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Xstabeth by David Keenan

White Rabbit, 2020, 172 p

The book is prefaced with a biography of one David W Keenan who committed suicide in 1995, lists his interest in occult matters, his published pamphlets relating to his home town of St Andrews and that he self-published one novel in his lifetime, Xstabeth by David W Keenan, Illuminated Edition with Commentary, reproduced in full thereafter – including various commentaries (as by diverse academics) interpolated between the narrative chapters.

With this I found myself in Russia again, seemingly in the immediate post-Soviet era, though this time St Peters (not for some reason St Petersburg) rather than Moscow where narrator Aneliya is the daughter of a famous musician, who is friends with one “even famouser,” Jaco, though the story later transfers itself to St Andrews.

Jaco is not the type a respectable girl ought to be getting mixed up with. He drinks and frequents strip clubs. But Aneliya is drawn to him nonetheless, with the consequences we might expect. During one of their encounters, in which Aneliya describes one of Jaco’s sexual kinks, she has the disturbing thought that Jaco had performed similar deeds on her mother.

The mysterious Xstabeth enters the story when an impromptu performance by her father in a club is secretly recorded on an old reel-to-reel recorder by one of the staff who is so besotted by it he determines to release it pseudonymously. The music has a force all to itself which is mesmeric but an acquired taste.

The transition to St Andrews is somewhat surprising but gives Keenan an opportunity to display his knowledge of the town. The street known as The Scores – thought to be named after golfing record cards – is said to be a place to pick up prostitutes (think about it) but little evidence is given for this in the text. Nevertheless, the famous golfer – never actually named but sufficiently accomplished to be tied for the lead in the tournament ongoing in the town – Aneliya has met at the hotel asks her to attempt to ply the trade there. It is only he (the famous golfer, who opines that Russian whores are the most desirable,) who obliges himself though.

Aneliya tells us “Naivety gets me every time. Knowledge can be cynical. It just gets used to undermine things. Sarcasm and irony are horrible. Naivety is the deepest form of belief. It’s closer to reality. To wonder. Plus it has more love in it” and “Writing is always starting from scratch. On the blank sheet. Always beginning again. Even when you think you’ve cracked it.”

David W Keenan’s Xstabeth is a strange but compelling confection. The narrative parts are written in short sentences. Sometimes broken up. Into even shorter ones. The effect is as if we are listening to someone speaking to us in staccato fashion. The addition of the commentaries makes David (without the W) Keenan’s Xstabeth even more idiosyncratic. Like the music it is named for, Xstabeth is a genre of one.

Pedant’s corner:- famouser (why Keenan chose to employ this for some while rather than the more familiar ‘even more famous’ is obscure,)  “the lay of the land” (x 3. It wasn’t a tune. The correct phrase is ‘the lie of the land’,) neck-in-neck (it’s neck and neck,) confectionary (confectionery.)

The Changeling by Robin Jenkins

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.

Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan

Harvill Secker, 2019, 234 p, including 2p Contents and 2 p Acknowledgements.

This is Logan’s latest solo collection of stories, her first, The Rental Heart and other fairytales, I reviewed here. I have also read her novels The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming.

The stories here are chiefly burdened with overly long titles eg Birds Fell From the Sky and Each One Spoke in Your Voice or We Can Make Something Between the Mushrooms and the Snow. As the title implies the subject matter tends to be dark. On the whole the collection is tinged with magic realism or outright fantasy and often tips over into horror.

The stories are prefaced and interspersed with what at first appear to be authorial interjections about the circumstances of writing the book and the author’s private life but these short passages soon evolve into what is obviously as much of a fiction as the stories which surround and envelop them.

The book is divided into three sections: The House, The Child and The Past. The first story in each is composed of four short pieces labelled respectively First Fear, Second Fear, Third Fear, and Fourth Fear but most of the stories deal with fear of one sort or another. These fears tend to be female concerns: childbirth and the things attendant on it (apprehensions about what is gestating, what has appeared, is the child safe and well? Am I a good enough mother?) abduction, rape, domestic restriction. One, about seeing a Punch and Judy Show and recognising its hideousness, is told almost entirely by way of footnotes. Another takes the form of a questionnaire – including its rubric. Another alludes to the story of Snow White but takes it in an even darker direction.

From my experience of her writing so far (see links above) Logan presents herself best, as here, at short story length.

Pedant’s corner:- “and fold it on itself” (‘fold in on itself’ makes more sense,) “for heaven’s sakes” (is USian. Britons say ‘for heaven’s sake’,) “into his screeching maw” (stomachs don’t shriek,) “aren’t I?” (Scots say ‘amn’t I?)

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Picador, 2022, 397 p.

This, Stuart’s second novel, is running over much of the same ground as his first, Shuggie Bain. Again we have a mother who is neglectful due to being an alcoholic, and her three children, of whom, here, like Shuggie, Mungo is the youngest. As Shuggie did Mungo has an older brother and sister, in Mungo’s case Hamish (Ha-Ha) and Jodie respectively. Unlike in that first novel the narrative of Young Mungo does not focus on the mother, here Maureen Hamilton, who, because she wants to feel she is still young herself, that she still has a chance in life, insists on being called Mo-Maw rather than Maw, but is mostly seen from Mungo’s viewpoint. The only exceptions to this are passages relating to Jodie’s brief hours of escape from feeling responsible for Mungo – with a married man, one of her teachers no less, not much of an escape – and a brief relation of a telephone call by one of Mungo’s tormentors to his own estranged family.

Mungo is devoted to his mother a fact which Jodie in particular finds irritating. He is also unsure of how to be a man. Perhaps as an indicator of Mungo’s uncertainty Stuart has given him a nervous itch on his face, an itch he keeps scratching.

The novel as a whole is composed of two intermittently interweaved strands which recount events in “The May After” and “The December Before.” The setting is Glasgow sometime in the mid-1980s – Jodie mentions the AIDS epidemic.

In “The May After” Mungo has gone on a fishing trip up north with two men known as Gallowgate and St John. Mo-Maw consented to this as an attempt to toughen Mungo up, to make a man of him. The fact that she knew little of these two, having only met them at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, does not bother her until too late. They take the bus north, soon coming upon “the green hills of Dumbarton.” Well, yes. Compared to Glasgow Dumbarton is green – or the green around it is more easily perceived.

“The December Before” is more the core of the book, describing Mungo’s daily life, tholing Mo-Maw’s prolonged absences from their house, making do as best he can with the help of Jodie’s administrations, his meeting with James Jamieson, who has a doocot on a scrap of waste ground backing onto a motorway, the constant chiding by Hamish (who is the local young hardman) to be more like him. Ironically it is the trip north which does that.

The inhabitants of the close where the Hamiltons live, put-upon Mrs Campbell in the flat below and Poor-Wee-Chickie on the ground floor, the latter the subject of suspicion as being thought to be gay and likely a child molester but who doesn’t care about that, are both kind souls, looking out for Mungo and Jodie. It was in December that Mungo met James and the pair began their friendship which soon grows into something deeper and to which Hamish takes great exception. For two reasons, James is Catholic and Hamish hates them (though he can’t articulate why, only that meting out violence in their direction is fun) but more importantly any hint of Mungo liking boys will reflect badly on Hamish’s standing.

A sentence describes those from more fortunate areas of Glasgow, “Middle-class Glaswegians had no loyalty, when it suited them they draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket but they knew none of its chill, none of its need. These Glaswegians were acceptably foreign and endlessly entertaining to the English.”

Stuart writes well, his prose is well above serviceable, but I was less enamoured with the violence portrayed. Moreover, the similarities between Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain tend to detract from the impact of either book. In his next book Stuart really needs to break free from the template he has used in his first two.

The cover actually does this book a disservice. The two youngsters kissing have too much facial hair to match the description of Mungo in the novel and the kiss is more passionate, much more uninhibited, than anything that occurs between Mungo and James in the text.

Sensitivity note. Refers to “the Paki shop,” but people did in the 1980s.

Pedant’s corner:- “inside of” (just inside, no ‘of’,) skillful (USian, the British spelling is skilful,) ball-peen hammer (more often spelled ball-pein.) “Other’s didn’t like the way” (Others didn’t like..,) snuck (sneaked,) “by her stocking feet” (stockinged feet,) fit (fitted,) “as his eyes slid towards to the soundless television” (either ‘towards’ or ‘to’; not ‘towards to’,) sprung (sprang,) “Stanley knifes” (Stanley knives,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “had to tilt his head backwards to breath” (to breathe,) “trying to make a man of out you” (a man out of you.)

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 2022, 373 p, including 3 p Afterword.

This one was published twenty years after Welsh’s first novel The Cutting Room and in it she returns to the central character of that book, Rilke, an auctioneer for the financially troubled Bowery Auctions. Rilke is gay and the intervening years gives Welsh, through Rilke, the opportunity to comment on the evolution in attitudes towards homosexuality that has taken place in that time. (Some prejudice still appears here but on the whole the other characters – even those he is meeting for the first time – by and large accept who and what he is.)

This starts from the first scene where Rilke is attending the wedding of the two Bobbys, where the parents of one of the two grooms were never to be mentioned. Rilke has to escort one of the guests, Jojo, out of the reception to avoid the possibility of a scene. Jojo gives Rilke a tip about the wind-up of an estate at Ballantyne House in Dumfries and Galloway whose owners are looking to sell off the house contents, a commission which might save Bowery Auctions’ somewhat failing fortunes. The next day Jojo is found dead in an alley.

As Rilke delves into the circumstances of the death via Jojo’s lodger, an art student calling himself Sands, he gets embroiled with gangster Jamie Mitchell and encounters a strange situation regarding the affairs at Ballantyne House and farm, where there was a car crash a week or so before and the auction crew rescue a frightened Vietnamese refugee, Phan, on a nearby road.

Welsh is always on top of her material here and interweaves her plot intricately. We are almost incidentally given glimpses of the more outré aspects of Glasgow’s gay scene.

Her talent for characterisation is illustrated by the on-off relationship between the auction house’s owner, Rose, and police Inspector Jim Anderson. There was the neat observation, “He had slicked his wet hair back from his face, like Brian Ferry before the cardigans set in.”

This doesn’t quite reach the levels which The Cutting Room did, but it is still a very good piece of crime fiction. A cut above you might say.

Pedant’s corner:- Burns’ (Burns’s,) “the frail women’s exit” (frail woman’s,) “a pair of storm doors” (on the top floor of a tenement? Storm doors are external. I think Welsh meant ‘vestibule doors’,) Sands’ (many times; Sands’s,) “black surplice” (on a minister at a funeral. Surplices are traditionally white and can be worn at funerals. If they’re black they’re most likely not a surplice but an ecclesiastical gown.) “Rose looked out of place the lady of the house” (needs a comma between ‘place’ and ‘the lady’,) “aren’t I?” (The speaker was a Scot. We say ‘amn’t I?’) “a group of youths were huddled” (a group … was huddled,) “people who never had no luck at all” (the sense demands ‘people who never had luck at all’,) “Sand’s said” (Sands said,) “some bullets” (these were for a shotgun, which traditionally is loaded with cartridges, not bullets. As indeed this shotgun was, later,) “let off three quick shots” ([again traditionally] shotguns can fire only twice before needing reloaded,) distributer (distributor.)

The Tenement by Iain Crichton Smith

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.’)

The Little Snake by A L Kennedy

Canongate, 2018, 137 p.

This is part of a departure for Kennedy. Her earlier books were short story collections and novels intended for adults. However in 2017 she started producing a series of children’s stories about featuring Uncle Shawn and Badger Bill – and llamas. The Little Snake is another diversion. On one level it is a children’s story, on another a fable, and on a third a meditation on death.

Mary is a girl living in a strange city where kites are flown from rooftops. One day she feels a strange sensation and observes a golden circlet round her ankle. This is the little snake Lanmo. Usually he is the angel of death, but with Mary he forms a friendship. Lanmo comes and goes many times throughout her life seeing her grow up, fall in love and mature while her (nameless) city becomes less and less hospitable as time goes by and war encroaches on its inhabitants.

Lanmo tells her of his sense of oddness that humans spend so much of their time contriving so many different ways to kill each other when their lives will end in any case. Selflessly he helps her escape to a better life but is in turn changed by her.

This is a book coloured by intimations of the modern world, the shadow of war, the necessity of migration, the kindness of strangers, the acceptance of death at the end of a life well lived.

For such a short book it carries quite a punch.

Pedant’s corner:- remarkably – even though the book is short – there is nothing to report here.

News of the Dead by James Robertson

Penguin, 2022, 374 p.

The book is set in a remote(ish) Highland glen, Glen Conach, named for the (unofficial) Saint who first converted the locals to Christianity, in three different time periods.

There are extracts from the Book of Conach, amounting to tales of his doings and good deeds. (In many ways these reminded me of the life of the Zen Buddhist, Hakuin Ekaku, as told in Alan Spence’s Night Boat. Then again the lives of religious ascetics are all probably very similar.)

That book was in the early 1800s in the library of Thomas Milne, Baron of Glen Conach, and a certain Charles Kirkliston Gibb had been invited (or invited himself) to examine and translate it. Dated entries from Gibbs’s journal of the time, found in the house’s ruins after it was destroyed by fire in the 1830s, are the other major thread. Gibbs thinks Milne is “surely a Tory but even sixty years since that did not oblige a man to be a Jacobite.…. Most Scots are Jacobite to some degree, whether they own it or not. Lamenting ‘what might have been’ eases our guilt at having thrown in our lot with the English. It is part of our character, I think, to love a lost cause.” The ‘sixty years since’ reference to Scott’s Waverley and the latter sentiments of this passage are another example of this perennial Scottish Literature itch.

The third strand, from the present day, gives us the thoughts of an old woman, Maja, who has a benign interest in a young boy, Lachie, who tells her he has seen a ghost. Her musings are a kind of framing device, topping and tailing the book. This gives the novel’s structure an unbalanced feel, though. The extracts from the book of Conach are undoubtedly necessary but they are too many and can feel repetitive. (Read about one ascetic and you’ve read about them all.)

The book’s transcriber Gibbs is a complete chancer, wanting to spin his examination of it out in order to avail himself of his host’s hospitality for as long as possible and casting around in his mind for which laird of his acquaintance he can sponge off next. Nevertheless, his debates with Baron Conach provide scope for philosophising. The Baron tells him, “‘Humans are the same in whatever condition they are found, though when men from different societies are by chance thrown together they may perceive themselves to be so unalike that one takes flight, while another worships, a third enslaves and a fourth murders his fellow creature. This is tragedy, my dear Charles, but is it not true? When Cain slew Abel he slew himself also.’”

Gibbs finds himself at first repelled by the Baron’s daughter Jessie’s birthmark but they become drawn together as much by proximity as anything else. The servant, Elspeth, though, has the best lines. She sees through Gibbs from the off and is as perky and sassy as you could wish. Her connections to the family are strong enough for her to have eyes on the estate’s heir. She says she’ll take a soldier for herself. Alexander Milne is indeed away with the army – as countless others from the glen have been, some not to come back, a familiar Highland tale. The army’s expedition to Walcheren ends badly, of course. But it does bring Elspeth her soldier.

The village is a microcosm, the local dominie and the minister both harbouring secrets. Gibbs reflects on one of the minister’s sermons that “The common folk of Scotland yield to none in their religiosity but I do wonder sometimes how deep it runs, and if one day they might suddenly discard it.” Perhaps a latter day thought untimely ripp’d.

In the present day researchers from university are scouring the glen to record oral tales of Conach, the details of which sometimes differ from those in the long lost book.

We end with Maja’s tale of the dumb lass, a stranger like Conach, who turned up in the glen in the aftermath of the Second World War and was taken in. “We humans have our waifs and strays like any other species of animal. We probably have far more.” The lass was dumb only in the sense that she did not speak.

A book, then, about kindness to strangers, refuge, and place in the world.

Robertson is never less than worth reading.

 

Pedant’s corner:- “came to nought” (came to naught.)

Klaus by Allan Massie

Vagabond Voices, 2014, 146 p, plus 3 p Afterword.

The book is an exploration of the last days of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann. Klaus’s life was always lived somewhat in the shadow of his father, who is often referred to here as The Magician.

Klaus’s homosexuality is made obvious to us from the start as on page one he is in bed with a young man but has just woken from a dream about his childhood home, now at best a ruin, but in any case one that can never be returned to. That dream brings thoughts of his elder sister Erika with whom Klaus had a close relationship. As young adults the pair had been intimate with their fellow actors Pamela Wedekind and Gustaf Gründgens. Erika and Pamela had been lovers, as too for a short time were Klaus and Gustaf. Nevertheless, Klaus got engaged to Pamela and Erika married Gustaf. Neither relationship lasted.

As a homosexual and an anti-fascist in a country and time (Nazi Germany) where to be either was dangerous, Klaus’s days in his homeland were numbered; as were Erika’s. Klaus eventually arrived in the US. He joined the US army in 1943 and became a contributor to Stars and Stripes, producing one of the first reports of the extermination camps.

Klaus’s 1936 novel Mephisto was a slightly disguised account of Gustaf’s career as an actor which not only did not cease under Nazism, it thrived. After Gustaf’s death his adopted son sued the publisher to have Mephisto removed from sale.

Considerations such as this, along with Klaus’s drug use, money troubles and his homosexuality, put him under strain. The relatively short book is filled with reminiscences about his youth and reflections on his present, the burden of which along with his estrangement from his homeland are too much to bear.

 

Pedant’s corner:- “Dr Goebbels’ instruction” (Goebbels’s,) “palet bed” (pallet bed.)

The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn

faber and faber, 2013, 380 p, plus i p Table of Pipers at The Grey House, i p definition of piobaireachd, iv p Foreword, lxvii p Appendices, ii p Glossary, v p Bibliography, xix p List of Additional Materials and i p Index.

 The Big Music cover

This is a variation on the ‘found manuscript’ novel – or in this case manuscripts, being the papers left behind by bagpiper John Callum MacKay Sutherland in the little hut he had built for himself in the hills beyond the Grey House at Ailte vhor Alech (the End of the Road) in Rogart, Sutherland, (turn left somewhere between Golspie and Brora and keep going to the unmarked fork in the road then follow it to the right.) This is the house, expanded and extended over the years, where the Sutherland piping dynasty set up its school of bagpiping and later, in an attic room, also a proper school for children from the area, now all defunct. Other relics, transcripts of radio and TV broadcasts and illustrative extracts from monthly journals contribute to the overall mix.

The human story in the book concentrates on the latest Sutherlands to be brought up in the House, those from the twentieth century to now, the aforementioned John Callum MacKay Sutherland and his son Callum Innes MacKay Sutherland. Both had left this Highland home to pursue careers in London, both were/are drawn back to confront the imminent death of a parent, in John’s case his mother’s and in Callum’s his father’s.

The novel itself begins early one morning with John taking from her cot Katherine Anna, the grand-daughter of his housekeeper Margaret, and spiriting her away with him. He intends to take her to the little hut as inspiration for part of the final piobaireachd he is composing. This act of kidnapping persuades the household – Margaret, her husband Iain Cowie, and daughter Helen – that Callum must be summoned back from London.

It becomes obvious (though heavily foregrounded earlier in the footnotes by invocations to note the increasing intrusion of the word ‘I’ to the text) that the guiding hand in the assembly of the text is meant to be that of Helen. This is highlighted by the information that the title of her dissertation was, “The Use of Personal Papers, Journals and other Writings in the Creation of Modernist and Contemporary Fiction.”

The family dynamics are complicated. Margaret and John had had a long-standing affair that produced Helen. While John was away down south Margaret had married Iain who now looks on Helen as his own daughter and on John’s return to the house resolutely tried to avoid any knowledge of his wife’s past (and rekindled) affair with Helen’s true father. Helen and Callum had become lovers when she was seventeen – some time before they both moved away for further education. Thankfully Katherine Anna is not Callum’s child.

The narration is not straightforward. It often adopts that form of Highland speech heavily influenced by Gaelic (to which is not difficult to accommodate) but it is interspersed with passages on the history of the Sutherlands, the Grey House itself, and of bagpiping. And it has copious footnotes.

Now; I love a footnote. But there are footnotes and footnotes. In a novel they are ideally used sparingly but here they appear very frequently – almost, but not quite, on every page, sometimes three or more to contend with. There is such a thing as overkill. Moreover, many of these impart the same information as previous ones or recapitulate something that has already appeared in the text. In some of them, too, there are comments on the text, as if the author is telling us how to interpret it, what to look for, which smacks of hubris and reads as if the author does not respect us as readers.

However, The Big Music is a bold venture. It attempts to set out in novelistic form the characteristics of the apotheosis of the art of bagpiping, the piobaireachd (usually rendered in English as pibroch,) while also making the case that it is an extremely complicated and worthy musical form, requiring a large amount of training by previous pipers as its essence is not truly captured by any musical notation. To that end we have sections of the overall story relating to the structure of piobaireachd, the ground, Urlar, a variational development, Taorluath, more variation, Crunluath (the Crown,) and a conclusion, Crunluath A Mach, which returns to the Urlar and ideally fades away as the piper recedes over the horizon.

But therein lies its main flaw. The playing of piobaireachd necessarily entails repetition, of notes and phrases. While some recapitulation and some emphasis by repetition may be necessary in a novel, it ought not to be taken to extremes. “Running over the same old ground” is not generally desirable. Mirroring piobaireachd unfortunately obliges it. That tendency in this novel may not quite be ad nauseam but certainly leans towards ad irritatem.

Occasionally the footnotes contain snippets that read as comments on the text. In piobearachd “Like in a story, one may return to a central idea that is never quite resolved, as in a fable or a myth there may seem to be an ending but the ending is not there.” A piobeareachd has no formal conclusion and in its performance, “The two extremes to be avoided are dragging and hurrying. …. Steadiness is more important than speed.” This commenting is made explicit when we are told “the idea of music that sits behind the words, of entire lines and phrases that sound rather than represent … Is at the very heart of the project here in hand.”

We are told that at the heart of John McKay Sutherland’s attitude to the music of his forefathers is “A loneliness that some might describe as a quality of mind that won’t let anyone in, come close. A loneliness that may be described as a quality of heart that can’t admit love.” I read this as a reflection of the influence of Calvinism on the Scottish male’s soul. In this context the observation that “The history of women in these places is always a quiet story, it’s quietly told” holds a harsh mirror up to history.

As a novel The Big Music certainly has ambition – especially in its attempt to extend the limits of the form. In its execution, though, it strays too far from the reason why people engage with novels. Its concentration on its characters – well drawn as most of them are – is too episodic, too sparse, too smirred, to resonate as it might.

A note on the book’s title. Within the piping fraternity piobaireachd is known as the big music, Ceol Mor (as opposed to strathspeys, reels etc which are regarded as Ceol Beag, little music.)

Pedant’s corner:- missing commas before and at the end of a piece of direct speech embedded in a sentence, “post offices” (Post Offices,) fine’ness (why the apostrophe?) green’ness (again, that unnecessary apostrophe,) stubborn’ness (ditto,) clean’ness (ditto,) Arogocat (elsewhere Argocat,) “someone taking over on a bad corner” (someone overtaking on a bad corner,) scared’y (‘scaredy’ would be fine,) “Then Callum hears his father’s breath starts coming again” (hears his father’s breath start coming again,) “smirring of the tune” – a footnote says “the glossary defines smirring as a general smudging but it is often used in the Highlands as a metaphor for light rain” – (the dictionary definition of smir is ‘light rain’ not ‘smudging.’ Smir is in widespread use in Scotland as a description of rain so light it can hardly be seen but nevertheless soaks through to the skin. I suspect the word’s use in piping actually derives from that rather than the other way round. Aside: when I visited Bilbao I was delighted when a local said a particular similar weather condition there – now, with climate change, no longer so prevalent – and had been called ‘smirri-mirri’ and I told her of the Scottish equivalent.) “Slowly, year by year, in every country except one the bagpipe either disappeared completely or was left ‘to the lonely hill-men or the occasional crank’.” The text says this is because mediæval conditions lingered in the Highlands longer that elsewhere in the world. (Yet later parts of the book acknowledge that different bagpipe traditions than Scotland’s still exist. Off the top of my head I can think of the uillean pipes, the Northumbrian pipes not to mention Galician and Cornish versions,) “the general lay of it” (lie of it.) “The connection between piobaireachd and lyric ….. and come to bear” (comes to bear,) footed’ness (again; what’s with the apostrophe?) Eric Richards’ (Richards’s,) “and how you could call someone a wife who doesn’t look to the man she’s married?” (how could you is the usual word order in English.)
In the Appendices: “the boundary between the districts of Sutherland and Caithness were slightly redrawn” (the boundary …was slightly redrawn,) an extraneous apostrophe, “the area of grounds and land surrounding the Grey House amount to some 400 acres” (the area … amounts to,) “the earliest references to a MacCrimmon (who was also a piper) appears in Campbell lands” (the earliest reference,) “a good representation of the terms of tuition etc that is available” (of the terms .. that are available.)

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