A Son of the Rock

Canongate, 2011, 395 p.

Murray Watson is a lecturer in English, having an affair with Rachel, the wife of his head of department, Fergus Baine. Murray is about to go on sabbatical to research the life and untimely death by drowning of all-but-forgotten poet Archie Lunan. He also has a complicated relationship with his brother, Jack, an artist who is mining the dementia of their father for his art.

Watson’s researches take him to the ex-department head, Professor James, who knew Lunan in his youth, and suggests Blaine had greater knowledge of the poet than he admits to, and to the island of Lismore off which Lunan died and where Lunan’s lover, Christie Graves, still lives. She wrote a book in the aftermath of Lunan’s death of which Professor James says, “I think it had something better than authenticity. It had integrity, and that’s all the truth we can ever hope for.”

On the island, with some input from his B&B proprietrix Mrs Dunn and Graves’s more-or-less unwilling assistance, Watson untangles the circumstances of Lunan’s death and Blaine’s connection to them.

The book is readable enough but in the end becomes an uneasy crossover of a novel of contemporary manners and crime story. Still, Welsh has an eye for characterization and description.

Pedant’s corner:- Hastings’ (Hastings’s,) “maybe she had always intended to it end like this” (it to end like this; or, to end it like this,) “a new wave of Scottish poets were throwing off the class-consciousness, self-obsession and non-poetic subject matter of the previous generation” (a new wave was throwing off,) “the management were simply optimistic business would pick up” (the management was optimistic,) “watched them slide slowly through the yellow viscous, like migrating stars” (the viscous what? Viscous is an adjective, not a noun,) “a root aboot in” (about,) “the Great Western road” (it’s always just been Great Western Road, no “the”,) “the prospect of whole new exhibition” (a whole new,) politeness’ (politeness’s,) rawl plugs (rawlplugs,) Meilke (elsewhere always Meikle,) “had hung himself” (hanged,) Reeves’ (Reeves’s,) fleur-de-lis (it was plural, so, fleurs-de-lis, or fleurs-de-lys,) sung (sang,) “the way another women” (either other women, or, another woman,) sunk (sank,) “the Barralands Ballroom” (is often pronounced that way but is actually Barrowlands,) an extraneous single end quote mark, “a homemade stigmata” (stigmata is plural, one of them would be a stigma.) “He’s been one of” (He’d been,) “‘Aren’t I?’” (the speaker was Scots, so, ‘Amn’t I?’) “Murray dropped their speed to crawl” (to a crawl.)