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Category: Scottish things

For the Good Times by David Keenan

June 22, 2019 /

Behind me, mirrored, the head of the snake, puffs, opens its black hood, my brain is going to fucking, spunk, bears fangs in its opened mouth, hoods its tongue, is spit on a mirror, and mirrored is miracle: because I know now why there are no snakes in Ireland. I know now. Saint Patrick told them to beat it because snakes move through time differently from us. Their tails are in the past but their heads are in the future. That’s why Saint Patrick told them to beat it. He had to get rid of them. Because if you can read the future then the game is up. And where would Ireland be without the game?

In Anna Burns’s Milkman, a young woman takes refuge in literature as a way of escaping the random brutality of life in the dystopia that is Belfast during the Troubles. In For the Good Times, we are on the other side of the fence, with the milkman who wasn’t really a milkman or at least others like him, pissing about and getting pissed and doing revenge jobs for the Ra while we’re about it.

This is a world where the laughter is loud and the singing is wild and the blood flows painfully and often. This is not a comfortable place to be. This discomfiting impasse, this rupture between a world in which life is lived and comic books are enjoyed and smart clothes admired and the hell in which lives are taken tit for tat and artists burn alive behind barricaded doors is conveyed to us through the words of Sammy, a provo in his youth, now in prison. Sammy is visited by visions – of his beloved best friend Tommy and the horrors they committed together, of the snake that stands for treachery and every single mistake made by every man, ever.

This extraordinary division in register, shifting the novel back and forth between Sammy’s hard-nosed, almost flippant account of irreconcilable social division and its violent consequences, and the hallucinogenic, occult imaginings of a pawn in the game who intuits realities and poetries beyond, realities that are almost more terrifying and more brutal than the blood and grime that is become his daily grind.

For the Good Times reaches beyond social realism into visionary experimentalism to offer us a novel that is in full control of its combustible material, deploying it in a manner that must rank as one of the harshest critiques of paramilitary violence you will ever read, at the same time utilizing it brilliantly as just that: material for the construction of a complex and subversive, bravura work of art.

As an unflinching portrait of these ‘good times’ this book is painful, hard-hitting, difficult to deal with. As the work of a writer who surely counts as one of the most exciting and complete artists at work in Britain today, For the Good Times is a must-read. To add that Keenan’s writing channels the spirit of Gordon Burn to an uncanny degree would seem superfluous to requirements.

“I wanted to make the point in a way that the modernist tradition in Ireland really stems from the Irish vernacular, the love of telling jokes, and the idea that storytelling is performative, and that there are different ways in which to perform a story. I wanted some passages to have the cadences of songs, I wanted to have stories told like interviews back and forth, and some that were pure fantasy like comic strips—this all comes from the Irish folk tradition, but also from the Irish street tradition, which I think definitely informs Irish modernism: that tremendous faith in the power of language.”

(From a fabulous interview with David Keenan at The London Magazine here.)

The Franchise Affair

May 20, 2019 /

In her thoughtful and persuasive introduction to the Folio Society’s 2014 edition of Josephine Tey’s final novel The Singing Sands, the crime novelist Val McDermid makes a splendid case for Tey as the bridge between the Midsomer cosiness of Golden Age crime fiction and the harder-edged suspense novels of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. I enjoyed McDermid’s essay – her love for and knowledge of crime writing bleeds through into every piece of criticism she writes – but it leaves me perplexed. Why don’t I see what she sees? The Franchise Affair was published in 1948. It would be easy to argue that it is more or less impossible for a writer and critic of my generation to properly understand the subtleties and subtexts of a novel that appeared almost twenty years before she was born. And yet still I am perplexed. Why does it seem to me that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights – both published a hundred years before The Franchise Affair and long before any of the twentieth century’s social and cultural revolutions could reasonably have been imagined – seem less straitjacketed by class prejudice and more feminist by far than anything I have so far encountered by Josephine Tey?

Well, the Bronte masterpieces are in a sense fantasies, I hear you reply. Tey is writing about the society that surrounds her – she is reflecting reality.

OK then, I counter. But that reality comes across as pretty ugly, and I don’t see Tey putting up much of a protest about it. She is wonderfully witty in places, waspish even, and I’m all for that. What I don’t see is irony.

*

The comparison with Midsomer Murders is not entirely spurious. The Franchise Affair is very much a small town mystery, with a restricted cast of characters and only a cameo appearance from Tey’s regular detective, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. Our hero this time is Robert Blair, a somewhat unadventurous local solicitor. Unaccustomed to criminal cases, when one unexpectedly comes his way his first instinct is to push it off on the sharp-suited and (therefore) less scrupulous lawyer Ben Carley. It is only his growing admiration for one of the accused, Marion Sharpe – the damsel in distress, though to be fair Tey does make substantial efforts to portray her as anything but – that forces Blair to change his mind. How far this decision will affect Robert’s life in the long run is left to us to surmise. I did admire Tey’s courage in not providing a typical happy ending. If only she could have shown this kind of grit and ambiguity in more open confrontation of social norms.

Marion and her widowed mother are what are most usually referred to as distressed gentlefolk. They live at The Franchise, a house they have inherited from a distant relative at an inconvenient location some distance from town. As the novel opens, they have been accused of kidnap and abuse by a sixteen-year-old girl, Betty Kane, who swears blind the two Sharpe women abducted her from a bus stop, then held her prisoner at The Franchise in an attempt to force her to become their maid-of-all-work. Betty is well mannered and pleasing to the eye. What’s more, she can describe the house and the attic where she says she was held in every detail. Her case seems watertight. But Robert Blair cannot believe it – not Marion! – and his friend, the somewhat disreputable but nonetheless good egg Kevin McDermott, a London barrister, does not believe it either. How can the Sharpes possibly be guilty when Mrs Sharpe is the sister of the horse breeder who sold McDermott his first pony?? Together, they set out to Save the Women. And so the mystery laid before us is gradually revealed.

I’m being flippant of course, which is unfair to Tey. As a piece of mystery writing, The Franchise Affair is deftly woven, economical, entertaining, pleasing in its attention to detail and satisfying in the pulling together of its clues and leads. Why then does it have to be such a blatant and depressing exercise in class prejudice? Of course what Betty does is horrifying – but it is horrifying because it is deceitful, damaging and unheeding of the consequences for innocent people. Contrary to what the novel seems to suggest, Betty’s criminality is not the inevitable result of her being ‘no better than she should be’, the child of a mother who enjoyed ‘dancing with officers’ instead of scrubbing down the kitchen floor, presumably, and – oh my God, worst of all! – someone who openly and lasciviously enjoys a good meal. ‘Eating like a young wolf at my hotel’. Good lord, whatever next.

Betty and her deceased mother are portrayed as persons who are likely to go off the rails because they don’t know their place. Bad blood, in other words, and blood will out Similarly, the witnesses for the prosecution – a servant named Rose Glyn and a farm girl Gladys Rees – are variously described as ‘slut’, ‘moron’, ‘illiterate’, ‘little rat’ – all epithets casually thrown about by the fine, upstanding men who are defending the Sharpes – poor ladies – from the evil machinations of the lower classes. Even Ben Carley, the wide-boy lawyer from the wrong end of the High Street, with his ‘town clothing’ and his love of a risque joke, is shown in no uncertain terms as an arriviste and, to paraphrase Marion, ‘not our sort’.

I liked the portrayal of Marion and her mother – the mistaken ‘witches’ on the wrong end of a village witch hunt – but why does Marion’s hard-won pluck and insistence on her independence (Val McDermid is perfectly right about the way in which a woman like Marion transgresses the gender stereotypes of the period) have to be at the expense of every other woman in the book? Silly Aunt Lin, Bible-bashing Christina, Betty’s mother and of course Betty herself: she’s lost her parents in the Blitz, now she’s losing her step-brother as well. Of course she’s messed up, and is potentially every bit as interesting a character as Marion. Instead, Tey chooses to portray her – lipstick in pocket – as a painted whore.

The only ordinary working people that come out of this OK are those – like Stanley who works in the garage and his own widowed mum – who doff the cap with a smile and respect their betters.

Yes, I’m disappointed. Maybe that’s unfair of me – maybe it really is impossible for a critic bitching in 2019 to properly grasp the rigid and unforgiving hierarchies of post-war Britain – and contrary to appearances I shall be reading more Tey. I’m intrigued by her odd, slightly off-kilter mysteries. In spite of my harsh judgement I can see, through the cracks, what she is driving at, and I want to see more. The thing that does terrify me is the thought of what I might find when I come to reread Dorothy L. Sayers. I devoured her books in my early twenties. They seemed to me then paragons of progressiveness and sardonic wit. What if I discover them to be full of the kind of unthinking bias that so thoroughly snarls up the workings of The Franchise Affair?

For now I shall put off the moment of truth, continuing in the hope that they are still perfect.

The far north

August 3, 2018 /

When I won the Kitschies Red Tentacle earlier this year, I decided I would spend the prize money on making some forays into the Scottish landscape, seeing places that were new to me and generally getting to know this country a little better. I spent some time in Edinburgh back in June. Other than one brief lunch hour between trains, this was my first visit to the capital and it was a memorable experience, not least because I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Alien at the Filmhouse while I was there – talk about excellent timing! In terms of its architecture, history, culture and overall vibe, Edinburgh is so very, very different from Glasgow, and I came away with the sense that my understanding of Scotland as a nation had been increased substantially.

In July, Chris and I visited Arran, our nearest island neighbour. We took the longer, three-ferry route via  Claonaig and Lochranza, a spectacular approach, especially under piercing blue skies. Arran is a marvellous place in every respect and we will certainly be back (I need to climb Goat Fell…) Then at the beginning of this week I undertook what turned out to be my most memorable rail journey since taking the sleeper train from Leningrad to Moscow in 1987., when I boarded the Far North Line to Thurso.

There is no better reminder than this of how big Scotland actually is. After travelling the three hours from Glasgow Queen Street to Inverness – a spectacular stretch of railway extending right through the Cairngorms – there are still another four hours of journey time to go, all accompanied by far-reaching views of the northern Highlands and the strange, vast interior of Caithness, the unique and environmentally important peat bog known as the Flow Country.

The journey will forever be characterised in my mind by the acreages of fireweed – rosebay willowherb – that daubed bright pink along the whole length of the line, in full and vivid bloom on my way up, just beginning to go over on my way back. Strangest of all though was the fact that I happened to be reading Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, a powerful and original work very different from Glazer’s film, and travelling through places – Dornoch, Tain – almost in the very moment that I was reading about them.

In the Caithness Horizons museum in Thurso, they have Pictish stones, whose elusive, unreachable mysteries move one to tears. They also have the original 1950s control room equipment from the Dounreay nuclear power station. You can sit in the seat where the controller would have sat – a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit on the side lend a particularly grounding touch of realism – and lift the telephone they would have used in the event of an emergency. You can see and touch the SCRAM buttons. It really is quite something.

On my second day in Thurso I made the crossing to Orkney on the Hamnavoe, leaving from Scrabster and landing in the old port of Stromness, whose history has been shaped equally by the herring industry, Arctic exploration and WW2. Travel logistics made it impossible to stay on Orkney more than a few hours on this occasion, enough time at least for me to gain a sense of the place, to climb up to the heather moorland behind the town and look down towards Scapa Flow. The Hamnavoe ferry’s route takes her right past the Old Man of Hoy, and as we passed by on our return journey – our captain made an announcement that orcas had been sighted alongside us, but in spite of our rushing immediately on to the decks, none of us passengers were lucky enough to catch sight of them – it seemed inevitable that I would think of Peter Maxwell Davies, the life he made on Orkney and his perennially lovely and timeless Farewell to Stromness.

Holy Isle from Lamlash Bay, Arran

Piers, Stromness

Main street, Stromness

Above Stromness

Obsolescence

August 22, 2017 /

This morning I happened upon this superbly articulate and, I would say, essential essay by McKenzie Wark, and I’ve been thinking about it all day. Quite apart from the admiration one would obviously feel for the way it is written – such an engaging and dynamic arrangement of arguments – it seems to me that this piece presents one of the most cogent defences of science fiction I have ever read. Wark shows SF to be not just radical but necessary as a means of exposing the derangement of our present age:

“Ghosh thinks that this strategy of introducing chance or the strange or the weird or the freaky into the novel is to risk banishment. But from what? Polite bourgeois society? The middle-brow world of the New York Review of Books? Perhaps it’s not the end of the world to end up exiled in genre fiction, with horror, fantasy, romance, melodrama, gothic, or science fiction. Frankly, I think there’s far more interesting readers to be found reading there.”

The essay seemed to come as an answer to the question of why I feel an almost inevitable unease – discomfort even – in the presence of a novel like Ben Lerner’s 10:04, one of the most perfectly realised studies of interiority I have encountered recently with not a word out of place or superfluous, and yet there is that dis-ease, all the same. It seemed to chime with feelings of sadness at the death of Brian Aldiss, one of our most insatiably curious writers, and devoted to SF almost at his own peril. Along with others whose comments I’ve seen in response to the various online memorials, I could come close to arguing that my intellectual life was kick-started by Aldiss’s great Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, and the vision it presented of SF as a distinct literature, a movement almost.

I feel fortunate in reading Wark’s essay precisely now, as I contemplate new work, new directions. I have a pile of notes already for the next book and I think it would be fair to say that I’m excited about it but even more so after today, with all these new thoughts about what the novel is for still in my mind.

Most of the book industry conspires against such a vision but that only makes it more exciting, more necessary.

*

Currently reading: Denise Mina’s The Long Drop, which is spare, chilling and excellent. It is also on the shortlist for the Gordon Burn Prize, which by accident rather than design I happen to have read most of, as well as several other titles that appeared on the longlist.  I’ve been so impressed by the Gordon Burn Prize – its ethos, its juries’ choices – that I am seriously considering reading and reviewing the full longlist next year, as a planned reading project. As for this year, I was lucky enough to hear Denise Mina talk about The Long Drop at the recent Bute Noir crime writing festival right here in Rothesay, an event that has proved to be one of the highlights of our first summer here, a miniature Bloody Scotland with every seat taken and everyone already looking forward to more of the same in 2018.

“In the future they will think they remember this moment because of what happened next, how significant it was that they found Mr Smart’s car, but that’s not what will stay with them. A door has been opened in their experience, the sensation of being in a car with friends, the special nature of being in a car; a distinct space, the possibility of travel, with sweets. Because of this moment one of them will forever experience a boyish lift to his mood when he is in a car with his pals. Another will go on to rebuild classic cars as a hobby. The third boy will spend the rest of his life fraudulently claiming he stole his first car when he was eight, and was somehow implicated in the Smart family murders. He will die young, of the drink, believing that to be true.”

*

The summer is well advanced, but still so full of things. Chris and I will be guests of Fantasticon, in Copenhagen, at the end of this month. At the end of next month there’s FantasyCon, and after that I’ll be in Paris on a writing residency, and hopefully writing. The new book will be set in Rothesay, or rather versions of Rothesay, with the novel that brought me on my first visit here more than a decade ago now – Andrew O’Hagan’s ravishing Personality – standing over me like an admonishment…

Our Pavilion

June 27, 2017 /

Last Friday, we had the excitement and privilege of being able to participate in a ‘hard hat tour’ of Rothesay Pavilion, which is currently undergoing a major programme of redevelopment – read rescue project – prior to its scheduled reopening in July 2019. 

The pavilion was designed in the 1930s by James Andrew Carrick, son of Ayr architect James Carrick, a noted practitioner of Arts and Crafts style. The pavilion opened in 1938, its clean Art Deco lines providing a startling and significant addition to Rothesay’s traditionally Victorian seafront architecture.  Carrick’s design is thought to have been inspired by the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, which opened in 1935 as one of the very first Modernist buildings in Britain. An art exhibition space, cinema and seafront cafe, the magnificently refurbished De La Warr was a venue we visited often and with great pleasure when we lived in Hastings. When we discovered she had a ‘cousin’ in Rothesay we were delighted.

Carrick went on to design two more iconic buildings on Scotland’s west coast: the Cragburn Pavilion in Gourock and the ice rink in Ayr. Sadly both of these are already lost to us, making Rothesay Pavilion three times more precious and worthy of preservation.

Although the exterior of the building looks rather the worse for wear at present, a sizeable amount of important work has already taken place inside – removing hazardous materials, securing the structure – in preparation for the major second phase of building works that are due to begin in the autumn.

The new Rothesay Pavilion will be a vital community space as well as a major arts and music venue, a youth training facility, an important source of inspiration and revenue for the island, a slice of the town’s history reborn. It’s a thrilling project and a thrilling prospect, and huge thanks are due to the Rothesay Pavilion registered charity‘s artistic director and CEO Julia Twomlow and to project manager Peter McDonald for hosting such an instructive and hands-on tour.

You can even see some live footage of our explorations at the Rothesay Pavilion Facebook page!

Where we are

March 14, 2017 /

It is difficult to keep finding new words for the political catastrophe that is engulfing the UK: the disingenuousness with which the Brexit government conducts itself, the wimpishness with which the majority of sitting MPs go along with it all, the – well, the non-existence of any opposition. Although Ian McEwan did a swift back-pedal on remarks made in interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais (no, they weren’t ‘garbled in translation’, Ian, it was you being spineless: how pathetic, to try and make out that ‘Nazi’ was substituted for ‘nasty’ – did it never occur to you the two words only sound alike in English?) he was perfectly right, and there was no need for him to hand out any mollifying ‘clarification’. The people of the UK are not Nazis (although a vocal minority are doing a damn good impression) but the democratic underpinnings of our parliamentary system have been subject to exactly the kind of depredations that laid the foundations for Nazi dictatorship in Germany in the 1930s.

A plebiscite – that’s a referendum to you and me – might look like democracy but more often than not it’s a power-grab by a government or section of government bent on weaponising the general populace towards its own ends. And talk about the Big Lie. Again, the people of the UK are not stupid, but they have been urged towards a certain viewpoint based on unsound principles, evident falsehoods, and the poisonous drip-drip of tabloid sensationalism. That blatant lies went virtually unchallenged as part of the pre-referendum Brexit ‘debate’ is not just a scandal, it has morphed into the biggest threat to our parliamentary democracy in living memory. That the sitting government now seems bent on pursuing the wages of these falsehoods – diving after them like lemmings over a cliff, in fact – is like watching an experiment in mass hypnosis run fatally out of control. That we as an electorate are effectively without an opposition – well, those ‘nasty’ comparisons just get bigger and bigger.

In a UK where government ministers can push ahead with an insane and retrograde agenda – an agenda that will set the social and political agenda for decades to come – without due parliamentary process (what sop to process we’ve been offered has been nothing more than a charade), and where the Lord Chancellor can stand by while the most scurrilous of our national newspapers labels our judiciary enemies of the people, it feels as if literally anything could happen here and there’d be fuck all we could do about it.

Remind you of anywhere, Mr McEwan?

A speech to Scottish Labour in which London’s mayor Sadiq Khan drew parallels between those in favour of a second Scottish independence referendum and those voting for Trump or Brexit kickstarted some heated debate last month about the nature of Scottish nationalism. I can see why Mr Khan might feel worried: he has had to face down the most appalling racism and the very word ‘nationalist’ must set off about a hundred warning bells. But while the frenzied backlash against Claire Heuchan for her timely and thought-provoking piece supporting Khan’s view is an unfortunate example of exactly what Khan was talking about (although I disagreed with Heuchan’s essay on several points, it seems to me that she is precisely the kind of thinker we need more of) I still think Khan got it wrong. Not about nationalism – he’s dead right about that – but about what the SNP stands for.

When talking about Scottish nationalism, we would do well to remember that the ‘N’ in SNP does not stand for ‘nationalist’, but for ‘national’. The SNP is the party for Scotland, in other words – not the party that promotes ‘Scottish nationalism’ in the sense Khan was getting at.

That kind of nationalism is old – so old – and invariably toxic. Not just in Scotland, but everywhere. As a planet, we are facing unprecedented challenges from disease, from poverty, from educational inequality and above all from climate change (which, if ignored, will exacerbate all the above a millionfold), In the face of such challenges, many of which are threatening to become crises even as we speak, the idea of something as thoroughly nineteenth-century as ‘nationalism’ is almost indecently parochial, destructive, and above all useless.

For Theresa May to claim that Nicola Sturgeon has ‘seized upon’ Brexit as an excuse to drive forward her own political agenda is just another piece of gross misinformation – all the more gross because everyone who peddles it knows it is untrue. The material change in political circumstances since the 2014 independence referendum could not be more seismic. Anyone who has followed Sturgeon’s numerous attempts these past six months to liaise with Westminster, to talk through options, to come to a reasonable compromise can see clearly that her announcement yesterday that she will be seeking consent from the Scottish parliament to call a second independence referendum was made because Sturgeon felt she would be failing in her responsibility not to do so. On the eve of May’s triggering of Article 50 and still with nothing but icy contempt shown for her efforts, there was finally no alternative.

As she made her announcement to the press yesterday, Sturgeon made it very clear that ‘it is not just our relationship with Europe that is at stake. What is at stake is the kind of country we will become’.  As journalist and commentator Robert Somynne so beautifully put it in his piece contesting Khan’s view of Scottish nationalism, ‘the ambition is not being “better than England”, but aspiring to just be better in an age in which progressivism is under threat‘.

I think Nicola Sturgeon is brave and I believe she is honest. As First Minister for Scotland she has my full support. My dream is to see an independent, diverse, progressive Scotland at the heart of a stronger European Union and that is what I’ll be voting for when the time comes. Whatever happens, I am proud and very happy to call Scotland my home.

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