The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

 

James Purdy’s second novel, The Nephew, written in 1961, was controversial in its day and – sadly – the reason for that controversy still affects a lot of fiction today. It tells the story of a (possible, never explicitly proven) homosexual love affair between a young man, Cliff, who subsequently goes to war in Korea and is posted missing in action, and another young man from his home town, called Vernon. What makes the novel so powerful is that this is not its principal theme; indeed, it is only late in the novel that this plotline emerges at all. There is no didacticism here; the homosexuality is not being written about as an “issue” with the characters only existing because they are homosexual and the novel only existing for the reason of debating that. Fifty plus years later, too many writers still cannot routinely create characters who just happen to be gay (or black, or Muslim), without this being a crucial element of the plot. It is the same problem Percival Everett bemoans when he says he wishes to be read as a writer, not as an African-American.

All very interesting, I’m sure you’re saying, but what does this have to do with Louise Welsh’s first novel, The Cutting Room?

The reason is that the novel’s protagonist, the wonderfully dissolute Rilke, is a gay man who, in the course of the novel, has a few sexual encounters. As with Purdy, however, Welsh doesn’t use this as a way of exploring gay sexuality: Rilke just happens to be a gay man. He is a beautifully created character, rich and complex, highly believable, as are the other main characters in the novel, and they all combine to provide a rich evocation of the seedier side of Glasgow living. The sense of place Welsh creates is profound, and you really feel you are immersed in this milieu.

Rilke is an auctioneer who is called by Miss McKindless to clear the property of her recently deceased brother. She wants this done quickly, and she advises Rilke that he is likely to find some unsavoury material. This, she wants destroyed. Rilke finds in an attic a complete library of pornographic material which he realises contains very rare and valuable works. As he looks through it he discovers some photographs of a young woman being tortured and killed. They are so realistic Rilke wonders whether they might be real, and he begins to investigate.

This pitches him into a shady Glasgow community of pornographers and fetishists and bent police. The novel zips along at a tremendous pace and we’re drawn willingly into Rilke’s world, as curious as him to find out the truth behind these terrible photographs. That truth, when it comes, is shocking.

I first read this when it came out in 2002, and Louise Welsh has just published, twenty years on, the sequel, The Second Cut. I’ve been looking forward to that but felt I needed to re-read The Cutting Room before I did. I’m glad I did. It was fun to make Rilke’s acquaintance once more, and I’m even more excited now to read The Second Cut.

New website for Rob McInroy Crime Writer

 I have set up a new website, robmcinroy.co.uk which will bring together information about my novels and short stories. It will still link to this blog, which I will continue to use for book reviews.

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan

 

Given that among the characters in Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth we have the devil, the beautifully horned daughter of the devil (who just happens to have killed her father), an intersex actor, Chinese triads and Scottish hitmen (and woman), the real-life William Burroughs and a man who – the devil notwithstanding – is surely the epitome of evil, then it is something to say that the most striking character of Luckenbooth is the building in which all the action is set, 10 Luckenbooth Close, Edinburgh. But it seems entirely meet to describe this tenement as a character because it lives and breathes and weaves itself inextricably around the lives of ninety years’ worth of tenants in a way that is wholly tangible. And surely this is as fine a piece of characterisation as you could ever hope to read:

No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is arthritic. It creaks often. Groans wretchedly when it rains. Its elbows are knobby. Knees buckled. It is old. How old, nobody on the street seems to know for sure... The dark wee close leading down to No. 10 Luckenbooth – has been here as long as any of them. Nobody sees it. No matter how many times they walk by. It’s unseen... It’s an ootlin. 

Luckenbooth is a striking novel about outsiders, the marginalised or the criminal or the ill or the down-at-heel. Spanning the years from 1910 to the millenium and told in three parts, each covering three characters who are given three chapters each, it’s a series of sometimes savage, sometimes scabrous, sometimes deeply moving stories. Although the stories are individual, all of the central characters are connected by their residence in Luckenbooth Close and some of their lives become fatally interlinked as time becomes fluid and the past pulses into the present, history brought to life and exacting a bloody revenge. Lives comes and go, sometimes in terrible circumstances, and still No. 10 Luckenbooth soaks up the pain that endures within its walls, groaning under its burden until gradually, inevitably, it begins to subside. 

The novel begins in 1910, when the devil is killed by his daughter and she – Jessie MacRae, possessed of a conscience as striking and as beautiful as the horns growing from her head – arrives at Luckenbooth to fulfil an arrangement made for her by her father – to provide a surrogate child for Mr Udnam, a man of the establishment, an Edinburgh worthy and, we come to discover, a man with terrible propensities. From this beginning, the novel slides inexorably towards millenium eve and a reckoning as painful as it is inevitable. 

The locus of Luckenbooth – the building and the novel – is that bifurcation between reality and nightmare, good and evil, life and the beyond. It is a borderland, a place where Otherness exists and where the battle between reality and the Other must take place. Often in literature, borderlands are chosen as a place to explore the role of suffering (think of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing), and so it is with Luckenbooth. The novel is a study of suffering, and of consequence and cessation. It is eschatology without theodicy, the end of things made secular. 

Luckenbooth is a deeply impressive work, thought-provoking, moving, violent and at times very, very funny. It is a brilliant piece of imagination.

Concert for Ukraine

I watched the Concert for Ukraine from Perth Concert Hall last night and it was a moving experience. In fact, I spent a fair bit of it in tears, and I’m not an emotional person by nature. The last time I remember such a thing happening was in 1989, and the reasons for my response last night can be traced all the way back to then. Here is the junction of the personal and the public, the way our past shapes our present. 

On 22^nd December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in the Scottish borders. As it happens, I drove past the site two days later, on my way home for Christmas. I’d been living in England for just over a year at that time, and loving life, but it still felt like “going home”. The connection was still strong. I tried not to look at the devastation to the right of the motorway and focused on Christmas, family, life, “home”. 

Those were more innocent days. My generation had grown up with no knowledge of war. Terrorism wasn’t yet a consideration of daily life. Lockerbie literally came out of thin air, the first major terrorist atrocity to impinge on my consciousness, and none of us could have realised how inured we would become to such events in the years that followed, how much they would come to shape our lives. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a terrorist atrocity. Don’t dignify it with the word war. 

A few weeks after Lockerbie, ITV aired highlights from Folk Aid for Lockerbie, a concert in Dumfries pulled together by the folk music community in aid of victims, just as Jim Mackintosh, Duncan Chisholm and co have done now for Ukraine. I videotaped it and watched it over and over. It was spinetingling. The connection between performers and audience was palpable, even through the TV screen. Sheena Wellington said going on stage was like walking into a big roomful of love.

And then Dougie MacLean came on. But more of that later. 

Heraclitus said you can’t step in the same stream twice. That quote has intrigued me my whole life. I’ve even written a novel about it, Cloudland, the best thing I’ve ever written. Here’s a quote from it: 

“I always try to think where it must be now. That patch of water. Right in front of you. Now it’s there, down there. And now it’s further on. In a minute it’ll be at Braidhaugh. Another five minutes, it’ll be in Muthill. I used to try to figure out what time it’ll reach the sea.” 

There is no teleology, there is no end, just the eternal pulse and flow of existence. So here I am, measuring out my life with molecules of water, that memory then, this one, yon one. You remember? Aye. 

Jim Malcolm, last night, accompanied by his daughter. His daughter! Must be over twenty-five years ago we first saw him. James, he was called then, Sconeward the album. “And my motor’s working harder as it climbs tae Auchterarder.” His version of “The Wild Geese”, second only to the great Jim Reid’s version, the song I sing every time I cross the border, every time I “go home”. 

Duncan Chisholm. Ah, Wolfstone of my youth. I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now. And Duncan introduced the next guest, Jonny Hardie, playing with Matthew Zajac while my mind sailed down the rivers of time. Jonny with Old Blind Dogs, the Lumpie on Gallowgate, tall ships in the harbour, Jonny and Davy and Buzzby kicking up a storm in Gosport, Jonny with Gavin Marwick, The Quiet Man set, the soundtrack they’ll play when they film Cloudland to mark the happiest moment of Ash Harker’s life, Johnnie and Gavin chasing each other up and down the fiddle, the tune rising and rising in joy and happiness. 

“Leith tae Kiev, Don to Gairloch”, tears for the new layer of meaning now overlaid on Hamish’s words, solidarity in peace, solidarity in war, o horo, the gillie mor. Hamish, the man who defined everything. 

Ross Ainslie and Duncan Chisholm played Gordon Duncan’s The Sleeping Tune as the river of time pulsed with memories of the supremely talented Gordon, memories of Gordon’s brother Ian, who was my Maths teacher at school, memories of our headmaster John MacLean. Once my mother was the MacLeans’ cleaner and I, a child of three or four, was introduced by him to his brother, “a very great man” he told me, and he was right, and that was my brush with the genius that was Sorley MacLean. I shook hands with a giant. 

From one MacLean to another. In Folk Aid for Lockerbie the encore was by Dougie MacLean, “This love will carry, this love will carry me, I know this love will carry me.” How they sang! That audience, congregation of the good in celebration of the true, in repudiation of evil, weaving their words of love into a spell of magic. Fast forward, April 20^th 2022, and the finale, Dougie and “This Love Will Carry.” New evil and a new congregation of the good ensuring this love will carry again and again and again. 1989, 2022, the past and the present, together in search of the future. 

Heraclitus said you can’t step in the same stream twice. It’s true. And it’s false. The stream bears on, the same molecules exist, in different combinations, new from old, handing down from posterity into eternity, my memories, my hopes, elisions, decisions, all of them merging with yours, and yours, and yours, and yours and forming, shaping something new, something wonderful. As ever Hamish Henderson got there first: 

Maker, you maun sing them…

Tomorrow, songs

Will flow free again and new voices

Be borne on the carrying stream.

And the carrying stream will bear us all, democrats of the world, together in peace and harmony. Our culture will survive. Our hopes will see the morning.

 

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Those Tyrannising Landlords by Seán Damer

 
Those Tyrannising Landlords, the new novel by my Ringwood Publishing stablemate Seán Damer, is an important book. It’s not often you say that about fiction, but Damer’s novel fills a fairly inexplicable gap – the story of the Irish immigrant families who descended on Glasgow between the Famine and the Great War to fashion new lives. The sheer number of such immigrants is extraordinary. In 1921, there were 160,000 Irish born people living in Scotland, mostly in Glasgow and the major towns of the west of Scotland, accounting for about 4% of the total population of the country. Back in the 1850s there were over 200,000, about 7% of the population. From the time of the Famine, these families came in search of better lives. By the twentieth century, a common cause was to escape the “tyrannising landlords” in Ireland ,whose frequent and brutal rises in rent left families almost destitute.

When they reached Scotland, of course, more often than not they encountered exactly the same problem.

In the 1910s and 1920s, when Those Tyrannising Landlords is set, the housing stock in Glasgow was abominably poor. The Irish immigrants tended to cluster in particular areas, such as Neptune Street in Govan, dubbed The Irish Channel because of the number of Irish families living there. And the housing in such areas was woefully substandard. Such was the level of overcrowding the Glasgow Corporation employed Sanitary Inspectors who would check on houses in the middle of the night to see how many people were living in them and prosecute the owners if there were too many. Two-thirds of Glaswegians lied in single-ends and rooms-and-kitchens with outside toilets. The lack of sanitation was a serious health hazard and life expectancy was low.

All this forms the backdrop for Damer’s novel, the story of the O’Donnells, from The Rosses in Donegal. In particular, it tells the story of Peggy, the only girl in the family, an intelligent and single-minded young woman, stubborn and determined. Appalled by the grinding poverty, violence and bigotry she sees around her, she becomes politicised, joining the Independent Labour Party and participating in rent strikes and demonstrations against the slum landlords and a political system that had no intention of doing anything to change the status quo. With the idealism of youth, she is intent on changing the world.

Those Tyrannising Landlords is a fascinating novel. Seán Damer is an academic with an intimate knowledge of both Glasgow and its Irish immigrant communities. That knowledge lends the novel a rare credibility and we are left with a feeling of revulsion that such conditions could have been allowed to fester for so long. The story of the O’Donnells, and in particular the delightful Peggy, is engrossing, entertaining and highly revealing.

Dark Star by Lorna Moon

 

Lorna Moon is famous as one of the earliest women screenwriters in Hollywood, writing for the likes of Greta Garbo and Lionel Barrymore, but she was born in Strichen in Aberdeenshire and her first novel, Dark Star (1929) is a loosely autobiographical story set in a fiction north-eastern town of Pitouie. In fact, Moon left Strichen when she was 24 and never returned but the call of home was strong and, while living in America, she began writing a series of stories based on her memories of Scotland. These stories, collected in Doorways in Drumorty, explored the sometimes stultifying life of small, presbyterian communities in a realistic way far removed from the then popular kailyard style.

Dark Star is an oddity, a novel that is curiously modern in its delivery as it describes a society that is steeped in the past. Even when the novel is set, one feels, the parish of Pitouie must have seemed old-fashioned. In this place, judgemental, uncompromising, Nancy comes of age, a striking and fascinating young woman whose thoughts form the opening line of the novel: “Nancy was glad when her grandmother died.” What a line! What an opening! Who could resist getting to know such a girl?

Nancy has been living with her grandmother since her mother ran away with the travelling fair, and she is fourteen when her grandmother dies. She is thrilled to think she is now going to be in charge of the house, have her own front door, live an adult life. Her dreams are disabused, however, when the minister, now her guardian, takes her to live with him in the manse.

She forms an alliance of sorts with the minister’s elderly mother, Mrs Anderson, their mutual dislike of the minister’s manipulative wife bringing them close. What unfolds is a peculiar form of bildungsroman. In some ways, Nancy is the cousin of Janet in Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, an intelligent, internalised ingenue, naive but somehow knowing. She is a dreamer who craves the certainty of knowing where she comes from: much of the novel revolves around her quest to find whether her father was the no-good Willie Weams or Ramsey Gordon, the young lord of Castle Fassefern.

This mystery sets up one of the central points of the novel, the disconnect between the righteous presbyterian locals and outsiders – travellers, fair people, the marginalised of society. Nancy, very much an outsider herself through her refusal to conform, naturally sides with the latter group, and yet she yearns for her father not to be the philanderer Weams but the lord of the manor. This duality is central to her character as she gradually matures and falls in love.

Dark Star is probably not wholly successful as a novel because it weaves between styles and registers. At times the style is almost irreal, disjointed and dreamy in the manner of Nathanael West (another Hollywood screenwriter) or James Purdy (although Dark Star pre-dates the work of either of these writers so I am not suggesting any causality). It is when it is in this mode the novel works best, giving it a more edgy sensibility. At other times the writing is more mainstream, indeed at times almost melodramatic.

Nonetheless, it is a fascinating read and well worth seeking out. Moon’s collected works were published by Black and White some years ago and second hand copies can be easily found online.

The Sea Change and Other Stories by Helen Grant

It takes a lot of skill to write gothic stories without them sounding ham or predictable. I’ve tried a few and never been satisfied with the way I manage transitions or plant the seeds of doubt. A lot of stories in this genre are a bit too obvious. There’s also a bit of a tendency to stick to the traditions, keep with the old tropes, write in a particular, style, often more or less a pastiche of the old masters of the genre like MR James. There is one such story in Helen Grant’s excellent collection, The Sea Change and Other Stories, but that’s quite intentional, as we shall see.

There are seven stories in The Sea Change, and they are admirably varied in location, subject matter and style. The writing is cool and controlled, drawing the reader into the particular worldview of each story, spinning the central mystery around them and drawing them towards a series of satisfying denouements.

The first story, set in an unidentified German town, revolves around a song which gives the story its title, “Grauer Hans” and features a young girl as a narrator. What she doesn’t understand but somehow intuits, and of course we can see quite clearly, is that she is in some jeopardy, cloistered in her small, upper-floor bedroom with window looking out onto the rooftops of the town. Terror is visited and then revisited. Decidedly eerie.

There is a complete change of style for the second story, the title story of the collection, “The Sea Change”. The author draws on her knowledge of scuba diving for a tale that is truly creepy, with some beautifully (by which I mean horribly) descriptive writing and an ending that is inevitable but still unsettling.

The next story, “The Game of Bear”, is the one I alluded to at the beginning, when I said one story was written in the style of the turn of the early twentieth-century experts in the genre. What I didn’t realise until I’d finished was that this was a prize-winning entry completing an unfinished work by MR James himself. The first 1700 words or so were his, the remainder the author’s. I didn’t see the join. Helen Grant convincingly pulls together the strands of James’s original puzzle in a way that feels completely unforced. An impressive feat.

“Self Catering” is a brief and humorous slice of almost whimsical horror. It’s essentially Mr Benn Goes Horribly Wrong and is tremendous fun.

We shift next to “Nathair Dubh”, a story centred on rock-climbing. The rock in question, of course, has a reputation for strangeness, and an eerie mist that descends on the climbers portends trouble. Trouble duly arrives.

“Alberic de Mauléon” is another MR James-related competition entry, this time to write a sequel to a James story, in this case “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”. This is set in the late seventeenth century and there is a very fine sense of place and time here. The inhospitable cold of the time, the life-threatening harshness of the era, is brilliantly conjured and the story’s twist is effectively engineered.

The last story, “The Calvary at Banksá Bystrica”, is probably my favourite, if only because although the mystery is perfectly laid out, it refuses to reveal itself totally. It is set in Slovakia and is based on a real place which the author visited and which she renders in vivid detail. Some of the descriptive writing in this story is truly excellent, creepy beyond measure but finely controlled.

This is a highly recommended collection, published in a good quality paperback edition by The Swan River Press. Seek it out. It’s worth it. 

Barossa Street coming soon

 Barossa Street, my follow-up to Cuddies Strip, will be published on 11th May by Ringwood Publishing.

It is available for pre-order here. 

20th January 1936, and King George V is dying.

The same day, Bob Kelty accompanies a friend to the house of a local recluse. There, they find Hugh Smithson brutally murdered in his bed. 

Horror turns to nightmare as Bob’s friend, Richard Hamill, comes under suspicion of the murder and Bob reluctantly becomes embroiled, once more, in the investigation of a terrible crime in 1930s Perth. Gradually, he begins to uncover the truth, and it is something nobody expected... 

Set against the backdrop of the abdication crisis and the looming shadow of war, Barossa Street examines the prejudice of 1930s society and its impact on the justice system. Will this lead to the police jumping to conclusions and prosecuting the wrong man? Or will Bob save the day?