Cinico: Travels with a Good Professor at the Time of the Scottish Referendum

The narrator is an urbane, cynical and egocentric Italian journalist with little interest in the truth, though not as shabby as his companion, a professor of politics. The journalist meets people across the spectrum of ideas, and the book concerns not just political events, but how people interrelate within a social context, Scotland’s place in Europe and how Europeans interpret each other. The Italian encounters a range of Europeans: a Ukrainian nationalist, a Russian religious guru, an eccentric Estonian, an Algerian refugee, a Lithuanian, a dying man and many Scots from different walks of life. The narrator falls in love with a Scottish campaigner. Beneath the urbane veneer, he’s a complex mix of the old-fashioned and the fashionable, and the relationship soon encounters problems. The Italian, like Voltaire’s Candide, starts with a mindset incapable of bringing him either understanding or lasting contentment, and ends the book with some understanding and awareness, insufficient for the elusive happiness we all seek but sufficient for a perfectly acceptable human existence.

Reviews of Cinico: Travels with a Good Professor at the Time of the Scottish Referendum

Allan Cameron's modern Candide, an Italian journalist, whirls back and forth across the dark landscape of Scotland's 2014 independence referendum like a shoogly meteor. Sometimes his cynical, witty comments light up the dark corners of Yes thinking, sometimes the sullen assumptions of the Better Together campaign. He meets and hears a score of fascinating characters with their own opinions, most of them foreigners making their own effort to understand the country. Towards the end, the fictional Italian writes down some of the wisest and most moving comments to be found on the epiphany of those amazing months. – Neal Ascherson; "… there are deep insights and thoughts worth holding on to. … I enjoyed it much more the second time I read it and was better able to linger over the many nuggets that glowed for me. For, despite the occasional irritation with Cinico's cowardice and specious self-analyses, I soon recognised that he has a human core which is open to change." – Alex J. Craig, iScot