A Son of the Rock

Hodder, 2006, 366 p. One of the Herald’s “100” best Scottish Fiction Books. Returned to a threatened library.

Set against the backdrop of the late 1990s foot-and-mouth outbreak this is a police procedural crime novel whose main viewpoint character is Detective Inspector Marjory Fleming,* wife of a farmer and mother of two children. Also prominent is the figure of Laura Sonfeldt, a psychologist newly returned to Britain from New York (and a failed marriage) and resolved to find out what happened to her sister who had disappeared from home over ten years before. There are also odd passages from the viewpoint of an at first mysterious third woman who is estranged from her family, the invitation by the author being for us to believe this is Laura’s sister.

For all I know the treatment may be typical of a crime novel, my acquaintance with that genre isn’t extensive, but I found it programmatic, with excessive information dumping and, for me, too much of a ‘by the numbers’ vibe to the writing. An underling with an annoying habit? ✔. A subordinate who is a loose cannon? ✔. Problematic relationships – this time with the detective’s father – ? ✔. A strained marriage? ✔ – but only because of the stress induced by the foot-and-mouth quarantine and subsequent slaughter. And the body, though we know from the somewhat overwritten prologue a murder has already taken place, doesn’t appear till page 136, a third of the way through the book, which seems a touch reticent. Then too there was a strained striving for an unusual angle with the introduction of therianthropy as an aspect of the character of one of the suspects. Then there was that coyness with regard to the third narrative viewpoint.

Detective/crime novels are not really my thing so the above ought to be read in that light but this novel was one of the entries in the Herald’s list of 100 best Scottish Fiction books (see link in this post’s header.) I severely doubt it would get close to my top 800. It did however contain the impeccably Scottish reflection, “It spoke to him, this countryside, in a language he’d all but forgotten at a level too deep to explain even to himself,” so fair dos.

*I did wonder if Templeton’s use of the name Marjory Fleming was somehow related to “Pet Marjory.” It is otherwise quite a coincidence.

Pedant’s corner:- his gas on a peep (at a peep,) Menzies’ (Menzies’s,) Jake Morgan, (Jake Mason,) bairns and weans used interchangeably, ‘Would I of done that if..?’ (Even in dialogue it irritates me that it wasn’t ‘Would I have done that?’)