A Son of the Rock

Victor Gollancz, 1985, 157 p.

As its title betokens this novel is about the lives of the inhabitants of a tenement which is old, built of grey granite in a town on the east coast of Scotland, and is personified in the first chapter as being somewhat intolerant of young people, preferring its inhabitants to have lived a little. As we start there are no children living in the building.

On the top floor we have Mrs Miller, a now reclusive widow embittered by the death of her husband in a lightning strike. She has visited her daughter in Rhodesia, and has all the prejudices against “the blacks” which that engendered.

Opposite live Mr and Mrs Cameron. He is a dyed in the wool Protestant, hence naturally a rabid supporter of Rangers. He is profoundly anti-Catholic and beats his wife.

Below them are the Masons, still young and expecting a child. Mr Mason feels guilty that he does nothing to confront Cameron’s violence. On the same floor lives former teacher Trevor Porter who claims to be a poet but is unpublished and has regrets about the lack of attention he paid to his now late wife.

On the ground floor are Mrs Floss, left relatively well off when her husband died, who takes cruises – and lovers while she’s at it – and retired milkman Mr Cooper who has a summer job as a lavatory attendant, tales of which he regales to Mrs Mason, which she finds a bit creepy.

Each impinges on the others but mostly in passing until a celebration of the Masons’ baby leads to the novel’s signal act.

The novel has some insights but there is something curiously inconsequential about it all and nobody in the tenement the reader can really root for. It could have done with a leavening of the humour found in the author’s “Murdo” stories.

Pedant’s corner:- “There had been …. widowed, men” (no need for that comma,) “he had wakened up” (woken up,) “James’ car” (James’s,) mediaeval (hurrah!) “a Rangers’ supporter” (‘a Rangers supporter.’ No-one would write, for example ‘a Motherwell’s supporter.’)