Andrew Greig – Fair Helen

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Andrew Greig, Book Review, Fair Helen, Scottish writer

The brown-eyed actor, Ivanhoe’s ancestor, Fair Helen and a compromised narrator

Oh blessings on Andrew Greig! He never disappoints this reader.

In Fair Helen he has gone for an old, or I should say, Auld Ballad, and expanded it. It is the tale of the borders, reivers, a couple of student friends in ‘Embra’ in the 1590’s, during the time ‘Jamie Saxt’ is King of Scotland and the ‘Auld Hag’ is dying on the throne of England. Meanwhile there are dark conflicts a-brewing between the Auld Religion and the Reformers. We are set for a fine tangle between politics, Church, State, Ancient Enmities and Loyalties – and incandescent loves.

Adam Fleming, a heidsman’s son, falls hard for Fair Helen, an Irvine,  who is betrothed (against her wishes) to the powerful son of another clan. These are lawless times (when were they not). Fair Helen is the cousin of Harry Langton, the narrator, a poor scrivener and friend of the Fleming son, who becomes embroiled and a pawn in a deeper game than just that of taking care of his friend and his cousin.

What is new in this piece of writing from Grieg is that it is right in his heritage as a Scottish writer, and there is much which is in the vernacular. And a pretty muscular and rich vernacular it is too.

I made a big mistake in getting this on the Kindle, as the glossary is much less accessible than it would be in the paper book.

So I gave up and surrendered to working out the meanings and hoped I was not making too many mistakes!

But don’t think Greig is just a folksy folky writer. He digs a rich seam of love requited and unrequited, filial duty, violence, and his central narrator, our poor scrivener, is deliciously dry, and wry, particularly in his footnotes (reasonably easily found on the Kindle without too much distraction). Not to mention battling with where loyalties lie and who can and who cannot be trusted

Greig, as ever, provides a treasure chest to ponder. And then there is his writing, layered, textured, snaggled with new-minted images.

There were so many places where I got caught by images, and fiddled with underlining passages of beauty and contemplation

So, here, on memory:

 Yet the dead return to us, no doubt, by night or by day, rising up from the rotted mulch of the years. Up from black oblivion they rise, catch fire and play across the surface of our minds, insubstantial, unignorable

And this, following a bloody raid and ambush, with a final image which raised hairs on my neck, that poet’s way of making images serve double purpose

 I had seen the gathering of a gang, now I witnessed its sundering. Many went their own way at Tinnis. It was dawn of the day by the old standing stone, cold and red-pink as lifeblood carried downriver

I like the sonorous weight of Greig’s prose, its economy, its variety, the darkness always waiting:

 She died around Candlemas on a quiet afternoon, her sister Ann and I present. Her breaths spaced wider. Her chest rose and fell minutely. Her jaw dropped. I heard that last breath go. Then there was but a shell and an open mouth, and within it darkness without end

Fair Helen Amazon UK
Fair Helen Amazon USA

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Janice Galloway – All Made Up

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All Made Up, Autobiography, Book Review, Janice Galloway, Scottish writer

Music, violence and what love means

Scottish novelist and poet Janice Galloway here continues her account of her childhood, this time focusing on secondary school, and the way she emerged from the silent, watchful child of her earlier book This is Not About Me

That I rated this a little lower than the first book probably reflects my own particular interest in the years of childhood, and the way children view the world. So, curiously, this book got to me a little less, the storms of adolescent sexuality seeming a little more prosaic and predictable. Perhaps it is, too, that the adolescent and the (ahem) mature woman or man are on the same side of the fence, living in the same hormonal country, with all the widespread physiology and psychology of sexuality. So, to pick on my own phrase, yes, to an adult, adolescence is more prosaic and predictable, its country more viscerally remembered, than that pre-pubescent world. And this is precisely why I am so enamoured of writer’s who help me re-member a way of feeling back into a world of ‘child’s eye view’

My reading of this Galloway book, is that it is a little more cerebral, a little more guarded, a little more reserved than her earlier book – the stoicism which was such a hallmark of the first, and in some ways remarkable in the child, somehow left me wanting to be let IN a little more, in this one. It is only towards the end, where suddenly Galloway plunges in to something more lyrical where I felt as completely grabbed as I did by that first volume.

This is a wonderful book, too, and certainly if it is the experience of adolescence, particularly adolescence in a certain time or place, that the reader most engages in, this will not disappoint.

I’m sure if I had only read this one, I would probably love as opposed to like it, but the more obvious heart consciousness of the first book and the fiercely intelligent little watcher, interested me more. To re-cap Wordsworth, with its textured, layered meaning

The child is father to the man

It is the kernel of who we become, and how early in life that ‘person’ expresses, which fascinates. The intelligent, cool , sometimes oversensitised watcher is a more widely found adult, and even a widely found adolescent, – that earlier book beautifully shows the seed of the adult in Galloway. And, yes, of course she is writing through the filter of the adult she now is, but the resonance of the child is crystal.

To return to this book – once again, i appreciate Galloway’s poetic sensibilities, whereby her words bear the weight of layered meaning – at least three interpretations within the title of this book! Clever, perceptive, witty Galloway!
All Made Up Amazon UK
All Made Up Amazon USA

Kathleen Jamie – Sightlines

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Book Review, Kathleen Jamie, Scottish writer, Sightlines, The Natural World

Weaving connections everywhere

I can only concur with the praise heaped on Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie. This is writing about the natural world of a very high order indeed, engaging with beautiful and precise descriptions of what she sees and experiences in a very satisfying way, but, even more pertinently, taking off into other philosophical and thoughtful areas. It is far more than beautiful descriptive prose about birds wheeling against the skyline or the majestic loneliness of mountains against the horizon.

So, for example, one essay about gannets on a gannetry beyond the Shetlands, has her musing (this being a nursery after all) about her own children, and the different relationships between mother and child in other species.

Helicobacter Wiki Commons

Another, highly unusual ‘natural world’ examination, is under the lens of a microscope, looking at tumours in biopsies, and at Helicobacter. She equates this microscopic world to the known world of landscape, seeing inlets, sandbanks, gullies, and bacteria like ‘musk oxen on tundra,seen from far above’ Pastoral bacteria, feeding on the gorgeous turf of stomach lining. And, for me, that heart stopping sentence in this essay:

That’s the deal: if we are to be alive and available for joy and discovery, then it’s as an animal body, available for cancer and infection and pain

Blue Whale Rib Cage

Whether it is the delights of cleaning a long dead whale’s ribs with a toothbrush (!) or going into the earth as if walking inside its body, to visit Paleolithic cave paintings, Jamie is thoughtful, and thought provoking

She embraces the obviously poetic and the mundane, and, like a true poet, sees the poetry in the mundane, using language which is the antithesis of the fey. This is nature writing which engages with the viscera and with sinew

I now have her earlier work, Findings, waiting to be read

I originally received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine Programme UK
Sightlines Amazon UK
Sightlines Amazon USA

At the Loch of the Green Corrie

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Andrew Greig, At the Loch of the Green Corrie, Book Review, Scotland, Scottish writer, The Natural World

Shaman of words

Andrew Grieg makes me consider, deeply, how much we need poets. The word poet (like all words) gets over-used and watered down. The poet, like the artist, is someone who should shock us into being awake, into being present. This is absolutely what Greig does, whether in his novels, his factual writings or his poetry.

The poet should be able to penetrate into the heart of darkness, into light which is so bright that it could blind us, and to show us the everyday which we pass by, unseeing, revealed in all its glory and despair. And how Greig does!

What is this factual book about? It’s about friendship between tough men who can be tender about their relationships with their women and with each other. It is about the power and the fragility and the mystery of the world, particularly the wild world, which keeps itself as removed as it can from mankind’s depredations. It is about the poet Norman MacCaig, influential in Greig’s own poetic development (as he himself no doubt is to a younger generation) It is about fishing and climbing mountains, geology and the Highland clearances, about fathers, both actual and father figures, about commitment between lovers, about savouring good whisky, facing death, about good conversations, and about poetry itself, language, and the heart of the mind, the mind of the heart. And more.

I have no interest in fishing, and whilst a keen escaper to the wild places I suffer from vertigo and would never climb a mountain in the way mountaineers do.

Link to Sandy Birrell’s site (photo)

But this, this book. It’s like some divine and mystical text, which suddenly pushes you into reality by its carefully chosen images and thoughts. My copy was slowly and thoughtfully read, as if it were a long poem, rather than quickly raced through (I’m quite a fast reader) Writing this fine, this true, deserves no less attention from the reader, since the writer has been so thoughtful and attentive to his craft.

The structure of the book has a repeating image of the fisherman – the chapters come in pairs, Cast – where the line flies out, lands on the water, and an action is taken – and then Retrieve, where the action, the thought, the conversation is waited with, and then the line drawn in, and the caught fish revealed and examined, before the new line is thrown, and the fish of thought even thrown back into the deep glass of the loch again

Much annotated, much underlined (sorry if this offends, but my best and most remarkable, memorable books are the ones which have the most underlining) this is a book to return to, to re-savour, and to continue to allow to resonate.

Here are some odd snippets of my underlining, which struck home

“We arrive at who we are first by following, then by divergence”

” My predilection has always been, will always be, to sit until I sense the source, the place the wind comes from”

“The age of poetry is not entirely ended. Flecks of it still glitter in the pauses between stories, among the mud and gravel bed of the stream”

“turquoise lakes brim inside burning shores” (sunset over a loch)

And, recounting a small moment, when he and his fishing companions prepare to eat their evening meal, in the quiet of a deserted loch-side, as sunset falls:

“Nothing stops this, I think, the bubbling pan, the slow-oncoming dark, the light more lurid as it dies. Our choice is whether to cherish it, mourn its passing, or feel as little as possible”

Yes. That’s what the poet does. Takes the ordinary and shakes us out of our unawareness, fiercely challenging us `Awake!’ forcing us to see the timeless, the real, what matters, teaching us how to live better.

This joins the library of books which I regard as my teachers. And, like the best of teachers, opens up new vistas – Norman MacCaig The Poems of Norman MacCaig (I was ignorant of this fine poet), and Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (The Canons)

At the Loch of the Green Corrie. Amazon UK
At the Loch of the Green Corrie. Amazon USA

Janice Galloway – The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

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Book Review, Janice Galloway, Laurence Sterne, Literary Fiction, Sanity and Madness, Scottish writer, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, Tristram Shandy

New York Times book review said it best

The front of my paperback edition carries the following strapline from a NYT book review: ‘Resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath’

That is it, in a nutshell. Both Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Plath’s The Bell Jar are, above all, wonderful and creative pieces of writerly craft. As is this. Janice Galloway combines the plangent, melancholy, mordantly funny, sharp-eyed anarchic WEIRDNESS of Tristram Shandy with the excruciatingly painful, honest, revelatory expose of a mind (very like yours and mine) cracking and giving way under the pressures of holding it together in a world which seems set-up precisely to force shattering in the first place – like The Bell Jar.

A beautifully constructed book, which like Tristram Shandy uses the visual aspect of what a printed book looks like to express something of what the book is about – without giving too much away here, as i don’t want to spoil the reader in their surprised response. This book, in non-linear fashion is the story of one woman and how she holds (and does not hold) together. Galloway, as I realise from having previously read two volumes of her later published autobiography This is Not About Me and All Made Up, has distilled some of her own life into this imaginative fiction.

The prizes and awards this first novel garnered are deserved and unsurprising. And, most searingly, the MIND/Allan Lane award. Aspects of mental health care are scorchingly shown.

Be warned, this book will have you laughing at the black humour of our protagonist at the very moment that the fierceness of her pain feels like a knife in the gut
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing Amazon UK
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing Amazon USA

Janice Galloway – This Is Not About Me

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Autobiography, Book Review, Janice Galloway, Scotland, Scottish writer, This Is Not About Me

Playing the hand of cards you have been dealt

I am a sucker for autobiographical books about childhood, because it is a time of such fluidity of response, and I am always captivated when a writer can distill the stuff of their own childhood, recount it as an adult, but still be able to hold the way the child saw the world.

I had never heard of Janice Galloway, and was delighted to get introduced to her writing.

Fascinating though it is to read childhood accounts of foreign lands and different times, there is something particularly interesting, to me, in those which have taken place around my own times, and in the UK. It can be shocking and salutary to read of how very different lives can be, yet in places close to home.

Galloway had a childhood which looked utterly bleak from the point of view of what life handed out – alcoholic father, poverty, drudgery, a school and home environment where ideas of nurturing, encouraging, celebrating the small developing person seem unbearably absent.

Yet, curiously, Galloway is not disconsolate, self-pitying, hate-filled or crushed. She writes with a generosity and even a celebration of her mother who was trapped by Janice’s birth, and let her know that, and her aggressive, bullying, excitingly life filled sister. Lives which on one level could be seen as small, failed, dysfunctional are seen in a way which also acknowledges the unique, precious, loved and affirmed aspects of those lives

It isn’t even that this falls into a `triumph of the human spirit’ genre (though Galloway certainly seems to have climbed out of everything which could have crushed a less generous or frailer spirit) This is neither the story of `a survivor’ nor is it the story of `a victim’, but it is a beautifully written account of one particular child, growing up in a time (1960s) and a place (Saltcoats, West Coast Scotland) told with wryness, humour, compassionate perception and warmth.Galloway neither sweeps the awfulness under the carpet, trying to hide it with a soggy rictus grin of wisecracking sentimentality, nor does she wallow in the pain. Rather there is an acceptance of both her sensitivity and her tough, creative stoicism. She plays the cards she has been dealt, rather than wasting time bemoaning the awfulness of the deal. This is a combination of the pragmatic and the poetic which I found utterly captivating
This is not about Me Amazon UK
This is not about Me Amazon USA