Two Scottish novels

Following on from my visit to the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, I’ve recently been reading a couple of books by Scottish authors – John Buchan and Ian Rankin, both of whom happen to be favourite writers of mine. One is a tale of cruelty and intolerance in the Lowlands of the seventeenth century, the other a story of murder and violence in modern Edinburgh.

First published in 1927, Witch Wood is one of John Buchan’s historical novels, and as such there’s a lot more depth to this than there is in what he called his ‘shockers’ – think Midwinter rather than The Power-House and Greenmantle. Buchan himself thought of it as his best novel. It’s set in Scotland at the time of the Civil War, an age of religious extremism which came in the form of the Presbyterian-inspired Solemn League and Covenant. In such an age, those who sided with Charles I could expect to be denounced as traitors and hunted down without mercy (their leader, the Marquis of Montrose – also the subject of a biography by Buchan, and who makes a brief appearance in Witch Wood – was a particular hate-figure), while by contrast it was not unknown for apparently upstanding and devout Covenanters to privately dabble in crime and devil-worship (Major Thomas Weir of Edinburgh being the most notorious example).

Witch Wood is the story of David Sempill, a newly-ordained Church of Scotland minister sent to a Lowland village called Woodilee. Although the villagers are firm in their Covenanter beliefs, their minister is less so to the point of befriending and sheltering Mark Kerr, a fugitive supporter of the afore-mentioned Great Montrose. Such tolerance is a dangerous act in itself, but it soon turns out to be the least of his problems.

Devil-worship is at the dark heart of Witch Wood, for David witnesses a diabolic ritual taking place in the woods; the satanists’ ringleader turns out to be Ephraim Caird, a prominent elder of the Kirk who is able use his standing in the community to turn the parish against its minister. A witch-finder arrives in Woodliee, and in the communal hysteria that follows the innocent suffer more than the guilty; to this is added an outbreak of the plague (vividly described) while a love-story between David and the ethereal Katrine plays out to its tragic conclusion. It is here that Buchan comes into his own, raising questions about human nature and religious tolerance with particular reference to self-deception and self-righteousness while not yielding to the temptation to merely brand certain characters as out-and-out hypocrites, although the novel certainly does deal with the contradictions which can become apparent in a society where religion totally dominates life (to a degree that is difficult to comprehend nowadays).

The conclusion is nothing if not dramatic, as David loses everything before he finally confronts Caird in the wood, forcing the latter to choose between God and the devil. David is never seen in the locality again, thus giving rise to the legends of the minister’s disappearance which are related in the novel’s prologue. This is a novel that works on many levels, with the exploration of important questions coming alongside an excellent description of the landscape – always a strong feature of Buchan’s – and strong depictions of the ordinary parishoners caught up in the events described; farmers so attached to the land that they are known by the names of their farms, cottagers, women – especially Isobel Veitch, David’s housekeeper – and Daft Gibbie, the village idiot. These well-drawn characters serve to add another layer of complexity, for with the notable exceptions of the leader characters Buchan has written much of the dialogue in the Lowland Scots dialect which can make the story a bit hard to follow at times; thank goodness my copy – a modern Polygon paperback version – has a glossary! A heavy read, but a rewarding one which I think may well benefit from a second or even a third reading, so I’m not getting rid of my copy yet.

Of a more recent vintage (2016), Rather be the Devil by Ian Rankin is the twenty-first appearance of John Rebus, the hard-nosed Edinburgh detective who by now has once again retired from the police but that doesn’t stop him from getting involved in cases alongside his younger associates, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox (both DIs in Police Scotland, as Scotland’s various constabularies became in 2013, here depicted as a somewhat frayed organisation). Here, Rebus – trying to cut down on his trademark drinking and making a surprisingly good go of giving up smoking (thanks perhaps in part to his pathologist girlfriend giving him a specimen jar containing part of a diseased lung) – becomes obsessed with an old case from the Seventies, the unsolved murder of a glamorous socialite in the Caledonian Hotel.

This isn’t the first time a Rebus novel has focussed on a case from the past (witness 2013’s Saints of the Shadow Bible which was in part about investigations into an old CID unit which had a distinct whiff of Life on Mars). He’s showing his age – he first appeared in Knots and Crosses, 31 years ago – and mortality isn’t far from the surface as he is diagnosed with having a shadow on one of his lungs (naturally, he takes to referring to it as Hank Marvin; musical references are never far from the surface in the Rebus books, the title of this one coming from a John Martyn song).

Age and shadows are recurring themes here, along with violence, power, greed and betrayal. Once again Rankin’s focus is on the seedy side of Edinburgh – think dodgy nightclubs and even dodgier betting-shops, with much of the action taking place in the evening rather than in broad daylight. A would-be crime boss by the name of Darryl Christie has been beaten unconscious on his own doorstep. He’s trying to fill the void left by Rebus’s old nemesis, veteran crime boss ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty, and it’s not long before rumours abound that Cafferty himself is behind it, hoping to come out of retirement. The beating should be Clarke’s case, but because Christie’s money-laundering activities are of interest to HMRC, Fox – previously transferred to the Scottish Crime Campus, which Clark resented – gets involved too. An attention-seeking vagrant who serially confesses to crimes (and who had previously appeared in 1997’s Black and Blue, one of the best in the series in which Rebus investigated an updated version of the real-life ‘Bible John’ murders) serves to bring Rebus himself on board in a semi-official capacity.

There is of course a link between the decades-old murder and the beating, for Christie is associated with Anthony Brough, the scion of an old Scottish banking family – and the murder victim, Maria Turquand, had been married to a man who worked for said bank. Not that she’d been faithful to him, adding various lovers to the list of suspects which includes a rock star who was staying in the Caledonian along with his entourage at the time of the murder (and who now lives just around the corner from the hotel in question). Brough, by the way, has disappeared, and the body of an ex-copper who worked on the Turquand murder is fished out of the Leith Docks (suicide it isn’t). There’s a mysterious Russian, who’s actually Ukrainian. Oh, and there’s violence a-plenty, some of it involving a hammer and some six-inch nails.

These distinct yet interlinked plots lead to something of a juggling act on Rankin’s part. Rebus and Cafferty are approaching the same point from very different angles. Being a criminal, Big Ger of course is subject to fewer constraints – although the retired Rebus, explicitly more concerned with the outcome rather than the process, is not averse to cutting a few corners himself, such as when he pretends to be Fox (a non-drinking anti-Rebus who, despite his more by-the-book approach, is the one who becomes increasingly compromised as the plot thickens). As was the case with Buchan, local knowledge and detail are key features alongside skilled story-telling. The ‘Caley’ is a real hotel, although as Rankin points out, it’s now the Waldorf Astoria, and there are nods to ongoing roadworks on Lothian Road and (of course!) the Oxford Bar amid confusion about the geography of Edinburgh on the part of some cops sent in from elsewhere. In short, this is a fast-paced and well-told story; Rebus may be getting on a bit, but his creator is still at the top of his game.

The Writers' Museum

Up in Edinburgh recently, I had a walk around the Old Town and, after enjoying the view from Castle Rock and checking out St Giles’ Cathedral, I chanced upon the Writers’ Museum, located in a courtyard just off the Royal Mile.

Well, seeing as I occasionally volunteer at Dr Johnson’s House down in London (and had just chanced upon a pub close to the castle which has a plaque outside saying that Samuel Johnson had dined there with James Boswell in 1770), I had to go in and have a look around. The building itself is called Lady Stair’s House and dates back to 1622 (as can be deduced from that year being carved onto the lintel over the front door) although it’s named after a woman – the widow of the Earl of Stair – who bought it in 1719. Having restored it in the late nineteenth century, Lord Rosebery (briefly Prime Minister in the 1890s; Winston Churchill later quipped that he “outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty”) donated it to the city of Edinburgh for use as a museum in 1907.

 

The museum is a delightful building whose three floors (accessed by two staircases, one a spiral and the other, main one having uneven stairs – an old anti-burglar trick) are devoted to three of Scotland’s most famous writers (two of whom were born in Edinburgh): Robert Burns (1759-96), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).

Burns, now regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, collected old folk songs from across Scotland (something that was being done by various writers across Europe at the time) as well as writing his own material, which includes ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘Address to a Haggis’ (as recited after the haggis is piped in at a Burns Night dinner) and that poem in which he says that the “best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men” do something in the Scots dialect that I can’t pronounce although I do know that it translates as ‘often go wrong’. The artefacts of his in the museum include a cast of his skull (made when his widow, who outlived him by 38 years, was laid to rest alongside him) and a sword-stick – a slim sword concealed in a walking-stick, which he had because he worked as an exciseman as well as being a writer.

I’d already seen the Scott Monument on Princes Street, a large Gothic tower that I was not surprised to learn is the largest monument to a writer anywhere in the world (it is not far from Waverley Station, Edinburgh’s mainline railway station which I suspect is the only train station in the world that’s named after a novel). The museum has Scott-related items of a more personal nature, such as his childhood rocking-horse (with one foot-hold higher than the other, for he suffered from polio as a child) and a lock of his hair. I’ve often thought that Scott – who met Burns when he was 15 – is one of those writers I should read more of – I’ve only read two of his books; Ivanhoe many years ago, after watching a TV adaptation of it, while a couple of years back I made heavy work of Waverley. Scott, I was intrigued to learn, was made a baronet not for his writing but for finding the Scottish crown jewels (which hadn’t been used since the seventeenth century and were thought to have been lost), and he was also the man who co-ordinated George IV’s visit to Edinbugh in 1822, a spectacular affair that did much to establish tartan as a potent symbol of Scottish identity (it had previously been banned in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745) and only took three weeks to plan.

The part dedicated to Stevenson is in the basement. This contains a wooden cupboard, once owned by Stevenson’s father, that was made by no less a person than William Brodie, better known as Deacon Brodie, a notorious eighteenth-century public figure in Edinburgh; a respectable cabinet-maker, locksmith and city councillor by day (he had the title ‘deacon’ not out of anything to do with religion but because he was head of a trade guild), he was also a thief and a burglar (many of his victims being people who he had made locks for!) by night. The pub named after him on the Royal Mile, not far from where he was hanged in 1788, plays on this dichotomy by showing both sides of his personality on either side of the sign. Amost a century later,  Deacon Brodie would serve as the main inspiration for Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There’s also some interesting information about Treasure Island (he came up with the map first, and worked the story around that). Although his literary reputation did for a time suffer at the hand of those snobs of the Bloomsbury Set, Stevenson’s legacy has been enormous – just think of how many stories derive from those two that I’ve mentioned! As for me, I’ve always meant to read some of his travel writing but, as with more Scott, it’s just something I don’t seem to have got around to.

There were some pictures of other Scottish writers on the walls; I was pleased to find a photograph of John Buchan, although the most impressive picture was the tapestry depiction of Burns, Scott and Stevenson.

Finally, there’s currently an exhibition at the Writers’ Museum devoted to a modern Scottish writer – Ian Rankin, for 2017 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Rebus books, the Edinburgh detective having made his first appearance in 1987’s Knots and Crosses. Rankin wrote that novel after having the idea of updating Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde into then-modern Edinburgh, which is why the reader is for a time led to suspect that the troubled detective is also the villain of the piece (and he could easily have been, for at the time Rankin had no plans to bring him back for more). I like the Rebus novels, to the extent that I made a point of seeking out the Oxford Bar when I was in Edinburgh last year, so I loved that there was an exhibition devoted to them at the museum.

All in all, well worth a visit.

Up the hill, and down the pub

What to do with a couple of hours to kill in Edinburgh before the train home? I was up there for the day yesterday, and so was faced with this question. After browsing the souvenir-shops along the Royal Mile, I thought it would be fun to climb Arthur’s Seat, the big hill just to the east of the city, but realised that this would probably take longer than the time I had left.

Instead, I focused my attention on the smaller Calton Hill which rises above the eastern end of Princes Street and is topped by a variety of early-19^th century monuments which has led it to be dubbed Edinburgh’s answer to the Acropolis (and thus, probably, the reason why Edinburgh has sometimes been referred to as the ‘Athens of the North’, although as the city has seven hills it has also been compared with Rome).

The climb was a fairly easy one. From the top, you can see all the way to the docks and beyond into the Firth of Forth – the island of Inchkeith is clearly visible, as is the Forth Bridge. As for the city, much of it is laid out before you, from Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building up to the Castle perched atop its rock.

Like several others who had come to Calton Hill, I climbed up onto the National Monument, that unfinished replica of the Parthenon which was started in 1822 as a memorial to the Scottish soldiers and sailors who had died during the Napoleonic Wars, although they’d only managed to erect a dozen of the columns before the money ran out. 

Nearby, among various other structures, is the Nelson Monument, a tower built on the highest point of Calton Hill shortly before the National Monument to commemorate Lord Nelson; it replaced a mast that had been used to send signals to the ships on the Firth of Forth (the flags that make up Nelson’s famous signal, the ‘England expects’ one, are flown from the monument every Trafalgar Day). The fact that it looks a bit like an upturned telescope is, apparently, deliberate.  

Naturally I can never resist the chance of climbing any available tower and as luck would have it I was there about half an hour before it closed for the day; plenty of time to go to the top and enjoy the panoramic view of this historic city.

After descending back into the city, I felt that a pre-train pint was in order, and that there was one Edinburgh pub above all others where this need could be best met. I have long been a fan of the Rebus books, Ian Rankin’s series of detective novels which are set in Edinburgh and which present a view of the city far removed from what the tourists see (rather like what the Morse books did for Oxford and the Zen ones for Italy, I suppose). The curmudgeonly yet likeable John Rebus may be a fictional character but he has a favourite pub, which he shares with his creator: The Oxford Bar in the New Town, that part of the city which was built in the late 18^th century and which retains much of its Georgian charm.

My guide book describes the pub as “that rarest of things: a real pub for real people, with no ‘theme’, no music, no frills and no pretensions”. I rather liked the sound of that, for it sounded like my sort of pub.

I also rather liked the name of the street on which it is located.

I really liked what I found – a quiet, old-fashioned sort of back-street pub where one could order a pint – it had to be Deuchars IPA – from the small bar at the front and take it to the main room and sip it in quiet contentment with the only accompanying sound being the rambling conversation from the people on the table opposite (even in the week before Christmas, there is clearly a point before which it is not the done thing to just leave work early and head to the boozer).

It brought to mind pubs like the Mitre off Hatton Garden (a favourite of mine) and various others, usually located in the back-streets, which have an authentic air which is sadly missing from so many watering-holes these days. The Oxford Bar was, I felt, definitely worth a visit in the short time I had before I walked back to Waverley Station, and onto the 17:00 to King’s Cross.