A Son of the Rock

Paul Harris Publishing, 1982, 253 p, plus vi p Introduction by P H Butter. First published in 1932.

Edwin Muir is better known as a poet but he wrote three novels of which this is the third.

The plot centres round the conflict arising when Tom Manson finds out his brother Mansie has begun seeing Helen Wiliamson, a girl whom Tom had previously walked out with.

This causes tension within the family, the brothers stop speaking to each other and Tom starts drinking to excess.

For a book published in 1932 and set in 1911 there is a considerable emphasis on sexual matters. Of the imaginings of becoming intimate with a woman we are told, “Such secret pleasures are exciting, but they leave a sense of guilt towards the object that was employed to produce them. Tom was filled with shame that such thoughts should come into his mind when he was with Helen, and told himself he was a waster.”

There is stress too on the attractions of Socialism to those of Mansie’s persuasion and social standing, and of the similarity of its tenets to Christianity.

Tom has a bad fall under the influence of drink and thereafter suffers a series of headaches which increasingly incapacitate him. Both he and Mansie (but not the reader) are confused by the doctors they consult about Tom’s condition asking whether he has ever associated with loose women.

As the illness progresses reconciliation occurs and we are treated more to Mansie’s reflections on having an invalid in the house.

As a novel this is not entirely successful. As an insight into aspects of life in pre-Great War Glasgow (the Mansons had moved there from a farm some time before the novel begins) it is certainly better than Guy McCrone’s books about the extended Moorhouse family.

Pedant’s corner:- in the Introduction; superceded (superseded.) Otherwise; threatingly (threateningly,) Maisie (elsewhere always Mansie,) inimaginable (usually ‘unimaginable’,) excretary (excretory,) “he turned and literally flew downstairs” (not literally.)