The novel takes its shape and architecture from an attempt by the son of successful photographer Michael Pendreich to curate an exhibition of his late father’s work. This magisterial work weaves bright threads of tales into a Tartan tapestry, mapping a Scotland which includes ‘the wastelands of de-industrialised Scotland, a tour of devastation called Uddingston, Bellshill, Cleland, Shotts, Fauldhouse, Breich, West Calder, all those places nobody outside Scotland thinks of as being Scottish, the Scotland so real it defies the imagination’. He knows his subject most intimately well, down to the very granite.
Throughout this ambitious, sprawling volume, Robertson moves confidently through society’s strata, from the corridors of power to the rancid underbelly of urban life. It may not have the frenetic energy of Welsh’s heroin shenanigans, or the surreal luminosity of Gray, but it does have a great big, human and humane heart, as it slowly introduces the carefully delineated folk of the novel… wounded, often fuelled by, or in thrall to booze, confounded by the present. But if I had to choose one book that manages to concertina the whole teeming tumult of twentieth century Scottish experience I’d have to plump for James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still, a magisterial, multi-voiced novel which sings both true and beautiful and beautifully true. One might usefully, say, read all of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels, in body-count sequence, perhaps, or gainfully listen to Neal Ascherson’s Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, the book in which the veteran and ‘shamelessly erudite’ writer comes home.
There are the four books (written over thirty years) which make up Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and Irvine Welsh’s jacked up and hyper-oxygenating Trainspotting.
You’re pretty much spoiled for choice when it comes to reading telling and entertaining material about modern Scotland, of course. Jon Gower pays tribute to the nation-defining work of one of Scotland’s most celebrated authors, James Robertson.
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