A reference to Siouxsie and the Banshees in Andrew Greig’s In Another Light (review to come) reminded me of the band’s treatment of this Beatles’ song.

Siouxsie and the Banshees: Dear Prudence

This has been a good year for books with me though I didn’t read much of what I had intended to as first I was distracted by the list of 100 best Scottish Books and then by the threat to local libraries – a threat which has now become a firm decision. As a result the tbr pile has got higher and higher as I continued to buy books and didn’t get round to reading many of them.

My books of the year were (in order of reading):-
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Electric Brae by Andrew Greig
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman
The Affair in Arcady by James Wellard
Flemington and Tales from Angus by Violet Jacob
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi
Song of Time by Ian R MacLeod
The Gowk Storm by Nancy Brysson Morrison
The Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andrić
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Fair Helen by Andrew Greig
The Dear, Green Place by Archie Hind
Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Cone-Gatherers by Robin Jenkins
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Born Free by Laura Hird
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

If you were counting that’s 25 in all, of which 15 were by male authors and 10 by women, 8 had SF/fantasy elements and 11 were Scottish (in the broadest sense of inclusion.)

A lot of my Scottish reading this year was prompted by the list of 100 best Scottish Books I discovered in February. Those marked below with an asterisk are in that 100 best list. (In the case of Andrew Greig’s Electric Brae I read it before I was aware of the list and for Robert Louis Stevenson his novella was in the book of his shorter fiction that I read.)

Electric Brae by Andrew Greig*
A Sparrow’s Flight by Margaret Elphinstone
The Guinea Stamp by Annie S Swan
The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
The White Bird Passes by Jessie Kesson*
Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks by Christopher Brookmyre
Buddha Da by Anne Donovan*
Flemington by Violet Jacob*
Tales From Angus by Violet Jacob
Annals of the Parish by John Galt
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
Change and Decay in All Around I See by Allan Massie
The Hangman’s Song by James Oswald
Wish I Was Here by Jackie Kay
The Hope That Kills Us Edited by Adrian Searle
Other stories and other stories by Ali Smith
Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi*
The Gowk Storm by Nancy Brysson Morrison*
No Mean City by H McArthur and H Kingsley Long*
Shorter Scottish Fiction by Robert Louis Stevenson*
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett*
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
Fair Helen by Andrew Greig
The Dear, Green Place by Archie Hind*
Fur Sadie by Archie Hind
Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown*
Stepping Out by Cynthia Rogerson
Open the Door! by Catherine Carswell*
The Silver Darlings by Neil M Gunn*
Scotia Nova edited by Alistair Findlay and Tessa Ransford
After the Dance: selected short stories of Iain Crichton Smith
John Macnab by John Buchan
Another Time, Another Place by Jessie Kesson
Consider the Lilies by Iain Crichton Smith*
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan*
Poems Iain Banks Ken MacLeod
Mistaken by Annie S Swan
Me and Ma Gal by Des Dillon*
Tea with the Taliban: poems by Owen Gallagher
A Choosing by Liz Lochhead
The Cone Gatherers by Robin Jenkins*
Born Free by Laura Hird*
the first person and other stories by Ali Smith

That makes 42 books in all (plus 2 if the Violet Jacob and Archie Hind count double.) None were non-fiction, 3 were poetry, 2 SF/Fantasy, 19 + (4x½ + 3 doublers) by men, 13 + (3 doublers and 1 triple) by women, 2 had various authors/contributors.

Polygon, 2007, 274 p (+ v p introduction by Andrew Greig.) First published 1925. Returned to a threatened library.

I would not normally have picked this up but when I saw the cover and that the introduction was by Andrew Greig I realised his The Return of John Macnab (on my tbr pile) must have some relation to this original, first published in 1924.

In it, three professional men, one a Cabinet minister, all bored with their lives, get together as “John Macnab” to send out a challenge to three Highland landowners that they will poach a stag or salmon on their land, remove it, then later return it, with money for charity depending on the result either way. The book is merely the unravelling of this premise and the delineation of the incidents which occur in its prosecution. It does give a peek at the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ brigade of the Western Highlands in the 1920s.

It is none of the three gentlemen however who is the book’s most rounded and intriguing character. That accolade belongs to Janet Raden, daughter of the owner of one of the estates to which “Macnab” issued his challenge. To their host Sir Archibald Roylance, who has fallen tongue-tiedly in love with her, she at one point says that the old aristocracy is dying because it deserves to, “We’ve long ago lost our justification.” However, in his introduction Greig says of her, “Like all Buchan’s good women she is essentially a chap,” a view to which there is more than a grain of truth.

It is not too surprising in a book concerned with field sports that descriptions of landscape should be prominent but this also places it in common with a swath of Scottish writing.

The authorial voice perhaps pokes through when we are told that “It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.” Here meaning if you’re used to ordering others – or being ordered – that affects how your actions are perceived and acted on.

To those of delicate dispositions I ought to say that – indications of the attitudes of the times in which it was written – there is more than one mention of Jews as being either fond of money or influential, an instance of the word “nigger,” and an utterance of the phrase, “I’m a white man, I am,” as an assertion of integrity.

The book is not really more than an adventure story. It will be interesting to see what Greig makes of the premise.

Pedant’s corner:- The Miss Radens (The Misses Raden.)

A Modern Romance. faber and faber, 2002, 312 p.

Love, sex and death. Of the three main preoccupations of the novelistic art only the last might truly be expected from what is a deeply Scottish novel. But as its subtitle suggests, Andrew Greig’s first novel Electric Brae is a love story. And while a modern romance can also be expected to deal with sex what there is here is not graphic and is absolutely necessary to the tale.

The generally linear narrative isn’t entirely straightforward and moves from first to third person and back again, ditto from past to present tense, but does so seemingly naturally, without jarring, and also uses Scots words and phrases organically and unapologetically.

Set against a background of the transition to, and the years of, Thatcher’s premiership and the jolt to the Scottish psyche that produced, the story starts with the meeting, on a mountain in Glencoe, between Jimmy Renilson, an engineer on the rigs whose voice bears most of the narration duties, and the man who becomes his best friend and climbing partner, the committed socialist Graeme. This is before we encounter the love interest, Kim Russell (though it’s really Ruslawska,) a woman about ten years younger than Jimmy and possessed of eyes that beguile him. As these three plus Graeme’s girlfriend Lesley and others in their circle orbit round each other the course of true love – here explicitly acknowledged as an addiction – fails to run smooth. It rarely does, or else we’d have no story; and the canon of literature would be rather empty.

Kim is a troubled soul, given to self-harm and driven to produce art works that fail to assuage the core of her angst. “All art is exaggeration,” she says, “that’s the trouble with it.” But all the characters give off the air of real breathing people, except perhaps for Mick DeTerre, an anti-establishment activist, who seems too broad brush.

Significant locations in the book roam all over Scotland, ranging from Eyemouth in the Southeast, up to Aberdeen, Orkney and later Shetland, Fort William and Ben Nevis in the West, Dunbar notably, and finally Prestwick. The art of rock climbing and some individual Scottish climbs are described at various points. It is a longstanding ambition of Graeme and Jimmy that they will one day “knock off” the Old Man of Hoy, preferably together.

Without shying away from the sentimentality that can lurk beneath the reserve, the novel does however touch on the heart of Scottishness and what differentiates it from its southern neighbour, in especial the inability of the Scottish male to acknowledge “the squishy stuff” of emotion, to admit even to friendship.

It addresses too the Scots shrinking from pretentiousness. At one point Jimmy remembers Lesley telling him that, “Graeme must conclude any intelligent statement with an expletive. As if to apologise for his articulacy,” adding for our benefit, “Clinging to the wreckage Lesley calls it.” Graeme says, in contrast to Scotland about the Falklands War, [Editorial insert:- sorry; police action] “England’s gone off its heid wi this war,” and on the failure of the miners’ strike, “Everyone for themselves these days, eh? It’s no the Scottish way.”

Jimmy himself has more than a few observations about Scotland and the Scots:-
“Deferred gratification, we love it. It lets us square Calvinism with hedonism.”
“Who are we? I wondered. We don’t even speak consistently. We’ll say ‘yes’ and ‘aye’ and ‘yeah’ in the same conversation, alternate between ‘know’ and ‘ken’,¹ ‘bairn’, ‘wean’ and ‘child’² and not even know why.”
“We’re a small country with blurry boundaries.”
“Have I mentioned that good sex is wonderful, a human joy, even in Scotland?”
Of the places listed over the radio in his childhood as in danger of snow and ice, “Some places, like some people, you love before you’ve ever met,” and on being accused of sentimentality over his love of the Scottish landscape, “Someone said sentimentality is the expenditure of emotion on an unworthy object. Do you think this country’s unworthy?”
“We’re living in a banana republic that disnae even have its ain government to be corrupted.”
“Scots prefer the bludgeon of sarcasm,” (rather than use irony.)
“A culture of stoic suffering is limiting but has its uses.”

He notes after a sojourn abroad that, “while he’d been away the value of property had gone up and on the whole that of people had gone down,” and “Great to be back in Scotland, the home of constructive criticism,” along with, “Judging by the estate agent’s at the top of the wynd, where people used to have a home, now clients invested in a property.”
“Mrs Thatcher had done us one great service for she was a litmus test. Three times she dipped the UK into her solution and each time the bottom part came out blue and the top pinker than the time before. We had forgotten we were different, and that difference went deeper than a taste for haggis, Murrayfield and Hampden and an inability to take seriously anyone called Nigel.” [Editorial insert:- This last sentiment, true enough when Electric Brae was first published in 1992, has become even more apposite in the past decade.]

He complains to a later lover, the Englishwoman Ruth, “All this stuff everyone talks about these days, about taking responsibility, taking charge, taking decisions, taking on board – it sounds like too much taking to me.” “Jimmy,” she said, “you’ll never adjust to the Eighties. That’s why I live up here – because most of you still believe the dream might just work. You still seem to think we’re interdependent… You won’t find many still believe that down South.”

Jimmy also sums up the Scottish mind-set, “You’re asking me to think, to come clean at this hour in the morning, with three-hundred close-hearted, tight-lipped Protestant years sitting on my neck?” More generally he muses, “Climbing’s no dafter than roping your happiness to someone else,” and, “It was hard but nothing compared to what we do to each other.”

Though the author does let Jimmy off a large moral hook a touch too easily near the end (though not an arguably greater one) and the symbolism is at times forced, all in all this is superb stuff, about the importance of relationships and mutual dependency.

And the Electric Brae? Apart from being one of the place names in the radio snow reports it is not mentioned at all in the book except in the excerpt from A Fly Fisherman’s Guide by H O N MacCaig that is quoted as a frontispiece. The Brae itself is a hill in Ayrshire that seems to defy gravity. In this sense of disorientation it is a great descriptor for the appearance of madness that love can take.

¹If you’re from the East coast.
²“bairn” and “child” if you’re from the East coast, “wean” and “child” if you’re from the West.

Pedant’s corner:- “Next weekend I’d cragging again with Graeme.” “born away on a receding tide” (borne) Lichtenstein (Liechtenstein.) “The longer you stay, bigger the bill will be when you leave.” Glamourous. “It didn’t looked played much.” “He stared back the Old Man.” Seperate. “Half of last the night.” “She hadn’t asked me too” (“asked me to” makes more sense,) Betty (Bette?) Davis, Casopeia (Cassiopeia) glaxy (galaxy,) self-centered (self-centred,) schlerosis (sclerosis,) whaft (waft,) whispy (wispy,) a whailing (wailing?) wall, smoothes.

Several Scots words appeared in unusual spellings; greit (for weep) is more usually greet, fousty (foosty or at a pinch foostie,) bisom (a rare variant of besom,) plouk (plook,) cheuchter (definitely teuchter,) wheich (definitely wheech.)

Twelve months gone and 29 books “Scottish” books read. (Or 30 if The Member and The Radical count as two; then again perhaps only 27 if A Scots Quair is treated as a single book.) That’s 2½ per month, give or take. And, if you discount the exceptions already mentioned, not a repeat author in the list.

2 were non-fiction; 4 outright SF/Fantasy; 18 were written by men (20 if the trilogy is separated) and 9 by women. (That gender disparity is lessened by 50% if you consider only authors still alive in 2014, though.)

I’m pleased to have caught up with John Galt and have already bought two more of his novels, delighted to have read A Scots Quair at last, made acquaintance with William Graham, Neil M Gunn, Carole Johnstone, Jackie Kay, Agnes Owens, Muriel Spark and Alan Spence and refound Naomi Mitchison. My main discovery, though, was Andrew Greig whose That Summer is the best book by a writer new to me (Scottish or not) since I first encountered Andrew Crumey.

My review of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life is still to appear. See later this week, or even tomorrow.

There is apparently a Read Scotland Challenge 2015. I don’t think I’ll make 29 this year. I’ve got a lot of other reading to catch up on.

The ones that stick in my mind most – for whatever reason – are:-

Signs of Life by M John Harrison
Mr Mee by Andrew Crumey
Be My Enemy by Ian McDonald
The Deadman’s Pedal by Alan Warner
A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon – but in especial Sunset Song
The Moon King by Neil Williamson
The Dogs and the Wolves by Irène Némirovsky
The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani
HHhH by Laurent Binet
That Summer by Andrew Greig
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Way to Go by Alan Spence

Four SF/Fantasy novels, six Scottish ones (eight if the trilogy is separated) and no less than five translated works.

faber and faber, 2000, 261 p.

Scot Andrew Greig’s first book contained poetry. He has since published more poetry collections, non-fiction books on mountaineering and golf, short stories and, so far, seven novels. That Summer (also known as The Clouds Above) was his fourth novel and the first work of his I have read.

The summer of the title is the one of 1940, a fact which could be divined from the book’s cover, showing as it does a Hurricane in flight over a country landscape (with a shadowy female head in the upper background.) There is an elegiac feel to the story from the start, as, sixty years on, a reunion of sorts takes place at a long abandoned wartime airfield; yet the figures seem insubstantial, ghosts of themselves, or of those who cannot come back.

As a novel, That Summer deals with those three perennial literary concerns, love, sex and death. The narration is trifold, with all three intermingled through the book. Two are in first person – from the viewpoints of (Flight) Sergeant Len Westbourne and RDF operator Stella Gardam – and there are intermittent third person passages, some of which describe the ongoing war situation. Len’s comrade Tadeusz Polarcyk and Stella’s friend Maddy feature prominently. We are treated to the relevant narrator’s own thoughts and their perceptions of the other three. All are eminently rounded people with strengths and flaws, feeling entirely real – as do the minor characters.

The scenario could be over-familiar from all those 1950s black and white films – exercises in national myth-making – part of the long shadow which that war cast over those who experienced it (who themselves grew up in the shade of the earlier war,) “I begin to think to see why our parents had kept their war to themselves. It was too horrible yet precious, it had gone too deep,” an all too present absence passed on in turn to their children (ie my generation) but in Greig’s hands it is far from hackneyed or clichéd. He captures well the transience and randomness of air combat, the dangers of losing sharpness on leave, the arbitrariness of becoming a casualty of bombing (the mangled, eviscerated, blown-apart bodies,) the heightened perceptions, the snatching at life in the midst of death.

That Summer could have been a mere love story but the quality of the writing elevates it beyond the mundane. It is subtle of Greig to have Len flying Hurricanes rather than the more iconic and glamorous Spitfires. It somehow grounds the story, makes it real. Of the veterans it is observed that, “They were there but even they couldn’t see the true losses.” Len comes to see that, “Everything we have, we lose. So to want something, anything, someone, is the beginning of tragedy. And yet, and yet.” After a particularly gruesome kill he thinks to himself, “What have I done? Nothing. Nothing at all.” Stella realises of Evelyn, a former boyfriend whom she sees one night, “He really does love me. Me, for who I am, not what he gets from me, and with (a) slight shiver (I) knew this would always be rare in my or anyone’s life.” Later in the book she muses, “Wartime is like real life but more so,” and, “How can we love anyone, when they’re just going to die?” but “there’s nothing else to do but love, nothing to be regretted but not loving.” Her first (pre the events of the novel) lover, Roger, whom she meets again accidentally, tells her there is not much more than beauty and sacrifice, “We must take what beauty there is, and sacrifice is all around us.”

A few hints of the author’s Scottishness make themselves felt. Stella spent a couple of schoolyears in Scotland. Len’s squadron is posted to Aberdeenshire for a rest period and he spends three days walking in the Cairngorms.

For those who survived the war, its long, nigh-on six years, these were the days of their lives; what followed, a slow descent. And 1940 was the crux. (“In a way it was all rather exciting, being bombed.”) By accumulation of detail Greig shows us this and, by doing so, also shows us what it might have felt like to be alive in Britain, that summer.