Bullies in the mist
‘The Lucky Charm of Major Bessop: A Grotesque Mystery of Fife’ by Tom Hubbard (Grace Note Publications)
Tom Hubbard is a remarkable Scottish author. Best known perhaps as a poet, working in both English and Scots, he is also a distinguished scholar, critic, translator, and editor.
He has written a range of biographical studies of Victorian authors, compiled various anthologies, translated European poets, become an expert on the links between Scottish literature and Europe, and has masterminded two important projects in Scotland’s contemporary literary culture: in the period 1984-1992 he became the first librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library, and between 2002 and 2010 he headed up BOSLIT (Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation) – a much-needed and widely admired scholarly tool. I think it would be fair to describe Tom Hubbard as a rare example of a Scottish man of letters.
‘The Lucky Charm of Major Bessop’ is that notorious challenge – a second novel. ‘Marie B: A Biographical Novel’, based on the life of the late 19th-century Ukrainian artist Marie Bashkirtseff, appeared in 2008. The subject must have struck many readers as an oddly bizarre, even remote one, for a novel. But in fact it was an entirely characteristic choice, given Tom Hubbard’s readiness to surprise and even overturn an audience’s expectations.
In his intriguingly quirky second novel he does exactly the same thing. First of all there’s an issue over the book’s title. The reference to Major Bessop’s lucky charm proves to be entirely ironic and metaphorical, with the major turning out to be, almost incidentally, another character’s ‘talisman’ (the Scott reference is also in play) or ‘lucky charm’. Again, while an important character, the major, somewhat misleadingly, is in no sense the novel’s sole protagonist.
Then there is the setting in Fife. Born in Kirkcaldy, Tom Hubbard seems to retain a special relationship with the Kingdom. (In the same year as his first novel, he co-edited a work called ‘A Fife Anthology’.) But the Fife of this ‘Grotesque Mystery’ is a strangely unfamiliar one. The school inside which the novel’s main action takes place, is located in a deeply rural area of Fife, a place with wonderful views but also mysterious, hidden woods and quarries. Hubbard’s Fife is perhaps a poet’s one – a Fife of bloody medieval ballads, outside of time, its landscape blanketed at any moment by mirky mist and haar. The school itself is equally surprising.
Mauletoun Preparatory School is no secondary modern or Scottish high school. It turns out to be an English-style boys’ public school somehow located in deepest Fife. (Had it been in nearby Perthshire, the element of surprise would have been lost.) The teaching staff is composed of Englishmen with a military background; the only women in the school are matrons and nurses; the sport that matters is rugby, and there is an emphasis on discipline, loyalty, a stiff upper lip and a kind of militaristic fitness and masculinity. In other words Tom Hubbard has written what at one level is a parody of the conventional ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ public school novel, complete with Flashman-style bullying and hints of homosexuality.
The novel has two time settings: 2012 and 1962. A character in 2012 is trying to explore the mysterious situation that led to the closing down of Mauletoun School, its brief existence as Crockarkie College, and its final demise in 1967. However the primary focus is on a recreating of the school and what went on in it in 1962-3 – the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy and the Profumo/ Christine Keeler scandal – the schoolboys, we learn, typically enough, snigger over its details.
A range of narrative procedures is deployed to build up the picture of the school. Sometimes an omniscient narrator is present, at others different characters in short chapters or monologues provide their individual perspectives in their own voices. Only one pupil voice is heard – he’s from Glasgow and is totally untypical of the pupils in general. Unsporty, interested in art and music, he is a kind of joker in the pack and survives by playing up to that role. Hubbard evokes the Scots of his Glasgow voice brilliantly. The voices of the bullies and their victim, on the other hand, remain silent – though from the opening pages we know ‘wee Burtie’s’ fate is a dire one: ‘Poor auld Burtie. It wasnae a nice way to go, the way he went’.
The voices of the teachers – the main actors in the story – reflect their English background. From the pipe-smoking, constantly Shakespeare-quoting, headmaster Henry Baxendale, to Colonel Peter Malory, Major Richard Bessop, and Captain Norman Wilkie (born in Scotland but not that one could tell), the world of the school remains utterly that of the English public school tradition. There is an alternative world on offer, but it is not in Scotland. It is in Amsterdam in the post-war Netherlands. Amsterdam proves to be a good place to live, mature enough to cope with ‘the grimmer legends’ of Fife and by implication the evil that the English public school in Fife fails to deal with in the case of the viciously bullied Burt.
What Tom Hubbard has written, I believe, is a tragically failing ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. The teachers all know that poor Burt is being horribly victimised; but the code to which they subscribe prevents them from saving him. Malory, Bessop and Wilkie all have outstanding war records, but Hubbard seems to be suggesting that the evil with which war confronted them has in the end proved too much for their own humanity. As the colonel surmises ‘the challenges of peace’ turn out to ‘match those of war’. This novel touches lightly on other major themes – about the relationship between the past and the present, about the reliability of evidence in the attempt to recover the past, about how to balance the farcical with a tragic sense of life’s meaning, about the nature of artistic truth: ‘Remember, too, that any narrator can be sae unreliable that ye cannae rely on him to be always unreliable’.
Some readers may find the novel’s ending unsatisfactory in that it leaves who exactly did what and why to poor Burt unresolved. But for me this second novel has only one major flaw. The character who describes Major Bessop as her ‘lucky charm’ is a nurse from America’s deep south. Here is her voice in her opening monologue: ‘Man, I’m pooped. But I thought I oughter git back to my journal. What I’m gonna write, though, I don’t think I’m gonna show it to the folks back home, I’d be lynched man’.
For once Tom Hubbard’s command of voice is less than assured. Gayle, despite distancing herself from ‘all that typical Southern shit’, never to my mind manages to establish an authentic-sounding voice. In a novel distinguished by a poetically illuminating and constantly imaginative use of language, this is a disappointing flaw. Nonetheless, ‘The Lucky Charm of Major Bessop’ is certainly lucky enough to pass the second novel challenge with something to spare.
By Andrew Hook | July 2015