Canongate, 2000, 237 p.

After a sojourn in Basah in the far East, painter Angus McAllister has returned to his Hebridean roots on the island of Flodday, whose only drawback is that the local women refuse to pose for him.

Janet Maxwell has temporarily left her philandering husband and sought refuge with her brother, the owner of Flodday’s hotel. She is pulling pints in the bar when she and McAllister meet. Eager to incite her husband’s jealousy, she conceives the idea of living at McAllister’s house Ardnave, as his housekeeper. Janet is originally from Skye and has second sight. When she enters McAllister’s living room she immediately feels a tragedy will occur there. This, combined with McAllister’s possession of a blowpipe spear, means Chekhov’s dictum about the gun on the wall will most likely come into play. Brought up a Wee Free, Janet has particular ideas on sex as being a sacrament; an attitude her husband finds both ridiculous and irritating.

Janet also foresees the arrival at Ardnave of a woman and her daughter. This will turn out to be Fidelia Gomez, one of McAllister’s former lovers in Basah, a devout Catholic who could not contemplate divorce from her husband, and her child Letitia. However, she is preceded at Ardnave by the Australian Nell Ballantyne, another of McAllister’s lovers. Such goings-on with three married women eventually occupying the same household, none of them the wife of the owner, set many tongues wagging.

These complications to Angus’s life all take place in Part One. Part Two sees the entry of Janet’s and Nell’s husbands, both golf nuts, and the demand by Fidelia’s to have custody of Letitia which precipitates the novel’s rather sudden climax.

This examination of Hebridean life, the locals’ gossip, the minister’s censure, the frustration and delay incurred by everything being shut on a Sunday reads as being somewhat traditional. Nevertheless, the hotel owner’s daughters are amused by the minister’s reference to God knowing everything since, “It didn’t matter if God knew your secrets. He could be trusted not to clype.”

The novel was first published in 2000 but has the feel of having been written earlier. Yet I suppose it was 25 years ago now.

Poor Angus is not quite perhaps as serious a book as some that Jenkins has written but I still accomplished.

Pedant’s corner:- “looked in stony copulation” (context suggests ‘locked in’,) “‘he’s got to be made understand’” (made to understand,) delf (it was pottery, Delft,) “when it ought to have been growing stranger” (growing stronger makes more sense.) “‘What’s your, then?’” (What’s yours, then?’”) “But what man McAllister’s predicament would not be” (what man in McAllister’s predicament,) clifs (cliffs.) “‘Keep your eyes off her books’” (‘off her looks’? Perhaps even ‘off her boobs’?) a missing end quotation mark, “while he was an his studio” (in his studio,) a missing opening quotation mark, “‘Why do like painting ladies with no clothes on?’” (Why do you like.)

Canongate Classics 22, 1995, 191 p, plus viii p Introduction by Alan Spence.

Charlie Forbes is an English teacher married to Mary, with a daughter Gillian and son Alistair. To the scorn and dismay of his headmaster and colleagues he considers one of his pupils, Tom Curdie, to be highly intelligent and worthy of encouragement. For Tom’s home is in Donaldson’s Court, ‘one of the worst slums in Europe’ and his dress matches that environment. Tom’s mother, her bidey-in – the crippled Shoogle not Tom’s father – and Tom’s brother Alec and sister Molly all share a single room in the Court. That Tom is sensitive – shown by his essays and choice of song at a competition – is a testament to him.

Forbes conceives that taking Tom on their annual holiday with his family “doon the watter” to Argyll will be to Tom’s benefit. (This is set in the grand old days when such expeditions by Clyde steamer were all but mandatory for Glasgow folk.) Forbes’s wife begs to differ about the prospect, Alistair is not bothered either way, but Gillian is suspicious. Prior to the trip we are made privy to Tom’s instincts when he breaks into the school at night to steal some money he knows has been left in a teacher’s desk. Nevertheless, Jenkins engages our sympathy towards him by revealing the circumstances of his home life.

As they approach the holiday destination, Forbes thinks to tell Tom, “‘In no other country in the world, not even in fabled Greece, is there loveliness so various and so inspiring in so small a space,’” but an inner voice, echoing one of his teaching colleagues, says to him “it’s guff, a lot of guff.” On landing, observing the other passengers disembark, Forbes recalls a coast landlady had once told him Glasgow folk were ones to splash the siller, East coasters and the English were far cannier.

A curiosity here is that Jenkins mentions other Clyde ports of call such as Kilcreggan, Craigendoran, Tighnabruaich, Largs, Millport and Rothesay but calls the Forbes family’s destination Towellan and its neighbour Dunroth rather than the Innellan and Dunoon on which they are obviously modelled.

Key incidents involve an encounter with a myxomatosic rabbit, Gillian spying on Tom on a trip to Dunroth where she witnesses him stealing two items of little worth but buying a more valuable present for Mary, the arrival of Tom’s friends Chick and Peerie and later of his mother and her brood, Shoogle and all.

While Forbes oscillates between being understanding to Tom and feeling there is nothing to be done to help him there is an evolution of others’ attitudes as the book progresses. Gillian eventually warms to Tom while Tom himself, having seen the possibilities life could have held for him turns in on himself. To reveal any more would constitute a spoiler.

As always with Jenkins the writing is assured, the insights sharp and his compassion for his characters shines through.

Sensitivity note. The text describes a photographer as a Jew.

Pedant’s corner:-  In the Introduction; V S Naipul (V S Naipaul,) Jenkins’ (x 2, Jenkins’s.) Otherwise none.

Polygon, 2006, 458 p, plus iv p Introduction by David Pratt. First published in 1961.

The novels by Jenkins I have read so far have always been situated in Scotland so this one, set among the British diplomatic community in Kabul in the late 50s, marks a digression. (Jenkins did spend some in Afghanistan himself in the mid to late 50s and on the evidence here had a good insight into the country as he displays some sympathy for Afghans and their customs.)

The meat of the story is in the flurry caused by the intended marriage between local Abdul Wahab and Briton Laura Johnstone who met while he was studying in Manchester and apparently fell in love. The British set in Kabul is disturbed since the precedents for such marriages have not been happy ones. (They do mostly though seem to have been between relatively naïve young Englishwomen and Afghans who have misrepresented themselves as rich before the marriage.) One such, Mrs Mohebzada, is in despair due to her husband’s family’s insistence on her conforming to Afghan customs. She is trapped as she loves her children but they are deemed by Afghan law to be Afghani citizens and so not allowed to exit the country. Laura however is over thirty and a teacher so liable to be more level headed than most. And perhaps more strong-willed.

The universal consensus among the ex-pats is that the marriage must be prevented and steps are taken to dissuade Laura and also to lean on the headteacher of the school where she has applied to teach to turn her down and on the Afghan authorities not to give her a visa. Nevertheless, Laura persists and embarks on her visit (at first intended to be only for six months to see if she takes to the place.)

On the Aghan side Prince Naim sees the marriage as a way to symbolise a union between East and West as a step to modernising Afghanistan. All this has the potential to feed into debate about whether the women’s full body covering, here called a shaddry, enforced for locals but not for Westerners, ought to be abolished. An Islamic cleric, Mojedaji, at one point voices the opinion that, if it is, there will as a consequence be an increase in rape. (Aside. Surely this attitude speaks more about men’s behaviour than of women.) A shadowy but potentially menacing organisation called the Brotherhood attempts to recruit Wahab to its ranks – an opportunity for advancement he grabs eagerly.

Meanwhile in the background, and by no means the novel’s focus, the influence on the country of the Soviet Union is growing. A diplomatic visit by Minister Voroshilov is intermittently referenced through the book.

Racism explicit and implicit runs through the tale. Englishwoman Mrs Massaour is married to a Lebanese man and feels betrayed by the fact that both her children are deeper black than her husband. The loving marriage of journalist and poet Harold Moffatt and Lan, a woman of Chinese origin, is threatened by his reluctance to have children because of the prejudice they will suffer as ‘half-castes’.

Jenkins has Mrs Massaour venture the thought of the characteristic British failing – obtuseness, the centuries-old irremovable unawareness that other people in other countries ordered some things better. (In some British people the obtuseness was aggravated by conceit.) This is an attitude that still prevails in certain quarters.

Moffat says to his wife in relation to racism, “birds and animals join together to mob to death one that’s different from the rest. Human beings are civilized; their killing’s more subtly done, and it takes longer. It may take a lifetime, but, Christ, how much crueller it is”

The complicated relation between the British in Kabul and the local population is illustrated by the extravagant celebration of the anniversary (complete with captured guns) of an Afghan victory over the British. Such entanglements are hard to shake off especially if they keep recurring. The seeds of Afghanistan’s current situation are already present in the book.

Dust on the Paw (the title is a quote which means small people are of no significance to the wielders of power) is a book of its time – for example it employs the words Negroes, Dagos and wog along with the racist attitudes of some of its characters – but still of interest.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction – “wracked by the war” (racked,) Jenkins’ (x 4, Jenkins’s,) “ex-patriot community” (ex-patriate, an ex-patriot would have foresworn their country, not clung to its ways,) iIt (It.) In the text itself: Mossaour (the spelling seems to be interchangeable with Massaour.) “‘Didn’t you use to have contempt for’” (Didn’t you used to have,) repuslive (repulsive,) “the lioness’ instinct” (x 2, lioness instinct, it doesn’t need the apostrophe – which would require an s after it in any case,) woe-begone (woebegone,) sanitorium (sanatorium; sanatoria was on the next page,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech,) “stanchly borne loneliness” (staunchly borne,) Moffett (elsewhere Moffatt,) insect (it was a scorpion, they are arachnids,) solider (soldier.)

Polygon, 2007, 181 p, plus vii p Introduction by Rosemary Goring.

The manuscript (actually several iterations of it) of The Pearl-fishers, with its initial title The Tinker Girl, was discovered in Jenkins’s papers after his death, with no indication he had intended for it to be published. Three other versions are stored in the National Library of Scotland, an early handwritten draft with many amendments, and two typescripts, one of which is identical with this published one.

It begins with a group of forestry workers on a break noticing two dilapidated carts drawn by equally decrepit horses as they approach. The carts carry a grey-haired woman, an old man, two children and a striking young woman. The collective thoughts of the workers are that such beauty is wasted on they call tinkers. All the workers that is, except Gavin Hamilton, the same Gavin Hamilton it would seem as appeared in Jenkins’s earlier novel A Would-be Saint, who has a natural disposition towards kindness.

The “tinkers” (Jenkins utilises the word’s negative connotations superbly to point out the prejudice inherent in the locals’ attitudes and suspicions) are travellers, yes, but make their living searching out pearls from fresh water oysters. The group has made the two hundred-mile journey from Sutherland so that the dying old man, the three young travellers’ grandfather, can be buried by the Great Stone where members of his family were interred when he was four.

All they ask of the locals is a field to pitch their tent, and Gavin grants their request. However, he always intended to invite them into his house instead. The young woman is Effie Williamson, the older woman is her mother, the children her brother Eddie and sister Morag.

The children turn out to be far from the feral wild things of the foresters’ imagination. Polite and well-mannered, they take to Gavin, as he does to them. Effie’s feelings are more complex. Her pride makes her want not to take advantage of Gavin’s generosity of spirit but her natural grace wrongfoots the locals – especially the Minister’s sister (also daughter of a minister and niece of a Moderator,) whom it is thought locally has her eyes on Gavin and would make him a good wife, though any relationship between them would doubtless lack passion.

The burgeoning attraction between Gavin and Effie does perhaps progress rather too quickly (the book is only 181 pages long) but it is destined never to exceed the bounds of propriety, despite any opportunities living in the same house presents. Any impediment to its advancement is provided only by Effie’s feelings of reluctance and restraint and Gavin’s deferment to them.

The backgrounds of both Gavin and the “tinkers” are well developed as are the dynamics of the small town setting but there is a rather rushed feeling to the book most likely as a consequence of it being unfinished (or I should say unpolished.) Had Jenkins had more time these could have been remedied. The Pearl-fishers is a worthy addition to his œvre, though.

Pedant’s corner:- In the introduction; Jenkins’ (several times, Jenkins’s,) miniscule (minuscule.)  Otherwise; “The next room they same upon” (came upon.) “She said by the window, waiting for him to come home.” (She sat by the window.) “That young ploughmen” (ploughman.)

B&W Publishing, 1994, 233 p.

Despite the impression that might be given by the front cover the would-be saint in question is not an aspirant to play football in the colours of either Paisley’s or Perth’s best known football teams (or, given the story’s setting in time, even at The Gymnasium) but is instead one Gavin Hamilton, who at first seems a fairly normal lad growing up in the village of Auchengillan. We are shown Gavin’s immersion in village life through the lens of the Great War where his father is off fighting. The tone of the writing in these early chapters portends his father’s inevitable death. All Gavin’s young life he has had no contact with his father’s parents due to some dispute that occurred before he was born but his grandmother introduces herself to him one day in the street, a fact he instantly knows he must conceal from his mother.

In the post-war years Gavin secures a scholarship to Cadzow Academy which creates a barrier with his contemporaries as they shy away from his now perceived difference. At the Academy he forms a friendship with a lad called McIntyre from the intervening town of Lendrick whom he meets on the bus taking him there on his first day. Apart from McIntyre the only other pupil who has time for him is Rachel Hallad, whose father is a writer. However, McIntyre’s father is ill and not long for the world.

When McIntyre has to leave, Jenkins gives us a reflection of that stoicism instilled by the lads’ background and times. “If they had been men they would have shaken hands, if they had been girls or women they would have embraced or kissed cheeks. Being boys, and Scottish boys at that, they nodded, smiled, and turned away.”

Gavin’s life trajectory is changed again when his mother also dies. His grandmother and grandfather come to look after him and he is immediately removed from the Academy as his grandmother thinks folks like them should not get above themselves, (grandfather doesn’t get a say,) so instead of University and perhaps a teaching career he ends up with a job with a solicitor in Lendrick.

Gavin is graced by his talent as a footballer and his involvement with the Church. As right half for Lendrick Rangers he helps them win the Junior Cup which brings to the town much needed glory a time of joblessness in the 1930s. He takes the opposition’s buffetings with equanimity and never retaliates. He is clean living (his prospective fiancée Julia, the solicitor’s daughter, is frustrated by his lack of interest in physical matters) as opposed to the team’s other stalwart the notoriously dissolute Grunter Houliston, whose resolute displays meant there was “no necessary connection between a man’s private morals and his public performance, whether as a footballer, a clergyman, or a politician.”

It is when the Second World War comes, though, that Gavin’s real difference shows itself. Kind to a fault, his beliefs mean that he decides he must become a conscientious objector. The relevant Board sends him to work in forestry in the far west of Scotland. Those who live locally do not much take to having conchies nearby but again Gavin shows his indifference to other’s ideas and again shows his prowess in a football match arranged between the forestry workers and the villagers. Even here, though, Gavin is as strange to most of the men he works with as with his fellow villagers in Auchengillan.

The early parts of the book – and not just the football aspect – reminded me of the same author’s The Thistle and the Grail, (some of the incidents have close similarities,) while the forestry scenes echoed The Cone Gatherers. Its structure is made oddly bifurcated by the two settings (village and forestry) but all the characters ring true and come to life on the page. As a depiction of rural Scottish life in the mid part of the twentieth century and of a man apart, A Would-Be Saint is excellent.

Pedant’s corner:- bannister (banister,) Iron Brew (did Jenkins not wish to use the brand name, Irn Bru?) “Mind you ain fucking business” (your ain,) ice-flow (ice-floe.)

Polygon, 2006, 296 p, plus vi p Introduction by Harry Reid. First published 1954.

The thistle of the title is the local team of the small town of Drumsagart, Drumsagart Thistle Junior Football Club, whose blue shirts have a red thistle crest. The grail is the ultimate quest for a Junior* football team, the Scottish Junior Cup.

Despite the apparent thrust of the title that the novel will be about football, it isn’t really. There may one day be a definitive novel that deals with that perennial Scottish obsession but this isn’t (quite) it. The quote from John Cairney on the cover to the effect that this is “easily the best book written on the relation between football and society in Scotland” may well be true but the novel’s narrative more or less skirts football. Instead, it is more about a small town, the characters who inhabit it, and the distraction from their lives that football represents. Bill Shankly is supposed once to have said, “Football isn’t a matter of life and death; it’s more important than that.” While at times, in the throes of a match, it can perhaps seem that way, it really isn’t. But as a distraction from life’s tribulations it can be a temporary balm – even while adding to them.

At the start of the novel Drumsagart Juniors are hopeless, suffering regular drubbings – usually to nil – every week. This culminates in a mass protest after a 7-0 humiliation at the hands of their fiercest local rivals, Lettrickhill Violet, wherein the committee members are the subject of intemperate threats and club president Andrew Rutherford is in danger of being dismissed. Mysie Dugarry, granddaughter of the club’s most famous player, who had gone on to play for Scotland, suggests they try one Alec Elrigmuir whom she describes as the best centre forward in Scotland. (He plays for a pit team and she is sweet on him.) Under pressure Rutherford agrees. Committee member and local pub owner Sam Malarkin offers to provide a free drink to everyone should the Thistle go on to lift the Cup, safe in the knowledge it won’t happen.

Apart from the possibility of Elrigmuir, a further potential hero arrives when Turk McCabe, a former centre-half, returns to the town from a sojourn in England. Now in his mid-to-late thirties he is an unlikely saviour but has determination and turns out still to have positional sense. And so the journey to the grail begins. There is a brief description of the first-round game at Carrick Celtic but Jenkins’s writerly gifts are not convincing here. (I suspect this may be true of any attempt by any novelist to depict an imaginary football match.)

There is a whole cast of minor characters each of whom is drawn realistically and sympathetically. Sam Malarkin’s interest in Alec Elrigmuir is more than football related as is his sister Margot’s – a source of dismay later on when Mysie gets to hear of it and Elrigmuir threatens not to play as a result of her displeasure. Elrigmuir himself may be a good footballer but off the field he is all but a simpleton.

Despite not being published till 1954 this reads like an interwar, even a 1920s, novel. Harry Reid’s introduction tells us, though, that Jenkins was a reluctant author with many manuscripts kept in his locker.

The attitudes to women of the male characters in the book read as being decidedly off-kilter these days. “The apple had been a gift. Eve’s to Adam had been free too, and it had soured the world,” and, “With women it was, of course, different; their brains were lighter, no-one could expect them to be as serious as men.” At a club committee meeting discussing the team’s problems we have, “‘Have you noticed, gentlemen,’ said Wattie Cleugh, ‘how it’s women causing all the trouble? …. It would seem that what started in Eden’s still going on.’” However, Agnes Elvan’s observation that, “‘There’s not a woman in Scotland doesn’t know the importance of football is exaggerated,” is probably still widely applicable. There is also a wonderful Scotticism when a character describes another as having, “the mind of a five-year old lassie whose backside was underskelped.”

That the times have changed in other ways too is illustrated when a doctor – called in to examine Turk after his put upon mother had poured boiling water over his feet – says of the offer of a cigarette, “‘Do him good.’ The doctor intercepted the packet and took one himself. ‘Do me good.’”

Turk is of course an habitué of the pub. When the local minister, who does not like football – or pubs – came to proselytise, Turk, in his eagerness to berate religion but wanting to show some knowledge, responded with a misquote, saying, “‘I am become a sounding brass or a tingling simple.’ That’s Bible.” A few lines later Jenkins transforms this double Malapropism into an inspired pun. On leaving the pub McCabe castigates those who remain as, “A shower of tingling simples.’”

The novel does not neglect wider issues. There is a small diversion into Politics. Rutherford’s father is a long-time socialist councillor, while Rutherford himself runs on behalf of his brother-in-law a biscuit factory, producing Drumsagart Bannocks in their distinctive blue and red liveried packets. His dismissal of Lizzie Anderson for theft, leaving her and her mother to likely penury excites his father’s ire. That Lizzie has falsely implied Rutherford had got her pregnant does not weigh in the balance for him. In his turn Rutherford interprets his father’s concern for the poor as a desire not to have the latter’s grandson well provided for. Poverty and the misery of unemployment are described but presented as matters of fact. Fecklessness on the part of impecunious men spending money on a triviality like football is implicitly deplored.

Yet it does not escape Scottishness. On a trip to an away game Rutherford reflects, “Scotland was a country where faith lay rotted like neglected roses, and the secret of resurrection was lost. We are a dreich, miserable, back-biting, self-tormenting, haunted, self-pitying crew, he thought. This sunshine is as bright as any on Earth, these moors are splendid: why are not the brightness and splendour in our lives? Seeking them, here we are speeding at fifty miles an hour to see what – a football match, a game invented for exercise and recreation, but now our only substitute for faith and purpose.” But there is still the lingering shadow of Calvinism, “too much pleasure on Earth weakened the promise of heaven and strengthened the threat of hell.”

*This designation does not mean for young players. It was a peculiarity of the Scottish footballing landscape that up until a year or so ago there were two separate non-amateur grades of football in Scotland; the Seniors, all those whose names are familiar from the Saturday football scores plus some in four non-national leagues, and the Juniors, still (semi-)professional but playing in a different set of closely geographically-based leagues – except for the all-encompassing Scotland-wide Junior Cup. The former Junior sides have now all joined the Scottish football pyramid system.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; “fifty miles and hour” (miles an hour.) Otherwise; “Wheehst” (Wheesht,) “‘They’s come flocking in’” (they’ll come flocking in,) “crotcheted tie” (x 2, crocheted,) Saunders’ (Saunders’s,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2,) “as any owner at potential Derby winner” (at a potential Derby winner.)

Canongate Classic, 1990, 351 p, including iii p introduction by Bob Tait. One of the Herald’s “100” best Scottish Fiction Books.

“Half Scotland sniggered and the other half scowled, when in letters to The Scotsman and The Glasgow Herald I put forward my suggestion that prisoners in Scottish jails be allowed to wear kilts, as their national birthright, if such was their wish.”

How can you not take an instant liking to a book of which the above is its first sentence? It certainly invites you to read on. Who can this quaintly opinionated, and perhaps ridiculous, individual be?

The interest in the kilt, though, is a marker. It is narrator Fergus Lamont’s signature apparel. One of those garments was the last gift he received from his mother before she walked into the local loch. She had married a man not Fergus’s father, left him for another – richer and much, much older – but had come back supposedly because of Fergus. She claimed Fergus’s true father was the son of the Earl of Darndaff – though others in the town said it was the under butler. However her fiercely Protestant (and resolutely anti-Catholic) father refused to speak to her, tipping her over the edge, not that that affected him. “My grandfather did not allow my mother to be buried in her own mother’s grave; nor did he go to her funeral. He displayed atrocious callousness; yet, by the sheer effrontery of faith, he compelled most people to think of him as a Christian of formidable and magnificent staunchness.” Fergus’s grandfather, like all those who profess to know the will of God, displays enormous self-righteousness. “‘You may be sure, Fergus, that if people are deserving of His help the Lord will not withhold it.’” Fergus is not convinced. “Young though I was, it seemed to me that it was really my grandfather himself who decided whether or not people deserved Jesus’s help…. There were some people with whom God, in my grandfather’s opinion, was displeased.”

The young Fergus had unthinkingly accepted the state of things; anti-Catholicism, the subtle social gradations of single-end, room-and-kitchen, two rooms and kitchen, up to the big houses in the west end of town. His nominal father, John Lamont, “wouldn’t say I was better or worse, but I was different. Whether this had anything to do with my having an earl for one grandfather, and a man of serious religious principles – he really meant a hypocrite – for the other, he wasn’t clever enough to say.”

Through his early life Fergus’s aspirations to his aristocratic connection grow but as his headmaster tells him, “‘You must bear in mind, Fergus, that the Scots landed gentry are a tribe apart. They do not speak like us. They go to considerable trouble and expense to avoid speaking like us. They are sent to exclusive English schools, to acquire their characteristic accent and peculiar habits.’” While recognising others’ sense he may not be quite what he seems he fakes it enough to achieve officer status – not to mention an MC – in the Great War and the attentions of a writer of romantic fiction (well aware of his humble origins) who more or less drags him into marriage. Though, as author, Jenkins does not dwell overlong on this aspect, a fear of being found out – even on the part of those who are perfectly competent – is a common emotion for a Scot. Throughout his life Fergus can never quite shake off the conflict between his compassion for those he has left behind and his reluctance to return without enough to show for having left.

The sense of distance engendered by his presumed, or actual, parentage (the identity of his sire is never revealed to us) allows Fergus to reflect on the foibles and dichotomies of his countrymen. “I was watching, I realised vaguely, a clash between two traditions in Scotland, that of love of learning and truth, and that of Calvinist narrow-minded vindictiveness.” “To the stern Calvinist no one was innocent, not even a new-born baby.” “Here was another conflict between two aspects of the Scottish soul…. mendacious sentimentality… and ironic truthfulness.” “It seemed to me that since Scotland was small, proud, poor, and intelligent, with a long history, she, better than any country I could think of… had an opportunity to create a society in which poverty and all its humiliations had been abolished, without refinement and spirituality being sacrificed. In the past the Scots had lost too many battles because, while waiting for the fighting to begin, they had been given prayers instead of second helpings.” The middle class “had throughout the centuries set up in Scotland a morality that put the ability to pay far in front of the necessity to forgive and love.” “For generations in Scotland bursary-winners and gold medallists have passed out of schools and universities, fixed in the belief that nothing has a value that cannot be marked out of a hundred. This is the reason why the Scots have failed as artists and patriots, but succeeded as engineers and theologians.” “Luckily the Scots are not a demonstrative or philoprogenitive race.” “Scotsmen do not find it easy to speak frankly of love, especially the physical aspects, without some protective coarseness. We call the act houghmagandy, and, alas, in the performance we are too apt to make it measure up or rather down to that crude term.”

But there is a kind of hope. “It is not the goodness of saints that makes us feel there is hope for humanity: it is the goodness of obscure men.”

When Fergus’s wife feels he is a hindrance to her social climbing and forces him out he takes the opportunity of a bequest to repair to the district of East Gerinish on Oronsay. Here he meets Kirstie McDonald, a child of nature, strong of limb and dressed in men’s clothes. They move in to his ancestral home (on his mother’s side) scratching a living from the poor soil. Of the local minister he is told, “He had nine children; eleven really, for two had died in infancy. Mrs Caligaskill was always ailing,” and thinks, “Without having seen this Caligaskill I hated him…. He represented that mixture of sanctified lust and hypocrisy which had stunted the soul of Scotland for centuries.” The passages dealing with this ten year long not-quite idyll, in many ways the time of Fergus’s life, do not linger on the page in the way those on his childhood did. In any case it is over too soon and island life is perhaps more judgemental than in the towns of the mainland. Only Kirstie had really accepted him. The doctor called in on her death warns Fergus, “‘You broke their rules. So did she. If one of them was to let a fit of pure Christianity get the better of him the Lord might be pleased, but I’m damned sure his congregation and colleagues wouldn’t,’” and, “‘You’re presupposing that tolerance is in itself a good thing. Not many people really believe that. Most of us are prepared to tolerate only what we understand and approve of.’” As a result the funeral has to be improvised. “‘Four ministers were asked,’ I replied. ‘All refused.’” Nevertheless the men of the island turn out in respect for Kirstie.

The promise that first sentence had of light-heartedness is not bourne out by the rest of Fergus Lamont which has a more serious mien. As a dissection of early to mid twentieth century Scottish mores and attitudes it is probably unexcelled.

Pedant’s corner:- peaver (usual spelling is peever,) medieval, the griping of buttocks (gripping?) “‘what she cannot know … that my books,’” (what she cannot know…is that my books…) Betty T Shields’ (Betty T Shields’s,) wheehst (usually the spelling is wheesht,) had never stank (stunk,) septagenarian (septuagenarian) a long (along.) “By cool Siloam’s shady hills” (Fergus – or Lamont – misremembers this. It’s actually shady rills.)

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.

Canongate, 2012, “the canons 15”, 234 p, including iv p introduction by Paul Giamatti. One of the 100 best Scottish Books. Returned to a threatened library.

The trees on a Scottish country estate are to be cut down for use in the Second World War. This requires their cones to be gathered so that the trees might be replaced. The cone-gatherers of the title are brothers Neil and Calum McPhie, brought in from Ardmore to do the work. The pair has been housed in a make-do shelter in the woods despite there being a perfectly adequate beach hut available. Neil has a keen sense of the injustice of this situation. He had volunteered for the war but is too old and ailing. In any case he feels protective of Calum who, while angelic of face, has no neck and is hunchbacked. This deformity and Calum’s aversion to the suffering of rabbits in snares and deer during shoots render him an object of hatred to the gamekeeper Duror. “How incomprehensible and unjust it was that in Europe, in Africa, and in China, many tall, strong, healthy, brave , intelligent men were killing one another, while in that dirty little hut those two sub-humans lived in peace, as if under God’s protection. He could not understand that, and he was sure nobody could.” Yet Calum is accepted in his local community of Ardmore where the people have come to know his essential goodness.

Duror is the villain of the piece but Jenkins is careful to render him in the round. His wife is bed-ridden and his bitter and scathing mother-in-law runs his house. A certain twisting of the soul is to be expected. Other characters are also well-nuanced. Despite her ten year old son Roderick’s intense sense of fairness the estate owner’s wife, Lady Runcie-Campbell, is staunch in her defence of social status. Roderick has a weak constitution and she wonders if he can be sent to public school. Their doctor reminds her, “‘The Scots tradition of education has always linked the school with home.’ She said nothing but he could see she was not pleased at his insinuation that by sending their children to public schools the Scots gentry were aping a foreign tradition.”

Like many a Scottish novel The Cone-Gatherers exhibits a feeling for landscape and deals with religion. The local doctor says of his wife to Duror, “Mrs Matheson is an incorrigible Scot. Food is to eat to keep health to work and praise God. Tatties and saut herring are food. Caviare and venison are gluttony.” Other phrases reflect the Scottish character. One of the estate workers, Erchie Graham, says to Neil, “A Scotsman, if he’s worth his porridge, nurses his grievance till it grows to be a matter of compensation,” but the stand-out sentence of the novel deals with the human condition. “By being born, therefore, or even conceived, one became involved.”

If Duror is seen as a representation of the Devil it puts the novel firmly in the Scots tradition. (Even if he is merely the devil within us all the same holds true.) Calum meanwhile is a less common subject, the epitome of goodness. While well worth inclusion in that 100 best Scottish Books list, like the best literature from anywhere The Cone-Gatherers at its core transcends nationality.

Again it was as well I left the introduction till after reading the book, as it contains spoilers.

Pedant’s corner:- “neither tocher nor dowry” (my understanding is that a tocher is a dowry, or at least a wedding portion,) shrunken (shrunk,) “enter the Golden Gates into San Francisco” (Golden Gate, I believe,) with weary wave (a weary wave.)