This is a meandering tale that weaves together numerous strands of
personal stories with the last fifty years of Scottish history, both
political and social. The first character we meet, Mike, is a
photographer and the son of a famous (and rather better) photographer,
and his story I found interesting. He’s a fairly passive person, almost
seeming to be an outsider in his own life sometimes, and surprisingly
mature in his early years. When he discovers that he is gay, there is
none of the angst or shock or even horror that might be expected in the
early seventies. He simply accepts it, and expects everyone else to
accept it too. The minor characters pop up at significant moments is his
life, or to underscore the political events of the day, and therefore
feel fairly contrived. Jean, in particular, seems almost unreal, a
semi-mystical figure acting as a catalyst both for Mike’s personal life
(such as introducing him to a boyfriend) and also in the political
spectrum, the focus for debate. Everyone seemed to gather around Jean,
and her legendary, almost mythical, stories.
The second
character, Don, is a Mr Everyman, a survivor of the war living a quiet
life with his wife, whose sole purpose seems to be to illuminate aspects
of the life of Jack, an odd character who survived the Japanese
prisoner of war camps physically intact but mentally scarred.
Then
we get to Peter (also Jimmy) Bond, Jack's nephew, recruited into the
intelligence service to (essentially) spy on the nationalists. Peter is
more interesting, perhaps, because we see him at a point in his life
where neglectful alcoholism is catching up with him, and he's only
barely connected with reality. But there's a macabre humour to it - when
he starts having hallucinations, he's relieved to realise that one of
them must be a ghost, and therefore there's no need to politely offer a
drink.
Then it’s on to Ellen, growing up in a mining village in
the fifties. Every time we switch character, I lose heart. This book is
long, it’s largely about politics which to be fair has some interest,
but not at this length, and frankly it’s unfocused and rambling. Any one
part of the book, telling the story of one character in depth, would
have made a good book and illuminated a shadowy part of recent history,
but trying to do too much makes it feel as though it ought to be a
textbook, not a work of fiction. I struggled on, as the story threads
became more and more intertwined, or perhaps tangled is a better word
for it. All these many characters are somehow mixed up together, in a
way that only grandiose fiction can get away with.
This is not a
bad book. Rather, it’s over-ambitious, and it commits the cardinal sin
of an author who’s done a great deal of meticulous research - he wants
to get every last bit of it into the book, every major political event,
every well-loved TV program or film, every disaster, every social
change. It almost felt as if he had a checklist and was ticking off
events. There are at least half a dozen terrific stories in here if the
author could have brought his eyes down from the stars and focused
instead on just a few of these characters at a time. That way, they
would have become memorable, fully-rounded people instead of mere
ciphers, stand-ins for this or that aspect of the changing face of
Scotland. This is non-fiction with a thin veneer of rambling
storytelling. And yes, I get the point about the story never ending,
trust the story and all that. Still it would have been nice to feel
there actually was a proper, novel-sized story in here, something with a
beginning, a middle and an end, rather than a series of vignettes. On
the plus side, it’s well written and there’s some interesting detail
about the Scottish political scene which I enjoyed learning about. So
three stars for effort.
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