A Son of the Rock

Polygon, 1991, 236 p. One of the 100 best Scottish Books.

This seems a consciously literary endeavour. It has no fewer than four epigraphs, a prefatory two-page introduction telling us that what follows is a day and night in the life of a Scottish city and that its three main characters are encompassed by a sequence of symbols of the major arcana of the Tarot, before riffing on the importance of dreaming and the imagination. Each subsequent narrative section begins with a page or two in page-centred bold print, sometimes using multiple fonts and sizes, headed with the time of day it refers to. Characters’ thoughts – italicised and also centred on the page – pop up in between the descriptive, or indeed speech, passages making the layout for those elements appear as a poem might. In the sections focusing on Douglas Shaw speech is denoted by opening ‘<>’ rather than the usual quote marks. Throughout, contractions such as can’t, won’t, couldn’t etc are rendered without their usual apostrophe.

Those three main characters are nineteen-year-old Ray Craig, searching for some blow, Helen Orr, 24, who married at seventeen but left her husband because he hit her (yet her mother wants her to get back with him,) and works in a casino’s restaurant, and Douglas Shaw, a drug dealer using an antique shop in a run-down but likely to gentrify area as a front and who is waiting for a big deal in Holland to come off. Helen now lives above Douglas’s shop in a flat rented from him – with whom she is in a loose relationship – while Ray comes across Douglas while seeking his hit and is offered a job (and that flat as a place to stay) by him.

There is nothing particularly memorable about their interactions or, indeed, their backgrounds. The only thing lifting A Day at the Office out of the ordinary as a novel is the typographical eccentricity of its layout. Which is not to say it’s bad. Not at all. I have certainly read a lot worse. I don’t think I would put it near my list of best 100 Scottish books, though.

Pedant’s corner:- mantlepiece (mantelpiece,) “taken care off” (of,) Douglas’ (several times, Douglas’s,) St Leonards (St Leonard’s,) “a gang of scaffolders were setting up” (a gang … was setting up,) “a second gang were at work” (was at work,) |”that brought to Douglas mind his brother” (Douglas’s,) a missing close quote mark at the end of one piece of speech, “or spit back” (spat back,) some missing full stop at sentences ends, stunk (stank,) focussed (focused.) “The opera was reaching a crescendo” (no. It wasn’t; the opera’s crescendo was reaching a climax,) “making with an effort at a smile” (that ‘with’ is unnecessary,) beneficient (beneficent) “on the bed next her” (‘next to her’ is more organic.)