The Box by Dan Malakin

 

Many moons ago I spent a few days with Dan Malakin on a writing course so I’ve long known him to be an all-round good guy and a damned good writer. Clearly, though, he’s spent the intervening years honing his writing craft because he’s an even better writer now than he was then. That much was clear with his first novel, The Regret, which told the story of Rachel, whose life unravelled at the hands of a computer hacker. Re-reading my review of that novel, one of the things that struck me at the time was how beautifully paced it was. But, I noted: 

The Regret does indeed rattle along at pace, but importantly this is not to the detriment of character or emotion. Where many novels eschew character building in their headlong impulse to thrash the story along, The Regret draws us expertly into the troubled mind of the protagonist Rachel, a woman who has suffered trauma in her life and is now, forcibly, having it revisited on her. 

Well, damn me, that’s precisely the point I was going to make about The Box... 

The story: Ally Truman, a young woman, is being targeted by a right wing incel organisation, Men Together. Her family house is being picketed by organisation members. Her father, Ed, is accused of sexual assault. Her brother is largely estranged from Ed, and Ed fears his family is falling to pieces. 

Then Ally disappears. 

And so is set in motion a narrative that never lets up. Ed is convinced Ally has been abducted but, before he can contact the police, he finds himself the key suspect in a murder, after his DNA is found on a murdered young woman’s body. He flees, teaming up with a friend of Ally and this unlikely pairing go on the run, determined to find out what has happened to Ally. 

What has happened? Why? How? And, most importantly, who do we believe? 

What unfolds is a tightly wound and terrifying tale, leading to a brutal and unexpected denouement. The Box is a masterclass of thriller writing, tense and taut, unpredictable, utterly compelling. 

But. 

Back to my review of The Regret, and my observation that Dan Malakin takes care to draw credible and appealing characters. Dan doesn’t write plot-by-numbers. His characters do not react to events as they must in order to impel the story, but as they would according to their natures. 

What is most impressive about The Box is not the pace and intensity of the narrative, it is the fact that, despite the driving rhythm of the novel, Dan Malakin still manages to draw out some important messages about contemporary society. This is a timely novel, engaging with the eerie world of right wing incels, that shady group of misfits and malcontents for whom misogyny is a way of life and whose increasingly violent, indeed deranged, views on women are growing ever more sinister. Malakin takes us into the heart of that group, confronts head-on this evil intent masquerading as political activism. 

But he never does this in any didactic way and, although we are informed clearly about the nature of these groups, such descriptions never detract from the plot or slow it down or cause any longeurs. Believe me, writing this tight takes a lot of effort. 

The Box is an exhilarating journey, a journey into the darkness of people’s minds and the implacability of hope. This is fiction to savour.

Hex by Jenni Fagan

December 1591, a prison dungeon in Edinburgh and in it a young woman – a child, really, only fifteen – called Geillis Duncan, spending her last hours on Earth before being hanged in the morning as a witch. Into the darkness of this night comes some light, Iris, a visitor, she says, from the future. This is the plot of Jenni Fagan’s luminous novella, Hex, a story about witchcraft and women and the ways of men. We don’t burn witches any longer, but that doesn’t imply we’re any more civilised. Not under the skin. In the margins and in the mainstream women are still under assault and men in power retain their capacity to transgress. 

The story of Geillis Duncan is a terrible one, drawn from a dark aspect of Scottish history, the witch trials of the 1590s. Geillis is accused of witchcraft and tortured. In agony, she confesses and also falsely implicates other women and they, too, are drawn into this nightmare of misogyny and violation. 

Her visitor, Iris – named after the Goddess of the rainbow who delivered messages to the Gods – is a supernatural traveller from 2021, determined Geillis should not be alone on her final night, and as the two women discuss what must happen in the morning we learn the baleful details of Geillis’s experience, the torture, beatings, rape, being forced to lie and in this way bring the same experience down on other innocent women. This is how terror works, degrading innocence, celebrating cruelty, dragging everyone and everything into its maw. 

If this was only a story about Scotland’s legacy of witchcraft it would be bad enough, but Fagan is exploring something much broader here, the roots of that barbarism which have grown and flourished in the dark through five hundred years and still assail our current day experience. Sarah Everard, murdered by a police officer. Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, sisters stabbed to death in a London park and then dehumanised further when their lifeless bodies were photographed by police officers charged with protecting the scene and the photographs were shared for the gratification of other men too senseless to understand human decency. 

The sisters’ story, and the stories of other women who have suffered at the hands of men, are woven into Fagan’s narrative, wronged women from our age sharing the stage with the wronged women of 1590s Scotland. For the next ten years, twenty, maybe more, we will remember these stories and remember the women’s names, but in time those names will disappear from the narrative and only the stories will remain, the hurt, the degradation, the sheer, unadulterated cruelty of men’s treatment of women. History become myth. And then we shall need a new Jenni Fagan, five hundred years from now, to give these women back their story. 

Iris says at one point: “Men want to know how they got trapped on earth”, but Fagan doesn’t allow them to escape responsibility through this appeal to gnostic suffering. To do so would be to simultaneously acknowledge the spark of the divine in them and it is impossible to reconcile that with what we see men do on a daily basis. “They hold hatred in their heart”, Iris continues. “They want to kill us because we create their lives from our bodies.” But Geillis advises her to show caution: 

I would like to say I have no clue what you are talking about, but I do. I also know what heresy and blasphemy sound like, and if they heard what came out of your mouth they’d hang you before they hang me. 

Women, then, should not talk back. Should not claim agency. Should not question the order of things. Think of the vigil for Sarah Everard, those women who were accosted and arrested for organising a peaceful moment of reflection in a murdered woman’s memory. Patsy Stevenson – because let’s name another name, let’s not forget, not allow her story to become myth – Patsy Stevenson, a slight woman held down and handcuffed by two uniformed thugs for the crime of compassion. 

And now our government, intolerant and hate-filled, stoking fear of “the other”, are changing the laws on freedom of assembly to make it easier for the instruments of the state to turn on the people of the state. Because we can’t have these women gathering and espousing peace, compassion, love, can we? Modern-day witches, all of them, and dangers to the natural order of things. 

Burn them. 

Hex is a historical novel of the present day. A wonderful warning. A troubling tale.

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.