Alan Riach shares literary favourites that weave crime and politics

ANDREW Scott is perhaps better known as Andrew Murray Scott, author of a biography and editor of a selection of the works of Alexander Trocchi, and valuable literary histories of that most under-rated of Scotland’s cities, Dundee.

As Andrew Scott, he has written a series of novels about investigative journalist Willie Morton, caught up in the Scottish independence movement and British establishment politics. In the first, Deadly Secrecy (2019), he looks at the cover-up of the murder of anti-nuclear activist Angus McBain, based on the actual mystery of the death of Willie McRae – the lawyer, SNP politician and anti-nuclear campaigner – which remains, to say the least, mysterious and in dispute.

In the second, Scotched Nation (also 2019), Morton investigates a secretive pro-Union group GB13, going undercover in the Houses of Parliament and the west of Scotland.

The third, Oblivion’s Ghost (2020) involves him in a search for a missing computer hacker and the fourth is another fictionalisation of history as Morton investigates the suppression of a 1980s Treasury document claiming that an independent Scotland would be economically viable and then discovers contemporary links between London and Madrid, and Scotland and Catalan independence. Sounds familiar?

They’re lucid, fast and map-conscious thrillers, where you can trace the action across from Edinburgh to the Highlands, the Western Isles, south to London and even over the North Sea to Denmark.

The geography is important. The fiction takes you through different societies, with contrasting priorities and people. Cliches are not avoided but they are founded in reality: the arrogance and ignorance of Westminster’s politicians, the family loyalties of the Danes, the swithering of Scots. Those “honorific aspects of being human” I mentioned last week underlie the questions that the novels explore.

In Oblivion’s Ghost, Morton is accompanied by the IT activist Luke Sangster – except (spoiler alert!) the man he thinks is Sangster may be an imposter. It’s clever of the author to embed in this part of the novel Sangster’s “rant” because, as we read it, we begin to wonder whether this speech is coming from a supporter or an opponent of independence.

It’s worth quoting in full: “The kind of people who think there’ll be another referendum and everything will just fall into line. A Scottish state will be formed and everyone one will give three hearty cheers.

“These people have no idea – no idea – what the British establishment is capable of, no knowledge of the brutality, the deception, the decades of hostility, the assassinations, the misinformation, the ‘disappearances,’ the torture – yes, torture – that was perpetrated in even the least of their former territories. Not to mention the dirty war in Ireland.

“And these were just the remote acquisitions of empire, the furthest-flung dots on the map. The kind of place which, apart from the profit and the pride of conquering, of being the overlords there, offered them little emotional significance.

“But Scotland – almost a member of the family … can you have any idea how such treachery will be regarded in Whitehall? After 300 years of so-called partnership, Scotland is just going to walk away? And they are going to stand by and shake hands and … what?

“Agree that the whole project was a big mistake? That these three centuries were wrong-headed? Perhaps open themselves up to criminal prosecution for it? Think on, as they say in Yorkshire. Listen – the Union will not be dissolved.

“There is no chance of it. Democracy will not be allowed to prevail, vote or no vote. If it comes to it, they will shoot people, people will disappear, the radio stations, TV, newspapers will be closed, social media will be suppressed, Holyrood disbanded, or neutered. Public opinion will be diverted, divided upon itself.

“The movement will be destroyed and the causes of it will be trashed. Its key people neutralised, with the full forces of the law. It will not happen.”

After which, the hero Morton clicks his tongue in exasperation and replies: “What a rant! Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re really on.”

What Sangster describes is …well, better put it as a speculative question: how far is all he describes mere fiction? The spectrum of possibility can be explored in a novel in ways impermissible to journalists committed to accuracy, which is one of the reasons the arts are always in trouble.

A popular meme on social media shows an image of a Tory politician with the caption: “The Conservatives don’t invest in education because they don’t want an educated public.”

You might think that’s ungenerous but it’s certainly snappy.

The balance is between the big and small, the macro-magnitude of millions and the personal sense of intrinsic worth. “Value” means more than one thing in these contexts.

On the one hand, there’s another popular media image that has Rishi Sunak saying, “‘British’ is simply shorthand for ‘English’” (such tiresome arrogance, wearing you down if you try to correct it politely!) and on the other there’s the piercing understanding as it applies to anyone, personally, in this enormous and uninsulated world.

Such understanding is always momentary. Legislation can help but can never guarantee. Maybe one of the things poems in Scots do intrinsically is hold us in such a moment, because the language itself is so bodily attached, or moves out from the body, into the air, so palpably. Its physicality will put your throat and mouth and tongue to work. Speaking it requires saliva. It can be read silently, fluently, without the pause that aesthetic artifice demands, and this is most evident in fiction, in narrative prose.

But in poems, the self-sustaining verbal artifice which offers a guarantee of artistic creation, the fact of the poem’s making, gives a different assurance, an assurance of craft in the made object. But the object is inert until enunciated.

That's true of all the poems from the anthology I wrote about last week, Sangs That Sing Sae Sweit (Scots Language Society and Grace Note Publications) and it goes further. The relation between the “native” vernacular voice, the language of an indigenous people of whatever region or “elsewhere” and the distinction art brings to any enunciated (spoken or written or published) creation is never absolute.

This was said most concisely and admirably by Sydney Goodsir Smith in the first verse of his “Epistle to John Guthrie” (1941): We’ve come intil a gey queer time Whan scrievin Scots is near a crime, “Theres no one speaks like that”, they fleer, – But wha the deil spoke like King Lear?

Nobody writes exactly as they speak. Speech is sound. Writing is letters. And in the overlapping, interconnecting, infolding and outpouring of verbal wealth and the verbiage that is always its context, a masterpiece such as King Lear or a well-made poem of any kind is a lasting resistance to the extent of opposition Andrew Scott’s fictional character Sangster itemises so compellingly in his horrible rant.

Sheena Blackhall’s stunning collection A Bard’s Life: A Life a life Portrayed in Poetry, Prose and Pictures (Perth: Rymour Books, 2021) is, as it says on the cover, an autobiographical sequence of poems (in Scots and English), prose, drawings and photographs.

In his preface, Alan Spence describes it accurately as “earthy and witty and funny (often scathingly so) but also lyrical and profound, brilliantly surreal, truly spiritual.” It begins with “Homage to the Ancestors”: Many wombs opened before my coming.

Quiet doors in the spirit house on the moor Where grandmother’s ghost is weaving a wooden cradle So she may nurse my bones.

In “Ballater Bairnhood” we have: A simmer storm…the gurly grue o thunner; Lichtnin’s yalla fork ootflang the Dee.

My cradle-soun, fur lullaby, The soople, breengin wave, wheep-lashed tree… In the anthology Norlan Lichts (Rymour Books, 2022), Blackhall is brilliantly evocative in “Judgement o the Bandies”: “The day wis sticky wi sun / Paiddlin in shalla puils…’ and: “A troot kerplunkit up / Like a weety comma stottin aff a trampoline”. If there’s a kind of momentary idyll in that, there’s another side to register in “Monthlies”, when “Cramps grip the pit o yer wyme / Like rakes, rippin seggs frae the sheuch”: Aince, in a Darlington job centre I feintit wi the pain Hittin the fleer wi a dunt Waukenin up in emergency Where a “bricht an smiley doctor” with a “kipper tie” suggests “a scrape”, “As if the wyme wis a saucepan / In need o scoorin”. When God said in Eden that he’d “sherply increase yer pain fin giein birth / In pain ye’ll bruing furth bairns / Cursed is the grun because o ye”. But Blackhall delivers her own judgement: “Ay weel, thanks fir thon / The short eyn o the stuick.”

Returning to A Bard’s Life, Blackhall’s blessing on all those who need to escape from loveless marriage is equally vivid in “The Mountain Hare”: When was the second I knew love fled?

When I hung on a hook like a shot deer, bled, And my heart stopped still like a ball of lead, Till I danced like a mountain hare… I would wish each wife who lies in dread, Waiting the creak on the stairs, the tread, Of the mate who shares her daily bread, The joy of the mountain hare.

Up where the setting sun burns red, To run like the wind, with the whole world spread Under your feet, to freedom bred The flight of the mountain hare.

The travels and locations in the book are various, prompting compassion, sympathy, horror, judgement, whether in Dublin, Vietnam, Auschwitz, Beijing, Ontario or Sri Lanka, but what is the peculiar compact of emotions and determinations that combine in “School Visit of a Scots Specialist”? How are the indigenous people and languages of Scotland treated in the nation’s educational establishments?

Good morning, I am Mrs X, Head Teacher I believe you have contacted the school wishing to visit What would you bring to our classes Here?

What would you come to tell?

The questions prompt not only answers but reflections, considerations of where these questions come from, what history of mind has led to the establishment of the authority that demands them, and how do we oppose it? The poems of travel and historical enquiry balance those of immediacy and personal response, so the poem ends: The firmament ower the birlin warld Hauds multiple constellations, Like a wattergaw foo rare an braw Are the leids o different nations!

The anthology Wunds That Blaw Sae Roch: 50 Years o Lallans Prose is the proper complement to the poetry we’ve been considering. Again, the range is wide, not only in the subjects addressed but also in the kinds of prose collected: fiction, of course, but also translations, playscript and critical prose, analytical and discriminating, historical and contextualising.

Alexander Scott, writing about Robert Fergusson, distinguishes him from his predecessor Allan Ramsay by pointing out that while “Ramsay had screivit anent ane or twa burgh worthies, Fergusson gaed furder and sang o the haill clanjamfrie o the townsfowk … But as weel as bein the makar o the toun, he was the makar frae the university, wi a scholar’s wey o airtan the rin o ’s lines an lauchin at his ain learnin. When the Yankee critic Lowell said that the bonniest wey o screivin cam frae ‘the tongue of the people in the mouth of the scholar,’ he micht hae haen Fergusson in mind.”

Donald Campbell gives an acute appraisal of the working miner playwright and poet Joe Corrie. Chris Robinson delivers an account of the Glasgow Unity plays, particularly Robert McLeish’s The Gorbals Story, George Munro’s Gold in His Boots, Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, Benedick Scott’s Lambs of God and Roddy McMillan’s All in Good Faith.

Then Robinson lays out a sampler of a “puckle o the wirds” from the Scots Dictionary: Bubblyjock, Gallus, Glaumrie, and rhyming slang such as “bag o’ yeast” (priest), “china” (mate, reduced from China plate), “tin flute” (suit) Joe Soap (dope), paraffin (paraffin ile = style).

And Derrick McClure contributes a lucid, reasonable, world-weary essay on the arguments that have gone back and forth about the “correct” spelling of Scots, recognising, in some respects, “the need o a staunart” and the resistance to it, and the opportunities, liabilities and urgencies brought upon us by the web.

Informed discussion of this kind – in Scots! – is itself a refreshment. It’s taken even further by Iain WD Forde in his essay “The Ither Scots Vernacular” which introduces questions about the antiquity of Scots and Gaelic in comparison to the languages of the folk who lived in Skara Brae, the Orkney settlement built before the Pyramids or Stonehenge, or of those who lived in crannogs on the water of the lochs when Scotland was inhabited by wolves and predators of other kinds, or Pictish, Latin and English, which each have their own histories of use and occupation.

The word “vernacular” comes from the Latin “verna” meaning a home-born slave. The resonance of that meaning is still with us, and these works of literature are its healthy, needed exploration and opposition. In fiction, Robert McLellan is represented by one of his great “Linmill” stories. The inimitable Lavinia Derwent gives us “The Tattie-Bogle” in which Erchie considers the relative values of, on the one hand, “a gairden” full of “compost heaps an watterin-cans an sub-soil” and on the other hand his own “single-end wi a jawbox (an Mrs Erchie) fower-stair-up in a tenement”. His horticultural experiments are held in abeyance while the relative virtues of cultivated nature and urban civilisation are weighed in the balance.

Whether fiction or memoir, Moira Dalgetty’s “A Glesga Hogmanay” is a horrifying account of an exemplary bigot and monstrous patriarch, ruining festivities with his venomous pontifications: “See Hogmanay, and hoo it’s meant tae be magic, everybody huvin a rerr terr? Wel, no in oor hoose it wisny, and we didny.”

Everything is lovely, the house clean, the cooking aromatic, the children all delighted and Tom Jones singing “What’s new pussycat?” on the TV, but then, at 10.30pm, in rolls the grandfather, “pissed as a fart” and “bawlin and shoutin” and crying for food, and then starting on the insults: Catholics, the miners, the Commies, “then wimmin and then emdy under 50 – and weans anaw. Know whit he said wants? That aw he waantit wis tae get a haud o wan o thae tanks the army uses – thae big Chieftain joabs – and drive it right doon Argyle Street at teatime, takin oot every bastart that’s face annoyed him.” After all this, the living room is like an undertaker’s for the bells at midnight. The sheer excess of verbal abuse was challenged by Auntie Maureen hitting the old man with a sauce bottle and Granny flinging his dinner at him, but rebellion made no difference and the misery of bullying prejudice and strength returned and prevailed: “It wis like some Glesga psycho version o The Broons, wi Hannibal Lecter starrin as Granpaw.”

It’s as if the miserable predictions of Sangster, in the Andrew Scott novel I began with, were being enacted again and again, and there was never going to be a change. Get back in line, get back in your place, and give me what I shall take! But there is change. It will not be denied. And it comes from the past, is embodied in the language, and revived, revised, regenerated by the young. It’s here, in the writing. And that will take us further.

The translations or “owersettin o walins frae the wisdom of the Native Americans” by Margaret Marenich ends with this: “But for masel, I canna forget the auld weys. Aftentimes, on a simmer morning, I rise at day-daw an slip out ti the corn parks. As I howe the corn I sing til’t, the same as we did whan I wis yung. Naebody gies a docken for our corn sangs nou.

“Whiles, at e’en, I sit leukin out ower the muckle Missouri. The sun gaes doun and the gloamin creeps athort the watter. In the shaddaes I can see again our Indian clachan, with the reik risin frae the lodges, an in the rair o the river I hear the skellochs o the weimen an the lauchter o the bairns, as in the bygane.”

The box is full of wonders. Our revenge is the laughter of children.