Play For Today: A Gift From Nessus (1980)

 

The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin (Canongate 2021)

 

Lighting another cigarette, Laidlaw became aware of a stooped old-timer with rheumy eyes who had joined the bus queue behind him.

‘You should enjoy life more, son. Your face is tripping you.’

The man’s breath was like a blowtorch, and Laidlaw wondered why it was that after a drink so many Glaswegians turned into the Ancient Mariner, eager to share their stories and wisdom with complete strangers. This particular example boasted a rolled-up newspaper, which he wielded like a baton, as if he could conduct the world.

‘At least it’s only my face that’s tripping me,’ Laidlaw responded. ‘Your whole life seems to be one long bout of falling over.’ He gestured towards the rips in the man’s trousers and the elbows of his worn-out jacket.

The man studied him, taking a step back as if to help him focus. ‘You look like an actor, son. Have I seen you in anything?’

‘We’re all actors in this town, haven’t you noticed? You’re acting right now.’

‘Am I?'

'Badly – but even bad acting deserves the occasional round of applause.’ Laidlaw dug a few coins from his pocket and placed them in the man’s hand. ‘Should cover your bus fare. Either that or a paper from this week rather than last.’

There was a double-decker drawing towards them at that moment. Laidlaw gestured for the old man to precede him aboard, but then stood his ground and told the clippie he’d wait for the next one. The new passenger stared in bemusement from the window as the bell rang and the bus pulled away, depriving him of his audience. Laidlaw didn’t doubt he would soon find another.

Walking Wounded by William McIlvanney (Canongate Books 1989)

The ridiculous image of himself hiding in the Wendy House began to seem more than an accidental moment in his life. There were perhaps times, it appeared to him, when a fleeting gesture or a spontaneous stance could freeze into definition, like a head stamped on a coin, and become your essential currency. For a great footballer it might be one game or one goal. For another man, the moment of his marriage. John dreaded that for him it might be his sojourn in the Wendy House. That might become the prison of his own sense of himself. Perhaps that’s who he was – a ridiculous naked man with one sock on hiding in a cardboard house, waiting for his own true love.

A Pint, a Punch Up and a Punt to Cordoba . . .

Via Facebook.

A follow up to the album challenge.

Day #8
With no explanations, post ten books that have made their mark on your life. Once a day, post the book cover and nominate a new person.

A Ninety Minute Nationalist writes . . .

Good joke via Facebook.

"New Celtic 4th kit is quite smart"

The Big Man by William McIlvanney (Canongate Books 1985)

Dan felt a liberating affection for his father. Poor, old, hard, honest bastard. Having lashed himself to his principles to survive, he couldn’t be blamed for not being able to move, though the times did. Dan’s love of his mother, never compromised, came back to him. He wished he could speak to them now to reassure them that he wasn’t lost entirely to the past they had believed in, that he hadn’t quite forsaken what they stood for, that he, too, had his pride. It wouldn’t have been an elaborate speech – they never were in his parents’ house. It would have been something gruffly cryptic, in a code they would have understood, something like: ‘Don’t panic, Feyther. Mither, Ah’m still me.’

But he had to admit to himself that his pride, if it was still there, was in a funny place. His parents’ pride had been like a medal they could wear, one they had earned. His own was something he felt was still with him but he couldn’t have pointed to it. The explicitness of their experience had bestowed on them a kind of brute heroism. His experience had been different, still was. If their lives had been as clear-cut as trench-warfare, his was as confusing as espionage, a labyrinth of double-agents.

What did you trust these days? You couldn’t vaguely trust the historical future in which his parents had believed. Part of it was already here and it was unrecognisable as what had been foretold. Better material conditions hadn’t created solidarity but fragmentation. Working-class parvenus were at least as selfish as any other kind. You couldn’t simply vote Labour and trust that Socialism would triumph. The innocence of his parents’ early belief in the purity of Socialism couldn’t be transplanted to the time that followed Socialism’s exercising of power, however spasmodic. In power, Socialism had found it hard to recognise itself, had become neurotic with expediency, had forgotten that it had never merely been a policy but a policy growing from a faith founded in experience. Lose the faith that had been justly earned from the lives of generations of people and Socialism was merely words and words were infinitely flexible. You couldn’t trust the modern generation of those who had formerly been the source at which Socialism had reaffirmed its faith. All around they were reaching private settlements with their society’s materialism in terms that contained no clauses to safeguard others of their own who might be less fortunate.

If you were honest, you couldn’t even trust yourself. He had often enough expressed his contempt for people he had known who, coming from his own background, had succeeded academically or in business and had turned their backs on where they came from. He had heard them at parties and in pubs preaching the worthlessness of their own heritage and he had despised them. But he also knew that you couldn’t trust yourself not to be like them until you had been to a place where the temptations were real, where you too had the opportunity to make a purely private enterprise of your life and the rewards were sufficient to put such principles as you had to the test. He had never been to such a place.

The Crime Interviews: Volume Two by Len Wanner (Blasted Heath 2012)

Good question. Why are you writing books?

I'm writing books to try and make a connection with a reader. It doesn't matter whether it's a reader who's on the Booker panel or a reader who's a waitress... Whenever I'm up for a prize I think: "Who the fuck are you to judge me?" And then I think: "Give me that fucking prize." Ha! You don't know these people exist until they write to you to say: "You're up for a prize. Do you want to come and have a bad hotel dinner, while feeling really nervous and wearing uncomfortable clothes, and then get up and make a cunt of yourself in front of a big audience?" What the fuck?

I mean, prizes are good marketing tools. They're shorthand for telling readers: "This is a good book." But a better way for people to come to your books is for their pals to say: "You'll like that book. It really meant something to me."

When did a book first really mean something to you?

When I was nineteen, reading Thérèse Raquin in a bedsit, being totally transported by the writing and the way two words can click together, and sitting back, thinking: "What an amazing thing to do with your life – to make that sort of connection with another person, to feel exactly what Zola was talking about, or looking at, or imagining... What an incredible connection!" And what I really love about Zola is that he was a political writer.

Do you see yourself as a political writer?

Yeah! Orwell was who I stole from the library... So it's that connection: reading A Tale of Two Cities and sweating with my heart racing at the end because it was so exciting. But I think you really have to keep your eyes on the prize, because otherwise you become bitter and disillusioned despite having everything. You're being published, you're making a living, you're spending your days in pyjamas wrestling with words, and people are writing to you saying: "I read your book and it mattered to me." How lucky is that?

(Len Wanner interviewing Denise Mina.)

I bloody knew it!

From a New Zealand newspaper's Q & A with Ian Rankin, who's currently bigging up the excellent 'The Impossible Dead':

The book that changed me is

... Laidlaw by William McIlvanney. I read this in the early 1980s when I was a student but also trying to become a published novelist. It's beautifully written, with taut plotting and a clean style. Laidlaw made me think I could maybe write my own crime fiction.

It has to be said . . . Morris Cafferty is no John Rhodes.

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney (Pantheon Books 1977)

'I'm going to miss the compassion you bring to the job,' Harkness said.

Milligan was looking out at the passing scene with a kind of sunny malice.

'No,' he said. 'Where you're going you'll get plenty of that. Laidlaw? You'll have to wear wellies when you work with him. To wade through the tears. He thinks criminals are underprivileged. He's not a detective. He's a shop-steward for neds. It'll be a great experience for you. Boy Robin meets Batman.'

The Papers Of Tony Veitch by William McIlvanney (Pantheon Books 1983)

'Oh,' John Rhodes said. 'And Panda Paterson.’

‘Correct, John. Your memory's good.‘ Panda said.

He extended his hand to shake and John Rhodes punched him in the mouth. It was a short punch, very quick and very measured, costing John nothing, the punch of a man in training, emerging from reflexes so honed they seemed to contain a homing device. It was only after it had landed you realised it had been thrown. lt imparted awe to some of the others. as if thought was fait accompli.

The effect was reminiscent of the moment in a Hollywood musical when the mundane breaks into a Busby Berkeley routine. Suddenly, Panda Paterson was dancing. He moved dramatically onto the small slippereened square of dance floor and did an intricate backstep. Then, extending his improvisation into what could have been called ‘The Novice Skater‘ . he went down with his arms waving and slid sitting until the carpet jarred him backwards and his head hit a radiator like a duff note on a xylophone.

‘That's the price of a pint in “The Crib”,' John Rhodes said.

There was blood coming out of Panda's mouth. He eased himself off as if to get up and then settled back. touching his mouth gently.

'Ye've made a wise decision,' John Rhodes said, watching him refuse to get up. 'You're right. Ah've got a good memory. Ah don't know where you've been lately. Watchin' cowboy pictures? Well, it's different here. Whoever's been kiddin' you on ye were hard, Ah'm here tae tell ye Ah've known you a long time. You were rubbish then an' ye're rubbish now. Frightenin' wee boys! Try that again an' Ah'll shove the pint-dish up yer arse. One wi' a handle.'

If you could have bottled the atmosphere, it would have made Molotov cocktails. Practised in survival, Macey was analysing the ingredients.

John Rhodes stood very still, having made his declaration. What was most frightening about him was the realisation that what had happened was an act of measured containment for him, had merely put him in the notion for the real thing. He wasn't just a user of violence, he truly loved it. It was where he happened most fully, a thrilling edge. Like a poet who has had a go at the epic, he no longer indulged himself in the doggerel of casual fights but when, as now, the situation seemed big enough, his resistance was very low.

The others, like Panda Paterson, were imitating furniture. This wasn't really about them. Even Panda had been incidental, no more that the paper on which John had neatly imprinted his message. The message was addressed to Cam Colvin.

Walking Wounded by William McIlvanney (Sceptre Paperback 1989)

He looked at the litter on his desk and wondered how he had come to be manacled to these invoices, how many years he had spent transferring days from the in-tray to the out-tray. It would be some time yet before he could go home, but the thought was merely a reflex, no longer carried any deep regret. Marie would be waiting there with a detailed report of how much hoovering she had done today and what the Brussels sprouts cost. Jennifer would be doing her usual impersonation of a foundling princess who can't understand how she has come to be unloaded on such a crass family and Robert, fruit of his loins and heir to his ulcers, would be playing songs in which the lyrics only surfaced intermittently and incomprehensibly.

From the short story 'Waving'.

Weekend by William McIlvanney (Sceptre Paperbacks 2006)

She paused the tape and started to spool forward. She was looking for a moment during the question time that followed Harry Beck's lecture. Mickey Deans had asked a question in a tone of such aggression it had stirred the room from somnolence into tension. Eventually she found it.
'You mentioned in class once that you still regard yourself as a socialist. How is that possible when you have such a jaundiced view of humanity?'
She thought she could almost hear Harry Beck's sad smile.
'First thing is, I don't think it's jaundiced. I think any kind of hope begins in honestly trying to confront what you see as the truth. That's all I've been trying to do. It's the darkness of that truth as I see it that makes me a socialist. After all, the dark is where the dawn comes from. I don't believe in Utopia. You won't find it on any map we can ever make. And if it did exist, we couldn't breathe the air there. It would be too pure for us. But I believe in our ability to drift endlessly towards dystopia. We seem to be programmed for it. As if we were saying to ourselves: if we can't beat the dark, let's celebrate it. I'm against that. I'm a dystopian socialist. Socialism is an attempt to share as justly as we can with one another the terms of human experience. Don't do the dark's work for it. If it's only void out there, let's write our own defiant meaning on it. And make it a shared meaning. I think believing in good is the good. Against all the odds. Even if I'm part of the odds against us. I think it's what makes us what we are.'

100 Best Scottish Books

Following on from these two recent fiascos, I've finally found a book poll on the net where my reading count reaches double figures. It's sourced from The List, which is , I guess, Scotland's equivalent of Time Out and the article dates from 2005.

Twenty-one out of a hundred is not a bad reading haul, and there's another twelve or thirteen books on the list that I'd like to read at some point.

I thought it was a nice touch from the list compilers that they did not insist that the authors had to be Scottish by birth; just that the book listed had to have a strong Scottish connection. Hence, for example, the inclusion of Orwell's 1984 in the hundred, which was written on the Isle of Jura. (And, if you've ever read Orwell's collected essays and letters, his strong dislike of Scottish people is very apparent.)

Each listed entry in the linked article has a wee synopsis and well worth further investigation, but I have posted below links to some of the more interesting entries. (Well interesting to me.)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark (1961)

Tunes of Glory - James Kennaway (1956)

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan (1915)

Under the Skin - Michel Faber (2000)

Buddha Da - Anne Donovan (2003)

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas De Quincey (1822)

King James Bible: Authorised Version - Various (1611)

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

The Divided Self - RD Laing (1960)

The Gowk Storm - Nancy Brysson Morrison (1933)

The Cone-Gatherers - Robin Jenkins (1955)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

Sunset Song - Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1932)

Born Free - Laura Hird (1999)

The Silver Darlings - Neil M Gunn (1941)

The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell (1791)

Annals of the Parish - John Galt (1821)

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (1902)

The House with the Green Shutters - George Douglas Brown (1901)

Lanark - Alasdair Gray (1981)

Paradise - AL Kennedy (2004)

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg (1824)

Trumpet - Jackie Kay (1998)

Morvern Callar - Alan Warner (1995)

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (1949)

Swing Hammer Swing! - Jeff Torrington (1992)

Hotel World - Ali Smith (2001)

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh (1993)

The Trick is to Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway (1989)

Jericho Sleep Alone - Chaim Bermant (1964)

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett (1771)

Lilith - George MacDonald (1895)

Imagined Corners - Willa Muir (1931)

Living Nowhere - John Burnside (2003)

Jelly Roll - Luke Sutherland (1998)

The White Bird Passes - Jessie Kesson (1958)

Young Adam - Alexander Trocchi (1954)

Rob Roy - Walter Scott (1818)

The Sea Road - Margaret Elphinstone (2000)

The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith (1776)

The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism - Tom Nairn (1977)

Consider the Lilies - Iain Crichton Smith (1968)

No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums - Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long (1935)

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling (1997)

Madame Doubtfire - Anne Fine (1987)

Me and Ma Gal - Des Dillon (1995)

The Highland Clearances - John Prebble (1969)

A Concussed History of Scotland - Frank Kuppner (1990)

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume (1748)

A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay (1920)

The Golden Bough - James Frazer (1890)

Grace Notes - Bernard MacLaverty (1997)

The Cutting Room - Louise Welsh (2002)

The Quarry Wood - Nan Shepherd (1928)

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (1984)

Brond - Frederic Lindsay (1984)

A Day at the Office - Robert Alan Jamieson (1991)

Behind the Scenes at the Museum - Kate Atkinson (1995)

The Dear Green Place - Archie Hind (1966)

Miss Marjoribanks - Margaret Oliphant (1866)

The Sound of My Voice - Ron Butlin (1987)

Flemington - Violet Jacob (1911)

Greenvoe - George Mackay Brown (1972)

The New Road - Neil Munro (1914)

Psychoraag - Suhayl Saadi (2004)

The Bull Calves - Naomi Mitchison (1947)

The Coral Island - R. M. Ballantyne (1858)

From Russia, With Love - Ian Fleming (1957)

A Disaffection - James Kelman (1989)

The Shipbuilders - George Blake (1935)

Our Fathers - Andrew O'Hagan (1999)

A Sense of Freedom - Jimmy Boyle (1977)

A Twelvemonth and a Day - Christopher Rush (1985)

The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst (1999)

Adam Blair - John Gibson Lockhart (1822)

But n Ben A-Go-Go - Matthew Fitt (2000)

The Siege of Trencher's Farm - Gordon Williams (1969)

The New Testament in Scots - trans. William Laughton Lorimer (1983)

The Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett (1961)

Open the Door! - Catherine Carswell (1920)

The Lantern Bearers - Ronald Frame (1999)

An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn - Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul (2003)

Children of the Dead End - Patrick MacGill (1914)

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night - Christopher Brookmyre (1999)

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (1908)

Garnethill - Denise Mina (1998)

Joseph Knight - James Robertson (2003)

The Magic Flute - Alan Spence (1990)

Electric Brae - Andrew Greig (1997)

The Guns of Navarone - Alistair MacLean (1957)

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith (1998)

Mr Alfred, M.A. - George Friel (1972)

Sartor Resartus - Thomas Carlyle (1836)

Black and Blue - Ian Rankin (1997)

Scar Culture - Toni Davidson (1999)

Whisky Galore - Compton Mackenzie (1947)

The Citadel - AJ Cronin (1937)

For the Love of Willie - Agnes Owens (1998)

Docherty - William McIlvanney (1975)

Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney (Harcourt Brace 1991)

'Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As they drove to meet him, they knocked down a man on the road. He was dying. If they tried to save him, they might miss their appointment. They decided that their appointment, which concerned all of us, was more important than the life of one man. They drove on to keep their appointment. They did not know that the man they were to meet was the man they had left to die.'
I wish I had more whisky.