain, Sutherland – a 2,500-year-old hole in the ground found on a lonely knoll in Sutherland, leading down into what may be Scotland’s oldest surviving basement.
The Old Fish Road to Ullapool, revealed beneath the waters of Loch Glascarnoch
Ben Griam Beat, Sutherland – the site of Scotland’s highest hill-fort? Or perhaps the ruins of a prehistoric cattle ranch, abandoned due to a cooling climate over 3,000 years ago
The modernist ruins of Cardross Seminary
The ‘lost village’ of Lassodie in Fife, a one time coal mining community that has been completely erased and now partially ‘re-wilded’
Wild History: Journeys into Lost Scotland by James Crawford is published by Birlinn, priced £22.00.
Can we define the ‘Scottishness’ of Scotland’s architecture? Frank Arneil Walker sets out to answer this question in this ambitious and stunning book that tells the history of Scotland in a unique way. Here, BooksfromScotland shares some of the photography found in the book, a glimpse of the treasures inside.
Mousa to Mackintosh: The Scottishness of Scottish Architecture
By Frank Arneil Walker
Published by Historic Environment Scotland
Skara Brae, Orkney
Craiglevar Castle
Culzean Castle
National Monument, Calton Hill, Edinburgh
St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh
Aberdeen Grammar School
Formakin House
The Lion Chambers, Glasgow
The Broom Estate, Whitecraigs
Tower of Empire, Empire Exhibition, Glasgow
Mousa to Mackintosh: The Scottishness of Scottish Architecture by Frank Arneil Walker is published by Historic Environment Scotland, priced £30.00.
Be More Dog is a warm and wonderful tale, written by Caroline Crowe with marvellous illustrations by Carlos Vélez. And though it is a book for children, Caroline tells us here that the joy of being more dog is a great life lesson for us all!
Be More Dog
By Caroline Crowe, illustrated by Carlos Vélez
Published by Floris Books
The Joy of Being More Dog!
Joy is such a powerful word. There are lots of synonyms you can use, but I don’t think any other word captures that feeling of unbridled happiness in the moment. Write it or say it out loud and you can’t help but remember a snapshot in time when you were filled with that emotional sunshine.
I wrote my latest picture book, Be More Dog, during the Covid lockdowns in the UK. It was an anxious time and it was often difficult to remain positive. One day I looked up from the table where I was working and noticed our family dog, Oka, lying in a small patch of sun on the floor of our sitting room. He’d found a bright spot and was just enjoying the moment. It was that image that sparked the idea for Be More Dog: a reminder that even in the most difficult times there can be moments of light, and we need to try to stop and appreciate them.
I think, especially as adults, we sometimes get caught up in focusing on bigger events and the happiness or excitement they might bring. The pace of modern life is fast and it’s easy to forget to appreciate all of those other less conspicuous moments that make up our days – the promise in the smell of freshly baked cookies or the exhilaration of riding a bike downhill with the wind in your face.
It’s often something that children are better at than grown-ups. There’s a scene in the book where it starts to rain and Sam, the dog in the story, encourages his young owner to splash in a giant puddle with him. There is magic in the illustrations that Carlos Vélez created for this book. They totally capture both dog and owner embracing the joy of the moment. I think as we get older we can become too focused on the consequences of things like jumping in puddles – muddy, wet clothes! – but maybe children and dogs see the possibility for joy first.
The other page in the book that always makes me smile is the image of Sam and his owner each doing something that makes them happy while they wait for Dad to come home. It’s a reminder that joy doesn’t have to be loud and showy. There is also joy in the quiet moments, like reading a great book or in the case of the young character in my story, drawing a picture.
Lastly, but perhaps most important, there is the joy that comes from making other people happy. Dogs have an absolute knack for gifting happiness and it’s something Sam teaches his young owner about. I hope that reading the book inspires children and grown-ups to recognise and reach for the little moments of joy in their day. Our four-legged friends are champions at finding it in the smallest of things and we could probably all do with being a bit more dog!
Be More Dog by Caroline Crowe and Carlos Vélez is published by Floris Books, priced £12.99.
Jamie Jauncey looks back on the life and work of his great-great-uncle in his latest book. David Robinson talks to him about having such a pioneering historical figure in his family.
Don Roberto: The Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham
By Jamie Jauncey
Published by Scotland Street Press
When he was 23, James (Jamie) Jauncey found himself in the presidential palace at Buenos Aires, looking up at a portrait of a handsome, bearded man astride a fine black stallion. The man in John Lavery’s portrait, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a gaucho’s cape, and seemingly at one with both his horse and the empty landscape of the Argentinian pampas, was his great-great-uncle, RB Cunninghame Graham, ‘a fantastic combination of Don Quixote and Sir Gawain, Indiana Jones and the Lone Ranger’.
Even stripped of hyperbole, Cunninghame Graham’s life had the kind of width and verve that seems impossible now, and was rarely matched in either the nineteenth century, when he co-founded the Scottish Labour Party, or the twentieth, when he was the founding co-president of the SNP. Consider the evidence. Here is a descendant of the Earls of Menteith and the first MP (a radical Liberal; the Labour Party did not then exist) to declare himself a socialist in the House of Commons. A writer of 30 books – including one which ‘broke the mould of travel writing’ and one which told the story that became the film The Mission – who also tried his hand as a Argentinian rancher, a Uruguayan horse trader, and took his wife on a dangerous 600-mile mule train to Mexico. A maverick who took up the cause of Irish republicanism and was jailed for defying the Home Secretary’s ban on a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, who supported Scotland’s striking miners and campaigned for an eight-hour working day. His friend, the novelist Joseph Conrad – who dedicated Typhoon to him – once wrote that by comparison, he felt as though he had lived his whole life in a dark hole.
When he stood in front of Lavery’s portrait half a century ago, Jauncey felt he knew everything he needed to know about the man Argentinians knew as ‘Don Roberto’. He was, after all, the family’s great hero, especially to his mother, who remembered him fondly from her own childhood and who also wrote a biography of him.
‘His name was forever on my mother’s lips so he was there in our childhood, offstage but somehow very present, and he assumed a kind of mythic status. She told us so many stories of him – about his time in Argentina, the story of Bloody Sunday (the violent 1887 Trafalgar Square demo at which he was beaten by police and arrested), and of how he was captured in the Atlas Mountains, and so on.
‘I didn’t feel any obligation to live up to him, but when I reached my sixties, I realised that I couldn’t any longer live with this two-dimensional colossus in the family landscape. I wanted to demythologise him, to find out what he was really about and what he was like as a person.
‘There are already five or six biographies, though the first two were almost written at his own behest. And it’s not really that the other got things wrong so much as that I felt I could tell the story through a slightly different lens.’
Jauncey admits that his book isn’t the result of long years poring over primary sources in the archives (which in any case were shut because of the pandemic). Instead, it is a personalised quest to come to terms with a larger-than-life ancestor, and Jauncey’s reflections on his own life as a writer (he has five novels to his name), traveller, and a family member that also adds depth to his portrait. While some biographers seem to strain every sinew to present an image of their subject as consistent, Jauncey leaves room for complexity and contradiction.
Even his parents’ attitude to Don Roberto differed wildly, he points out. ‘My father was a small-c conservative, a diligent jurist who liked to be out of the spotlight. Robert loved the spotlight, and so to my father he was both dangerous politically and had an extravagant personality. Yet to my late mother, Robert was glamorous and kind and she hero-worshipped him. Her own biography (Gaucho Laird, by Jean Cunninghame Graham, 2005) is a semi-fictionalised version of his life and yet she barely mentions Robert’s nationalism at all and I think she thought it was just a pose, an aberration. She wasn’t of a generation able to take it seriously.’
Jauncey harbours no such doubts. ‘You have only to read the speeches to sense the depth of his connection with Scotland,’ he says, pointing out that the Scottish Labour Party under Keir Hardie was committed to home rule – a policy it only dropped in 1927, when Don Roberto became active in the national movement.
‘What convinces me that he wasn’t fooling around in his politics is that, right from the start of his career, he was a humanitarian. In South America he had seen people living in desperate conditions and had been deeply touched by it. When he came back to Scotland and saw the conditions the miners were living in, he realised that a Liberal government, funded to some extent by the mine owners, was never going to take their cause on board, so he determined to do something for them – which is why he pressed for an eight-hour working day.’
Mavericks like Don Roberto fascinate because they stand outside of their own time. Reading Jauncey’s biography makes clear why he was able to do this: Robert’s father’s mental illness, the debts into which this plunged the family, and Robert’s own failure to make his fortune – all of this gave him a mindset at variance with so many late Victorian values. His marriage to the rather wonderful Gabriela (to my mind an even greater maverick) proved the point: ostensibly born in Chile to a French father, in reality she was a probably a Yorkshire teenage mother who ran away to London and then Paris to work either on the stage or possibly as a prostitute. As James Robertson points out in the foreword, the story of Robert’s marriage ‘is so romantic that it would hardly stand scrutiny as a novel’.
But even though mavericks fascinate, we’re never quite sure of them. And that, says Jauncey, is the reason that Don Roberto isn’t as recognised today as he should be: we find him just too hard to place. As an example, he mentions his journey, disguised as a Turkish doctor, to a part of Morocco forbidden to foreigners, during which he was briefly imprisoned by a local warlord. When Mogreb el Aksa was published in 1898, Conrad hailed it as ‘the travel book of the century’, while Hugh MacDiarmid later described it as ‘one of the best books of travel ever written’.
‘There’s a genuine mystery about the whole journey,’ says Jauncey. ‘Did he go there for the hell of it – because he often did do things for no other reason. Or was he spying for the British government and reporting back to Sir Arthur Nicholson, his distant relative who was then the permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, what the tribes were up to in southern Morocco? Or was he on a commercial enterprise? All are perfectly possible.’
One of those would, I suggest, knock on the head the idea that he was an anti-imperialist (for which, I should add, there is also plenty of evidence). ‘It would’ Jauncey agrees. ‘But this is where he is fascinating because he is just so full of contradictions.’
In his book, he lists some of them. Don Roberto was, he writes ‘the aristocratic socialist, the Scottish laird with the manners of a Spanish hidalgo, the hard-riding dandy, the romantic realist, the cosmopolitan nationalist; the progressive who deplored the effects of progress, the visionary antiquarian, the anti-imperialist, anti-racist admirer of the Spanish Conquest, the moderniser with one foot in the past, the disdainful writer of literary prefaces who could chatter easily in Scots with his tenants …’
When he looked at Sir John Lavery’s portrait of Don Roberto, Jamie Jauncey saw a singularly interesting person with hardly any of these complexities. Fifty years on, his own fine portrait of one of the most fascinating Scots of his era contains them all.
Don Roberto: The Adventure of Being Cunninghame Graham by James Jauncey is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £24.99.
Mixing travel writing, history and memoir, Iain Maloney’s latest book, The Japan Lights, not only offers insights on Scotland and Japan, but on the author and his subject, engineer Richard Henry Bruton. We asked Iain to tell us more about his unique travelogue.
The Japan Lights
By Iain Maloney
Published by Tippermuir Press
The Japan Lights is your first travel memoir since the acclaimed The Only Gaijin in the Village, published in 2020. In their own ways both books attempt to integrate Scotland with the unique culture of Japan. How did the experience of writing this book differ? And did it, as you note in the Introduction, ‘raise more questions than it answered’?
The Only Gaijin in the Village was very much a book about myself and my experiences, the culmination of 15 years living in Japan summed up in one narrative, which meant the next book necessarily had to be something different. People were asking for Gaijin 2 but I knew that was impossible—I’d used up all my good anecdotes for a start! I came to Japan when I was 24 and published Only Gaijin when I was 40. It was a book in which I was looking backwards and drawing conclusions whereas The Japan Lights is much more about the present and the future (strangely, for a book that is partly focused on the 19th century). The writing process was hugely different as a result: Only Gaijin involved pulling together all my anecdotes, my experiences, then sitting in my office and shaping it into something, but this was much more of a traditional travel book in that I actually had to go to all these remote corners of Japan on planes, trains, cars and boats, meet people, find out things, search for stories. At least, that was the original plan: Covid hit right as Only Gaijin came out and I was turning my attention to Brunton and his lighthouses. Writing a travel book during a lockdown was… challenging. That changed the book in fundamental ways. It also made it more interesting in a sense, for me, because I didn’t know how it would end. It was an adventure in the proper sense, a journey into the unknown.
In the historical figure of Richard Henry Brunton you situate a clear connection between Japan and your homeland. However, the symbol of the lighthouse has a literary significance too through the family of Robert Louis Stevenson. In what ways do you find lighthouses a useful symbol in connecting the two disparate cultures that are so central to you?
In both books I draw parallels between the cultures of Scotland and Japan but that’s really what all immigrants do: I’m approaching the point where I’ll have spent as much of my life in Japan as in Scotland, so in a sense the person I am today is a synthesis of living in those two cultures. That said, there are obvious connections that jump out—island nations, closeness to the natural world, a history of innovation and ambition—but there are also interesting contrasts: for example, Japan considers itself a small nation that wants to be a major power while Scotland really is a small nation that is comfortable with that. It’s when considering lighthouses and sea travel more generally that one of the most interesting differences arises, and that’s our attitude to the rest of the world. Scots have always looked abroad for opportunity—for better or worse—and for most of our history the sea was a highway, a connection between us and everyone else. In contrast, for 250 years Japan deliberately closed itself off from the international community, fiercely and often violently protecting their isolation. The sea was a negative, a highway that brought nothing but trouble. The building of lighthouses in Japan is a strong symbol of that changing, a symbol of a new way of thinking. Lighthouses are warning beacons, but they are also welcome mats: when you’ve been at sea for months, the sighting of a lighthouse beam warms the heart and answers the question ‘are we nearly there yet?’ Building a lighthouse is like sending Voyager into the depths of space with images of humans and some cultural artefacts: it’s saying, ‘here we are, come say hi.’
In the book’s introduction you identify an important shift in the way we view coastlines – from entries to the world to boundaries, edges. What can we learn about history by resituating our understanding of coastlines as the main points of departure and arrival?
I think it’s less about what we can learn about history but what we can learn from history to inform the present, which is always the fun part of history for me. We’re living through an isolationist period, a period of national retrenchment when walls literal and figurative are being erected around the world. At the exact same time, migration is increasing for a variety of reasons—war, economics, climate change, the entirely predictable fallout of globalised capitalism—and that’s only going to continue. As the climate emergency worsens (to take a justifiably pessimistic stance, since target after target is being missed and we may already have passed the point of no return) and millions more are displaced it’s going to inevitably force a rethink of the idea of what a nation is. So many people think of their country as a castle with high walls, battlements and a drawbridge that can be pulled up. This is particularly pronounced in places like Britain and Japan, island states surrounded by water: a literal moat. The water is a barrier between me and you. I like to think differently, to flip that. The sea is a bridge, a highway, the connection between us. In the past, if you wanted to go from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, you went by sea: it was easier, faster, often safer than going over land. The coastline in this sense is analogous to a kerbstone, the edge of the road rather than a barrier to another world. If you think of the North Sea, for example, as a street with houses off it—Scotland, Norway, Denmark—then the world opens up in a positive, friendly way.
Overshadowing every sentence in the book is the legacy of the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami, which caused such devastation along Japan’s eastern coastline. On top of this, COVID-19 hits during your five-year pilgrimage. Would you describe this as a book about tragedy, or about resilience?
Like all national disasters, the memory and legacy of the Tohoku triple disaster is behind everything in Japan, and we are still working through systemic and governmental failures: tragedy and resilience are two sides of the same coin. Humanity has always found ways to pick itself up and rebuild after tragedy and seeing that with my own eyes was humbling and inspiring. But I’d say this book is much more about fragility than tragedy or resilience. Tragedy for many of us is usually something that unfolds on our TVs, to other people, in other places. We are all guilty of falling into the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ trap, of thinking that the worst won’t happen to us. Travelling around the coastline, seeing the lighthouses which are symbols of human fragility against the power of nature, and then travelling to Tohoku and seeing the literal scars of the tsunami, seeing towns where the oldest building was built a decade ago, it brought home to me how easily everything could change in an instant. An earthquake, an eruption, a tsunami, something we have absolutely no control over, no way to predict, no way to stop, could happen today. And that’s not counting the risks we are taking building nuclear plants on fault lines or pushing the climate beyond breaking point. In places like Scotland, where the climate is benign, where natural disasters are unthinkable, we’ve lost that sense people like Brunton had of being puny humans at the mercy of the elements. If we found some of that humility again, maybe I wouldn’t be so pessimistic about the outcomes of the climate emergency.
There appears to be a personal investment in your quest to learn about Richard Henry Brunton, to go beyond his work and try and unearth the man behind the lighthouses. Did you see yourself in him? And what do you think his story can teach us?
There were quite a few Scots who came to Japan once the country reopened—Thomas Glover being the most famous—and I came across Brunton while researching a series of articles on some of them. Something about him got under my skin in a way that the others didn’t. I think I do see potential similarities between us beyond the obvious factual parallels. Some of his character flaws are ones that I’m aware of in myself—a confidence that can turn into arrogance, a perseverance that can become overpowering—but the difference is that I recognise these flaws in myself and attempt to change or mitigate them. He didn’t: he was right and everyone else was wrong. He was a stereotypical stubborn Victorian, not much given to self-analysis or admitting weakness.
What really hooked me on him though was something I examine in the book, the question of whether our negatives should cancel out our positives. As I was writing this book people around the world were discussing whether you can still enjoy an artist’s work when you find out they have committed crimes or hold reprehensible beliefs. Can we really expect our heroes to be perfectly flawless beings, literal saints with not a blemish or stain? How far should we go in calling out misdemeanors and where does forgiveness come in? Brunton was, even by the standards of his time, racist. The things he said about the Japanese in his writings are hugely offensive. He was a difficult man to like and he made many enemies amongst the foreign community in Yokohama. By the end, no one wanted to renew his contract or offer him a job, forcing him to leave Japan before he wanted to. But no one questioned his genius as a civil engineer, and the Japanese Coastguard today laud him as a hero, a man whose efforts saved hundreds of thousands of lives and are still doing so. That dichotomy in his character is what fascinated me about him: he embodies the argument raging today, a flawed man who did great things. He wasn’t a saint or a villain, he was a mess of a human, like the rest of us.
Do you have another pilgrimage lined up in the future – and another book?
I went on a very different kind of pilgrimage to Seattle just before Covid and wrote what I’m calling my Nick-Hornby-midlife-crisis book about grunge music, mental health, and growing up in Scotland in the 90s. I’ve yet to convince publishers that there’s a market for it, but I will persevere. I’m working on other things and as always going in multiple directions at once—poetry, science fiction, a literary novel—but I’m still looking around for the next non-fiction/travel project. It has to be the right idea though. This book took six years from lightbulb to publication, and that’s a long time to spend with one man, pursuing one idea.
The Japan Lights by Iain Maloney is published by Tippermuir Press, priced £9.99.
Sometimes, comfort and escape is not what a reader wants when heading to the beach. For those readers interested in horror and explorations on the body, Heather Parry is a writer to watch. Following on from the success of her novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, comes an unsettling but brilliant short story collection, This Is My Body, Given To You. Here, we share one of her stories, ‘The Small Island’.
This Is My Body, Given For You
By Heather Parry
Published by Haunt Publishing
The Small Island
There has been a blight about these islands. Their grain has ceased growing; their livestock no longer breeds. Fields lie flat and the hills are barren, devoid of new life. As the last of the mature animals are slaughtered and rationed out, the future holds a horrifying uncertainty.
On the larger island, the people are reaching desperation. Angry seas have kept them from the mainland for too long. Each time they send out a boat, it comes back terrified, or sinks while still in view. The remaining people are afraid to try again. And so, for the first time in a hundred years, they are looking to the smaller island. The small spit of green that is lush with sheep and teeming with generations closed off from the rest of the world. The island that, as their grandparents told them, held witchcraft and sorcery and the horror of humanity.
Aboard the boat – the best they have, though it creaks beneath the weight of its small crew, and rocks with the gentlest wave – the youngest and strongest of the community’s men tie knots and plug leaks. They hammer wood to wood, pull tarpaulin and secure it. The others stand at the tiny harbour and watch them as they work.
It is ready, the captain-of-sorts announces to his uncertain crew. It’s time.
A girl runs forward, a creature somewhere between a child and a woman. She is going with them. She has always wanted to be more than the place she was born in. The girl’s mother knows better than to protest; the crew find that there is little point in it either. A life jacket is handed to her. She straps it on and sets herself down at the front of the boat.
The crossing is difficult and strained by the same indignant seas that have kept them from the mainland. But the distance is much shorter. They could have done this journey many times before. They did not.
There is no port on the smaller island. No harbour or jetty. A vast beach is their only welcome. They navigate the rocks and take the boat into the shallow waters. Two of the younger men go to haul their bodies out of the boat and into the sea, but the captain blocks their path with his outstretched arm.
Wait.
They look up across the sand and over the grass and up to where the village begins, where houses hundreds of years old still stand with thatched roofs. They look to the buildings beyond, the small church and the meeting hall. They see not a single movement; not a breath.
Why don’t you jump ashore and see, the captain says to the girl. Why don’t you take a wee run up that beach and tell us what you find.
They push her onto shore, a tester, a little yellow bird without her cage. She runs from the water, over dunes and up the gentle incline. She goes willingly, an adventurer.
The fields are empty. Amongst the buildings she finds nothing but death. People that have dropped seemingly in an instant. Bodies at desks and in kitchens, bodies intertwined and bodies alone.
She runs back to the water, the sand moving under her feet, and finds that the boat is further out than it was before.
A plague, she says. There is nobody here left alive.
The captain hauls the anchor back into the boat. Paddles slip into the water and they begin their escape. The girl runs forward, made slower by the sea.
You’ll have breathed it in, says a younger man. You’ll have caught it.
Another says, We can’t let you bring it back.
There is silence, then. Silence from her and from the men who leave her. Silence because there’s nothing to say.
She stays amongst the dunes for three days, shivering and starving and clinging to hope, running up to the village only to drink water from the well. On the fourth day she accepts that they are not coming, and makes her home amongst the dead.
She steps around their bloated forms, pink foam escaping from their noses and parted lips. She searches their houses for what might sustain her. It is a week before the canned foods and pastes and butter and cream run out. Another of stomach cramps and the rotten corpses of rats and snails. Of chewing the straw from roofs and hallucinations of beef. Of glances at the reddening, rictal bodies scattered about the floor, as if abandoned in an abattoir.
It is the twenty-first day of her abandonment when, free of tears and resolute, she takes a handsaw from a tool shed and slices the biceps off the largest man she can find. Those that have fallen outside are colder and better preserved. She is so hungry she barely thinks of the morals. She builds a fire and rubs the muscle with salt and sits it to smoke and cook and become delicious.
She devours it within minutes. She is human again. She sleeps full.
The next morning, the brightness of the day wakes her. She strips naked and heads down to the water, her bathtub, and takes herself into the frigid sea. She runs hands over skin and goosepimples and feels a swelling under her fingers. From elbow to shoulder she has grown; not on both sides. Only one. She brings her arms out of the water and flexes the left. The bicep rises, strong and round and firm. She grasps it with her other hand. She grins.
There are two dozen dead outside the croft buildings and tiny homes. With her new strength, she uses her left arm to flip them over, to uncurl them from their poses, to tear them from one another. She appraises them. Blood has pooled; teeth and nails drop from fingers and gums. Yet each body has its own benefits. A pair of round buttocks, large feet, strong shoulders. She first takes the lips of a woman at her sink. A knife will do this; two slices and it’s done. She fries them up in oil in a pan. They slip down with ease, and she sleeps. The next morning, her face is heavier. She finds a cracked mirror. There they are, full and red and hers.
She takes calf muscles and forearms and the glutes. She takes daintier ears and longer fingers and breasts twice the size of hers. She pops out two gelatinous masses, barely clinging to their shape, from the body of a teen. The next morning, when she wakes, she has the blue-grey eyes she’s always wished for.
She is strong. She is powerful. She can run and bend and move and lift and swim just as she wants to. She spears fish from the still-living seas, and grasps eels, and holds her breath to dive for scallops. She hears the absence of her people every day, but she no longer cares.
She shears a cock from the groin of every dead man. She lines them up, five in total, and imagines them turgid. She looks for girth and length and erectile tissue. She swallows one whole, holds back a retch, and goes to sleep with a smile on her face.
The next morning, she wakes with a weight between her thighs. It sits in front of her vulva. She thinks of the things she always thinks of at night, and it grows and swells and brings sheer delight. She has chosen well. She is perfect.
The boat comes after three months. She hears it from the hillside. Wrapped in blankets to hide her new form, she strides down to the beach where they sit still metres from the shore. They are afraid, again. She lets them speak.
We need you, says the captain. We want you back. We can’t handle the shame. There is one word that he does not say, and she notes it.
Go home, she thinks. I am happy here. But she does not say it. Instead, she runs her gaze over sturdy hands and firm hips and brows that sit heavy over eyes.
There is life here, she says. Things growing. Things that have sustained me. Come and see.
She waits a while. They do as she tells them. She takes them one by one around corners, into dark rooms, to show them something. She wrings their necks, smashes their skulls with rocks, stabs their chests with cold pokers. She picks over flesh and sinew and muscle and marrow, waiting for the next boat to come to rescue her.
She takes the parts that she wants, and leaves the rest to rot.
This Is My Body, Given For You by Heather Parry is published by Haunt Publishing, priced £9.99.
Staying with horror, It Came From The Closet is an essay anthology that takes a look at cinematic horror history told from the perspective of LGBTQIA+ writers. Here, the anthology’s editor, Joe Vallese, writes of how looking at horror through this lens brings a new richness to the genre.
It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
Edited by Joe Vallese
Published by Saraband
It’s hard to deny that horror movies can be, well, pretty fucked up. And yet, I and so many other queer people somehow can’t help but find immense guiltless, unironic pleasure in them. We’re titillated by the genre, even when it actively excludes us from the narrative—or, worse, includes us only to marginalize, villainize, or altogether neglect us…
So then, how are we to think about the complicated relationship between the queer community and the horror genre? How can we find such camaraderie in the very thing that so often slights us? As a still-closeted, still-horror-obsessed teenager in the late ’90s and early ’00s who did not yet know anyone who was out, I worried over this incongruity, fearing that somehow my wires were even more crossed than I knew. Was my affection for horror just some residual self-loathing, a sorry attempt at maintaining that bit of machismo I credited to myself while in my brothers’ company? Did I need to shed my boyish bloodlust to make room in my brain and heart for more heady, urgent, queer pop culture? Worse still, did my chatty, encyclopedic, know-it-all-and-dying-to-share-it zeal for horror actually give my secret away? Thinking about this self-induced anxiety embarrasses me now, but when you’re always hiding in plain sight, you second-guess every move you make, every word you utter, every passion you claim.
It wasn’t until I stumbled upon AOL chat rooms and Internet forums solely dedicated to horror that I discovered just how deep queer affinity for the genre runs. I was astounded by how many regular posters proudly identified (from behind avatars and witty handles) as LGBTQIA+, and was floored by how masterfully they explicated what they saw as queer coding in many of their favorite movies…
I eventually came to understand that, while I was busy fretting over whether being gay would displace me from connecting with the films I loved most, queer affection for horror was actively being claimed, recontextualized, and integrated into the culture and community—and, like most things touched by queerness, horror becomes more textured, more nuanced, and far more exciting when viewed through a queer lens.
Though the current horror landscape is slowly (slooooowly) telling more queer-centered and -adjacent stories, we largely remain tasked with reading ourselves into these films we love, to seek out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways in which we encounter, navigate, and occupy the world. In this way, It Came from the Closet is very much the anthology of my cinephilic dreams: a collection of eclectic memoirs that use horror as the lens through which the writers consider and reflect upon queer identity, and vice versa. These essays don’t draw easy lines between horror and queerness but rather convey a rich reciprocity, complicating and questioning as much as they clarify. The powerful and diverse voices in this collection reckon with trauma, shame, grief, loss, abuse, race, discrimination, parenthood, familial structures, religion, disability, illness, art, love, and so much more. While these essays spotlight each writer’s singular queer perspective, their respective representations and analyses of ‘the Horror Film’ serve as a kind of universal connective tissue between them and their readers.
It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror edited by Joe Vallese is published by Saraband, priced £14.99.
David Flanagan is back with another amazing adventure with Uncle Pete and TM, this time in the arctic, searching for a lost polar bear. It’s another cracker sure to get young readers flying through its pages! Enjoy the extract below.
Uncle Pete and the Polar Bear Rescue
By David C. Flanagan
Published by Little Door Books
‘What’s that in the sky up ahead?’ TM suddenly shouted to Uncle Pete, pointing from her seat in the plane. ‘It looks like smoke!’
It was smoke, the thickest, blackest, nastiest looking stuff you can imagine. There was a trail of it snaking up through the cold, clear Arctic air. The smoke hung in the blue sky, like someone had smeared soot across it.
Uncle Pete turned the plane to try and avoid the black smoke, and TM coughed and coughed when they flew through the horrible dark clouds of it.
‘Where’s it coming from?’ spluttered Uncle Pete.
TM peered over the side of the plane, trying to see where the smoke began.
‘Look!’ she yelled to Uncle Pete. ‘A ship! It’s coming from a ship!’
Sure enough, far below the plane, there was an enormous dark ship moving fast through the ocean. Icebergs just bounced off the front of the ship, so it was obviously very strong.
The ship had ten huge funnels, all belching out black smoke into the air. There were big cranes along its deck (which is what the floors on a ship are called), and some other mysterious objects that were all covered up. Uncle Pete felt a bit nervous about going closer, but he had to find out what had happened to Berg’s family. And he wanted to see what was under those covers on the ship’s deck.
‘Let’s take a look!’ he yelled to TM and Berg. ‘Hold tight!’
Trying to avoid the clouds of black smoke billowing from the funnels, Uncle Pete dived the plane towards the ship, roaring around it in a big circle.
The ship had a name, painted on the back in big white letters. It was called THE HUNTER.
‘It looks very suspicious indeed!’ shouted Uncle Pete to TM and Berg. ‘I’m going to fly a bit closer and have another look at what’s on the deck!’
Secretly, he wondered if Berg’s family were being hidden under those covers, but he didn’t want to say anything to his friends just yet.
Uncle Pete turned the plane back towards the ship and flew much nearer to it so he could see if there were any clues about what it was doing.
Berg’s nose twitched as they got closer to the ship.
‘I can smell my family!’ he yelled. ‘I can definitely smell them! They’re on that horrible looking ship!’
Just then, three angry looking men burst out of a big metal door on the ship, shouting and pointing up at Uncle Pete’s plane. They didn’t look very happy, or very friendly. The men ran to the mysterious shapes on the deck and pulled off the covers. Uncle Pete gulped when he saw they’d revealed some big guns.
The men started turning the guns towards Uncle Pete’s plane and then… BANG, BANG, BANG! The guns shot at them!
Now, lots of dangerous things had happened to Uncle Pete on his explorer adventures, but he’d NEVER been shot at before. He was completely shocked! Uncle Pete was always peaceful and kind, and hated when people shot animals, or each other.
‘Uh-oh!’ shouted Uncle Pete, ducking down in his seat. ‘TM! Berg! Get your heads down!’
Uncle Pete gritted his teeth and flicked the plane from side to side, trying to avoid all the bullets being fired at them from the ship.
TM was absolutely furious. “How dare you!” she yelled at the men on the ship, though they couldn’t hear her. Then she had an idea.
‘Berg!’ she yelled. ‘Grab some tins of beans and let them have it!’
Berg opened one of their rucksacks and pulled out six tins of beans. Uncle Pete turned and twisted the little plane towards the men on the ship and, just as they passed over the blazing guns, Berg threw the tins of beans over the side.
The tins flew through the air, clonked two of the men on the head and knocked them out. They fell in a heap on the ship’s deck. But this just made the third man angrier, and he spun his big gun around and began blasting away at Uncle Pete’s plane again.
‘This is too dangerous, even for us!’ Uncle Pete said to TM. ‘I think we’ll need to go and get help!’
Just as he was talking to TM, a bullet from a ship’s gun tore a hole through one of the wings of the plane. Uncle Pete managed to keep it flying, but he now definitely thought it was time to get out of there.
‘HA!’ shouted TM over the side of the plane. ‘It’ll take more than that to stop us!’
But then another bullet hit the engine with a loud THUD. The engine spluttered and stopped – stardust poured out of the hole in the engine making a long sparkly trail across the sky.
‘Uh, oh!’ said the three friends all at once.
The two men who’d been knocked out by Berg’s bean tin bombs were getting up rubbing their heads. They cheered when they saw the stardust trail from the damaged engine, and the little plane beginning to dive towards the ocean.
‘We’re going to have to jump out!’ yelled Uncle Pete, hoping he’d packed his parachute and not his dirty washing, just as he’d done by mistake on his first adventure with TM. He’d made sure he’d put a parachute in the back for Berg and he’d made a tiny little one for TM, too, just in case they got into a bad situation. And this was definitely a bad situation.
Uncle Pete and the Polar Bear Rescue by David C. Flanagan is published by Little Door Books, priced £6.99.
Robin Scott-Elliot is an acclaimed writer of children’s books. His latest release, Sweet Skies, is a brilliant tale of a boy in post-war Berlin who dreams of being a pilot but is fighting to survive in a battle-weary city. In the extract below, Otto witnesses the victorious US pilots coming to the city’s rescue.
Sweet Skies
By Robin Scott-Elliot
Published by Everything With Words
Chocolate was falling from the sky. Otto watched it fall, head back, mouth open, and if he’d been able to tear his gaze away, he would have seen that every child gathered at the end of the Tempelhof runway was a mirror image. Every head with every shade of hair colour, red to blonde to jet black to brown pigtails and yellowy stubble like a cornfield after harvest, was tipped back, mouths open as if in hope the chocolate might float straight in.
It was like watching parachutists leap from doomed planes, except the parachutes started small and stayed that way. They were handkerchiefs after all. Soon they could make out the bounty hanging beneath them and, as if someone had barked a command, eager arms stretched skywards.
They’d arrived early as Ilse instructed and argued about where the best spot would be. In the end they split up. Karl hopped and hauled his way up the rubble mountain, giving him the best view to direct Otto and Ilse in their candy collection mission.
There were more children gathered than the day before. As Ilse predicted, news of the candy drop had spread (it was an impossible secret to keep). Ilse was close to the fence, where most children gathered. They clustered together, moving this way and that like a flock of starlings, trying to estimate where the parachutes would land.
Otto was at the foot of the mountain, but the noise of the plane engines meant he couldn’t hear Karl’s shouts. It was the waving crutch that caught his eye. Karl was pointing to the cemetery. Otto looked up again. Karl was right, several parachutes were drifting that way.
Otto leapt over the ragged wire fence. The cemetery was one of the new ones dotted across the city – this is what happens after wars. The graves were wooden crosses, hammered into the ground in ragged rows and fighting a losing battle against straggly bushes and weeds. There was not a lot of time for looking after the dead when staying alive was such a full-time occupation.
A few others followed Otto, noticing Karl’s direction. They eyed each other, like runners at the start of a race… how quick is she? He looks slow? Why’s he looking over there? Because here comes one. A makeshift red parachute was nearly down, attracting every eye in the cemetery. Which meant Otto wasn’t looking where he was going and tripped over a loose brick. He sprawled forward, head just missing the cross of a tilting grave marker.
He was up again in seconds, but his fall was enough for a girl of about his age, hair pulled into a ponytail and a fierce look on her face, to leap and catch it. She clutched it to her chest and spun round to face the others. The red handkerchief parachute made it look like she’d been wounded.
‘Mine,’ she snarled, a declaration accepted at once by the others, not least because several more parachutes were about to touch down.
Otto saw one hanging from the corner of a cross and ran. A boy tried to trip him but he jumped over the outstretched foot and dived for his target, yanking it off the cross and pressing it to his chest as he rolled into a ball ready for the other boy’s attack.
But like the girl – who was sitting on a grave marker staring at her chocolate bar as if she couldn’t believe what was happening – he was left alone. Finders/keepers was the Kinder Code: the unwritten rules between children trying to make their lives among the ruins of the adult world. Besides, why fight over one chocolate bar when plenty others were falling from the sky?
Otto rolled onto his back to catch his breath. Above him was another parachute, heading right for him. Chocolate falling from the sky. How ridiculous. He was laughing as he scrambled to his feet and reached one hand for it and didn’t stop laughing even as another boy leapt across him and grabbed the precious package.
The laughter spread, a happy infection, and as they darted after the parachutes, beneath the shadows of the Skymasters, child after child began to catch it, even as they pushed and shoved and leapt and dived for the chocolate from the sky. The cemetery was full of laughter.
When it was done, Otto, who’d forgotten a bag, scrambled up to Karl’s vantage point with his booty rolled up in the front of his baggy old jersey. It was his father’s and he had to roll the sleeves up to reveal his hands. He dropped his treasure in front of Karl and pulled himself out of the tangle of jersey. It had been chilly when he left home before the sun was up. He was hot now, sweating, and still laughing, although it was more of a gasp for breath.
A last plane roared overhead and a last mini-parachute dropped. They watched it flutter down into the upstretched hands of a small boy dancing a jig in anticipation. Otto scanned the skies then switched his attention to the ground.
Over the fence in the airfield, lorries were rushing to the parked planes. The unloading began at once; sacks were humped out of the planes, collected by groundcrew and lifted into lorries. Once the planes were emptied, their engines spluttered back to life and the ch-ch-ch-burrrrr of propellers jerked them forward.
Otto waved as the first Skymaster rose towards them from the runway. He could make out the pilots in the cockpit, caps jammed on tight by their headphones, dark glasses in place, setting a course for their home base far away in the safety of the west.
Otto kept waving, Karl joined in and below them the rest of the children did too. A number flashed into view on the plane’s fuselage – 712 – and as it did, the wings waggled. Otto raised both hands to the sky and yelled in delight. He was still yelling and punching the air when the next plane took off and that too waggled its wings as it flew over.
‘Where’s your bag? What did you get?’ Ilse’s face was red from the climb up the rubble and her parachute-chasing.
Otto ignored her first question and pointed at his jersey. On it lay three bars of chocolate.
‘One each,’ he said.
Sweet Skies by Robin Scott-Elliot is published by Everything With Words, priced £8.99.
Red Star Over Hebrides is a unique book where Donald Murray looks back at his childhood in Lewis through prose, poetry and song inspired by the deep-rooted social and cultural connections of the island with Russia and the Baltics. He explores aspects of Hebridean life, such as the fishing industry and crofting land raids with the stories of literary giants such as Dostoevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy. Below, Donald remembers a dominant community figure.
Red Star Over Hebrides
By Donald S. Murray
Published by Taproot Press
From ‘Capone and Dostoyevsky’
Hypocrisy is a dying art in these islands. Every weekend, there’s a queue buying scratchcards and DVDs at the local shop. ‘Give me those lucky dips, Martin,’ they announce to the shopkeeper. Or, ‘I’ll take this film. And that one,’ they say, placing the empty cases on the counter. ‘I need something to pass the time on a Sunday afternoon.’
Duncan Macdonald – the church elder that some twenty years ago we all knew better as Capone – would have stood for none of that. A tall powerful figure in his grey overcoat and hat, his eyes had the sharpness of a gannet’s gaze. For all that he was in his seventies, one look would have been enough to terrify the likes of Martin, his hand sweeping over these goods like Jesus chastising the moneychangers in the temple. ‘What do you mean selling stuff like that? It may do a lot for your profits, but it won’t do much for your soul!’ And then his glare would swirl round his fellow-shoppers. ‘Gambling! Breaking the Sabbath! What do you mean by doing such things?’
One time I was on the wrong side of this look was a few short weeks before he died. A young student, I was reading Crime and Punishment near the back of a crowded bus when he came to sit beside me.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
I told him.
‘Now tell me … Do you ever spend time reading the Bible? I bet you never spend much time doing the likes of that.’
I smiled weakly in response. There are some people with whom it is a waste of breath to quarrel.
Yet in his youth, Capone never spent much time studying the Bible. If rumours are to be believed, he was never still long enough to lift the Good Book. Instead, he would be scaling rocks on the shoreline; balancing on one leg or combing his hair while standing on a stone outcrop that jutted out a hundred feet over the ocean and daring others to follow his example.
‘I bet you couldn’t do that.’
He would clamber on the roofs of the village blackhouses too, blocking the chimney with a large flat stone or a piece of turf or wood. As the inhabitants ran from their smoke-choked home, he would be hiding behind a nearby wall, trying to choke down his own laughter.
‘I bet they don’t know what’s happened to them.’
‘I bet …’ Even in his years as a church elder, this phrase would be like a nervous tic on his lips. ‘I bet you don’t think often of your salvation … I bet you don’t read the Bible like you should…’ In the years before he found the Church, however, these words were more than habit. They clicked continually on his tongue as he played cards and dice with the men with whom he worked on the Hydro schemes in places like Cannich, Cluanie and Glencarn. Phrases like ‘I bet’, ‘I raise’, ‘Ace of Hearts’, and ‘Jack of Diamonds’ formed part of the only common language of their camps.
People from the battered ends and edges of all over Europe learned to use it. There were Highlanders and islanders; poor Irish from the ragged coastline of Donegal—coming from communities where steady work was rare and intending to return when things had changed. And then there were those known as the ‘Poles’ – the displaced men of not only Poland but also countries the others never knew existed – like Lithuania, Ukraine, Estonia. Unlike the West Coasters and Irish, they had been forced to surrender many of their dreams of return. Looking over their shoulders at nations lost either to bloodshed or tyranny, they had little choice but to try and begin new lives on the strange and alien landscape they had chanced upon.
For all their differences, the groups had much in common. In slow and faltering English, they could each tell stories about the frailty and precariousness of life. Poverty and weakness had helped to make them that way; the sound of money in their pockets – crisp notes and coins – a more comforting rhythm than the pulse of their hearts. Only a good wage in their hands could grant them a short spell of security, a time of calm and ease.
The author Capone caught me reading, Fyodor Dostoevsky, would have known much better than me how they felt. Never from a rich family, his father, murdered by serfs, left little for his widow and children. This turned the young Fyodor into a radical—so much so that he was imprisoned for political reasons by Tsar Nicholas I. He made, too, an early, disastrous marriage to a widow who suffered from consumption and had a son from her first husband. He was also involved with a magazine banned by the Russian government. A short time later, his wife and brother died. At one stage, he even had to pawn his clothes for food.
And throughout all this, there was gambling. The gaming tables at Weisbauden in Germany. The spinning roulette wheel. Roll of dice. Cut of cards. Eyes shut and hoping for a glimpse of luck. A change of life. It was the same with the men in the hydro camp. The boredom of isolation. Stench of sweat and grime. The prospect of poverty when this spell of work came to an end. All this made them gather nightly at a table in the centre of their hut; the words ‘I bet…’, ‘flush’, ‘pontoon’, ‘I raise…’ never requiring any translation for this multinational group of men whose blackened fingers stained the cards within their hands. As they coughed up the dust of earth and boulder that had gathered in their lungs, the pile of coins gleamed brightly. To have it in their fingers meant the oblivion of whisky. Or another kind of oblivion—a new life that would help them escape the horrors of the old.
Red Star Over Hebrides by Donald S. Murray is published by Taproot Press, priced £14.99.
Sally Magnusson has brought readers another exceptional novel of historical fiction. We caught up with her to find out more about her writing and reading.
Music in the Dark
By Sally Magnusson
Published by John Murray
Congratulations Sally on the publication of your latest novel, Music in the Dark. Could you tell us a little bit about what readers should expect from it?
I hope what they’ll enjoy in it is a love story in later life, in which two people hurt by life find healing and joy. And also thatthey’ll discover new things about the role of women in resisting the Highland Clearances – and the cost of that resistance.
Your novels are all set in the past, in different times, in different locations. What is it that draws you to write historical fiction? How do you choose your times and places?
I love stories. I am endlessly fascinated by history. And I’m always drawn to the atmosphere and feel of place. So when I have a good story – especially one that excavates the experience of women from the vacuum that is the historical record – and a good place to set it, that’s me on my way.
Do you read a lot of historical fiction too? Do you have recommendations of your favourites from this genre?
I do read a lot of historical fiction. I am Hilary Mantel’s number 1 fan. When it comes to The Clearances, Neil Gunn and Iain Crichton Smith are shining beacons from the last generation.
Music in the Dark is set at the time of the Highland Clearances, a significant moment in Scottish history. What did you want to bring to readers in exploring this period?
I wanted readers to feel what it was like to grow up in a Highland township as a talented girl who composed songs and had been well educated in the local parish school as well as being mentored by the Free Kirk minister, Rev Gustavus Aird (a real historical figure who championed the people of Strathcarron). I wanted them to understand the kind of community these townships were, and what it meant to lose it. I wanted to introduce them not just to the appalling violence with which the women of Greenyards were treated by the police in March 1854, but to the aftermath in the years and decades that followed What happened to these women afterwards with their head injuries and their bright dreams crushed? I want readers to think, but above all to feel their way into the minds and hearts of these people – men too – who are only a few generations away from us all. Jamesina’s later life in Glasgow and then Rutherglen, where the novel is set over the course of one night 30 years after the events in Strathcarron, is inspired by the life of my own great-grandmother.
Your main character, Jamesina Ross, is also a writer. Did you feel a kinship in writing a character who wants to bear witness too?
Yes, her love of words is something I identify with, and the way Latin has stayed with her through the decades, as it has done with me, and did too with my mother, who lost a lot when she succumbed to dementia in her later years, but never her Latin. And yes, I wanted Jamesina Ross to be concerned with bearing witness, because that mattered to people then and it matters now, as much as ever.
It is also an intimate story of love found later in life. How do you tackle writing emotional vulnerability?
I feel my way into the character and try to be honest. I’m attracted to ambivalence and nuance – the fact that people can feel one way one day, one hour even, and something different the next. I like characters who can be irritable and grumpy … I identify with them.
What are your favourite love stories in fiction?
Goodness, there are lots. Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End leaps to mind. I also like love stories that don’t involve romance, like the one between Shuggie Bain and his mother.
What are you looking forward to reading next?
I’ve just finished Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. May need to give myself a laugh with some Dickens next – Birnam Wood has quite an ending.
Music in the Dark by Sally Magnusson is published by John Murray, priced £16.99.
David Robinson finds the beauty of church, art, and community in Peter Ross’s latest travelogue, Steeple Chasing.
Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church
By Peter Ross
Published by Headline
At the last four funerals I have been to, there hasn’t been a single hymn. I shouldn’t be too surprised: the growing unpopularity of Christian rituals of death is one of the signs of our times. As an example, consider this: direct cremations (no service, no mourners) used to be almost unheard of – even murderers and paupers got some sort of ceremonial send-off into the afterlife. Now they account for one in four of all funerals.
That’s how we are with death these days: increasingly, we’re giving it the cold, secular shoulder. We don’t want religious funerals in churches or chapels (none of my last four were), so the numbers have dropped by 80 per cent in the last decade. Bad news for the clergy and undertakers is good news for supermarkets and off-licences: according to the Co-op – which conducts 100,000 funerals a year – 21 per cent of us feel that the wake is more important than the funeral service.
So where does this leave Britain’s churches, those great traditional portals on the infinite? If we have lost faith in Christianity so much that we don’t even want to use its rites at the one moment when they might offer consolation, what’s the point in keeping churches open in the first place? As congregations dwindle and roof repair bills rise, can they ever be anything more than a costly irrelevance?
Such questions are at the heart of Peter Ross’s Steeple Chasing, an ecclesiastical echo of his graveyard explorations in A Tomb With A View, which went on to win the 2021 Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year award. The titular pun indicates that this is to be a journalistic journey: with 16,000 Anglican churches in England alone, anything other than an impressionistic survey of British Christianity’s ebbing sea of faith is impossible. For all that, his book is never less than fascinating, and even though some of its stop-off points are familiar (Lindisfarne, Durham, St Paul’s Cathedral), his chapters on the wooden angels guarding the medieval hammerbeam roofs of so many East Anglian churches, the Great East Window at Gloucester, Stanley Spencer’s painting The Resurrection of the Soldiers at Sandham in Hampshire, and the medieval mural The Ladder of Salvation of the Human Soul at Chaldon in Surrey have inspired me to add them all to my bucket-list.
Ross isn’t a believer himself, but his journalism has always been marked by the kind of deep empathy that makes this irrelevant. More than that, he knows where the core of a good story lies, and has a nose for the telling quote. So at Pluscarden Abbey, a monk tells him ‘I sometimes think it would be nice to have a wife. Or even a pair of socks’ and that matters every bit as much as the details of the monks’ centuries-old rituals. At Southwark, he tells the story of the cathedral cat’s meeting with the late Queen (‘This is Doorkins Magnificat, Ma’am’) so well that I found myself watching the service of thanksgiving for its life. He tracks down effigies so life-like that they could be horror film extras, talks to steeplejacks about working on buildings that sway in the wind, and tells a story about a Norfolk man who stopped satanists using the local village church and then – in a scene that could come straight from JL Carr’s A Month in the Country – uncovers 11th century paintings of angels on its nave walls.
At London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields (‘Refugees Welcome’) he helps serve meals to the homeless and needy in a chapter that goes on to offer one possible defence of keeping churches open in a post-Christian age – that the role they play in mental health counselling, addiction support groups and so on is, according to Treasury figures, worth a cool £55.7 billion. One does, though, suspect that his heart really isn’t in this purely utilitarian argument. The real value of churches, he maintains, is that they hold the past and present, decay and use, in a rare balance, that their buildings have a poetry and spirituality about them that only intensifies as they come under threat. As the head of a charity dedicated to rescuing such buildings points out, ‘These buildings transcend time. They are the spiritual investment and the artistic legacy of generations and a community’s greatest expression of itself over centuries.’ In France, all church buildings older than 1905 can, in theory, claim state aid for repairs. In Britain, where some 2,000 churches have closed over the last ten years, and where the Heritage Lottery Fund no longer has a special section to deal with churches, they are a lot more vulnerable.
Not all are. As Richard Holloway points out, visits to cathedrals are on the rise. That’s understandable: they are, after all, awe-inspiring in scale even now, as well as being vast repositories of our history – the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral is nothing less, says Ross, than England’s Valhalla. (Did you realise that the cathedral it replaced after the Great Fire of London was once the world’s biggest? Me neither).
In my own experience, the one church where past and present dissolve into each other most completely is Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh, of which Holloway was once rector, about which he wrote so compellingly in his memoir Leaving Alexandria. Ross does it full justice too, helped by excellent interviews with both Alison Watt, whose superlative painting Still hangs above the altar in the church’s Warrior’s Chapel, and Holloway himself. Personally, it’s art, not faith that imbues the place with such a deep sense of spirituality: the depth of Watt’s art and Holloway’s own writing, or the story I’ve heard him tell of his predecessor as rector, a double Military Cross winner in the First World War who was known for his compassion towards the poor and vulnerable.
Buildings like Old St Paul’s seem to stand outside time in a way that would make perfect sense to quite a number of people Ross interviews. At Durham, the aged guide talks about St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede as though they are both still living; at Lindisfarne, the former curate of the church next to the priory, tells him that as far as she is concerned Saints Aidan and Cuthbert ‘are just as alive as we are, though in a different state’. And although I wouldn’t go quite so far, I do think that knowledge of the past can, by making us aware of the fleetingness of our own lives, can gift us, however briefly, a sense of timelessness. Of all the reasons for taking up the hobby of what John Betjeman called ‘church-crawling’ – which Ross, tongue only slightly in cheek, suggests ought to be as popular as Munro-bagging – this is, I suspect, the one that chimes the loudest with him: that nowhere else do the past and present slip so easily into each other.
Although not quoted in Steeple Chasing, John Betjeman articulated similar thoughts in the poetry he wrote while serving as the press attache to the British High Commissioner in Dublin in 1941-3, especially those poems written while wandering round increasingly dilapidated graveyards in Church of Ireland country parishes. His poem ‘Emily in Ireland’, for example, ends like this:
There in pinnacled protection,
One extinguished family waits
A Church of Ireland resurrection
By the broken, rusty gates.
Sheepswool, straw and droppings cover,
Graves of spinster, rake and lover,
Whose fantastic mausoleum,
Sings its own seablown Te Deum,
In and out the slipping slates.
The slates slip, the family is extinguished, yet the poem is written in the present tense. The faith of the mausoleum’s builders – and, presumably the accompanying church – still sings out. Maybe the sea of faith is these days just a tideless, emptying pool, but as long as those buildings are there to remind us what it was, our horizons widen retrospectively across centuries, and we can imagine what faith must have felt like even if we no longer feel it ourselves. Peter Ross, I am certain, would completely understand.
Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church by Peter Ross is published by Headline, priced £22.
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