Eccentrics and Individualists

Garry MacKenzie, Scotland: A Literary Guide for Travellers

IB Tauris, 272pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781784536411

reviewed by Mike Gonzalez

When Walter Scott explored the Scottish lochs and Robert Louis Stevenson wandered the narrow alleyways of Edinburgh, many travellers would probably have carried their volume of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ or ‘Kidnapped’ in their bags as literal literary companions. Scotland, after all, was just being ‘discovered’ by new bourgeois tourists agog at the prospect of unearthing the romantic ghosts and medieval heroes that Scott had placed in the landscapes of the Highlands. They might have found a space for a volume of the writings of Robert Burns, the great people’s poet of the Lowlands. The most adventurous might have taken Boswell and Johnson’s Journey to the Hebrides (1775), though hopefully with fewer misadventures and squabbles than the great writer and his biographer.

Today, in the wake of an explosion of fine writing across the country, this Literary Companion will have to stand in for the small library you might otherwise need to take along. In a real sense, this is a guide book to Scotland with literary anecdotes. But is succeeds in being evocative and affectionate. It is also ambitious in its range of reference, which sometimes assumes more than it is fair to expect of the visitor. But then, this is not a history.

Edinburgh is a fair starting point, a city that receives every year cultural amabassadors from across the world. The city gave us Jekyll and Hyde, Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie – but inevitably perhaps Harry Potter overshadows them, having begun his life in the wonderful Elephant Café on George IV Bridge, where admirers flock to have a coffee, some fine cake, and leave a comment on the toilet wall. Less well known, but given its due weight here, is James Hogg’s gloriously sinister Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), oddly post modern despite having been published in 1824. Perhaps it falls to Ian Rankin’s curmudgeonly detective Rebus or Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh to guide us through the seedier parts of the city.

The Border Country is probably, and undeservedly, the least familiar part of Scotland. That’s a pity, because it is home to Scott’s neo-gothic pile, Abbotsford, beside the river Tweed, where his eccentric collection of historic bits and pieces provides a kind of map of the hugely successful novels which provided a Scotland of the imagination for a Victorian world. The proliferation of abbeys (many of them fortified) across the region are reminders that this was a terrain fought for over centuries between England and Scotland. The existence of the border is a gentle reminder of who in the end could claim victory. To the west is Burns country, from Dumfries (where he lived and worked as an excise man) to his home village of Alloway where a wonderful new museum allows the curious to read and hear his witty, incisive and radical work.

The guide is full of references to itinerant writers passing through or across the country – Shelley, De Quincey, Stevenson’s David Balfour, the fleeing hero of Kidnapped (1886). But Glasgow has held its writers close, and has provided space for a spectrum of fine writing that could stand its ground anywhere. The gloriously eccentric and erudite Alasdair Gray is a painter, a playwright, and the author of a comic surrealist masterpiece in Lanark (1981). His murals at Oran Mor in the West End, ‘more Blake than Michelangelo’ as McKenzie observes, are well worth a trip on their own. An earlier and hugely popular novel (my Spanish father recommended it highly), Alexander McArthur’s No Mean City (1935), presented the image of a slum city besieged by razor wielding gangs that most Glaswegians are less than happy about. That world of poverty and alienation still exists, though the Gorbals of the novel has gone; it has its chroniclers too, glimpsed in a new detective fiction of writers like William McIlvanney and Denise Mina. But the anti-romance of the hard boiled realism of the thirties has long since given way to the eloquence of Edwin Morgan’s Glasgow Sonnets (1972), for example, to Liz Lochhead’s witty poetry and Louise Welsh’s Gothic urban landscapes. The echoes of that other world are still to be found in James Kelman, whose work is controversial above all because it speaks with the language of the street, though it draws from it both profound tragedy and insight, as in How Late It Was How Late (1994).

Scotland has produced its share of eccentrics and towering individualists. Iain Hamilton Finlay was a poet, a gardener, a sculptor, a radical, all qualities that are combined in his Little Sparta, a garden that narrates its own story. It is I suspect deliberately out of the way, but certainly worth finding. Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle (1926) is his epic commentary on Scottish nationhood. It continues to provoke, as he so often did, vigorous arguments even among the sober. James Robertson’s fine novel And the Land Lay Still (2010) offers a very different but equally compelling account of Scotland’s more recent history.

There is another world to be discovered across the Highland Fault line. It is place of thick woodland from which emerge craggy and forbidding hills and which lead on to a fractured coastline looking across to the Hebridean islands. Its literature reflects, in many different ways, this landscape and the history it has embraced. The islands are a strange universe, isolated by geography and language. I speak no Gaelic but simply to listen to the great Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean is enough to feel the melancholy, the anger and the solitudes of these communities. Norman MacCaig describes the northern coast, his work ‘more guide than poetry,’ naming the scarred rocks and expansive bays he knew so intimately.

The novelist who for me is among the most powerful and original of all registers another diminishing world. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is both an elegy and a protest, more poignant because it is narrated through the rhythms of the Doric, the language of Aberdeenshire , that he reproduces through the speech of Chris, his heroine. Moving south, Dundee is a city that has gone through many rejuvenations registered in part by its writers – its moment of decline in the comically incompetent verse of William McGonagle,to the supremely skilled Don Paterson of a reborn literary city.

MacKenzie takes his reader on a long and rewarding walk across Scotland. His range of references is wide, and presented with passion and without pretensions. Inevitably the selection is a personal one, just as mine has been in choosing some of the works he highlights over others. And no doubt other reviewers will find a favourite book or poem left aside. I think the inhabitants of Stirling might feel slightly peeved at its omission. But there is one literary event I would like to highlight, though it is not strictly an available text. ‘The Cheviot the Stag and the Black Black Oil’ was a pathbreaking work of theatre, developed by John McGrath’s 7:84 company in the mid seventies. It toured every corner of the country with its pop-up book scenery and presented the history of Scotland’s colonisation and oppression in song and story. For the traveller who wants to find the origins of contemporary Scotland, of its nationalism and its vote to maintain its links to Europe, they could do no better than seek out the text or the DVD of this extraordinary work.
Mike Gonzalez is Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Glasgow.