A battle of strategy against SR
Kenneth Roy
How a public body dealt with
our investigation
Also on this page:
John Forsyth
A broadcaster on the Marr fiasco
Nemesis and after
Alf Young
The mid-term disaster for Obama
is only the start of his troubles
Also on this page:
Alan Fisher
How is Palin to be stopped?
Give my regards
to Mr Reid
Norman Fenton
A fond remembrance of the Clydeside saviour
Also on this page:
Dharmendra Singh
SR’s weekly film review
Alone but not lonely
Ena Lamont Stewart
The Scottish playwright on old age
Also on this page:
Andrew Hook
A big book
Rear Window
In Rear Window this week, we republish three short instalments from an article by the playwright Ena Lamont Stewart published in SR after her death in 2006. Her masterpiece,
‘Men Should Weep’, opened last week at the National Theatre in London to critical adulation. In her later years, Ena Lamont Stewart left her native Glasgow to
live in Ayrshire.
Now I am an inhabitant of a much more important Prestwick. I now live in what is called, I believe, a ‘granny house’ attached to my son’s bungalow. It doesn’t take me
more than 15 minutes – even with my rheumaticy old legs – to get down to the beach and watch the sun go down behind Arran; a flare-path laid down on the water invites
me to fly across.
Seagulls arrive and stay for a confab; dogs dive in for a splash; in the winter, waves lap the sea-tangled flotsam; in the summer, the little here-and-there sailing dinghies lean to the wind. There is something about standing alone on the shore looking at the sun’s flare-path: a seagull, left wing down, making a neat landing to join a couple of pals rocking gently on the waves; a dog having a last noisy splash. The sun sets. I am alone on this shore in the after-glow.
I am used to being alone. I am not lonely. Well, not often lonely. Just a little tired, now and again, of talking to myself in my head. It worries me sometimes, this on-going
dialogue. I hope my lips don’t move; my eyes betray. But how do I know? People are too polite to stop and say: ‘Excuse me, but do you know your feelings are showing?’ But if I’m talking at all, it is to the stars. At the back of my little house, gazing, stiff-necked, at all those stars I ignored when I lived in a city. I gaze and gaze. Night clouds are so mysterious: they have huge blue-black rents in them; they mend and tear again; dissolve and drift over the face of the sailing moon. I never really knew the moon in town except through my window when – if it was a new moon – I turned a coin in shame-faced superstition in case – just in case – she should be offended if I didn’t, and take back that which I had in the way of money: never much at the best of times.
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Poems by Gerard Rochford
Today’s banner
Central Station, Glasgow
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Moffat brown
Islay McLeod
On the road to Moffat, Dumfriesshire
A big book
Andrew Hook
In James Kelman’s Booker prize-winning novel ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ (1994), there is a scene in which the incarcerated Sammy, the novel’s protagonist, comments on a cell-mate using a personal stereo: ‘ye knew he was coming a cropper: he had gave up the ghost; sitting there backed into the wall with his eyes shut, his knees up and his chin down, the earplugs, dreaming his fucking dreams’.
This image of the personal stereo prisoner – eyes shut, ears plugged – is a defining one for the kind of novel that in recent years has come to dominate Scottish fiction. In novel after novel writers have succeeded brilliantly in focusing on and creating characters who, for a variety of reasons – social, political, psychological – find themselves ignored, shut out, disconnected from any meaningful contact with the surrounding world. The resulting self-enclosed, limited consciousness is evoked for the reader with astonishing intensity, immediacy and vividness. ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ is the classic example of the genre, well worth the Booker and every other prize.
What defines the so-called ‘Glasgow’ school of contemporary novelists – Kelman himself, Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney, Jeff Torrington, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, and of course Irvine Welsh – is a commitment to giving a voice, to a greater or lesser degree, to the Scottish working or under-class, to the ignored, the neglected, the dispossessed. And in a general sense, the job has been done.
No account of contemporary Scottish culture, and of Scottish literary culture in particular, could possibly ignore the impact of the Glasgow school. But they are not the whole story.
Alongside their familiar names, there exists another group of Scottish novelists working within an alternative tradition of Scottish writing. Their immediate antecedent is the unjustly neglected James Kennaway, but today’s Allan Massie, Ronald Frame, Iain Banks, William Boyd (if we can lay claim to him as Scottish) and Emma Tennant continue to create fictions in which plot and character are able to engage with that wider world of society, history, politics, art and culture that Sammy and the other oppressed and victimised characters of the Glasgow school are inevitably excluded from.
Is it possible for a writer to bring together in some way these two traditions of the contemporary Scottish novel? Well in my view that is exactly what James Robertson has achieved in his splendid new novel ‘And the Land Lay Still’. Robertson is of course already an established and admired contemporary writer. His 2003 novel ‘Joseph Knight’ gained both prizes and critical praise – and deserved even more. Its evocation of life in enlightened 18th-century Scotland, and on the Scottish-owned and run slave plantations in Jamaica, is compelling. It proves that in the right hands the historical novel is very much alive and well. (That is why it is so surprising to learn that, in terms of sales, ‘Joseph Knight’ is the least popular of Robertson’s novels: what are all those American professors with their literature courses in colonialism, slavery, and racism thinking about?)
The new novel is a big book – and not only in the sense that it’s almost 700 pages long. It is big as Grassic Gibbon’s ‘Scots Quair’ is big. It is big as McIlvanney’s ‘Docherty’ is big. It is big as Gray’s ‘Lanark’ is big. ‘And the Land Lay Still’ charts the movement of 50 years of Scottish history from 1947 to 1997, evoking a changing society, economy, morality, and political world – including the story of the emergence of the SNP, a story handled with a Scott-like even-handedness.
Its settings range as widely: from the remotest north-west of Sutherlandshire, through mining villages and provincial towns, to Edinburgh and Glasgow. Its characters, created with an almost Dickensian richness, emerge from and define every level of the class structure of Scottish society. Readers may find such range and variety of characters hard to keep up with. (There’s no harm in checking back…) And Robertson does not choose to bring them all together through the kind of complex plotting that a Victorian novelist might have chosen to invent. Most of these characters act out their own story – inside or outside a family structure. But as in a Faulkner or Dos Passos novel, the story of one character will fleetingly intersect with that of another.
The narrative structure is not a simple linear one. There are many flashbacks, recollected memories, surreal moments, interminglings of past and present. Does Robertson succeed in unifying such a country-wide sweep of material? I think he does. His sense of an ending has always been keen. Joseph Knight, the actual slave brought from Jamaica to Scotland by his owner, and finally freed by the Court of Session in Edinburgh in 1778, thereafter disappears from history. James Robertson finds him in a brilliant flight of the creative imagination.
‘And the Land Lay Still’ ends with parallel brilliance. In allowing one of his main characters – a photographer – to explain how he has arranged a retrospective exhibition of the work of his father – a more successful photographer – Robertson is able to comment on the nature of his own work as a novelist, forming and structuring a picture of the Scotland of the recent past. The intellectualism of these pages then fades into an electrifying account of the link between the photographs on the gallery’s wall and the lives of some of the characters with whom we have become involved. It is an ending that is emotionally powerful and extraordinarily moving. A big book indeed.
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University
