The second novel by Annalena McAfee is a curious confection indeed. Mhairi McPhail, a Canadian of Scots descent, accepts a job on the remote and fictitious Scottish island of Fascaray. With her nine-year-old daughter, she decamps to “a bonsai Scotland, a diminutive Dalraida, an atomic Alba, a bright flake of Caledonian confetti in which all our country’s marvels … are shrunk as by faery command”, in order to write a biography and establish a museum in honour of the island’s recently deceased, nearly centenarian bard, the fykesome and ill-cankert auld dotterel Grigor McWatt. The novel is presented as various found texts – parts of Mhairi’s biography of McWatt; parts of her diary; parts of McWatt’s Fascaray Compendium, an unpublished ethnological, botanical, historical lifelong project. We also read his testy newspaper polemics and his poetry, “translations” or “owersettins” of work by Yeats, Frost, Byron, Housman and Keats into Lallans, if you like, or synthetic Scots if you don’t.
When I started to read it, it induced a kind of vertigo-inducing double vision. I know a fair wee bit about Scottish literature, and McWatt is a weirdly composite character. His Anglophobia is borrowed from Hugh MacDiarmid; his beret and kilt are reminiscent of Sorley Maclean; his monomania about one island recollects John Lorne Campbell; his wartime experience and folk song success are filched from Hamish Henderson; his pet otters nod at Gavin Maxwell; his ill-fated romance with a damaged young woman is patterned on George Mackay Brown and Stella Cartwright.
McAfee, binding her narrative to a small area, relocates fictional versions of every famous bit of recent Scottish history to the island. So the “Fascaray Five” try to reform landholding under the Nazi-loving laird Montfitchett, just as the seven men of Knoydart took on the fascist-sympathising Lord Brocket. It is Fascaray, not Gigha, that benefits from community buyout legislation. Fascaray, not Edinburgh’s the Inch, where postboxes with E II R are blown up by nationalists questioning when there was a E I R of Scotland. There’s even “Archie Tupper”, a brash US billionaire, who tries to build a golf course on Fascaray, and a film about his heavy-handed tactics being screened at Cannes. MacDiarmid famously wrote “Our Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?” Well, it is in McAfee’s novel; everything happens on a five miles by three canvas. A fictitious place must have fictitious place names, and here McAfee is on even less certain ground. Names like “Loch Och” and “Loch Aye”, the islands called Plodda and Grodda inhabited only by gannets and the Ring of Drumlish seem more like a TV pitch for a Caledonian version of Father Ted.
Alongside these flights of fancy, real people are often mentioned. McAfee’s world appears to be one where Donald Trump isn’t real (oh, one wishes!) but the singer Karine Polwart, the novelist John Burnside and the historian Tom Devine are. It might be metatextual fun, but it reads like a palimpsest of Scottishness draped over Scotland. That doesn’t make for an unentertaining novel, and as soon as I decided this book wanted to be read as a prose version of the films Local Hero and Brigadoon it had indubitable charm. It’s as sentimental and as silly in many ways, but still a pleasing way to while away an afternoon when not staring at the heather, the haar and the howe. It’s got a lovely “aww” moment as well as some “ach” moments.
Most interesting of all are McWatt’s/McAfee’s Scots interpretations of English poems. Many of the best here are transculturations as much as translations: Keats’ Mermaid Tavern becomes the Fascaray Inn, the “best” and “worst” in Yeats’ “The Second Coming” become Scots and English – at which, I admit, I bristled. They are strong reimaginings, and the idea of a Scottish poet doing a literary landgrab on the canon is both clever and provocative. It has also been done before; the late Angus Calder’s versions of Horace, or Rody Gorman’s Gaelification of “Highway 61 Revisited”, or Robert Crawford’s English “translations” of Scots poems show that Scots is a particularly useful tool in the lexicographical box. Again, I would quibble on some points. “Tapsalteerie” is a joyous word, meaning “upside down”, or “topsy-turvy” and as a part of McWatt/McAfee’s take on “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” – “tapsalteerie is lowsed ootower the warld” – becomes carnivalesque rather than a slow tolling. It is not the only note that jars: some of McPhail’s and McWatt’s “English” is also out of key.
Hame is a sweet and quaint novel, full of just-in-time revelations and obvious fondness. It will, I suspect, be received differently in different parts of the country; as a Richard Curtis film in waiting down south, and as a naive intervention about identity, the status of Scots and how England relates to Scotland from where I am writing. Good luck to her, though. As we Scots know, dafties gang kim-kam whaur aingells are feart tae tread.
• Hame is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
View all comments >