“We fictionalise to reach a truth”. – J. G. Ballard
Scotland is rich in writing talent and novels about its history. These are some books I’ve enjoyed recently, by way of recommendations for summer reading.
Scents and Sensibility
Edinburgh. Two hundred years ago. The Botanic Gardens are growing, efflorescent like the city. Sir Walter Scott busies himself, preparing for the much-hyped, but still unconfirmed, visit of King George IV.
On to these shoots of true life, events and people, The Fair Botanists (by Sara Sheridan, Hodder & Stoughton, 2022) grafts two bright, fictional characters who drive the plot. A plot based on love, flowers, perfumes and secrets.
Elizabeth, a widow newly arrived in Scotland, and Belle, smart courtesan, share a fascination for the Agave Americana, one of the rarest plants in the world, and due to flower any moment in the Botanics. Elizabeth wants to capture it in paint, Belle as perfume. Their stratagems to make their way in the capital, despite its sexism and conformity, are gently unearthed and the story unfurls.
The book conjures a sensual array – colours, smell and tastes and reveals the changing essence Scotland’s capital city in the twilight of the George Iv’s reign.
The stories entwine towards a benign bloom of Edinburgh in flux. The Fair Botanists is a deft blend of fiction and history, bringing both vividly to life. It’s a cracking read, offering tremendous insight into what made Auld Reekie tick and richly deserving of its Waterstones’ Scottish Book of the Year award.
Hear No Evil
Another Sarah S, another Waterstones’ prizewinner, another account of early nineteenth-century Scotland, this novel is also based on real people and events and spliced with fictitious characters and plot. Hear No Evil (by Sarah Smith, Two Roads Books, 2022) deals with a murder trial in 1817, centering on Jean Campbell, a deaf woman originally from Islay.
Like many islanders of her time, faced with abject poverty Jean migrates to Glasgow where she is accused of throwing her own baby into the Clyde. Transported to a cell in Edinburgh, she faces hanging. Her sole hope of a fair hearing – any hearing – lies with Robert, teacher at a specialist school the Deaf Institution. To clear Jean’s name Robert must fathom what really happened. This investigation entails several trips to Glasgow, a serious undertaking as the stagecoach journey takes twelve hours!
Robert’s quest to find the truth also means gaining Jean’s trust. The novel succeeds in showing, through the development of a relationship based on mutual respect, Jean’s complexity, and humanity. Fledgling sign language is subtly used to make Jean’s character become more than merely a victim.
In Hear No Evil, Smith who alongside novel writing is a contributor to Bylines Scotland, sharply contrasts the mood of each city. From Edinburgh’s Tollbooth Prison, Robert trudges the wynds, closes and cold, stone streets to grand squares and chambers, meeting judges, professors and doctors concerned with Jean’s case. In Glasgow Robert encounters the bridges, the maze of vennels in the Briggait, Saltmarket and Candleriggs, thatched roofs jammed among stone tenements and dirt-poor people teeming around the black river,
As the truth about Jean’s baby unfolds, Hear No Evil offers not just a personification of how people with disabilities were undervalued in earlier times, but an understanding of how long the journey to full equality remains today.
A Prince flees – and ends up in drag
Alan Warner’s tenth book, Nothing Left to Fear From Hell (Polygon, 2023), “A Surreal Chronicle” reunites us with legendary characters, events and locations – Prince Charles Edward Stuart and a band of Jacobite followers, including Flora MacDonald, fleeing to the Hebrides. Warner’s chronicle depicts them with lively, often filthy and foul, realism.
This novella is part of publisher Polygon’s series of Darkland Tales,fictional retellings of stories from history, myth and legend by Scottish authors that includes Rizzio (2021)by Denise Mina, a reimagining of the murder of the private secretary to Mary Queen of Scots. Hex (2022) – witchcraft and misogyny – is by Jenni Fagan whose fantastical Luckenbooth (Cornerstone) I loved. It sort of does for Edinburgh what Alasdair Gray did in Lanark for Glasgow (Unthank).
Desperate and hunted by thousands of redcoats, the Prince, known as “the pale man” in this tale rather than his usual Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his followers stay remarkably spirited as they evade capture, despite the £30,000 English pounds reward to any who would betray him. The thrill of the chase makes this short book an exciting adventure as well as a highly original picture of what, in the wake of Culloden, that famous getaway over the seas could have really been like.
Warner revitalises true-life characters – Neil MacEachain, Irish captains O’Neil and O’Sullivan, and the legendary Flora MacDonald – with punchy, authentic dialogue and descriptions.The Prince is the star – flawed, vain yet intrepid against the odds – holding fast to his cluster of supporters.
The pale man cuts a far from princely picture. He vomits, shits and pishes on the first island they land. The rank conditions forced upon him and his party are depicted in lurid detail. They are bitten by “terror mitches” and an ever-increasing number of the insects which are that are included as sketches on the pages between each chapter.
Although we know how the story ends, the speed of action and threat of fatal arrest keep the narrative gripping. Though grim, the group’s plight is laced with banter and inuendo. Much fun surrounds the prince’s hopeless attempts to pass as an Irish seamstress, Betty Burke. Not the great pretender after all, he fidgets with the wig and vexes at his lack of bosom. No danger of the Bonnie Prince troubling Ru Paul!
Two become one for this series of mystery thrillers
If you want a series to entertain you over the summer try the rich depiction of 1800’s Edinburgh crafted by Ambrose Parry, pen name of Marisa Haetzman and husband Christopher Brookmyre. There are now five books in the Raven and Fisher series from The Way of All Flesh (Canongate Books, 2018) to The Spendthrift and The Swallow (2023). The fifth in the series, due to be published next week (title from Aesop’s Fables) is actually a prelude to book four, Voices of the Dead.
Dr Will Raven and would-be medic Sarah Fisher delve into Edinburgh’s dark secrets to uncover the circumstances of strange and unexpected deaths. The medical history and research are scrupulous, as compelling as the plots and the evocation of old Edinburgh, in these highly readable mystery thrillers. As Haetzman is an anesthetist the detail about chloroform in The Art Of Dying (book two, 2019) was something I found fascinating.
Rilke rides again
Finally, two books – twenty years apart – with the same milieu and characters set in present-day Glasgow. Louise Welsh’s debut, The Cutting Room (Canongate, 2002) was a breakthrough award winning novel. The follow up novel The Second Cut published in 2022 reunites us with the characters again.
From the unlikely premise of a house clearance, Welsh conjures up, through auctioneer-turned-detective Rilke, a weird Glaswegian world of bent coppers, porn, drugs and death. Like Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s crime noir, Rilke is a loner with an internal voice that glues him to the reader throughout.
In The Second Cut (2022), Rilke rides again. He now inhabits a post-Covid Glasgow that brews an even stronger mix of squalor and humour, with orgies, asylum-seekers enslaved, a dead dog and the suspicious death of a friend. Welsh gets Glasgow – I found Rilke’s dander round the Trongate endearing in its familiarity. This long-anticipated sequel is well worth the wait.
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