The Guardian has published a list of the 100 best novels of all time.

I was particuarly delighted to see Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness appear there but no 89 is really too low. Some of the others are on my tbr pile.

Shockingly – to me at least – Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is not there though I note Maggie O’Farrell did include James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (the quintessential Scottish novel) in her top ten.

The others I have read are:-

80 Rebecca

79 Go Tell It on the Mountain

75 The Bluest Eye

71 Kindred

66 The Master and Margarita

63 White Teeth

62 Half of a Yellow Sun

56 Mansfield Park

51 My Brilliant Friend

50 Wide Sargasso Sea

46 The Leopard

41 Heart of Darkness

36 The Handmaid’s Tale

35 Great Expectations

34 Wolf Hall

33 David Copperfield

31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

30 Frankenstein

29 Pale Fire

23 Midnight’s Children

22 Things Fall Apart

20  Wuthering Heights

18 Persuasion

17 One Hundred Years of Solitude

16 Nineteen Eighty-Four

14 Mrs Dalloway

13 Emma

09 Pride and Prejudice

08 Jane Eyre

07 War and Peace

04 To the Lighthouse

02 Beloved

I mentioned recently in my review of Christopher Rush’s A Twelvemonth and a Day that it fell into that long list of laments with which the Scottish novel is liberally bestowed – going back at least as far as the poem on the state of the nation written on King Alexander III’s death after falling from a cliff in Fife in 1286, but which may well be an oral tradition older still.

This sense of things lost seems to be an itch which Scottish letters is unable not to scratch.

Many of the books on the 100 best Scottish Books list fall into this tradition; of the ones I have read not only the Rush but also Iain Crichton Smith’s Consider the Lilies, Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place, William McIlvanney’s Docherty, George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, Neil M Gunn’s The Silver Darlings, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song certainly qualify. Arguably Jessie Kesson’s The White Bird Passes also fits the bill; its title certainly does.

Whether this dwelling on things gone by is due to a sense of lost nationhood or not is a matter for debate but the itch is played out not just in Scottish literature, the lament is a major strand in bagpiping and has a long history in song (eg The Flowers o’ the Forest.) The Proclaimers’ Letter From America – “Bathgate no more” etc – is merely a modern take on the form.

Another important strand in the Scottish novel is that of the döppelganger/the supernatural. Here James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which can certainly be seen as a reflection on the duality of the Scots psyche after the Treaty of Union as well as an illustration of Scottish literature’s fascination with the Devil, is the prototypical – and arguably the finest – example though Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is perhaps better known furth of Scotland.

On thinking about all this I realised that, despite being Science Fiction, my own novel A Son of the Rock was also such a lament (though it eschews any truck with the supernatural.) The book was certainly conceived in part as an allegory of the decline of shipbuilding on the Clyde which had occurred in my early lifetime but I had not consciously been aware of any wider resonances while I was writing it. I did though somewhat impertinently consider it as a “condition of Scotland” novel.

Perhaps Scotland’s condition has always been in decline, its writers always noticing what has been, is being, lost. I note here that Andrew Grieg’s Fair Helen is a retrospective lament for the loss of “wit and laughter, music and dance and kindliness” in the Reformation.