The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by SG MacLean

 

When The Redemption of Alexander Seaton begins the eponymous hero is a disgraced former divinity student, now an unhappy school teacher, although we do not yet know the cause of his disgrace. He is beset principally, it seems, by his own conscience and already we sense this is a man too hard on himself.

In Banff, on a stormy evening in 1626, apothecary’s assistant Patrick Davidson staggers in the street and falls to the ground, apparently drunk. Alexander Seaton witnesses the event but does not intervene, assuming he will be fine. Also witnessing the scene are two town prostitutes and they, in an attempt to help Patrick, leave him in Seaton’s schoolroom. By morning, he is dead, poisoned.

Thus begins SG MacLean’s atmospheric historical crime novel. The tale that unfolds takes in a possible popish conspiracy and perhaps even an invasion of Scotland, witch trials and witch-burning, the banishment of women for crimes committed by men, love and loss, virtue and dishonour and, of course, the gradual, reluctant redemption of Alexander Seaton himself, a good man who cannot forget or forgive his one misadventure.

Suspicion falls on Charles Thom, a music teacher and friend of Seaton’s. He is arrested and seems likely to be charged, but Seaton is convinced of his innocence, as is Doctor Jaffray, another friend of Seaton’s and another good and honourable man. They endeavour to help Thom.

A discovery among the possessions of the dead man, meanwhile, point to a possible alternative solution, with apparent evidence of a popish plot to invade Scotland. Seaton is sent by the Banff authorities to Aberdeen to seek the assistance of men whose expert knowledge might throw light on proceedings.

Or so he thinks.

The novel rattles along and the character of Alexander Seaton increasingly develops depth and credibility. He is a man at odds with his surroundings and with himself. Although he cannot forgive himself for the actions which brought an end to his ministerial ambitions, his several acts of kindness and decency in the course of the novel mark him out for us as a good man and we wish, simultaneously, for him to solve the crime and to seek an accommodation with himself.

Shona MacLean has a PhD in the history of Aberdeenshire in the seventeenth century and it shows, although she wears her knowledge lightly. There is a tremendous sense of place and time here, without any of the detail ever overwhelming the narrative. It is a complex novel with a satisfyingly confusing plot and characters who all feel well rounded and not just making up the numbers. This is highly recommended.

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

It isn’t a spoiler to say that the main protagonist of Elspeth Barker’s wonderfully unclassifiable masterpiece O Caledonia dies on the final page, because we are advised of this death on the first page. What unfolds between initial declaration and final explication is the creation of a character utterly unique. In real life, Janet would probably be unbearable but as a character on the page she is mesmerising. The novel recounts her life from birth through to her untimely death at the age of sixteen and is one of the funniest but most thought-provoking works I’ve read in some time. 

In a family of eccentrics, Janet stands out for her oddness. Living in Achnasaugh (“the field of sighing”) in the north of Scotland, amidst Calvinism and its associated dourness, the family eschew the moroseness of life around them. The family motto is Moriens Sed Invictus – Dying But Unconquered – and they mean to live up to it. Janet’s mother, Vera, is a harridan waging perpetual war against everything. Cousin Lila is a drunkard gradually reducing her life to squalor. And Janet – brilliantly clever, totally introverted, heroically unsociable – lives inside her own head, enjoying her dreams, enduring her nightmares, deprecating the horrible reality around her. 

Read any review of O Caledonia and you will see it variously described as bildungsroman, nature writing, gothic drama or tragicomedy. In her introduction to the current edition, Maggie O’Farrell notes: 

In these 200-odd pages of prose [Barker] gives the nod to a number of literary genres while deftly navigating her way around and past them. There are more than a few allusions to the Gothic Novel, to classical myth, to Scottish literary tradition, to nature writing, to Shakespeare and autofiction. 

However, she continues, trying to fit it into any category is reductive because O Caledonia “at once plays with and defies genres”. She’s undoubtedly right about that, but one category in which I think it does naturally fit is “Scottish writing”. There’s the imagination and sheer love of words of Alistair Gray; there’s the gothic dread of Stevenson; the mordant wit of Muriel Spark; the stunning evocation of landscape and place of our great poets, Sorley Maclean, Kathleen Jamie, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown et al; in Janet, a spiky free spirit, there’s a resonance with the wonderful Dinah and Dorinda in Eric Linklater’s neglected children’s classic The Wind on the Moon – truly, here are three girls ready to take on the world; and above all, there’s the classic Scottish binary of Calvinism and liberalism John Knox and Robert Burns. 

All of this is told from the perspective of oddball Janet, determined to go her own way, do her own thing, gripped by learning and a passion for every living thing except human beings, especially her family. She is clumsy, distracted, probably dyspraxic, unwilling to participate in any activity which doesn’t meet her approval. And, of course, like all outsiders and nonconformists, she gets a reputation for being strange. Even her mother is disappointed in her. After her death, “Janet’s name was no longer mentioned by those who had known her best. She was to be forgotten.”

Gloriously, she isn’t forgotten because every reader of this novel will remember Janet forever, the girl who either didn’t care or cared too much, depending on your perspective, the girl who simply wanted to live on her own terms.

And, in Scotland, depending on which side of that Scottish binary you’re on, that approach is either maleficent or magnificent.

To this Scottish reviewer, Janet is and always will be magnificent.

Rose Nicolson by Andrew Greig

Going right back to his earliest novels, The Return of John Macnab and the luminously odd Electric Brae, Andrew Greig’s books have been marvellous page-turners. That’s not only because of the plot – he’s no mere Jeffrey Archer or Dan Brown – but because of a conjunction of occurrence and consequence in the narrative. Things happen, and they matter, and the story unfolds in moments that feel connected and timeless. 

As well as being a master of narrative, of course, Andrew Greig is a poet and his poetic ear and eye are well to the fore in his new novel, Rose Nicolson, in which we take a journey into the souls of Reformation Scotland and of the narrator William Fowler and the eponymous Rose Nicolson herself. 

This poetic inflection can be seen particularly in the openings of chapters, where Greig paints an image, or a thought, or a problem, one which will give spine and shape to what comes next. Take this, for example: 

The world’s wheel spins. The soft clay of the self spins with it, awaiting shaping hands.

The first sentence, on its own, could be thought trite, even cliched. But then comes the second, amplifying, sentence and we are led into the thematic core of the novel, its vital questions: whose are the shaping hands? how do they shape us? can we, should we resist? what say have we in the final outcome? 

In the ensuing chapter, Will Fowler is attending his studies in St Andrews in 1575, a young man of independent mind, not yet determined on whether to be a follower of Plato or Aristotle, a Divine or a Humanist. He is invited by the Dean to assist with the removal and sale of a cache of items, bowls and platters and jugs, candlesticks and cups and, most significantly, wood-carved saints and a single chalice – symbols of Popery, in other words, and thus highly dangerous in Reformation Scotland. Will’s family are traders and it makes sense for him to help, but make no mistake this is dangerous. Will agrees, and the moment he does the world’s spin gathers him up and the shaping begins. What will be the outcome? 

Rose Nicolson is a wonderful historical novel, with a fine sense of place and history and characters who feel important, stories which matter, events which are, at once, particular and timeless. It is a love story, and is that not the oldest story of all, the one we all live ourselves, some time, somehow? But it is also Will’s and Rose’s love story, and that is unique and personal, infinite.

Some thoughts on writing a short story

Having recently finished a second stint as one of the judges of the Ringwood Publishing Short Story Competition, I thought I’d make a few observations on the stories I’ve read and perhaps give a few pointers for people looking to enter future competitions. 

Firstly, to everyone who entered the Ringwood competition, or who has entered any writing competition at any time, congratulations. Congratulations twice over. Once for conceiving, starting and finishing your story. And once more for having the courage to enter it for a competition. That isn’t easy, I know, and the sense of disappointment when you don’t win or get on a shortlist can be dispiriting. So well done, and thank you for sharing your work with us. Please don’t give up. 

Now, looking at the stories this time round, I have to be honest and say my first observation is that quite a high percentage of the stories entered weren’t ready. In many, there were simple punctuation, grammar or spelling mistakes which point to a story that hasn’t been fully edited. That alone isn’t enough to eliminate a good story from contention, but alongside those mistakes there were, in many instances, clear signs that the story needed more work. 

No story will be a finished article on the first write. Even the second write. Third write. Fourth, fifth, sixth. Short stories are an unforgiving medium because they allow for no wasted words, no longeurs, no unnecessary scenes or scene-setting. Get into your story immediately. Tell that story as concisely as you can. Then leave the story at the first moment you can safely escape, your story told, the point made. You can only do that when you’ve written and rewritten and rewritten it, removed every unnecessary word, distilled the plot to its essence, left nothing but the hard, sharp form of the tale itself. 

There’s no doubt a high percentage of stories would be immediately improved by deleting the first two, three or even four paragraphs. So many stories began with a protagonist going somewhere, or preparing to do something. Nobody cares about that. Start when the action starts. 

Read your story aloud. How does it sound? Are the moments of tension tense, the moments of love tender, the moments of humour a relief? And, more importantly, does it sound like a story from your head, or is it like any other story you might read on the web? 

Years ago, when I was in Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp, an online writing forum, Alex used to do an exercise where he would take a paragraph each from up to ten stories by different members of Bootcamp and stitch them together. Naturally, the story made no sense, but what was notable was that although the plot was nonsense the voice was consistent throughout. In other words, we were all writing in the same way, with a generic voice (usually Raymond Carver’s), with nothing distinctive, no way of grabbing the reader and saying to them “listen to this, listen to me, this story is amazing.” 

Voice is such an important aspect of storytelling. It’s about the way your sentences work, the words you use, your tone, the rhythms of your sentences, the ebb and flow of emotion. Voice is the way you tell your story. No one else can write your story. You are unique and your story is unique so make it sound unique. 

When you do that you will start to see your story crystallise on the page. It will become specific, real, an imagined world made flesh. Your characters will be more than names, your locales will be more than streets or hills or enchanted glades. They will be Ash Harker, young and frightened and alone, travelled 5,000 miles in search of truth; they will be that street, Milnab Street, the street where you were born in your big brother’s bed; they will be the Knock hill, trees and heather and blaeberry bushes, stretching high over Crieff and nestling between the Grampians and the Ochils; they will be the enchanted glade where you fell in love, where your life truly began, where the wonders of the world were revealed. Everything in your story will be real. Specificity is everything. Without it there is no story, just words. 

Take chances. Be bold. Search for that perfect, beautiful phrase, one that nobody’s heard before, one that sings, soars, hits you in the solar plexus. Make mistakes. That’s okay. You’re still learning. Ray Bradbury said the first million words was your apprenticeship. I’d rather read something where the author’s tried too hard and it hasn’t come off than something where they’ve settled for the first description or action that came to mind. I want to go on a glorious adventure with you, my mind and yours perfectly in union. 

To end where we began: congratulations on your immense good fortune in being a writer. It’s a grand business, and I wish you all the very best of luck in making your writing wonderful. Hopefully, we can do it all again next year.

Class of '37 by Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer

Class of ’37: Voices From Working Class Girlhood, by Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer, is an extraordinary book because it is about ordinary people. The voices of working class people through the ages have seldom been heard. And the voices of working class children, specifically girls, are heard even less often. We all know the cliche “history is written by the victors”. Well, it’s true, but history is also written by the rich. There are novels of working class life, from Robert Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists through to the angry young men (and women) of the fifties, to modern classics such as Shuggie Bain. These are important works, all of them, because they catch the rhythms and the idioms of their working class subjects but for all their importance as chronicles of ordinary lives they are still essentially works of fiction. The true voices of the working class, meanwhile, remain concealed behind the “respectability” or “properness” that informed so much historical record over the years. No one wanted to hear from these people. 

But we do. 

The Imperial War Museum’s Forgotten Voices projects covering the First and Second World Wars, Burma and the Falklands, gave voice to ordinary men and, sometimes, women who explained the impact of war on their lives. They were mesmerising for the way they brought to life people whose lives would otherwise have been neglected. But they told of life in wartime, life under stress, life away from the norm. So, still, we weren’t hearing the voice of authentic working class lives. 

Enter the Mass Observation movement. This was a research project that began in 1937 and ran through to the 1960s. The aim was to record everyday life in Britain, using observers who would record the conversations and behaviours of ordinary people and issue questionnaires and diaries on various topics. One can question the efficacy of this approach, and the research methodologies used wouldn’t stand up to modern academic standards but, for all that, Mass Observation has given us a treasure trove of thoughts and actions and stories from people who would otherwise be totally lost to history. 

One of the first studies was in Bolton and it is this material that Barron and Langhamer have formed into their beautiful book. In the Mass Observation archive they found thousands of pages written by working class boys and girls, giving us a unique insight into their worlds, their thoughts and beliefs, their hopes, their fears. This is the untrammelled voice of working class childhood and it is astonishing to have these children come to life in front of your eyes.  

We follow in particular a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls from Pikes Lane Elementary School, who were given a series of essays to write by their teachers on subjects such as “heaven” or “the Royal Family” or “how I spend my holidays” or “What I learn at home that I don’t learn at school”. Through these essays we are drawn into the lives and thoughts of these girls and in the course of the book we come to know them. We are also given the pen pictures written of them by the Mass Observation observers and we can see how wrong those observers sometimes were, the lazy generalisations and casual prejudices that lay behind their impressions of the girls they were studying. Through the girls’ essays we can see beyond these generalisations into the sophistication of their thought, the ambitions they held – sometimes modest, sometimes not but always strongly held – and we see how the poverty of the times and the lack of opportunity shaped their existences. Most of them came from families who had worked for generations in the mills. Escaping the mills was a common aspiration. Some girls wanted to work in shops, others to become hairdressers, others to enter nursing. All of them, whatever they wanted for their lives, spoke of their ambitions in clear and moving prose. 

What makes this book even more poignant is that once they had finished their research the authors contacted the families of these girls. Many of them still lived locally, and they were happy to talk about their mothers, and were even happier to read the words their mothers had written as young children. And so we learn which of the girls achieved their ambitions, who lived full lives, whose lives were cut short. The authors write movingly of talking to their feelings as they talked to the families: 

[they] are mostly grandparents themselves now. It was oddly disconcerting to hear these elderly voices telling us about their mothers, who lived in our minds so vibrantly as living, breathing twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls. It felt the wrong way round, as if the generations had been swapped. 

Class of ’37 is a gem of a book, bringing to life a cast of wonderful and vibrant young girls. History is written by the rich, and somehow we have to find a way of changing that.

The Fair Botanists by Sara Sheridan

The Fair Botanists

When – and I’m sure it will be when, rather than if – they make the film of The Fair Botanists, the opening scene has to be the extraordinary sight of a group of fully mature, twenty-five feet trees apparently perambulating down a suburban Edinburgh street. They are, in fact, being transported on barrows from the old Edinburgh Botanic Gardens to the site of the new Gardens – the ones we know today. This scene is the startlingly vibrant beginning to what is, throughout, a startlingly vibrant evocation of 1820s Edinburgh. 

Sarah Sheridan marshalls a fascinating and complex array of characters, some real – notably Sir Walter Scott and King George IV – and some invented. Like all the best fictional characters, of course, they are built on the edifices of real people, and Sara has clearly done her research, giving us, amongst others, a Georgian courtesan, a court diplomat and the aged scion of a prosperous Edinburgh family whose wealth, like many of those at the time, was probably garnered on the backs of slaves. We also have the head and the head gardener of the Botanic Gardens, assorted staff and workers, a young widow, the bastard offspring of Robert Burns, a talented and ruthless plantswoman and a blind woman whose remarkable sense of smell is put to particularly effective use in the distilling industry. 

Their worlds collide through the unlikely premise of an Agave Americana plant, monstrously tall and ready to flower, the only example in Europe known to do so. So rare and exotic are the seeds of this plant that overnight they become highly coveted. What follows is a fascinating and hugely enjoyable story of daring and despair, endeavour and loss, played out against the backdrop of an imminent – and inaugural – visit to Scotland by King George. Friendships are forged and broken, hopes dashed, emotions raised, all of it in the New Town of Edinburgh which is literally being built around them. 

The Fair Botanists is brilliantly researched but it wears its research lightly. In its female protagonists we have two strong and determined women. They don’t always do the right things but they always do them for the best of reasons. The novel doesn’t shy away from the issues of the day – Henry Dundas literally casts a shadow over Edinburgh today, through the Melville Monument in St Andrews Square, and The Fair Botanists doesn’t shirk from examining his baleful legacy. The compromised position of women in Georgian society, too, is aired through the various experiences of Belle, Elizabeth. aunt Clementina and Mhairi, but there is never any didacticism in the narrative. Rather, it is a joy to read from start to finish.

This is highly recommended.

Barossa Street

 I am delighted that Ringwood Publishing have contracted to publish my next novel, Barossa Street.

Barossa Street is the follow-up to the CWA John Creasey Golden Dagger Award-longlisted Cuddies Strip, which was described by Val McDermid as "highly recommended". It features once more, Bob Kelty, the shy but dogged policeman from Cuddies Strip. Now, much to his relief, out of the police force, he is nonetheless embroiled in another vicious crime when a friend of his is arrested and charged with a murder that Bob is convinced he didn't commit. He sets off in pursuit of the real culprit and uncovers some nasty truths in the process...

Barossa Street will be published in Spring 2022.

Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow

I remember working with a group of learners once, and remarking how each of them, to differing degrees, had a tendency to distance the reader from their writing. What they were doing was telling the story at one remove – not literally in the pluperfect tense – but in the sense of much of the principal action having been completed at an earlier time than that of the main narrative. The effect of such writing is that much of the story is told almost in summary form and the reader feels excluded from it. It is a surprisingly common fault in beginner writers. 

I was reminded of this when reading E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley, because Doctorow uses precisely the same technique. He is doing it intentionally, of course, and his distancing is quite deliberate. Because distance, remoteness from the world, an abstract sense of unbelonging, is precisely what Homer and Langley is about. So, for example, early in the novel the protagonists’s maid receives a war letter informing her that her son is missing in action, presumed dead. Instead of relating this through dialogue, allowing the reader entry into the scene at that profound moment, it is told in narrative summary and loses, as a result, some of its emotional intensity. But where, with my learners, that would be a fault, with Doctorow he is turning it into a major strength of the writing, because it is underlining the character of the novel’s narrator, Homer Collyer. We can’t enter an empathetic scene when the tragedy unfolds, because Homer himself is unable to comprehend such concepts. He lives at a remove from the world and cannot truly be a part of it. 

This sense of disconnection from the daily travails of ordinary living runs through the novel to a remarkable degree. It is based – albeit very loosely – on the true story of the Collyer brothers in Manhattan in the early to mid part of the last century. Recluses and eccentrics, they lived in isolated squalor in their apartment in Fifth Avenue (moved in the novel closer to Central Park), gradually accumulating a houseful of junk and detritus. Literally so: every room was piled to the ceiling with newspapers, books, boxes, human organs pickled in formaldehyde, a Model T Ford chassis, chandeliers, banjos, bicycles, everything, an extraordinary panoply of junk. Over the years it became a “labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends”. After their deaths in 1947, the authorities removed 100 tonnes of junk from the house and, because it was in such a state of ill-repair, the building itself was demolished. 

In the novel and in real life, the brothers set themselves against society. Homer is blind and Langley is badly scarred by his experiences in the First World War, both mentally and physically, with a terrible cough brought on by exposure to mustard gas. They withdraw from a society which they increasingly regarded with mistrust. They refuse to pay taxes, or their mortgage, or phone or electric or gas bills. Gradually, these amenities are cut off but the brothers remain undeterred. The Model T provides a generator for electricity. Langley scavenges across the city for food and water. The reality was a desperately sad story, but Doctorow has taken this rough material and made something quite beautiful with it. He has turned these brothers – strange, probably insane – into men of honour and reason. 

And in so doing he has, of course, cast a light on our own society and our blighted modern world. Because Doctorow extends the metaphorical reach of the brothers’ story by taking liberties with their history, allowing them, for example, to live on into the 1960s, when they are adopted by the young hippies as heroes of the counter-culture and into the 1970s, when they are finally abandoned to their fate. Thus, he allows them to be detached, to become almost chimerical chroniclers of the twentieth century from its elysian pre-First World War days to the beginnings of the modern technological and computer age. 

The fact that our narrator is blind, of course, presents us with yet another level of dissociation from the materiality of this modern world in which they are reluctant participants. And, again, this is a brave and highly impressive piece of writing by Doctorow: how does one tell a tale through the eyes of a man who cannot see? Doctorow sets himself this challenge and conquers it superbly. Homer Collyer cannot see the world, nor can he understand those who inhabit it, and yet, through this lonely, despairing man we are given a vision of the world which is starkly perceptive. Near the end, when he is deaf as well as blind, he writes, “I am grateful to have this [braille] typewriter, and the reams of paper beside my chair, as the world has shuttered slowly closed, intending to leave me only my consciousness.” In this way, the reader is simultaneously drawn inwards with Homer, to that dark and sad state, and outwards, to a world we take for granted but which he has reflected back at us with all its imperfections and peril. It is precisely because we are forced to view it through the lost eyes of an outsider that we can see beyond the veneer of the world into the austerity we all too often gloss over: Homer Collyer allows us, for once, to see ourselves as others see us, and it is an uncomfortable experience. 

Only occasionally does reality intrude on the brothers’ cloistered life. In the early days they run weekly dances until they are shut down by the authorities; twice, they come into contact with an underworld gangster – the first time beguilingly, the second more troublingly; during the Second World War they provide refuge to a Japanese couple until the couple are arrested and interned; latterly, they are adopted by hippies and their house becomes an alternative hang-out. But mostly the shutters are drawn and the world is repelled. Inside, Homer and Langley live their own, lonely yet determined existences. Langley is on a mission to classify every event and happening in the world and produce, from his labours, a comprehensive “eternally current dateless newspaper” of humanity which covers anything that could ever happen. Events like Watergate prove troublesome in terms of classification as generic types, but Langley remains devoted to his task. Homer, meanwhile, works on his music, playing his beloved pianos, and writes his life story. In keeping with the passive reporting style I mentioned in the opening of this review, nothing that happens to them feels direct, or organised, or redolent of ordinary living. It is typical of the oblique nature of the novel, for example, that their first encounter with computerisation is not a computer per se, but a computerised digital organ. Nothing in this novel is straightforward or commonplace. Everything is at a remove from our understanding of life. 

Robert Epstein, writing in The Independent, concludes an otherwise highly favourable review with the somewhat ambivalent observation that Homer and Langley succeeds if one can accept that “a historical novel need not do more than paint a picture of its protagonists”. I disagree that this is all Homer and Langley achieves. Despite the remarkable sense of inwardness, there is still, here, an analysis of the First World War, the Great Depression, the gangster era, the Second World War, Vietnam, hippies, Watergate, the assassinations of JFK, MLK and Bobby Kennedy, New York’s blackouts and so on. The twentieth century history of America is here in full, only it is presented in negative, in the human spaces beneath the history. It is an extraordinary, but hugely effective way, to analyse our human story. History is written by the victors, they say. Well perhaps, here, we have history written by the losers.