12 Scottish books in 2021
Christmas 2020 was a dark time for many. The norm had become restrictions. Contact with family and friends was limited. My partner, Rachel and I were both working from home and were quite happy in our wee bubble. The dark nights of winter had become one of the challenges of lockdown. Previously these would be filled with Christmas gigs, Christmas Parties and Christmas Hangovers. We’d long since got bored of the nightly battle to find something on Netflix, so I rediscovered reading.
I love a book, but I can go years without reading much. Non-fiction books, magazines, technical manuals and music biographies sit in the toilet and stacked on flat surfaces, I dip in and out if I’m in the bath. My life tends to be too busy or I’ve become too much of a short attention spanned workaholic addicted to wifi connected screens to take the time to shut off and immerse myself in fiction.
I used to read a lot when I was a solo traveller and wifi wasn't as prevalent. I tried to read significant books from the country I was in at the time. It was a good way of discovering obscure books and learning about cultures and it worked well with my workaholic nature of not just being able to read a book because I wanted to. It had to be part of a virtual Panini sticker album in my head.
So at the end of 2020 the stars aligned and I found myself needing some respite from the computer, the well of telly was running dry and the best new novel in the world was set in Glasgow…..
A novel about working class Glasgow in the 80’s got loads of press for winning the booker prize and arrived in my lap at the perfect time. I thought it started a bit slow, and I took a wee while to get a handle on who all the characters were in the different timelines, but this might be as much about my brain being ruined by a Netflix speed of pacing. Once you’re in the main timeline, I started cancelling and postponing my other activities as the characters jumped off the pages.
It’s hard to recommend this book to people that aren’t Scottish, or even who aren’t working class. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to read this book without having known loads of Shuggie’s and Agnes’s growing up.
The book has had so much coverage, and I’m not a book reviewer, so chase all the reviews and see if it’s for you. I absolutely loved it. It’s a fiver if you click the link or picture above - what do you have to lose?
Following Shuggie Bain, I decided that given that there wasn’t much chance of us venturing much beyond Scotland in the near future, I would use literature to get a bit more excited about Scotland. I would aim for one novel set in Scotland a month for 2021…..
Novel number two was quite an easy pick. I’d asked for it for Christmas. Andrew O’Hagan is from Ayrshire, so I can make an even better claim to relating to him than I can to Shuggie Bain.
I’d previously read Be Near Me and really enjoyed it. His writing takes you along for the journey, and you become more than just an observer of the story. Mayflies tells the story of music fans from Ayrshire going to gigs in the early 90’s. The characters are just a few years older than me, but I recognise the experiences perfectly. There is a genius in the way that the inane pointless conversation of youth has been captured. In-jokes and alternative humour that at the time you think makes you unique and some sort of outsider comedy genius, but the truth is you just like bonding over talking shite.
This recreation of such a unique personal experience would be enough, but he then fast forwards to present day and allows us to reflect on what those relationships mean in adult life - that’s as much as I’ll say.
I loved it. It didn’t have the “classic novel” structure or characters. It was more of an experience. My only complaint is that it was too short. I look forward to him telling me more about myself in his next book.
My “March” book (which I was reading in late January) was another Christmas gift. No one even knew that I was trying to read Scottish novels :) After the cathartic soaks in the bath remembering my youth with Mayflies, it was nice to have a change of pace. Pine is a classic thriller which I guess will(at least should be) an ITV telly programme. I flew through it and it reminded me how relaxing an “easy” book can be. I loved the world she created and would love to read more from there.
At time of writing, it’s £3 at the link above. A steal for a wee veg on the couch.
When I decided I would read a Scottish novel a month, I rifled through my book cases to see what I had already. There has been a dog-eared copy of Kidnapped that has moved from flat to flat with me without being read. I don’t know where it came from. I may have pinched it off a sibling or the family bookshelf at some point.
It is a fictionalisation of a historical event, which I always like cos you feel you are getting to tick two boxes at once. Like a film that’s based on political history that lets you head down a wikipedia wormhole while you are watching. This one is even more significant because my grandmother lives in Appin where it is set.
For some reason I’d never read it. I read and loved Treasure island, but for some reason I’d never tried kidnapped. It seemed like a good opportunity to change things up a little and look cultured while I was reading by reading a classic(more on that later).
So it starts quite dark(I mean it’s at night in bad weather), and obviously the language is far harder to read than the easy pickings of modern crime thrillers and the like, but there’s something about Victorian adventure books aimed at 12 yr old boys that sits just about right with me. It’s not quite as swashbuckling as Treasure island, but there’s some definite Goonies notes as the two adventurers traverse mountains I’ve been on and describe the Scottish highlands. For this reason, even in the worst weather I’ll had off on a road trip round Scotland.
The books did two things. It made me watch the various adaptations for film(I’ve been watching classic films) and it convinced me once more that I could read victorian literature…..
Buoyed by my enjoyment of big RLS, I decided to give Walter Scott a go again.
About every 5 years, I go to Opera, Ballet or Musical Theatre or I listen to Jazz, Metallica or the Smiths. People talk about how good they are, and I kind of feel I should like them. I don’t. Then after about 5 years I forget that I don’t and I try again. Thats how I feel about historical literature. I want to be the person who is enjoying reading the same words that people read and enjoyed hundreds of years ago, but it’s just not in me. You go three pages without a punctuation mark in endless prose that describes a story you don’t care about and then SQUIRREL!! I’m the dog from Up. I re-read the same page about 20 times and just can’t find interest in it. I feel the same way about Dickens and Conan Doyle. I want to like them but just can’t. Walter Scott is the worst though. Strangely I quite enjoy Dumas, Casanaova, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, so maybe I’m just hitting Walter Scott in the wrong mood, or foreign victorian writers have had more recent translations.
Rob Roy is a legendary character that is up there in Scottish consciousness like William Wallace. I’ve never really understood why. I guess it’s because of this romanticised adventure novel. The problem is that it’s not really a story, it’s like a mildly interesting legal scenario with Rob Roy shoe-horned in. Some lawyers have sat in the pub and talked through a case. Who else cares? I think I’ve read the first third three times and decided life is too short. Maybe I need to try a different Walter Scott.
Okay Ely Percy! Rescue me from Walter Scott!
This was a birthday gift. On the cover it boasts “recipient of the Scots Language Publication grant”, for the next edition they can quote me for the cover:
“Where Walter Scott fails Ely Percy triumphs”
This book is really really lovely. Again, back to my youth where I overlap in the main character’s Venn diagram. High School life in the west of Scotland in the 1990’s. Lots of little vignettes that don’t require the concentration or commitment that I’d failed on in Walter Scott; this it the exact opposite. There’s wonderfully recognisable characters from working class towns. Strangely for a book just short of 400 pages, there’s not that much of an overarching narrative and the success of the writing is that it doesn't really need it.
Every time I’ve taught students of this age, you want to scream at them that they are talented and can achieve great things. In the same way you are rooting for the main character, not as part of some great swashbuckling adventure, but just in life. It’s heartwarming.
Ely’s previous novel Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz is on my ‘to be read’ list.
I got this recommendation from Ely Percy’s twitter.
It’s another one that portrays what I think of as a niche part of my life - street culture in little working class towns in Scotland. Maybe it’s not as niche as I think it is and everyone can relate to it - it’s hard to tell.
They should crop dust with this in the central belt. Like Gideon’s bibles, there should be a charity that just hands this to 12 year old boys across the central belt. I think it would give them a far better understanding of what they are fighting against and what they are fighting for. For people who were never 12 yr old boys in working class Scotland, I think it is a manual for understanding toxic masculinity and the male mental health crisis.
Luckily I managed to avoid most of this growing up and was pretty much just an observer/survivor of it rather than a victim, but I definitely still feel effects of it on a daily basis. Darren McGarvey talks about it. Growing up surrounded by fear. Subconsciously you can smell rough areas and you keep eyes on the back of your head wherever you go, so I can’t imagine actually being as ingrained in it as Armstrong is.
What he does here is gives us a Scottish Boyz n the Hood but far less cheesy and much more real(to a Scottish boy). It could so easily have been toe curlingly cringey. “Me and Wee Baz smoked a doobie then pumped some burds”, but he is much more skilful in his use of language and wonderfully self aware about the situation and the futility of it - all while managing not to renounce the joy and core part of his existence that these experiences and this culture are. It’s just stunning.
So by July I was quite proud of myself. I’d read (and even finished one) historical novels, booker prize winners and things in the Scots language. I’d stuck with it for long enough that reading had become habit again. By now my partner was entering the second trimester of pregnancy and what they don’t show you in films and televisions is that her bedtime was getting earlier and earlier. It was the height of the summer and I was finding that I had 4 hours of evening to myself with daylight streaming through the window. I’d taken to slowly nursing a whisky and sitting in a seat by the window and enjoying a book.
This coincided wonderfully with my friend Richy recommending an author. Alan Parks. Gritty crime thrillers set in Glasgow in the 1970’s. What’s not to love?!
The most obvious comparison is Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels. I have pretty much read all of them. They are great for turning yourself off, and you can pretty much read one in a day. These are no different. I started Bloody January one evening and the next afternoon I walked to the book shop to buy February’s son. I think they are better than the Rebus novels for me, because it’s Glasgow and not Edinburgh, their pacing and grit level are a bit more up to date and Alan Parks music tastes overlap with mine more than Ian Rankin’s do.
So I rattled through the four that have been written in a week or so.
I feel almost guilt when I read books like this. It’s like watching an action movie or a crime thriller. You rarely learn much about the human condition, but it’s a great ride. Up until this year, I read that rarely that I felt that books I read should be significant or go some way to ticking off the 1001 you are meant to read before you die or something. That said, I will read his fifth book on the day it comes out :)
I wasn’t sure whether to include this or not. It’s not really set in Scotland and it’s more of a memoir than a novel, but it comes with a great story and it won’t be on all the other lists of 2021 books that most of these books are on, and this one is self published which is a wonderful concept.
Rachel and I were on a date night somewhere not long before lockdown kicked in. In the taxi home, the taxi driver was pretty talkative and somehow we got onto the subject of Rachel having been to India. The taxi driver(James) told us that he’d spent a fair while there - in jail - for smuggling drugs….. He started to tell a wee bit about it, but told us that we could buy his book on Amazon.
It was a great read. It’s self published and as such doesn’t have the benefit of a big publishers editing team etc. so you take that on board when you get involved, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this man’s story and the whole concept of a wee Glaswegian hard man finding his feet in such an exotic world. I think it’s great that people can tell their story like this. Whether it’s his writing style or how much I can relate him to people I’ve known over the years I found it a really easy read. I don’t think Spielberg will be rushing for the film rights cos it’s a well trodden path, but there’s a sequel and it’s on my wishlist for a future easy read.
As soon as you get into Ian Rankin or Val McDermid(my first one is still sitting on the shelf) or now Alan Parks, it’s not long till you hear the name William McIlvanney starts to appear in reviews and synopsis/synopi/synopsises. He is intrinsically linked to the term Tartan Noir. I still don’t really know what it means. Gritty crime novels set in Scotland.
So I picked up his classic, Laidlaw. It’s the archetype for these type of books.
William McIlvanney is much more descriptive than those that came after it. You can see why it’s so influential and attractive, but the constant similes and metaphor is almost comical. It feels like there should be a Tenor sax playing acapella blues in the background. My favourite is:
“He had a face that looked like an argument you couldn’t win”
It definitely gives me a window to the past and I found myself imagining my Glaswegian grandparents walking the same streets and drinking in the same pubs. I would even suggest that the prose influenced my papa’s use of language and way of telling a story and trying to make it sound more interesting than it was.
There’s another two books in the series. I’ve got them on my list, but I’d read new stuff by Alan Parks first.
This is the first in a series of books that should be right up my street. Short novella’s by well known authors that cover different parts of Scottish history. Short books. Easy to pick up. Don’t let truth get in the way of a good story and give me romantic notions related to some old Scottish buildings for a road trip.
I really struggled with this. I found it plodding. I was uninvested in it and there weren't really any characters, just a list of lots of names. It felt a bit like watching the second half of a random Game of Thrones episode. It picked up in the last few pages when Mary came back in, but in general I was pretty disappointed.
I found myself wondering why we have a fascination with Mary Queen of Scots. Is this the best story that goes along with her? Is it because she got involved with Elizabeth the first and the news is printed and made in England? Is it cos she’s a female monarch? We have all sorts of monarchs and consorts with better stories in Scotland, but there was this romantic notion built around her in the 1800’s that persists today. I think I was hoping that her story would be elevated for me in some way.
Anyway, the next books in the series are Hex by Jenni Fagan (March 2022) and The man who would not be king by Alan Warner(Autumn 2022). I’ll jump into them with both feet in the hope that this ongoing series improves. I’ll also not judge Denise Mina too harshly. I’ll check out her ‘proper’ work.
This author fell into my (virtual) lap by accident. I’ve dipped in and out of genealogy most of my adult life. I go at it with some fervour for a few months at a time and then lose interest as the obsession to solve a new link becomes so obscure as to be pointless, and the harder a link is to make the more tenuous the evidence. My genetic make up is remarkably uninteresting. Scotland and Northern England - for hundreds and hundreds of years. If you use your imagination, and only ignore the fact that only landed gentry have a paper trail further back than the 1600’s then I can make an argument for Edward Longshanks being my 26th Great Grandfather. However, my research isn’t solid enough for my mum to give up her SNP membership yet.
Anyway, I find my Scottish relatives from the past 200 years far more interesting than my regal relatives from the past 1000 years. My Great Grandmother was a Bain. Her father was born in Dingwall to farm workers from the surrounding fields. After(or before) that the trail kind of runs dry. We were due a road trip and found an interesting hotel deal up that way. The weather had cancelled any plans of climbing mountains, so with an OS map and some photocopies of birth records we went for a wee wander around the farms and fields and dirt tracks around there. I didn't even know what I was looking for. Simple things like seeing a rusted road sign which confirms your guess of what some 1820’s handwriting says on a census can make your heart race as if you are Indian jones finding the holy grail. Eventually I pulled over and admired the view.
All I really had left was to stand in the fields I knew my ancestors worked in and imagine their life and their moment of zen looking at the same view and the same mountains. I found that the lay-by I was in was the Neil Gunn Memorial Viewpoint. Who he?
Neil M. Gunn was a Scottish novelist. He stayed in a farmhouse near where I was standing. I don’t know which one. Possibly one my ancestors lived in or visited. He wrote historical novels here about the time of the highland clearances. So he stood in the footprints of my ancestors writing about the time that they existed. Good enough for me. I did a bit to research and bought Silver Darlings.
It’s not short and the pace is very much relaxed compared to what I’ve been reading, but I moved house while I was reading this, and between that and Rachel being pregnant, it was a lovely book to relax into at a crossroads in life. The history in the book is in flux, and I read it at my new bay window that overlooks the Clyde and the mountains. It felt like a different kind of reading. I’ll definitely check out more of his stuff.
For my final book of the year, I thought this was too good to pass up. William McIlvanney’s last book. A Prequel of Laidlaw, unfinished when he died with Ian Rankin taking up the reins to finish it. It’s such a nice concept that in itself made it an enjoyable read. I think its a definite improvement on the 1977 version of the character, you can almost tell when it is Ian Rankin writing. There’s more swearing for a start :)
I don’t think the story is up there with the best Rebus novels, it might be sacrilege to some, but I don’t think Laidlaw jumps off the page in the same way Rebus does. I still like the feeling of old Glasgow though.
Conclusion
So I very much made it through a Scottish novel a month in 2021. It was a fun journey. I definitely need to check out more contemporary stuff and keep my finger on the pulse of the literature world. If that fails, I know there’s enough undiscovered tartan noir to last a life time and help you nurse a whiskey of a late night. Hopefully in 2022, I can be both more selective about what I read and also find some great Scottish crossovers that lead me to music, travel, genealogy and whatever else. I’ve already got a fairly optimistic reading list for 2022….
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