Notional Identities: Ideology, Genre and National Identity in Popular Scottish Fiction Since the Seventies [Unabridged] 144385056X, 9781443850568

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Notional Identities

All excerpts from Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin appear by permission of the Orion Publishing Group. Knots and Crosses is Copyright ©1987 Ian Rankin, all rights reserved. All excerpts from The Incomer by Margaret Elphinstone appear by kind courtesy of Margaret Elphinstone. The Incomer is Copyright ©1987 Margaret Elphinstone, all rights reserved. Fair use is assumed for quotations drawn from all other referenced texts, for the purposes of critical study. Every reasonable attempt was made to contact the rights-holders of the texts which are discussed in this book.

Notional Identities: Ideology, Genre and National Identity in Popular Scottish Fiction Since the Seventies

By

Thomas Christie

Notional Identities: Ideology, Genre and National Identity in Popular Scottish Fiction Since the Seventies, by Thomas Christie This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Thomas Christie All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5056-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5056-8

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of my parents Gilbert Christie (1945-81) and Alexandra Christie (1947-2010)

“Literature is the question minus the answer.” Roland Barthes (1915-80)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................... ix General Introduction .................................................................................... 1 PART I: Scottish Speculative Fiction Chapter One ............................................................................................... 13 Scottish Speculative Fiction: An Introduction Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25 Iain M. Banks’s The State of the Art (1989) and Ken MacLeod’s The Stone Canal (1996) Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 71 Margaret Elphinstone’s The Incomer (1987) and Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000) PART II: Scottish Crime Fiction Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 115 Scottish Crime Fiction: An Introduction Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 125 Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses (1987) and Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning (1996) Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 163 Denise Mina’s Garnethill (1998) and Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room (2002) Conclusion ............................................................................................... 197 Notes........................................................................................................ 205 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 227 Index ........................................................................................................ 263

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who offered their support and encouragement during the research and compilation of this book. I am immensely grateful to my wonderful family, Julie Christie and Mary Melville, for all of their thoughtfulness and encouragement all the way throughout the entire writing process. I would also like to thank Stirling University’s Professor Roderick Watson, Dr Scott Hames and Dr Suzanne Gilbert, as well as Professor Alan Riach of the University of Glasgow, for their invaluable advice and guidance. I must also take this opportunity to sincerely thank Dr Elspeth King, Michael Donnelly, Douglas J. Allen and the late Mrs Janey Buchan (19262012) for their fellowship and counsel. A special note of gratitude is also due to Alasdair Gray and the late Iain M. Banks (1954-2013) for so kindly having taken time out of their busy schedules to speak with me about my research. It would be an impossible task to thank everybody who has offered me their goodwill and encouragement during the completion of this book, but sincere appreciation is most certainly due to my good friends Ivy Lannon, Eddy and Dorothy Bryan, Ian McNeish, Denham and Stella Hardwick, Dr Colin M. Barron, Michael McGinnes, Bill and Sue Wood, Lesley Duncan, Alex and Kelley Tucker, and Rachael J. McClure. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to each and every one of you.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

In October of 2011, a heated debate found its flashpoint in the pages of the Scottish Review online journal, centring on the subject of the relationship between modern Scottish literature and the issue of Scottish national identity. The dispute began when novelist Sophie Cooke voiced the opinion that “contemporary literary critics [...] are keen to de-nationalise Scottish writing and to present it as ‘writing’, not “Scottish writing’”,1 reflecting that: I wonder if the issue here isn’t the way that nationalism and intellectualism have always sat so uncomfortably together. Nationalism, after all, often plays on emotion as much as reason. But this is precisely why national identity has always had such an interesting effect on art: because art, too, inhabits our hearts as much as our heads. In its building of an imagined community, nationalism, like writing, is an active cultural project that mixes fact and feeling. Its emotional appeal should not make us want to flush our national identity from our books. After all, I can’t imagine any novelist wanting to write a book that leaves their readers emotionally cold.2

Cooke’s forcefully-argued article was met by a robust response little more than a week later in the form of a similarly comprehensive piece of writing from Scotland on Sunday critic Stuart Kelly, who dismissed Cooke’s claims that he was “engaged in a programme of denationalising literature”3 and instead maintained that his position was in fact rather more nuanced: I have deep problems with some of the naive constructions of nationhood, and equally gauche equations drawn between these ideas of nationhood and the literature of that nation. In short, I have a profound suspicion of essentialism; and essentialism always trips into exceptionalism. We’re not just essentially different, we’re exceptionally better.4

Kelly’s article argued for an increasingly inclusive approach to writing in Scotland, encouraging awareness of national identity more in terms of the country’s status in interaction with the wider world rather than through a strategy of exclusive self-examination. However, his rebuttal of Cooke’s

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General Introduction

critical observations provoked considerable controversy, with many literary and academic figures joining the debate in the Scottish Review over the weeks that followed. These included poets Catherine Czerkawska and Tessa Ransford; journalist Paul F. Cockburn; literary scholar Scott Hames, and novelists James Robertson and Quintin Jardine, amongst several others. Many of these contributors believed that neither of the original positions were necessarily as irreconcilable or as mutually exclusive as had initially appeared to be the case, but nonetheless subsequent opinions on the matter rapidly polarised. The often impassioned arguments which ensued may not have culminated in any one definitive conclusion, and indeed the interchange provided many more provocative questions than it was ultimately to answer, but it did emphasise beyond question that the issue of national identity in Scottish literature remains crucially important, highly relevant to studies of the discipline, and one which continues to stimulate intense deliberation amongst commentators. The salience of popular genres of fiction, particularly in contrast to the literary mainstream, has also long been a contentious issue both in Scotland and beyond. Even in this postmodern age of overlapping generic characteristics, there remains a stubborn residuum of disdain towards genres such as science fiction and crime fiction, with these popular modes of literature often derided for exhibiting well-worn tropes, formulaic plot structures and qualities of exaggerated non-realism. In spite of the fact that hostile perspectives continue to prevail with regard to the study of popular genres, with numerous critics still considering work in these areas to be somehow naturally inferior to literary fiction in qualitative terms, recent years have seen a considerable shift in critical attitudes with regard to genre writing. Joe Fassler, for instance, is one of a growing number of commentators who have observed that generic distinction is in no way as precisely ordered as had once been the case: High-profile literary writers have fled the place we call “real life”—and their numbers are growing. Literature shelves now commonly feature Halloween party staples: Zombies, werewolves and vampires; hardboiled gangsters and private sleuths; space aliens with high-tech gadgets. Today’s serious writers are hybrid creatures—yoking the fantasist scenarios and whiz-bang readability of popular novels with the stylistic and tonal complexity we expect to find in literature.5

The flexibility which has been offered by the increasing cross-pollination of genre characteristics has proven beneficial in ways other than simply presenting a creative liberation from long-held formal expectations. Genre

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fiction continues to perform very strongly in commercial terms, a popularity amongst readers which has only continued to increase in recent years. Yet the relevance of such popular genres has also grown within critical scholarship. Gavin Miller, for instance, has noted that: The increasing vigour of Scottish literature since the 1980s has led not only to a revival in literary fiction, but also to a growing diversification into other narrative genres. The detective story—in the form of so-called “tartan noir”—has been the most obvious popular genre to undergo revival, but science fiction has also blossomed in the work of authors such as Alasdair Gray, Iain (M.) Banks and Ken MacLeod.6

Further complicating the issue, of course, has been the tendency for the rebranding and recategorisation of genres in recent years; science fiction, for instance, has proven to be so multifarious in the spawning of its subgenres that many critics have come to reclassify this category of writing as “speculative fiction”. This more inclusive generic term has since been used to encapsulate not only writing which bears correspondence to traditional science fiction genre tropes, but also to encompass other forms of writing which exhibit more recognisable formal qualities of conventional literary realism while simultaneously featuring non-realistic subject matter, in a manner similar to the way that many texts which may have previously been considered traditional fantasy fiction have now been rechristened “magical realism”. This increasingly wideranging method of classification has, in many ways, proven to be a useful distinction; as David Seed justly observes, “to call science fiction (SF) a genre causes problems because it does not recognize the hybrid nature of many SF works. It is more helpful to think of it as a mode or field where different genres and subgenres intersect”.7 Perhaps even more germane to studies of speculative fiction, particularly in recent years, is the growing sophistication of the formal qualities and exploratory power of this category of writing. As early as the 1980s, critics such as Patrick Parrinder were arguing that “the genre is essentially oriented towards social criticism”,8 adding that “critics who see science fiction as an essentially didactic genre [...] may be closer to the truth than those who see it as irresponsible popular entertainment”.9 As Parrinder’s insightful comments suggest, the allegorical and socially diagnostic qualities of speculative fiction offer writers an enticing opportunity to analyse and comment upon cultural and political phenomena, often using futuristic or outlandish environments to mirror and subvert the nature of modern social conditions in order to make an ideological point (albeit often obliquely). Scottish speculative fiction has

4

General Introduction

proven to be no exception to this rule, and indeed a similar effect has been produced in the crime writing of Scottish authors since the mid-1970s, where hyperrealism is employed to produce stark, often brutal depictions of modern life to facilitate the examination of issues such as social deprivation and the relative ineffectiveness of the modern political process. Robert Crawford is one of many academics who has no hesitation in asserting that “certainly we live in a great age of Scottish crime fiction”,10 and indeed the plentiful output in this increasingly wellpopulated field shows no sign of abating in the near future. Yet in spite of the creative potential which is presented by these popular genres of Scottish literature, such modes of writing often remain under-examined and neglected in comparison with mainstream literary texts, even in recent years. This has proven to be the case with the most prominent and bestselling of popular genre writing, including the late Iain M. Banks’s longrunning and internationally successful Culture cycle of speculative fiction novels. Commentator Steve Arnott has opined that: Many on the left in Scotland seem mainly or wholly ignorant of these titanic, richly layered literary and philosophical works, even though they are authored by one of Scotland’s leading popular writers. Thus they are unable to participate in a meaningful discourse about the important—and genuinely revolutionary—ideas and concepts that they contain.11

Conversely, the ongoing consumption of Scottish popular fiction amongst the reading public over the past few decades and, increasingly, critical acknowledgment within the mainstream press has led to hostility from some literary figures who have come to consider its escalating recognition to be undeserved. As author James Kelman so memorably observed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2009: It’s always been an indication of that Anglocentric nature of what’s at the heart of the Scottish literary establishment, that they will not see the tremendous art of a writer like Tom Leonard for example, and how they will praise the mediocre—how so much praise and position is given to writers of genre fiction in Scotland. If the Nobel Prize came from Scotland they would give it to a writer of [...] detective fiction, or else some kind of child writer, or something that was not even new when Enid Blyton was writing the Faraway Tree, because she was writing about some upper middle-class young magician.12

It is certainly illuminating to view Kelman’s disparaging observations about the critical interests of the literary establishment through the lens of public awareness when expressed in the stark light of comparative sales

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figures. His Man Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late (1994) was to sell a total of 11,986 units between the years 1998 and 2011,13 whereas approximately 17,000,000 copies of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus detective novels (though admittedly considered collectively) had been purchased between the cycle’s inception in 1987 and the end of 2005.14 However, Kelman’s concerns do mirror the fact that Scottish literary writing in this period has entered a significant and exciting phase, and that the New Renaissance from the 1980s onward has itself exhibited a far from uncontested relationship with literary nationalism which continues to be hotly debated. Dietmar Boehnke, for instance, has remarked that: In the twentieth century, especially with the “new Renaissance” in Scottish literature and culture since c. the 1970s/80s, the establishment of a separate Scottish literary canon was increasingly seen as necessary and desirable. Today, this canon is still in the process of being consolidated, but it is itself certainly not immune to refractions by contemporary writers.15

As Boehnke suggests, the far-reaching impact of Scottish literary writing in this vibrantly creative period is still being actively interrogated by critics, as is the fact that many novels produced in this period of literary revival have integrated traditional nationalistic concerns within a more broadly internationalist framework of observation in new and increasingly innovative ways. The extent to which this has also been true of Scottish popular fiction writing during the same period, however, is very much dependent upon individual genres and their tendency to articulate issues of nationhood and ideology through the fixed and recognised conventions of these respective categories of writing. That said, I would nonetheless argue that any lingering critical contempt towards popular genre writing in sweepingly generalistic terms can no longer be regarded as a satisfactory analytical stance; given the increasing opacity of genre boundaries over the past few decades, to assume that all texts aligned with a particular popular genre must necessarily conform to specific formal qualities or engage only superficially with social, cultural and ideological issues is to enforce an artificial distinction upon this mode of writing which is as inaccurate as it is obstructive. As Alan Riach observes in his text Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation (2005), modern literary commentators must be mindful of “popular culture—what music, painting, television, what radio, cinema, comic books, can do”16:

6

General Introduction They remind us of the spectrum of that currency, its promise and its debasement and the longing within it. And they ask us to take seriously the ways the means of production and distribution of sounds and attitudes, confidence and embarrassment, the manufacture of cool and hard, fashion and irony, the generation of comfort and wit, engagement and apathy affect us all. To draw towards a conclusion, we need to keep the value and danger of this potential in all art keenly in mind. Elitist disdain of ephemeral, populist, mass-produced work, or philistine disregard of high art and difficult work are equally inappropriate here. The point is, they are connected.17

A discussion of popular Scottish literature necessitates the consideration of a given text within the context of its particular genre as well as in relation to other writing in the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction at the time of its production, and this book aims to consider and contrast the work of Scottish authors writing in two different genres of popular writing—namely speculative fiction and crime fiction—within the period between the 1970s and the beginning of the new millennium. In so doing, I would posit that different conclusions can be drawn through a comparison between literary fiction and these two disparate popular genres, with keener and more convincing connections establishing themselves when comparing crime fiction to the mainstream of modern Scottish writing than has been the case with Scottish speculative fiction of the same period. The starting point of this study can be explained by the fact that the mid-1970s were witness to the publication of breakthrough texts which would come to have influence and relevance to later Scottish writing in both fields: Chris Boyce’s Catchworld (1975) and William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw (1977). By discussing eight texts in total—four chosen from the field of speculative fiction, and four crime fiction novels—the development of these popular genres will be examined with regard to Scottish writing during this indicated period. In addition to selecting texts which encompass different chronological points within the period under consideration, each novel or novella has been carefully chosen to aid discussion of the many subgenres which have been employed within these popular categories of writing over the course of the years in question. From the environmental anxieties of Matthew Fitt to the politically-charged technocracies suggested by Ken MacLeod, and from the stark detective fiction of Ian Rankin to the social critiques and darkly psychological commentary of Denise Mina, the individual concerns of each work are considered with regard to the traditions and conditions of their production, their relevance to other work in the field, and the extent of their engagement with issues of ideology and nationhood.

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Analysis of Scottish popular genres does, of course, present further challenges. With regard to Scottish speculative fiction, for instance, Caroline McCracken-Flesher has perceptively noted that “superficially, this nationally marked literature is subsumed by the terms both of the universal and the global. Considered part of anglophone science fiction because British, Scottish science fiction is thus ‘universal’, but as ‘not English’, it perversely cannot rise to the level of ‘global’”.18 Thus although the literary profiles of authors such as Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod have come to reach considerable prominence in the field of speculative fiction, the genre itself has proven to be so internationalist in its appeal (especially since public access to the Internet has become increasingly widespread, broadening reading communities in ways which transcend national boundaries) that their work is often categorised as British rather than Scottish in origin, if indeed any recognition of its geographical origin is made at all. By contrast, much modern Scottish crime writing has become considerably more recognisable in terms of its country of origin due to the adoption of the collective term Tartan Noir, a categorical description which “combines traditional Scottish identity, history, and culture with the brooding atmosphere of film noir”.19 Although not all Scottish crime writing is situated within the confines of the dominant Tartan Noir movement, its highly contemporary nature and emphasis on social realism have ultimately anchored this subgenre more recognisably within the confines of a modern and relevant Scottish milieu, emphasising its cultural significance in more explicitly national terms than has often been the case with many other popular texts in the field, including (for instance) the varied detective novels of Alexander McCall Smith or the rural police novellas of M.C. Beaton. As the title of this book suggests, the concept of national identity is by no means concrete or unambiguous in either its nature or its composition, and this fact has been acknowledged both directly and indirectly by Scottish popular genre authors just as it has been by writers of literary fiction. Although the depth of engagement with issues of national identity has differed widely between the genres of speculative fiction and crime fiction, and indeed varies considerably from author to author, there is a real sense in some of the works under discussion that a perception of national identity is almost as febrile and deliberately constructed as the very fiction which is being used to explore it. McCracken-Flesher has speculated that “perhaps Scottish literature is, inevitably, science fiction, and as such, a model for other places, and future spaces”,20 and indeed it can be argued that literary “Scottishness” has itself developed into a genre which is marked by recognisable conventions: a category of writing with

8

General Introduction

identifiable tropes which has, in critical terms, become as recognisable as particular popular genres of literature even in spite of its long-held association with urban realism. Riach too has noted that “I do not intend to suggest that various forms of Scottish cultural production conceal an essential, irreducible national identity, but rather that they present themselves as ways and forms in which relations are expressed and revealed, and that these change in history and through the creative use of different technologies”.21 This observation is particularly marked in the case of Scottish speculative fiction, where unfamiliar ecosystems or exaggeratedly dystopian social phenomena are used as carefully composed backdrops upon which to present a timely ideological commentary, often exploring the national condition without explicit reference to Scotland itself. This exploratory quality of the genre has been highlighted by McCracken-Flesher, who has emphasised the wide-ranging potential of its applications: In Scotland, a culture under pressure to sustain itself in the present against the past has produced a literature of the future. From the interplay of Scotland’s political anxieties with her cultural heritage and the work of scientists, Scottish science fiction imagines a differential tomorrow expressed through the overdeterminations of place, the uncertainties of time, the slippages of language, and the multiplicity of self. This literature at times runs ahead of the curve for science fiction, and today shows the potential to remap the genre.22

Yet speculative fiction alone cannot claim the monopoly upon such potential for challenging assumptions with regard to the scrutiny of—and suppositions surrounding—national identity. Scottish authors of crime fiction have likewise taken up the task of interrogating fundamental aspects of the country’s distinctive cultural characteristics—state and nationhood, education and ideology, religion and philosophical worldview —and incorporating this engagement intrinsically into their work. Although crime fiction narratives are inevitably situated in more recognisable environments than that presented by a majority of their speculative fiction counterparts, the wide-ranging approach towards social and cultural commentary which has been employed by novelists in this field has often proven to be equally as far-reaching and innovative, though in markedly different ways. Crawford observes that “for Scots, as for so many others, crime fiction offers the suggestion that clever use of information can solve problems and provide an assurance of at least partial closure—an appealing promise in an age overwhelmed by proliferating technologies of not always reliable information,”23 and indeed many

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authors of such texts use just such a system of factual dissemination not simply for narrative purposes, but also to interrogate and contest longstanding notions of what may be termed the Scottish condition. This has been the case both prior to and following the establishment of the country’s devolved parliamentary system, where authors have readily questioned the social, cultural and political trajectory of the nation in relation to its heritage and its identity, even as they acknowledge that any new-found convictions are increasingly difficult to construct with any degree of certainty within a rapidly-shifting postmodern age of sociocultural intersection and deconstructed realities. Ultimately, this book aims to explore as fully as possible what kind of relationships exist—and the extent to which they exist—between the concerns and strategies of Scottish popular genres and that of contemporary writing within mainstream literary fiction in Scotland. Although, as discussed above, markedly disparate approaches are utilised by different authors and between different genres, the degree to which issues of ideology and national identity are engaged with by writers of speculative fiction and crime fiction writers during the period between the 1970s and the present day will be carefully considered, and the existence and nature of the relationship between “popular” and “literary” modes of writing will be assessed. It is my hypothesis that the nature of such a posited connection between these literary forms will be inclined to vary between popular genres, with speculative fiction offering a largely implicit appraisal of Scottish cultural and national issues in conceptual rather than directly observational terms, whereas crime fiction—with its emphasis on social commentary and metropolitan realism—has an inclination to present a far less oblique observation of contemporary socio-political issues. In examining the validity and qualities of such a connection, the areas of accord and dispute surrounding individual authors’ analyses of Scottish national identity must also be examined, and the often intricate correlation between political, cultural and social concerns considered in relation to other works in the field, in addition to the writing of their literary counterparts in the field of mainstream fiction.

PART I: SCOTTISH SPECULATIVE FICTION

CHAPTER ONE SCOTTISH SPECULATIVE FICTION: AN INTRODUCTION

Scottish writing in the science fiction genre over the course of recent decades has proven to be vibrant and innovative. Numerous commentators have noted that the 1980s onwards have given rise to what Alan MacGillivray terms “a general reaction within the SF genre against the increasingly tired-looking patterns of science fiction as published in the magazines and for the popular market”,1 and indeed the output of Scottish authors in the field during this period has been creatively energetic, thematically challenging and often politically charged. Brian W. Aldiss, writing in 1986, makes two observations about science fiction; firstly, that “the time has never existed when ‘science fiction’ was a homogenous commodity”,2 and secondly, that as “such a thing as pure genre does not exist. [...] There is no such entity as science fiction”.3 Science fiction has always been difficult to categorise, and some literary theorists have chosen to reclassify the genre with the looser but more inclusive term “speculative fiction”, a comprehensive categorisation which allows elements of other traditions, such as metaphysical fantasy fiction and national mythology, to coincide with the recognised conventions of science fiction. Use of this more recent critical terminology has gained currency in Scotland, the United Kingdom and beyond; as Peter Brigg argues: There has been no absence of confusion over the definition of science fiction as a genre proper, and [...] in the 1960s Judith Merrill [sic] popularized “speculative fiction,” a term originally coined by Robert Heinlein. It was intended to be a recognition of the increasing use of the “soft” sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology in science fiction. [...] As a redefinition of science fiction, the term has gained credence in scholarly circles and embraces the wider range of activity that it was designed for. But it has clearly not accounted for a great deal of the work by mainstream writers, work that ventures into the uses of science fiction tropes, conventions, or methodology. It is, finally,

14

Chapter One an expansive term for a genre (science fiction) that was in transition at a[n] historical moment.4

Brigg’s mention of mainstream authors who are not immediately identified with the genre raises another point of interest, specifically that of the shifting status of science fiction in the eyes of literary critics in recent years. If the genre was once considered to have little serious merit, if any at all, in the eyes of academic commentators, it has now earned a state of critical legitimacy, and this change has been evident from at least the mid-1980s onwards. Writing in 1986, for instance, Thomas Kent notes that: Literary critics, until recently, regarded science fiction as an inferior genre because it was not “serious”. Therefore, to be considered a “serious” writer, the author avoided writing in the science fiction genre. The unformulated convention, “science fiction is an inferior genre,” which is not a formal rule, like “a sonnet must have fourteen lines” is a formal rule, nevertheless assumed an imperative function. When science fiction became institutionalised and established as an acceptable literary genre, the unformulated convention lost its imperative function, although it still lingers as a kind of custom in some areas of academe. Serious writers now write science fiction, and writers who were once considered inferior are now serious because the genre is serious.5

It is, of course, important to note that the disparaging criticism of science fiction to which Kent alludes does remain in evidence to this day, at least in some quarters. Novelist and historian Allan Massie, for instance, writes as recently as 2003 that “the characteristic weakness of [the science fiction] genre [is] indifference to the complicated individual human being, indeed ignorance of him and her”.6 Even the most superficial survey of the work of modern speculative fiction authors writing in Scotland proves that Massie’s sweeping generalisation is a false one, though it is indicative of a broader and persistent critical scepticism. If Massie’s view of this category of writing appears pejorative, The New York Times columnist Sven Birkerts—writing in the same year—likewise provides an attack on science fiction representative of the most notorious preconceptions which continue to cling to the genre: Science fiction will never be Literature with a capital “L,” and this is because it inevitably proceeds from premise rather than character. It sacrifices moral and psychological nuance in favor of more conceptual matters, and elevates scenario over sensibility. Some will ask, of course, whether there is still such a thing as “Literature with a capital ‘L’.” I

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15

proceed on the faith that there is. Are there any exceptions to my categorical pronouncement? Probably, but I don’t think enough of them to overturn it.7

It would, of course, be disingenuous at best to suggest that all modern speculative fiction has the ability to counter the observation of critics such as Massie and Birkerts; as in all genres, quality of published writing varies widely, and the subordination of character and conventional concepts of realism to other factors such as concept and incident can indeed be witnessed in many texts. The important point, however, is that this oversimplification no longer holds true critical legitimacy, as many works of speculative fiction now incorporate highly detailed approaches to characterisation and social realism in ways which flatly contradict the above hostile views. Indeed, the matter has become further complicated by the engagement of major literary authors such as Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy and P.D. James with novels prominently incorporating futuristic, technological and/or extrapolative social concepts which, until recent years, would almost inevitably have aligned these texts under the generic umbrella of science fiction rather than that of mainstream literature. To some extent, the intense denigration voiced by some commentators towards speculative fiction may stem from the genre’s overtly commercial roots; the term itself owes its origin to Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), founder of pulp magazine Amazing Stories, which was launched in April 1926 and which “announced the existence of sf as a distinct literary species”.8 As John Rieder reflects: “Science fiction” was invented in the pages of the redoubtable Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories—Gernsback’s own preferred term was initially “scientifiction,” but it was displaced by “science fiction” at least partly because of the preference expressed by readers of Amazing. The process involved the retrospective identification of a tradition. [...] This was not a scholarly or conceptual exercise, however. Whatever else one can say about the term, “science fiction” functioned for Gernsback primarily as a commercial category—a promise to the purchasers of his magazine that they would find a certain kind of story inside its covers.9

In some ways, the “retrospective identification of a tradition” which Rieder identifies above is a process which continues to unfold even today, as the genre continues to develop and to assimilate new conventions from other modes of writing in much the same way as literary fiction has begun to borrow heavily from tropes which were once the preserve of science fiction alone. Irrespective of its genesis, however, derogatory critical analyses of speculative fiction have notably declined over the course of

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Chapter One

recent decades (with a few exceptions such as those mentioned above), largely due to the genre’s increasing prominence in—and significance to—Western popular culture. The cultural proliferation of science fiction by the early 1980s led commentators such as Eric Rabkin to note that the growing public appreciation of the genre was encouraging critical analysis to adapt in order to address the magnitude and consequence of its evolution during this period, in turn causing a considerable blurring of generic distinctions: Science fiction is now gathered in one place in the bookstore, but may also be scattered through the sections for general fiction, children’s literature, poetry, reference, and even religion and self-help. It turns up on calendars and T-shirts and instructions for programming your home computer to run “Space Invaders”. Perhaps no single definition could do justice to this extraordinary wealth of production. Speaking primarily of its literary branches, different critics have attempted nonetheless to trace some order in this universe. [...] While no single definition seems to have been fully satisfactory for all discussions, all definitions rely on the recognition that the worlds of science fiction are, often aggressively, not our world and yet, often quite subtly, the worlds of our inner doubts and wishes.10

Rabkin’s suggestion that science fiction environments are simultaneously unfamiliar and recognisable, projecting the alien or futuristic onto a blank literary canvas in order to convey allegorical situations or delineate ideological points through means other than conventional realism, presents obvious benefits to a writer exploring the nature of national identity, itself a posited construct. This aspect of the genre holds obvious potential for the Scottish writer of speculative fiction, not least at this particular historical moment. As Caroline McCracken-Flesher has noted, a current thematic concern with intrinsic issues of identity, whether individual or collective, that has been raised generally within the field of speculative fiction writing has been fortuitously presaged by the political and cultural reality of modern Scotland: The growing anxiety about living imaginatively beyond our human relevance and perhaps even our recognizable existence, a problem for today’s science fiction, only goes where Scots, by historical necessity, have boldly gone before. Post-Union Scots, as now “British” and no longer unproblematically “Scottish,” have had three hundred years’ practice at being on both sides of time, yet left behind by what is supposed to be progress. They manage to be both -colonial and post-. [...] Today, post- and -colonial narratives contend across a term, “devolution”, that points simultaneously to freedom and a separate progress, and to a

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backward evolution. Caught in a vexed present and with no idealizable future, Scots find themselves articulating a compromised space subject to an uncertain temporality.11

McCracken-Flesher’s observations are indeed reflected in the work of several Scottish authors of speculative fiction, even though their engagement with issues of nationhood is often subtle and indirect. Yet in addition to any such explorations of identity being engaged with in this field of writing, the characteristics of the genre itself are regularly being contested, its boundaries constantly being interrogated and re-examined as they continue to evade firm demarcation. The implication of critics such as Rabkin that genre definitions of science fiction are often contentious and given to constantly shifting interpretations, which echoes Aldiss’s concerns, can perhaps be attributed in part to the genre’s relative youth. Ryan Britt, for example, argues that changing generational viewpoints have meant that speculative fiction is now regarded in a new light, but one which has again shifted and reconfigured common expectations of the genre’s characteristics: Many of us are hardwired in our literary experiences from an early age to regard dark cautionary tales as the highest form of creative expression. And it doesn’t get much darker than [Aldous Huxley’s] Brave New World, [Ray Bradbury’s] Fahrenheit 451, and [George Orwell’s] 1984. While there are of course real profound thematic breakthroughs happening in all of these novels, there are certainly equally interesting thematic breakthroughs in other science fiction novels that aren’t as depressing.12

As Britt suggests, although dystopian social extrapolation has come to supplant alien invasion fables in typifying speculative fiction for many who are unfamiliar with its many varied subgenres, the field has opened up to greater mainstream scrutiny in recent years, and in ways that would have been considered unthinkable in decades past. Much critical effort in the past has been expounded upon demarcating the margins of science fiction, emphasising its distinction from other forms of imaginative writing in prose fiction, and this has continued into the modern day where the boundaries of the genre have become even more amorphous than at the time of the term’s genesis. Patrick Parrinder, for instance, observes the prominent mode of differentiation which once prevailed between “pulp” and “mainstream” science fiction: The term itself did not come into widespread use until the 1930s, so that the ostensible critical history of science fiction is a very recent one. For a long time reactions to the genre were conditioned by its existence as a

18

Chapter One brash, commercial mode of writing with its main outlet in pulp magazines. There was an absolute separation between the handful of “mainstream” literary works which, if one cared to think about it, were science-fictional in essence (The Time Machine, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, etc.), and the stories and novellas which appeared in the pulps.13

Some residuum of this long-held division does remain in the cultural appraisal of speculative fiction, though in recent years—with the likes of Amazing Stories having been replaced by magazines such as Interzone and other such sophisticated outlets—it has become a great deal more subtle. Iain Banks, for instance, chose to separate his work into two distinct categories: science fiction situated in futuristic and/or extraterrestrial locales (writing as Iain M. Banks) and literary fiction set in contemporary timeframes, often exhibiting situations which occasionally employ elements of striking non-realism—most notably in novels such as Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986) and Transition (2009). A number of texts published by Banks in the latter category, though never commercially marketed as science fiction, nonetheless demonstrate elements of Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic, as proposed in his critical work The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975): The fantastic requires the fulfilment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work – in the case of naïve reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic” interpretations.14

Todorov’s definition is a useful one, for his designation of the fantastic (which, he explains, is a term that is clearly distinct from “the marvellous” and “the uncanny”) fits into a wider appraisal of speculative fiction which is subtly different from conventional definitions of technocentric science fiction, even although the former term is now generally considered to encapsulate the latter. For instance, while science fiction exhibits many readily-identifiable subgenres (including time travel, post-apocalyptic, environmental, cyberpunk, space opera and social science fiction, to name only a few), the term “speculative fiction” has become an even more wideranging descriptor, enveloping all of these subsidiary strata of science

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fiction whilst also encompassing various aspects of other related (and yet distinct) genres which include fantasy, horror and mystery fiction. In many ways congruent with this ambiguous demarcation of any one singular definition of the genre, much speculative fiction of the past thirty years has embraced postmodern writing techniques in ways which have further blurred the categorical margins. Most especially since the emergence of “cyberpunk” in the early 1980s, new writing in the genre has borne witness to a concerted break from traditional prose styles deriving from the earlier “Golden Age” of science fiction.15 Roger Luckhurst postulates that the genre’s close association with postmodernism from this point onward has had a profound effect upon its recent development: On the level of culture, [the] transformation [of science fiction throughout the 1980s] has been allied to the emergence of postmodernism. This concept is difficult to define because it was used so variously in the literary and cultural discussions of the 1980s. Postmodernism was sometimes narrowly defined as an aesthetics, a new mode of art, literature and architecture that had emerged after Modernism, a contemporary form that could be traced back to the 1950s.16

These evolutionary changes in the approach of modern speculative fiction authors to their work have continued to compound critical disputes over the characteristics of the genre. As Parrinder notes, the issue has subsequently become controversial enough amongst individual authors that its very prominence has led to the potential for it to influence the actual writing process, and in a manner which is itself distinctively postmodern in its application: The extreme narrative sophistication of some contemporary science fiction, fantasy, and postmodernist realism does, admittedly, pose problems. [...] While it may be true that such fiction eludes generic classification, the confusion is often deliberately contrived, and a generic approach can provide the best means of giving a critical description of the work in question. In the field of science fiction today, the relationship between theory and practice is sufficiently close for there to be a very real possibility of the novelist bringing his cognitive scepticism to bear on the definitions put forward by academic critics.17

Such narrative complexity has become increasingly evident in speculative fiction written by Scottish authors, particularly since the late 1970s onwards. Although the publication of Iain M. Banks’s earliest science fiction novels in the 1980s (following his mainstream literary success several years earlier) came to profoundly reinvigorate the profile

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of Scottish speculative fiction, the field was not entirely moribund at the time of his emergence. The most immediately recognisable Scottish speculative fiction novel prior to this point arguably remained David Lindsay’s landmark A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)18, a work of remarkable philosophical complexity which drew upon fantasy traditions as well as recognisable science fiction tropes. Among other noteworthy Scottish contributions to the genre were Neil Gunn’s novels Young Art and Old Hector (1942) and The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1943), which engaged with dystopian environments in a manner which neatly complemented the work of Orwell and Huxley, and also the lively work of astronomer Archie Roy, who produced six speculative fiction texts between 1968 and 1978 (commencing with Deadlight, 1968), many of which drew liberally upon aspects of the paranormal and employed conventions common to the mainstream thriller. However, as novelist Jack Deighton has suggested, Banks’s landmark breakthrough seemed all the more remarkable given the relatively sparse output of Scotland’s speculative fiction authors at that particular historical moment: Until Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas, 1987, contemporary Science Fiction by a Scottish author was so scarce as to be invisible. It sometimes seemed that none was being published. As far as a Scottish contribution to the field went in this period only Chris Boyce, who was joint winner of a Sunday Times SF competition and released a couple of SF novels on the back of that achievement, Angus McAllister, who produced the misunderstood The Krugg Syndrome and the excellent but not SF The Canongate Strangler plus the much underrated Graham Dunstan Martin offered any profile at all but none of them could be described as prominent. And their works tended to be overlooked by the wider SF world.19

It was the major international achievement of Banks’s Culture texts, however, which led to an increase in interest in Scottish speculative fiction writing, and this has been further enhanced by the later eminence of Banks’s contemporary Ken MacLeod, who has also since become established as a leading figure in the field with considerable stature from the mid-1990s onwards. Both authors wrote with a keen awareness of the critical expectation focused upon accepted genre characteristics, and though often concerned with non-terrestrial locales, advanced technologies and futuristic timeframes in their work, they also prominently made use of Scottish locations and characters in selected texts. There is also a sense that for Banks and MacLeod, issues and notions surrounding the conventions of nationhood may be fully explored through the use of

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extrapolated social constructs rather than being inhibited by such generic apparatus. As MacGillivray notes: Banks and MacLeod write out of a clearly Scottish sensibility, in that both of them are reacting against the settled assumptions of the traditional tendencies in both English and American science fiction in ways that we have come to associate with the mainstream of Scottish realistic fiction. [...] If [they] are the SF icons of the moment, this is a great literary coup for Scottish writing, one on which new writers ought to build for the future.20

Yet in spite of the similarities in their respective strategies of thematic engagement, there are also significant differences in the literary approaches of these two authors. Whereas “Banks largely anticipates many of the more recent objections to the supposed ‘essentialism’ of Scottish identity”,21 as Gavin Miller observes, he “tends to regard nationalism as an instrument towards a socialist future. Socialist ambition is central to Banks’s science fiction, which scarcely contains room for ‘nation’ at all”.22 For MacLeod, on the other hand, the examination of nationhood is perhaps even more ambiguously demarcated. Although characters with a Scottish heritage are crucial to the action of the Fall Revolution quartet, in both the cycle’s contemporary and futuristic timeframes, the ramifications of their actions stretch far beyond one nation, and indeed even one planet. Andrew M. Butler has argued that in MacLeod’s complex Fall Revolution cycle, “a dialectic opens up between the ideologies of socialism (which is for the collective) and the ideologies of libertarianism (which is for the individual)”.23 This in turn invites examination of whether the political themes of Banks’s novels are exclusively socialist in notion (at least, in the traditional sense), given that the motivations of the socio-political systems discussed in many of his works are ideologically complex while remaining shrewdly indeterminate in terms of philosophical purpose. Cristie L. March, for instance, remarks that Banks’s fictional interstellar society of “The Culture”, for which his science fiction became best known, is “structured as a group of ‘anarcho-libertarians’, albeit ‘very well armed’, to counter a trend Banks notices in much SF writing”.24 Banks’s exploration of the outwardly utopian Culture grew considerably deeper over the course of his novels, revealing ever darker manipulative qualities in the society’s astro-political dealings which belie the ostensibly passive nature of its denizens’ post-scarcity existence. Nor is March alone in perceiving that Banks’s approach was, at least in part, a reaction to a preexisting inclination within literary science fiction. As MacGillivray comments:

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Chapter One Banks is rebelling, on his own say-so, against the simplistic rightwing [sic] patriotic assumptions of Cold-War-haunted American science fiction, seen in their full horror in the sentimentalities of Star Trek and Star Wars, and has created a left-leaning socialist high-technology libertarian utopia in the Culture.25

The work of both Banks and MacLeod often typifies a technologicallyinclined approach to speculative fiction, although—as has been noted—the methodology of both authors proved markedly disparate in application. Yet in spite of the fact that advanced technology and technological solutions are amongst the most recognisable mainstays of writing in the genre, Adam Roberts makes the significant point that science fiction “is better defined as ‘technology fiction’ provided we take ‘technology’ not as a synonym for ‘gadgetry’ but in a Heideggerean sense as a mode of ‘enframing’ the world, a manifestation of a fundamentally philosophical outlook”.26 Rather than including extrapolated technologies within their respective narratives simply as a means of aiding in the creation of a futuristic environment, both authors incorporated such constructs as a means of exploring the social and personal ramifications of issues including posthumanism and artificial intelligence. These concepts have considerable implications for the human condition, in Scotland and beyond, and neither MacLeod nor Banks squandered the potential of their analyses, discussing at length the impact that the existence of such advanced technologies may conceivably have upon the individual and society at large. Between them, MacLeod and the late Banks dominated the field of Scottish speculative fiction for the past two decades. Nevertheless, recent years have seen the emergence of a number of other authors who have contributed critically successful texts to the genre. They have included the complex social futurism of Charles Stross, the vibrant space operas of Gary Gibson, and the distinctive technological “cyberpunk”-style thrillers of Richard Morgan. However, in spite of the predominance of male authors the genre has not been entirely devoid of female voices. The work of Margaret Elphinstone, for instance, demonstrates a quite different approach to Scottish speculative fiction than those offered by her male counterparts. Whilst fully in tune with the revitalized dynamism of the genre since the 1980s, her work owes less to the technological futurism of Banks and MacLeod and more to an agrarian tradition which has perceptibly deeper roots in Scottish literature. Elphinstone has written in both the science fiction and fantasy genres, and as Colin Manlove notes, although mostly based in Scotland her fiction—when set in a contemporary timeframe, such as her anthology of magical realism An

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Apple from a Tree (1991)—offers not a traditionalist, backward-looking evocation of national mythology, but rather “a Scotland of tourism, urban sophistication, college degrees, and state exploitation”.27 When considering her early science fiction novels, however, the evocative themes of Elphinstone’s work instead exhibit many influences from much earlier writing in Scottish fiction, ranging from Naomi Mitchison to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, which have bearing on both the distinctive style and subtle yet compelling ideological thrust which are demonstrated throughout her novels. By employing narratives which are as ecologically conscious as they are feminist and socially aware, Elphinstone proves no less adept at shattering the long-held generic shibboleths of speculative fiction than the starkly polemical elements of MacLeod’s work or the striking symbolism and cunningly-employed political undercurrents evident in the novels of Banks. Furthermore, later authors have combined the ecological concerns of Elphinstone with the technocratic sophistication of MacLeod and Banks; Matthew Fitt’s work, influenced by literary and cultural traditions as much as he is by many identifiable genre tropes, presents a playful prognostication of future Scottish society while also proving testament to the adaptability of speculative fiction within the framework of a self-conscious exploration of evolving nationhood and its ramifications for the individual. In the following two chapters – through comparison of Iain M. Banks’s The State of the Art (1989) and Ken MacLeod’s The Stone Canal (1996), and then Margaret Elphinstone’s The Incomer (1987) and Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000) – I will explore some of the prevailing trends which have been established in works of speculative fiction written by Scottish authors in recent years, both in terms of new genre developments and the revitalisation of long-standing narrative themes, and will aim to relate them to concurrent characteristics and aspects of Scottish literature including ongoing critical debates and explorations of national identity. Mindful of Aldiss’s warning about the vagueness of genre boundaries, and Roberts’s assertion that “all of the many definitions [of science fiction] offered by critics have been contradicted or modified by other critics”,28 it is important to recognise that the four authors named above frequently embark upon very different approaches in each case. They all present, in many diverse ways, speculative fiction which subverts traditional critical expectations of the genre. In the process of so doing, the writers under discussion explore complex and sometimes volatile issues of political and national identity which clearly bear upon the particular social and ideological conditions of their production.

CHAPTER TWO IAIN M. BANKS’S THE STATE OF THE ART (1989) AND KEN MACLEOD’S THE STONE CANAL (1996)

After emerging into the public view in 1984 with his controversial novel The Wasp Factory, Iain Menzies Banks (1954-2013) had a profound and lasting impact upon modern Scottish literature. Although he was quick to build upon the success of his debut novel with two further works which, in their distinctively postmodern approach, employed the fantastic to delineate aspects of the seemingly commonplace (the effects of mental instability in Walking on Glass, 1985, or the turbulent psychological experiences occurring within a coma in The Bridge, 1986), his early literary work was to foreshadow a later entry into the field of speculative fiction. As Alan Riach has observed, Banks’s first few novels are often intensely concerned with constructing “bridges from dream-worlds into contemporary reality,” noting that “these novels frequently depend upon or obliquely comment on traditional genre fiction”.1 It was not until 1987 that Banks would engage directly with the science fiction genre through his novel Consider Phlebas, the first text which was to bear his now-famous middle initial. Banks went on to emerge as the most immediately recognisable Scottish science fiction author of recent times, and his profile in the field rapidly rose to join the ranks of the most eminent authors in the United Kingdom. John Clute asserts that “for many readers and critics, [Banks] was the major new UK sf writer of the 1980s”,2 while George Mann described him as having “developed a reputation as one of the most revered authors of space opera in Britain”.3 Mann’s alignment of Banks with the space opera subgenre is entirely correct (though his work in the field encompassed many other facets of speculative fiction), and Banks also became just as well known for the highly characteristic political and satirical edge of his science fiction, which has come to distinguish him among other Scottish authors in the

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field. Although the rather more problematic issue of national identity is one which was more directly addressed in his mainstream literature, where contemporary Scottish locales and characters featured heavily, it is his science fiction work which has acquired the reputation of being more acutely ideological in nature. As Michael Levy has noted, “as popularized by Banks, the new space opera featured high literary standards, significant political commentary, particularly from a left-wing perspective, along with a willingness to accept moral ambiguity rarely found in the work of American authors (except, perhaps, [Dan] Simmons) in this subgenre”.4 Banks’s profile as an author of speculative fiction was, of course, considerably enhanced by the significant commercial and critical success of his literary fiction, most especially including his novel The Crow Road (1992), adapted and serialised for television by the BBC in 1996, and the contentious Complicity (1993), which was produced as a feature film in 2000 by Talisman Productions. His genre plaudits were also numerous, with high-profile honours and nominations being bestowed by a wide variety of respected bodies including the British Science Fiction Association Awards, Hugo Awards, John W. Campbell Memorial Awards and Locus Awards. Although some of Banks’s later mainstream fiction toyed dextrously with the fragile genre boundary which exists between science fiction and mainstream literature (particularly evident in Transition, 2009), he continued until the time of his death to publish his literary fiction with the omission of his middle initial, thus persisting in a knowing differentiation between his two chosen modes of writing. This raises interesting questions with regard to the manner in which he employed recognised genre tropes to emphasise specific political points, and consciously embraced literary writing in order to engage with others. (In still other respects, Banks’s work sometimes exhibited identifiable areas of stylistic overlap between these different types of fiction: the distinctive phonetic Scots dialogue of the Barbarian in The Bridge, for instance, was to presage the innovative linguistics of Bascule’s first-person narrative in the far-future technocracy of Feersum Endjinn, 1994.) It is, however, safe to assume that Banks himself came to consider his work in both fields to be of equal importance, for in a number of interviews he unambiguously asserted that “as the one literature primarily concerned with change and its effects on people and society, SF is—at least potentially—the most important literary form in the world”.5 Although it is difficult to overstate Banks’s prominence in Scottish speculative fiction, by the mid-1990s another author of major significance had entered the field in the form of Ken MacLeod (1954-). With a literary methodology even more profoundly political than Banks’s, MacLeod was

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to establish a vibrant futurescape of thought-provoking ideological observations and constantly changing, unstable utopias in The Star Fraction (1995) which quickly marked him out amongst the critical community as a major emerging talent. Indeed, MacLeod’s originality and ideological persuasiveness have helped to established him as one of the most noteworthy authors of “political” science fiction since the prolific American author Robert Heinlein, though the complex melange of socialism, libertarianism and anarchism offered by MacLeod’s fictional societies is diametrically opposed to the reactionary ideology of novels such as Heinlein’s militaristic Starship Troopers (1959) and the unambiguously right-wing To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987). MacLeod’s distinctive approach to his subject matter was to gain almost as much prominence amongst science fiction readers as Banks’s celebrated technological and libertarian socialist society of the Culture, and his dark social realism and incisive cultural commentary would foreshadow the work of later authors of Scottish speculative fiction of the early twentyfirst century. These include novels as diverse as Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002); Gary Gibson’s Against Gravity (2005); Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005), and Michael Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire cycle (200911), all of which have touched—in different ways—upon the issues of technology, society and culture that MacLeod’s texts had engaged with throughout the 1990s. By comparison to some other authors of Scottish speculative fiction such as Margaret Elphinstone, who employs the genre to emphasise and promote the unchanging values of a mythic past, MacLeod enthusiastically celebrates futurity, regarding constant change, adaptation and development as a positive step towards improving rather than compromising human society. Like MacLeod, Banks’s writing was structurally complex and demonstrated an acutely controlled understanding of characterisation. His science fiction also tended to be, in ideological terms, less overtly didactic in nature than that of his contemporary and long-time friend MacLeod, but no less penetrating in its political application. This may be in part due to Banks’s assertion that he occupied a political position which was much closer to the ideological centre ground than MacLeod’s own personal standpoint. Whereas MacLeod continually makes his Trotskyite inclinations explicit, both in his literary output as well as in interviews, Banks instead styled himself as “a vintage champagne socialist”,6 and “deeply suspicious of libertarianism”.7 However, although this centre-left ideological configuration may tend to suggest that a less incisive edge can be attributed to Banks’s own political motivations, this rarely proved to be the case. His science fiction output in particular was extremely critical of

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the notion of cultural imperialism, corporate influence and the commercial over-commoditisation of modern society (elements of which also appeared in his literary fiction, particularly in novels such as The Business, 1999). Although, as James Brown notes, “there is an element of utopianism in Banks’s sf”,8 Banks differed from MacLeod’s approach to the utopian in the sense that although his protagonists often belong to an advanced (and even ostensibly idyllic) society, he “tends to take figures from one cultural milieu and put them into another, [and] thus explores cultural difference, while also sometimes mediating public, social phenomena through the individual consciousness of the visitor”.9 Writing at a point when Scotland was newly considering its place in the wider world, both in political terms and with regard to its national identity, the concerns of Banks’s speculative fiction correlated—albeit often implicitly—with issues being raised within the New Renaissance, voicing scepticism over traditional assumptions regarding nationhood while also actively questioning what cultural benefits could potentially be discerned from future social and ideological developments in the country and beyond. Banks’s science fiction has become best known for the post-scarcity astro-political community which he created in the 1980s, known as the Culture. Although vaguely anarchistic in configuration and intensely technologically focused in a manner even more extreme than the futuristic societies of MacLeod’s texts, such as the New Mars colony of The Stone Canal (1996) and the Solar Union of The Cassini Division (1998), the non-human—though mostly humanoid—Culture is quite distinct from MacLeod’s work in its depiction of a quasi-technocratic civilisation which is loosely structured upon utopian ideals. As Gavin Miller notes, “Culture citizens [...] exist within life rather than trying to dominate or possess it”.10 Yet as Brown is correct in suggesting, Banks was careful in his novels to portray characters and societies which are distinct from the Culture and, in exploring the social and political disparities between them, illuminate the nature and particular nuances of this vast interstellar community. It is this uncompromising focus upon the exotic and unfamiliar, even when employing the alien as a means of expounding political issues which are by their very nature universal and recognisable, which separates the speculative fiction of Iain M. Banks from the more fantastical of the entries in his canon of imaginative literary fiction—often set within the United Kingdom, or Scotland specifically—which were published under his un-initialled Iain Banks alias. Science fiction produced by Banks which does not touch upon the Culture (even tangentially, as in novels such as Inversions, 1998) was relatively rare, and his genre novels which are focused upon Earth and

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human society were even more atypical. Yet his novella The State of the Art (1989)11 is remarkable in that for the only occasion in his canon of genre fiction, Banks starkly juxtaposed his deeply advanced alien Culture with the customs of contemporary Earth: an inspired comparison which allowed him to satirise the peculiar mores of human society (more specifically, the mainstream of Western society) by viewing them through the lens of a utopia which has long since left behind the extremes of modern human existence as it is understood in today’s world. It is almost certainly the closest that Banks came to interrogating the Scottish condition in his speculative fiction writing, even although—intriguingly enough—the country itself is almost never mentioned in explicit terms throughout the narrative. Given the emphasis placed on the relative insignificance and peripheral nature of the Earth, interaction with one sparsely-populated nation-within-a-nation would have seemed incongruous at best. Instead, the political implications of the alien Culture, considering and ultimately declining to integrate the stubbornly inassimilable human species into their society, raises fascinating and much more oblique issues of cultural colonisation which Banks alludes to throughout the course of the novella. Its narrative taking place between late 1976 and early 1978, The State of the Art concerns a Culture spaceship clandestinely surveying the people and society of the Earth in an attempt to discern whether humanity is suitable for absorption into their own, much more technologically and socially advanced, civilisation. However, this seemingly straightforward mission is complicated when one of the survey team becomes “contaminated” by the human way of life, leading to a difficult quandary which must be addressed by his colleagues. As David Langford notes, “there is Kiplingesque horror in the portrayal of a visitor who goes native, accepting the local affliction of disease [...] and death”,12 and indeed much of Banks’s tale centres upon the dilemma faced by the survey team in whether to “rescue” their shipmate from the human vices that he has progressively (and intentionally) mired himself in, or rather to respect his wishes and abandon him to what they perceive to be an existence of primitivism and degradation. The Conradian parallels here may appear striking, but Banks adroitly avoids a consciously postcolonial approach to his subject matter, instead using this contrast of societies (and species) not to satirically demonise the human condition by laying bare its savagery and comparative triviality in relation to the Culture, but rather to reflect the humans’ spontaneity and cultural vibrancy when indirectly influencing their extraterrestrial visitors. The disparity between the two races is never less than marked:

30

Chapter Two It did occur to me he might not enjoy the feeling of being something close to human-basic, but I thought it was obvious from what he’d said when we were talking it over beforehand that he didn’t expect to enjoy it. He knew it would be unpleasant, but he regarded it as a form of birth, or rebirth. I thought it unlikely he would be so unprepared for the experience, and so shocked by it, that he would want to be returned to his genofixed norm, and even less likely that he would go on from there to abandoning his idea of staying on Earth altogether. (The State of the Art, p. 160)

Banks’s approach to the issue is characteristically nuanced and restrained, with neither society emerging as inherently superior, simply different—and quite possibly permanently incompatible. A subtle acknowledgement of the dangers of cultural exceptionalism is difficult to deny, both in the Culture’s natural assumption of technocratic superiority and the humans’ oblivious lack of awareness regarding observation by their alien overseers. The dichotomy between the distinctiveness of the individual and the identity of the nation is one which Banks had engaged with in his literary writing, perhaps most notably in The Wasp Factory, where the fractured sense of self reflected in the troubled protagonist Frank/Frances Cauldhame—brought into particularly sharp relief at the novel’s climax—is presented in stark comparison to the distinctively Scottish natural environment in which he finds him/herself. Yet reaching publication more than a decade prior to Scottish devolution (and with a narrative set at around the time of an earlier, unsuccessful national referendum for devolved government), the examination of the balance between cultural independence and assimilation presented by Banks in The State of the Art seems eerily prescient—particularly, as Steve Arnott has argued, when we consider that although the Culture has the potential to bring considerable scientific and social benefits to the people of Earth, it cannot by any means guarantee their cultural enlightenment in the process: The Culture is neither Utopia or Dystopia because human nature in Banks’ vision is not a blank slate or human putty to be perfected or damned. Or more correctly “person” nature—whether that person is human basic, human enhanced, machine or alien—arises from its evolutionary and contingent history and the very nature of sentience and social being itself. The lives of persons can be enormously enriched by a better society, but they do not become wholly New.13

Throughout the novella, the Culture is depicted as a highly complex society, populated by humanoid creatures and vastly evolved artificial intelligences, the latter being manifested in the controlling minds

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responsible for space travel and the everyday running of civilisation. This affords the humanoids the freedom to live as they wish without fear of material scarcity, for technology has made resources within the Culture essentially infinite in nature, meaning that conflict over capital and property has now become meaningless (the starting point for many of Banks’s subsequent speculative fiction narratives about the effects of a post-scarcity society upon the individual). Yet the Culture is also defensive of its status of technological dominance, as Cristie L. March takes note: It carefully protects its technology—limiting access to its citizens and preventing other civilizations from access, thereby preserving its technological superiority. At the same time, it uses its superior technological presence to influence other civilisations it considers to have outdated governing systems, despite its professed dedication to autonomy and individualism.14

The divergence between an Earth still caught up in the brinkmanship of the Cold War and the seemingly utopian, progressive Culture creates a familiar strategy in Banks’s science fiction which March observes as his evocation of “a dramatic contrast between the Culture and other societies it encounters [in order] to illustrate the problematic design of imperialist and capitalist structures”.15 The biting satire of Banks’s approach, comparing the untamed brutality of human civilisation against the detachment of a technologically advanced extraterrestrial society, has some resonance with the approach of Douglas Adams’s celebrated science fiction satire The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979); the humans’ comparatively mundane materialist system of work and consumption is cast in stark contrast to the liberation and autonomy of the Culture. Yet the baleful wit of Banks’s novella seems even more serrated than Adams’s parable of unchecked bureaucratic excesses and human eccentricities; the Banksian exploration of the slowly corrupting influence of modern society on beings who are considerably more intellectually refined and culturally developed cuts more deeply and with greater precision than the affable, surrealistic alien visitors of Adams’s novel and its sequels. Furthermore— and even more so than Adams before him—Banks takes great care to avoid any simplistic ideological point-scoring, for although he focuses intently on the self-destructive tendencies of human society he also applies considerable precision, in so doing, in illuminating the less palatable aspects of the alien Culture’s ostensibly utopian existence in turn. Banks uses two characters, the protagonist Diziet Sma and Dervley Linter, the survey team member based on Earth, as a bellwether of the

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Culture members’ differing views upon the Earth and its peoples. Sma (who also appears in Banks’s novel Use of Weapons, 1989) is gravely concerned that atavistic violence is so ingrained in the human psyche that an apocalyptic war is inevitable in the Earth’s near future, and baulks at the notion of Linter’s decision to remain on the planet as a permanent resident. Yet Linter rejects Sma’s warnings, arguing instead that the cultural vibrancy and unpredictability of the human race is more attractive to him than his continued secure but monotonous life as part of the Culture: He drew on his cigarette, studying me through the smoke. He crossed his legs and brushed some imaginary fluff off the trouser cuffs and stared at his shoes. “I’ve told the ship that when it leaves, I’m staying here on Earth. Regardless of what else might happen.” He shrugged. “Whether we contact or not.” He looked at me, challenging. “Any... particular reason?” I tried to sound unfazed. I still thought it must be a woman. “Yes. I like the place.” He made a noise between a snort and a laugh. “I feel alive for a change. I want to stay. I’m going to. I’m going to live here.” “You want to die here?” He smiled, looked away from me, then back. “Yes.” Quite positively. This shut me up for a moment. (The State of the Art, p. 129)

While it may offer comfort, abundance and an unparalleled selection of lifestyle choices to its citizens, its advanced technologies and artificial intelligences supplying unlimited resources in a society where greed has been eradicated and currency has long since been rendered meaningless, Linter eventually comes to detect in the Culture a kind of static uniformity, a malaise whereby the near-infinite material profusion available to its members has caused, if not exactly stagnation, certainly a kind of societal inertia. Sma’s trenchant disagreement with Linter’s stance, and the implications for the survey team’s decision on whether to move beyond covert surveillance in order to make direct contact with the Earth’s governments, forms a noteworthy variant on the format established by Banks’s early Culture texts. Carolyn Brown notes that: The Culture novels of Iain M. Banks play with the oppositions of the “Utopian” and the “heterotopian”. The possibilities of a society without want, of joy and fulfilment are evoked, indeed described with considerable élan, yet the complexities and contradictions of the Culture

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when it encounters other cultures, who do not share its existence, form the action of the text.16

It is interesting in this regard to consider exactly what point Banks is making by examining so closely Linter’s decision to reject the values of the seemingly-paradisiacal Culture in favour of the comparative barbarity of Earth. It is true that an antipathy of certain characters towards the Culture is a mainstay of a number of other novels in the series, though these individuals tend to consider (sometimes derogatorily) the Culture’s social dynamics while existing outside its confines and are thus usually sceptical in their dealings with it. As Banks himself noted, “if you’re writing from the point of view of someone who doesn’t believe the same way you do it makes you think, you start to question your own beliefs, and that’s always a progressive, good thing to do,” adding that “the Culture does do its damnedest to accommodate everyone, even people who hate it. It spends vast amounts of time and resources making sure everyone can live as they want”.17 Although his ideological points could not be clearer, the relevance of Banks’s narrative in regard to Scottish nationhood remains largely oblique. It could be surmised that the nonconformity and unambiguous autonomy of the Culture acts—in this novella, at least—as a kind of ultimate goal to be strived for, a secular paradise where, rather than suppressing competing viewpoints, every opinion is respected, and heterogeneity is encouraged and celebrated. This would, of course, suggest a rather more shrewd allegory of the perceived benefits of Scottish independence than may ostensibly seem to be the case; though the refined Linter is eventually destroyed by the effects of the very human impulsiveness that he has so long admired, the reader is left to speculate on how the Earth could possibly adjust to the abandonment of its long-held prejudices and unique qualities in favour of the Culture’s essentially anonymous diversity. To this end, the radically innovative governmental system that is the Culture—one which is based upon self-determination and individualism, even though its political borders are usually rather hazily demarcated— may be read as Banks’s analogy for the Scottish Diaspora, underpinning the wide-ranging cultural influence of the country in international terms as well as alluding to perceived characteristics of the nation itself. But he also uses the novel’s central dichotomy to raise issues about Scotland’s cultural self-determination, emphasising the complexity of national identity as a phenomenon which even the Culture—for all its much-vaunted ability to accommodate and replicate—is unable to fully harness. In spite of the Culture’s abundance and egalitarian approach to social imperatives, it is not a civilisation without its own issues and

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imperfections, and Banks was assiduous (most especially with later entries in the cycle) in making the point that this seemingly utopian construct is, in actuality, far from paradisiacal. He thus urges that change should not simply be made for change’s sake, and—I would contend—in so doing it may be argued that his multifaceted appraisal of self-determination sounds a subtle note of warning that the encouragement of further Scottish national autonomy must never be allowed to inadvertently squander the immense potential that it brings for progressive and inclusive social change. In this sense, although he uses the Earth-Culture relationship to allegorise Scotland as a single nation of cultural distinction in negotiation with external political and social forces, he also employs it to present a subtle critique of cultural (and Cultural) oppression, where the unique distinguishing qualities of the planet ultimately prove impervious to the incursion of external influences. As John Garrison has argued: While a single pronoun, gender switching, orbital space habitats, and sentient machines may not be in Scotland’s immediate future, Banks’s science fiction could play a productive role in charting Scotland’s social progress. It strikes me that the motto associated with the anti-globalization movement, “Another World is Possible,” invokes a strong connection between social movements and imagined worlds.18

The novella also expresses concerns over national and individual selfdetermination in other ways. Banks turns to an implicit suggestion that the extreme comforts and endless multiplicity of lifestyle options afforded by the Culture, while undeniably appearing utopian, has divested some of its members of individual drive and ambition, leading to the languor that Linter suffers—the Culture, in its unvarying accommodation of every need and wish, can offer everything except spontaneity. In this regard, Banks’s text appears to validate Darko Suvin’s assertion that “all variants of dystopian-cum-eutopian [sic] fiction [...] pivot not only on individual selfdetermination but centrally on collective self-management enabling and guaranteeing personal freedom”,19 and indeed the innovatively (and at least ostensibly) utopian nature of the Culture—governed by machines but run for the benefit of humanoids—is such that conventional notions of science fiction, particularly in terms of the space opera subgenre, are cunningly subverted. Linter knows that absolute freedom can itself prove stifling; the other characters, baffled by his seemingly-inexplicable decision to remain on Earth, are unable to deal with his deep-seated desire for personal autonomy in a world of strife and conflict when he already belongs to a civilisation which they believe is dedicated to independence and free will. As an endorsement of upholding the value of embracing

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self-sufficiency, in terms of national sovereignty as much as individual freedom, Banks tempers the exuberance of Linter’s single-minded determination with the futility of the character’s ultimate fate. The manner in which Banks so freely and openly embraces universal issues such as social responsibility and individual autonomy does, to an extent, obscure the directness of his rare engagement with a human milieu within his speculative fiction writing. Gavin Miller’s observation that “Banks’s science fiction [...] scarcely contains room for ‘nation’ at all”20 is as undeniable as it is perceptive, and yet tantalising hints are peppered throughout the course of The State of the Art which suggest a subtle, almost entirely covert engagement with issues of Scottish national identity. In his famous essay On National Culture (1959), Frantz Fanon asserts the opinion that “the consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension”.21 Fanon’s suggestion of a national consciousness which remains distinct in the face of international influence and cross-pollination is reminiscent of the adaptability of Banks’s Culture, its deceptively pliable structure allowing a multifaceted social identity to flourish irrespective of any encounter (or conflict) with other civilisations. It achieves through assimilation what the Earth can only manage through resistance, albeit unwittingly. Yet as Jonathan Hearn notes, characteristics of national identity are constantly in flux and, as such, are difficult to define in any one concrete way: Identities are multiple and situational. Scottish national identity hangs in a constellation of overlapping and interpenetrating identities—British, Celtic, European, Western, working class, to name just a few—which can be variously combined and emphasised according to the goals and demands of the moment. Not only is identity a “pick-and-mix” business to a degree, but the choices shift over time. Identity is processual, what it means to be Scottish not only varies between individuals, but also historically, as do the larger bundles of identifications with which it becomes associated.22

Hearn’s observations as to the multifaceted nature of identity are certainly mirrored in much of Scotland’s speculative fiction, where the nature of “Scottishness” is refracted through the prisms of class, ideology or timeframe, or even articulated by transcending international considerations in order to explore aspects of nationhood from the viewpoint offered by non-terrestrial environments. This approach offers significant potential to employ wide-ranging allegorical techniques which is often disregarded by

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many authors of literary fiction, and yet it presents unparalleled opportunities to interrogate the complex contradictions and paradoxes of modern nationhood. Just as a Scottish national identity is itself comprised of many competing attributes, so too is the Culture exemplified by its ability to absorb and incorporate the benefits of other societies without compromising its own distinctiveness. Yet for all the emphasis laid upon the social benefits of the Culture, Banks is at pains to call attention to the fact that an ostensibly inclusive and advanced society need not (indeed, could not) be a faultless one. Although the ennui experienced by Linter with regard to his Culture lifestyle was rare in Banks’s work (as noted earlier, hostility towards the Culture tends to be focused through the lens of non-Culture characters), the fact that he embodies the role of a Camusian outsider is not entirely surprising, for many of the protagonists of Banks’s novels similarly functioned as exiles or outcasts. Banks stated in a number of interviews that he considered that “Alasdair Gray’s Lanark is the best Scottish novel this century, it was a landmark”,23 and indeed many of his early mainstream novels are heavily influenced by Gray’s ground-breaking 1981 text and its famous titular protagonist.24 Thom Nairn, for instance, observes that: [Lanark] fus[es] postmodern stylistic pyrotechnics with blunt realism or largely fantastic, science fiction scenarios. It is very much this sort of fusion which is apparent in Walking on Glass and The Bridge, Banks himself remarking: “I don’t think The Bridge would be the way it is at all if it wasn’t for Lanark”.25

In a manner similar to Lanark’s Duncan Thaw, who finds himself unable to truly belong either in the “real” city of Glasgow or the surrealistic society of Unthank, Linter follows a path which is similar to (if not completely congruent with) other Banksian characters in both his mainstream and speculative fiction. Roderick Watson notes that The Crow Road, for instance, “follows a pattern familiar to many [Banks novels] in which a protagonist (often a young man) has his eyes opened to the world around him”.26 Yet there is a deeper, and darker, strategy at play in the cautionary tale of Linter’s descent—or, from his point of view, enlightenment. While other Culture characters in the novella are influenced to a lesser degree by human society—Li, for instance, with his newlydiscovered penchant for mass-market film and television science fiction— Linter alone chooses to fully embrace Earth’s customs for his own ends. From Sma’s point of view, the story plays out like a subtle (if knowing) variation on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), as she watches powerlessly while one of her peers faces an inexorable spiral into

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primitivism and—to her eyes—irrationality. She is dismayed by Linter’s decision to have his body’s integrated bio-mechanical enhancements removed, thus leaving him at the mercy of human illness and disease, so that he can integrate more closely with the planet’s indigenous population. He eventually discards his means of communicating with the Culture ship in orbit and later, much to his colleagues’ bewilderment, embraces monotheism via Christianity. All of these choices, from adopting organised religion to rejecting advanced technologies designed to enhance one’s physical health, are anathema to the Culture, and yet Linter discerns a dimension of moral complexity which he feels that his peers have overlooked: You can’t have the peak without the trough, or light without shade... it’s not that you must have evil to have good, but you must have the possibility for evil. That’s what the church teaches, you know. That’s the choice that Man has; he can choose to be good or evil; God doesn’t force him to be evil any more than He forces him to be good. The choice is left to Man now as it was to Adam. Only in God is there any real chance of understanding and appreciating Free Will. [...] You have to see that. The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotomizing everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad. (The State of the Art, pp.195-96)

Banks depicts Linter’s seduction by organised religion as the absolute nadir of the character’s descent into human archaism. Yet although Banks’s apparent disdain towards religious spirituality seems more or less inevitable—he had well-publicised associations with both the National Secular Society and Humanist Society of Scotland throughout his life, and dealt with spiritual and atheistic issues in several of his other novels, including The Crow Road, The Business and especially Whit (1995)—it must be noted that his treatment of the issue is significantly more subtle and thoughtful (if not necessarily more sympathetic) than has been the case in the work of many other Scottish speculative fiction authors. It must be said, however, that whereas other strident atheistic literary voices emerging from the field, such as Ken MacLeod and particularly Charles Stross, may have publicly given opinions on religious matters which range from extreme scepticism to outright hostility, their texts have often dealt with these issues in measured and even contemplative ways, in blunt contrast to the unambiguously harsh judgement towards religious views meted out by crime fiction novelists such as Christopher Brookmyre and Louise Welsh. However, this trend is far from exclusive to Scottish

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popular genre writing, just as it is by no means a recent development; as Farah Mendlesohn observes: By 1960, secularism, or at least a liberal interpretation of most faiths, provided an apparently hegemonic intellectual tradition in the USA. Consequent upon this, and stemming from the imperialist adventure-story model which much early genre fiction appropriated, the emerging sf world assumed it was the voice of a secularist future and treated religion with at best polite contempt: religion was essentially of the “Other”, the backward and the primitive, and its role in sf was either to be undermined or to indicate the level of civilization which any given alien race had achieved.27

Although Banks appears to portray spirituality in a slyly scornful light, his depiction of the morality of the Abrahamic religions is demonstrated in rather broad-stroke, Manichean terms (and Linter’s account closely echoes the question posed by the prison chaplain in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, 1962: “Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than the man who has the good imposed upon him?”28). Yet his representation of the ideological clash between Earth and the Culture is rather more nuanced—and more keenly balanced. Much of the negative depiction of humanity which Banks provides, at least from the standpoint of the Culture, could in essence be attributed to any pre-existing social system on the planet—Linter’s fatal stabbing at the novella’s conclusion, for instance, takes place in New York City, but the criminality which causes it is random enough to have taken place in almost any major population centre. In this sense, Banks leaves the impression that it is the essential nature of humanity, rather than the political systems that its members follow, which is the factor that makes Earth so unpalatable to the Culture, such that they ultimately decline to make any kind of direct contact with the planet. Even Marxist ideology, the closest approximation that humanity can offer to the egalitarian Culture and its resolutely classless citizens, is not immune from the incisiveness of Sma’s disparaging observations, seeming moribund even before the fall of the Soviet Union: It was ironic that in this so-called Communist capital [partitioned Berlin] they were so interested in money; at least a dozen people came up to me in the East and asked me if I wanted to change some. Would this represent a qualitative or quantitative change? I asked (blank looks, mostly). “Money implies poverty,” I quoted them. (The State of the Art, p.142)

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Liberal democracy fares no better, being aped most prominently in the actions of the eccentric Li and his fascination with science fiction films and television series which had come to permeate the planet’s popular cultural psyche of the time, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). Crucially, while Li admires the outlandish fictions offered by the Earth’s peoples, unlike Linter he has no illusions at all as to the planet’s inferiority to Culture norms, describing it as “a backwater rockball infested with slavering death-zealots on a terminal power-trip” (The State of the Art, p.142). Li becomes influenced in particular by Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek television series (1966-69), and decides arbitrarily that he should establish himself as the captain of the Culture survey ship, quite in spite of the fact that the crew members had hitherto always enjoyed a status of total coequality and the ship’s governing artificial intelligence is many times more capable than any biological being. It is thus possible, even likely, that Li functions as a kind of extreme metaphor for the kind of “simplistic rightwing [sic] patriotic assumptions of Cold-War-haunted American science fiction, seen in their full horror in the sentimentalities of Star Trek and Star Wars”,29 to which Alan MacGillivray suggests that Banks was actively responding with the radical nature of his Culture novels. Li’s ambitions are met with a mixture of puzzlement and gentle ridicule by his shipmates, but his meritocratic aspirations have resonance with the rarefied economic climate which lay in wait for the Earth (and Scotland) of the mid-to-late 1970s as it entered the turbulence of the following decade. Yet Banks’s own creation of the Culture, as Carolyn Brown observes, is a corollary of exactly such socio-economic conditions: “the Culture is essentially a postmodern, nineteen-eighties utopia, which witnessed not only the concluding stages of the post-war global arrangements, and the ‘Cold War’, but also the seemingly unstoppable globalisation of finance capital, consumer booms, and the homogenisation of space”.30 Here, too, Banks introduces an implied note of warning for a Scottish readership who were, at the time, being profoundly (and most likely detrimentally) affected by the Thatcher administration, itself one of the most sweepingly proactive of all post-War governments; whereas the Cold War presented a real and immediate risk to global safety, with Britain in the front line of any possible intercontinental nuclear exchange, the potential offered by the commercialisation and militarisation of space was one which presented unparalleled opportunities but which was actively monopolised by the superpowers, leaving the UK—and, by extension, Scotland—on the periphery of any such new developments. Here, in essence, there is a warning that although the Culture offers

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matchless technological refinement, its real strength lies in its progressive and adaptable societal constituency; thus, Banks suggests, Scotland need not necessarily be circumscribed by the standpoint or ideological influence of others, as the aptitude for real and active change already lies within it. In spite of its ideological weight, The State of the Art does retain much of Banks’s characteristic wit, and his satire of mass-media science fiction is particularly effective in the manner in which it highlights the fact that his own writing in the field, which often tends to be categorised as belonging to the “space opera” subgenre, knowingly challenges the work of earlier exponents of this literary area, particularly authors from the 1920s to the 50s such as E.E. “Doc” Smith and Edmond Hamilton. It is noteworthy that Banks should use this larger-than-life mode of writing to frame his sophisticated political fables; the term “space opera”, originally attributed to author Wilson Tucker in 1941,31 was initially applied—as Brian Stableford notes—to “colourful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict. Although the term still retains a pejorative implication, it is frequently used with nostalgic affection”.32 Modern authors of speculative fiction, Banks among them, have consciously distanced themselves from the largely conservative worldview presented by early entries in the field of space opera, and certainly Banks’s socio-politically aware experimentation with the long-standing customs of the subgenre have led some critics, such as Paul Kincaid, to consider that the ideological configuration of this category of science fiction has now become quite different: [In] the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, we can see that this universe of plenty is overtly cast as a utopia. There are no limits in the universe of the Culture, at least none that constrain the characters. The laws of nature, if and where they are acknowledged [...] are not restrictions on action but tools that can be exploited. [...] In other words, the principle underlying space opera, the universe within which the space opera operates, is based ultimately on freedom, on openness, on plenty. In contrast, the principle underlying hard SF, the universe within which hard SF operates, is based ultimately on restriction, on the rule of law, on scarcity. I would characterize the one as liberal, the other as right wing.33

Kincaid’s summation is, however, ultimately somewhat sweeping in its analysis; Banks’s Culture texts rarely equate restrictiveness entirely with a conservative mindset, even if reactionary characters are often set in antagonistic roles. However, in adopting an energetic space opera approach to frame such a socio-culturally layered narrative, Banks does regrettably allow himself to stray into the realms of self-indulgence. The

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Li character’s gleeful adoption of the more outlandish paraphernalia of popular science fiction designed for mass audiences—including recognisable franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars—appears rather too knowing for its own good, and strays from the realms of metanarrative into self-satisfied extravagance. It is very much a matter of individual opinion whether Li’s ridiculing of the extreme non-realism of some forms of science fiction in television and film is a wise narrative choice in a novella which is itself a work of science fiction that is, at heart, relying on one of the form’s most established (and hackneyed) tropes—that of alien visitors surreptitiously infiltrating and interacting with human society. Although Banks does employ Li as a device of vague comic relief to alleviate the tragedy which faces Linter on the planet’s surface, one may question the extent to which the contrast between the two situations may perhaps be too radical to prove even remotely convincing. It is perhaps the aliens’ ultimate withdrawal from Earth society which most eloquently underpins Banks’s approach to the issue of the national condition. The Culture’s observation of Earth society—and their subsequent departure, having refused to make any overt contact with human governments—can be interpreted as a metaphor for the self-determination of contemporary Scottish culture, committed to a future which it alone can decide. This rejection, even tacitly, of outside intervention—even in a benign fashion—is redolent of a rather circuitous admission on Banks’s behalf of the cultural anxieties which existed in pre-devolution Scotland at the time of the novella’s production. Here, in spite of the Culture’s grave doubts as to the long-term survival of Earth’s inhabitants, the planet is left to continue along its own path nonetheless, requiring no paternalistic intervention to secure its future development. Human civilisation, it is implied, must forge a trajectory which is shaped by its own strengths and failures; having particular social or cultural influences imposed upon it by external sources would render its development essentially inauthentic. While I would argue that this metaphor for Scottish national autonomy seems unmistakeable, as is the note of caution towards the dangers of cultural imperialism, the argument is heavily underplayed by Banks to the point that it can only be discerned in oblique subtext. He thus makes effective use of the fantastic qualities of speculative fiction to underscore the fact that just as national identity itself is a gradually shaped and openly interpretable phenomenon, so too does prose fiction of every genre have a vital role in delineating it. As Timothy Brennan observes, national identity itself can be conceived as a construct, and one which is often as unpredictable or indefinable as a fictional narrative may prove to be:

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Chapter Two Nations [...] are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role. And the rise of European nationalism coincides especially with one form of literature—the novel... It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the “one, yet many” of national life, and by mimicking the structures of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles.34

The Culture’s eventual decision to essentially abandon the Earth to its own future, as Race Mathews notes, must surely be interpreted as resigned acceptance due to the fact that “mankind is not yet ready for contact, and that the Earth should be categorised as a control world in a wider process of observing whether certain social pathologies inevitably cause the societies exhibiting them to self-destruct. [...] Mankind is to remain undisturbed and free to work out its destiny for itself”.35 Thus although the Earth retains its autonomy, it is a concession which is granted by the Culture rather than consciously demanded by the humans. As part of a wider allegory of national self-government, it emphasises that the phenomenon of globalisation has led to the inescapable fact that Scotland —independent or otherwise—remains part of a wider international community with which it must eventually engage, one way or another. Earth may remain unaware of the Culture but, Banks suggests, if the human race can survive long enough then they may conceivably achieve a level of social development in the future where contact will eventually be made; a kind of mutual political engagement, as opposed to direct cultural assimilation. Yet for all the considerable pessimism that the Culture expresses towards the long-term future of the human race, their negative attitude is counterbalanced by Linter’s celebration of the surprisingly resourceful ability of humans to adapt and rework themselves in order to react to unexpected needs. It is difficult, upon reaching the novel’s conclusion, to determine whether Banks’s sympathies truly lie with the well-meaning but emotionally distant Culture, or the unpredictable and comparatively unrefined people of Earth. But likewise, there is a sense that human obstinacy ensures that the planet’s natives would have been antipathetic to the mores of the Culture even if contact had been made, which is broadly suggestive of Scotland’s persistent ability to retain its autonomous national identity in spite of cultural encroachment and hybridisation over the years. As Banks himself stated: [There is] the feeling that because of the alienation that Scots have felt from successive British governments, because the Scots have consistently been saddled with governments completely different from the way we’ve voted, we feel that we’re not part of that any more and therefore people

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look for ways to express themselves, express their difference. A cultural divide has opened up and most English people don’t understand the depth and the width of it, even now. That has made a difference. Writers in that situation have a different voice and are even more determined to express it.36

Observations on the subject of nationhood similar to Banks’s own have been expressed by other authors in the field of speculative fiction, albeit by often radically different ideological means, and indeed “political” Scottish science fiction has been an area of interest to critical commentators for some years. The significant impact of Banks’s work in this area has been noted by many, although perhaps due to its relative brevity The State of the Art has actually come to be considered one of the least prominent of all Banks’s Culture works. (It should be observed, however, that the novella’s later publication in an eponymous anthology of short fiction has ensured its continued ease of availability alongside the rest of the canon, and public perception of The State of the Art has been further enhanced by its adaptation for BBC Radio by science fiction author and screenwriter Paul Cornell in March 2009.) Yet taken as a whole, Banks’s series of Culture novels, with their deceptively playful emphasis on new approaches to ideological awareness, have had a lasting effect upon the subgenre of political speculative fiction. Until the publication of Consider Phlebas and its many sequels, the most critically successful exponent of political writing in recent Scottish speculative fiction would almost certainly have been considered to be Chris Boyce. Although now little-known outside of his native Scotland, the late Boyce built solidly upon the work of Scottish precursors in the field such as Michael Elder (arguably best remembered for his novel Nowhere on Earth, 1972), and he was presented with the Gollancz/Sunday Times SF Novel Award for his first novel Catchworld (1975), a text which—blending elements of space opera and advanced artificial intelligence technology—presaged the political vitality of Banks’s work by a decade. Boyce then published the even more forthrightly ideological Brainfix (1980), a gritty political thriller centring upon the British government’s use of a fictional mind-control drug. Duncan Lunan notes that with the latter novel, Boyce’s prescience, though valuable to the construction of the narrative, actually proved counterproductive to the publishing process: Brainfix, published in 1980, suffered an ironic twist of fate. Chris had difficulty placing the novel because it kept coming true: the first draft had Russia invading Afghanistan in 1988 and America withdrawing from the Olympics in protest, whereupon it happened ten years early. Even then the

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Chapter Two publishers found it too hard to believe: not the nationwide use of mindaltering drugs by a government determined to stay in power, not the wiring up of the SAS into a single mental entity as an instrument of repression, not the nuclear “accident” arranged with the Americans after Scotland becomes independent, no, they were easy to believe. But three million unemployed in Britain—fantasy!37

Lunan is right to observe the fact, which John Clute upholds, that Boyce “had the misfortune of predicting a rise in unemployment to an unheard-of three million in a fiction published just months before, in the harsh reality of the first Thatcher recession, it actually reached four million”.38 The influence of Boyce’s fusion of Scottish cultural observations and long-established genre tropes can be witnessed in much later novels such as Jack Deighton’s British Science Fiction Association Award-nominated A Son of the Rock (1997). Yet the profound anxieties of state interference and creeping totalitarianism which manifest themselves in Boyce’s work, and which seemed all too immediate in the glacial Cold War tensions of the 1980s, are mirrored in Banks’s resolute determination to present the Culture as a doggedly anarchistic and liberated society which is very much at odds with the hierarchical social structures of Earth. Banks emphasises the appeal of making a conscious decision to exist independently from mainstream political structures, not in order to promote an explicitly libertarian standpoint but rather to articulate a rejection of the tacit oppression of individual autonomy, whether it is expressed by either ideological or philosophical means. The potential for an autonomous Scottish state is clear, even if he often seemed reluctant to stress it too vociferously. Yet even Banks’s work, in the field of science fiction at least, cannot claim to be quite as explicitly political as that of his most proximate literary contemporary: Ken MacLeod. MacLeod has, within a relatively short period of time, built a solid reputation as one of Scotland’s best-known and most commercially successful authors of speculative fiction. By the late 1990s he had, like Banks before him, established an international reputation within the field, and subsequently he has received, or been nominated for, honours from organisations as varied as the Hugo Awards, Prometheus Awards and Nebula Awards, amongst many others. Although his novels are deeply politically conscious, he is quick to note that “I very much don’t set out to make a political point. Like most writers, I start from some ideas or even just an image. That can be a political idea”.39 Such notions have proven to be the ideological foundation and thematic driving force for MacLeod’s speculative fiction from the start of his career. His status within the science fiction literary community has been enhanced by his willingness to

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subvert existing genre traditions in order to present a distinctive, socialistically focused approach to themes of cultural dynamics and political mechanisms in narratives set both in the present day and in the near-to-distant future. This alone, as Mendlesohn observes, marks out MacLeod as an author of significance in the modern field of speculative fiction writing: One major flaw of much sf has been its authors’ inability to extrapolate social change with the same credibility as it has brought to technological change. Too many writers have assumed that the future is an unending journey into American liberal-capitalism and have been unable to make the leap to encompass intellectual change within their social schema. In MacLeod‘s novels technological change drives widespread social dislocation and intellectual reconfiguration: it creates cognitive dissonance out of which new possibilities emerge. The ability to draw such new patterns, to outline such cognitive dissonance should be, but rarely is, crucial to the sf project.40

MacLeod‘s intentions within the genre are far from straightforwardly polemical however, and his work has encompassed a number of recognised speculative issues which have become common to the field, including the cultural ramifications of an interstellar post-Earth diaspora on the operation (and nature) of human society and, more significantly, the effects of new technology (most especially nanotechnology and artificial intelligence) on the function and development of the human psyche. Clearly then, like Banks before him, the relationship of his work to notions and issues deriving from Scottish national identity are ambiguous and often elusive. The above themes of the evolving societal traits of cultural development and technological progress with the ability to change humanity’s perception of itself, along with a great many other issues, are explored throughout MacLeod’s Fall Revolution quartet (1995-99), a thematically-linked series of novels which comprises The Star Fraction (1995), The Stone Canal (1996), The Cassini Division (1998) and The Sky Road (1999). It was this cycle which first demarcated his political concerns to the speculative fiction community, and firmly established his critical reputation within the genre. This section focuses primarily on The Stone Canal (1996), the second book in MacLeod‘s Fall Revolution cycle and a novel which exemplifies many of the key themes in the quartet as a whole, including the dangers of allowing uncontrolled technological development to evolve in a manner bereft of ethical consideration, and the threat of near-future social breakdown from clashing political ideologies. MacLeod would later posit this situation as a succinct question: “What if capitalism is unsustainable,

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and socialism is impossible?”41 Perhaps the one novel in the series which deals most explicitly (and ingeniously) with issues of Scottish national identity, albeit by alluding to a country eroded by a hostile and complex geopolitical situation which grows beyond the control of any one sovereign state, The Stone Canal builds confidently upon themes established in MacLeod’s debut novel The Star Fraction, and functions as both a prequel and sequel to the earlier text. It also lays emphasis upon MacLeod’s highly subtle analysis of anxieties surrounding Scottish nationhood in the period immediately preceding the re-establishment of the Holyrood Parliament. MacLeod‘s preoccupation with advanced technologies, artificial intelligence and ostensibly counter-utopian societies (which, if they can be considered utopian at all, are deeply unstable in nature) has led to the Fall Revolution cycle becoming associated with the cyberpunk movement of science fiction literature. Mann, for instance, readily classifies the first novel of the cycle as “a taut cyberpunk thriller”.42 Yet although MacLeod himself has not explicitly acknowledged this categorisation, he names the subgenre’s pioneers Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Pat Cadigan as “four of the writers I most admire”,43 and has described Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk text, Neuromancer (1984), approvingly as an “eruption of the real world into science fiction”.44 Significantly, given the explorations of complex technological developments in his work, MacLeod has voiced significant scepticism about the likely development of artificial intelligence—one of the key themes in the Fall Revolution cycle, as well as much of the cyberpunk subgenre generally. As he has noted: The problem in the real world remains one of human agency. There are no saviours from above, no angels or aliens to save us. And, for sure, there are none behind the computer screens. Artificial awareness is where it’s been since the 1940s and always will be: “just twenty years away”. The better minds and stronger hands must be our own.45

Additional to the generally humanistic attitude that the above may imply, the cyberpunk connection suggests a concern on MacLeod‘s part with the depiction of a human society struggling to adapt to a technologically diverse yet impersonally dystopian future, as the increasingly grim post-World War III environment of The Stone Canal indicates (at least during the latter stages of the Earth-based section of its narrative). Even so, MacLeod’s approach defies the nebulous characteristics of the cyberpunk subgenre, never engaging with its component attributes quite as completely as, for instance, Matthew Fitt in

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his lively contribution to the genus, But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000). With a striking use of narrative which employs lowland Scots dialect, and a depiction of a Scotland ravaged by environmental dangers, Fitt shares some of MacLeod’s apprehension about the potential perils of rapidly advancing technology, and the ability of its human developers to control it either effectively or responsibly. This is worthy of note when compared to authors such as Margaret Elphinstone, who express such anxiety over the detrimental role of technological development in modern culture that the societies depicted in novels such as The Incomer (1987) and A Sparrow’s Flight (1989) have ultimately chosen to reject it completely. On the other hand, MacLeod’s ideological reflections are much more distinct in comparison to those established in the work of either Fitt or Elphinstone. Indeed, even the cyberpunk appellation appears much less pertinent in relation to The Stone Canal’s relatively freshly-formed society of New Mars—for all of its technological complexities and cultural eccentricities— than it does to the urban harshness of MacLeod’s Norlonto community and the bleak near-future Britain in which it is situated. Indeed, it seems oddly paradoxical that in spite of MacLeod’s finely-drawn dystopian outlook on British (and indeed global) society, a number of critics have come to draw parallels between his politically complex world-building, replete with all of its collective imperfections and uncompromisingly-drawn human frailties, and the conventions of utopian fiction. While it seems difficult to reconcile the multifaceted speculative societies of the Fall Revolution series with the kind of socialist utopia depicted by, for example, William Morris in News from Nowhere (1890), Jesse Walker notes that: Utopian fiction has a bad reputation, much of it well-deserved: Few genres are as congenial to humorless, didactic writing. Most utopias have little room for development, ambiguity, or questions left open, let alone interesting characters or an involving plot. [...] MacLeod sets up several societies then lets them loose in something akin to the real world, where they can compete, infiltrate each other, and try to come to terms with their internal contradictions. If the traditional utopian uses fiction to express his firmest views, MacLeod seems to be working out ideas as he writes. His books are filled with politics, but those politics, in turn, are suffused with playfulness and contingency.46

It must be observed that MacLeod‘s highly unconventional approach to utopia—explored in unsound and shifting communities, as opposed to a traditionally idealistic depiction of social existence—is synchronous with new approaches to representations of dystopia. (Here, too, it is worth observing that although MacLeod deals with the tumultuous social

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ramifications of a Third World War, he never allows himself to drift into the overworked tropes of a post-apocalyptic fable.) Whereas dystopias and anti-utopias have conventionally been interpreted as cautionary warnings or commentaries on undesirable contemporary social or cultural phenomena, some authors in recent years have expressed a markedly different attitude to the subject. A number of writers aligned to the cyberpunk movement, especially earlier practitioners such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, have come to employ dystopian societies not in a forewarning or cautionary function, but rather as a postmodern celebration of the infinite possibilities of constant development and adaptation which the conventions of some forms of dystopia are able to provide. This sense of extreme adaptability, which develops the notion of dystopia into a less negative concept than its traditional connotations have suggested, invites comparison with the opinion voiced by commentators such as Fredric Jameson that the ideals of utopian literature have a catalytic, self-perpetuating effect: The debate over Utopia’s representability or not, indeed over its imaginability and conceptualization, does not threaten to put an end to Utopian speculation altogether and to return us sagely to the here and now and our own empirical and historical limits. Rather such debates find themselves drawn inside the Utopian text, thereby becoming occasions for further Utopian productivity.47

In terms of Scottish identity, we see in MacLeod—as in Banks—a cautious note of optimism regarding the country’s national qualities of cultural adaptability; in The Stone Canal, the protagonist and antagonist— both of them Scottish—demonstrate the ability and the resolve to mould society to their own ends, albeit for very different means. There is an unavoidable sense of “manifest destiny” in the unconventional nationbuilding of both men, who are each determined to construct autonomous socio-political entities which are not constrained by the perceived limitations of the current capitalistic, liberal democratic models currently favoured by the West. In so doing, MacLeod advances a kind of postterrestrial variation on the Darien Scheme: his use of Scottish characters to colonise and reconfigure new and unfamiliar territories presents a bold but confidently-demarcated recognition of Scotland’s potential to challenge long-held political shibboleths, even although he appears to concede that revolutionary ideological strategies do not always result in expected outcomes and thus emphasises the need to strike a vigilant balance between individual freedom and personal responsibility. Although MacLeod explores this cautionary theme with characteristic vigour, in

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narrative terms he is contributing to an already well-populated exploration of the nature of dystopia. Authors such as William Gibson emphasise the excitement which can be generated by the unconstrained consumerism within capitalistically-based dystopias, particularly in terms of new technologies, and their ability to offer continuously changing outcomes with social ramifications both low-key and wide-ranging. (As Adam Roberts notes, Neuromancer is a novel where technology and dystopia are curiously interlinked, presenting a society which “delights in the ingenious and fascinating toys its imaginative universe produces”, although “this delight is expressed chiefly in terms of the damage the technology can do”.48) In this regard, and considering MacLeod’s well-established ideological concerns, it is interesting to note Krishan Kumar’s opinion, writing in 1977, that “socialism is still the modern utopia, but far less clearly or confidently so”.49 In today’s world, post-Thatcherism and postCold War, Kumar’s assertion appears much less certain, and indeed for MacLeod—and the characters that he creates—socialism forms merely a starting position for the formulation of his future societies rather than their intended end-point. The degree to which MacLeod seeks to explore the notion of Scotland’s possible future development through the use of two disparate communities—one of them based on English soil, the other on an alien world—is compelling, not least due to the fact that the few sections of the book which are actually set in Scotland itself (mostly in a contemporary timeframe) tend to be geared predominantly towards providing crucial character background to the book’s protagonist. Yet perhaps surprisingly, MacLeod’s apparent unwillingness to discuss the Scottish nation in explicit terms, rather than being counterproductive, may actually be seen to have profound benefits. As Dietmar Böhnke has observed, “talking about Scotland the nation always involves the danger of evoking a whole cluster of stereotypes, set images and (subconscious) associations. The search for a ‘national character’, for ‘Scottish types’ also somehow presupposes a static image, which can never mirror a living community accurately”.50 Thus in his use of adaptive, rapidly developing future societies—both of them having been established by highly individual Scots—MacLeod is able to offer an oblique if often satirical reflection upon the contemporary Scottish mindset, as well as an implicit extrapolation of the country’s possible futures. This is especially true of MacLeod’s splintered, fractious Britain; his exploration of this disunited kingdom appears surprisingly congruent with Böhnke’s assertion of resistance to Scottish cultural assimilation within the United Kingdom at the end of the twentieth century:

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Chapter Two Scottish national identity is characterized by the problematic status of Scotland being a nation without a state. [...] It has often been asserted that Scotland has never been properly integrated into the cultural values of the British state, and this is doubtlessly true. Yet the political union with England now approaching its third centenary has resulted in a basic insecurity as to what really constitutes the distinctive Scottish culture.51

A central thread in the narrative of The Stone Canal is an exploration of the United Kingdom’s uneven road towards republicanism and the country’s subsequent Balkanisation—a political environment which had previously been depicted in some detail throughout the first entry in the series, The Star Fraction. In the earlier novel, this tumultuous process has already been completed and the British Isles are nominally presided over by an unpopular constitutional monarchy which has, in turn, been imposed by an American-controlled United Nations responsible for the overthrow of Britain’s nascent republican political system. The Stone Canal, published the following year, aims to explain how the governmental fracturing of Britain came about, starting from the present day. This is done from the point of view of social revolutionary Jonathan Wilde,52 who was a supporting character in The Star Fraction, now become the protagonist of its sequel. Roughly one half of The Stone Canal’s narrative closely follows Wilde from his student days in the Glasgow of 1975 through to his demise in the mid-twenty first century, and the story of this character’s life becomes an instrument by which MacLeod explores a range of intense political and cultural changes across the globe (though specifically in continental Europe) over the course of several decades. These range from the brief but cataclysmic events of a global conflict to Wilde’s gradual move away from Scotland to set in motion the establishment of an anarchistic free trade zone, “Norlonto”, in the former North London. It is typical of MacLeod’s relatively uncommon approach to science fiction that he should choose to focus in such intense detail on the politics and economic systems of the future, rather than simply to use these postulated societies as a compelling backdrop on which to project narrative incident, and this distinctive methodology was to inform later works in the field such as Andrew Crumey’s energetic alternate history novel Sputnik Caledonia (2008). MacLeod exercises considerable skill in moulding his near-future social scenarios into a highly erudite political satire, told from Wilde’s changing viewpoint. The Stone Canal employs a complex dual narrative to explore the protagonist’s life until the point of his apparent death (told in the first person), and then following his unexpected—and involuntary— resurrection on another planet in the far future (which is related principally

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in the third person). This formal choice is highly effective in that the first person sections of the book deal more closely with Wilde’s actions, whereas the third person sections instead focus in greater detail upon his mindset, and the reasons which underpin his individual choices. This shrewdly-judged division of MacLeod’s examination of the character reaches a logical conclusion at the novel’s endgame, where the true nature of Wilde’s long-term plan becomes evident. Ideological discourse and the dynamics of political systems are key to Wilde’s character, and his unconventional approach to socialism is made manifest at an early stage in the text, where he debates political philosophy with the novel’s primary and secondary antagonists, David Reid and Myra Godwin, in Glasgow University’s Queen Margaret Union in 1975: “I don’t want a planned society anyway,” I said. “It doesn’t fit in with my plans”. That got a cheap laugh. “So what are you?” Reid asked. “A right-winger?” I sighed. “I’m an individualist anarchist, actually.” “’Ey’m en individualist enerchist, eckchelly’,” Myra mimicked. “More like an anachronism. It’s a tragedy,” she added with a flourish to the gallery. “The kid learns some kinda Marxism at his daddy’s knee, and he ends up a god-damn Proudhonist!”53 (The Stone Canal, p. 30)

Wilde’s views on Marxism are different from the morally relativistic Reid’s from the outset, yet the respective ideological stances occupied by both men share a common capacity for significant variance over the course of the passing decades—in the case of Reid, quite fundamentally so. Wilde’s shrewdly adaptive approach to socialism is mirrored by MacLeod’s own highly individual political development (as he states in a 1999 interview, “the Libertarian Alliance and [...] the debates in the Communist Party and the crisis of the Eastern Bloc stimulated me to think much longer and harder about socialism”54), and the manifest ideological incongruities which Wilde must gradually come to terms with as the novel progresses are compared to the pragmatic political attitudes of his parents, whose unwavering left-wing convictions are rooted in long-held British radical traditions: “Tall, stooping, grey-haired and as tough as old boots, they’d seen it all before: the Peace Pledge Union, CND, the Committee of 100, Vietnam Solidarity, CND again...” (The Stone Canal, pp. 105-06). Wilde inherits the dedicated internationalist social conscience and conceptual apparatus of his parents, eventually remoulding their beliefs in order to adapt to a changing geopolitical reality, and ultimately it is he—

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not Reid—who retains an authentic anti-authoritarian stance throughout the course of the novel. Indeed, Wilde’s irregularly defined politics are made evident even from his appearance in The Star Fraction, where he is described as “an anomalous figure for decades, regarded as a left-winger in the space movement, a libertarian space nut by the left”.55 MacLeod effectively contrasts the social realism he employs to delineate Wilde’s early existence in the “pre-death” sequence of the novel (replete with traditional student retreats, Glasgow-based science fiction conventions and pub crawls around Edinburgh) with the bleak impersonality of the near future, where conflicts are largely fought by remotely-situated technological means and long-established political structures are fractured and reconfigured in manifestly unconventional ways. Debates surrounding the speed of technological advancement and its ramifications were all too common during the dial-up Internet boom of the late 1990s, and MacLeod joins this discussion with a clear awareness of the significant consequences which result when advanced technology rests in the hands of political elites, and the future implications for democratic societies held to ransom by technocratic plutarchies. Here, perhaps more than at any other point in the novel, we witness MacLeod’s emphasis upon his fictionalised settlements as being essentially nationless states; political systems in fruitless search of nationhood, just as Scotland—with its culturally autonomous national identity—remains situated within another political entity even although it has not yet achieved self-governance. Norlonto, for instance, carries with it the defensive deterrent of nuclear arms (somewhat ironically, given the strong views of Wilde’s unilateral disarmament-supporting parents), but this distinction alone cannot confer upon it the prestige of a nation state, merely that of a self-sufficient (and self-ruling) community. As James Brown observes: With the advent of nuclear weapons, violence is now too deeply implicated in the kind of systemic instrumentalism that strongly suggests an essentially non-human dominant historical agency. This is, of course, an illusion, but from the point of view of any individual, it is an illusion that communicates the seemingly palpable truth of one’s impotence in the face of technological power used as political power, and in the face of what gets elided with this: an historical process that seems to be careering out of control. It is a pervasive concern.56

But just as notably, it seems obvious that their level of sovereignty in the eyes of the outside world is largely irrelevant to this anarchistic cooperative, due to the fact that it makes no discernible difference to its actual status or economic prosperity; an admonitory observation on

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MacLeod’s part, perhaps, that for a devolved Scotland as much as for any nation, changes in political attitude and approach must come from within lest they be imposed from without. His point is unmistakable: if politically-minded individuals do not act, they will eventually be forced to react when someone else attempts to set the agenda. The problematic relationship between socialism and libertarianism, for instance, is examined throughout the course of the novel, and indeed it is one of the key themes throughout the Fall Revolution cycle as a whole. In his examination of systems of state economic control existing in a diametrically-opposing position from that of the notion of unfettered free enterprise, it is worth noting that during an interview with Jesse Walker of Reason magazine in 2000, MacLeod appears ambivalent when asked if he believes Trotskyism is, or can be, compatible with traditional anarchistic or libertarian ideological systems: “Trotskyism is an offshoot of Bolshevism, which is not very libertarian, to say the least. But in the 1960s and ’70s especially, it appealed to a lot of people who had a radical, antiauthoritarian impulse”.57 MacLeod explores this theme not only in his depiction of Norlonto—the independent free trade zone established in the former North London by Wilde and his associates, which had featured significantly in The Star Fraction—but also in the settlement of New Mars, Reid’s anarchistic off-world outpost. A stateless, independent community established far from Earth’s decaying political sphere of influence, New Mars is only nominally held under Reid’s tenuous sway on account of his social manipulation and unmatched approach to free marketeering. Here, MacLeod issues a cautionary note with regard to Scottish political reform; ensuring a sustainable cultural future can only be aided by an awareness of the national imperatives of the past, even if only to avoid limitations which had resulted from them in times gone by. When Wilde (revived as a clone many years after his death) becomes a potent agent for revolutionary change on the distant colony world, Reid finds that both his strategic cultural management and his business interests come under sustained attack. As John H. Arnold and Andy Wood observe, “as a kind of historical artefact himself, Wilde’s reappearance in the world of New Mars [...] stands as metonym for the past as a repository of secret knowledge; although again, the promise of revelation that this holds out may prove illusory”.58 The Norlonto project is used by MacLeod as a multifaceted representation (and parody) of the free market system taken to its most extreme point. Although self-sufficient in terms of internal service provision, MacLeod continually emphasises Norlonto’s reliance on the goodwill of its neighbours for its continued existence. The biting satire on

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display in this allegory of Scottish nationhood within the United Kingdom is hard to ignore; Norlonto may seem largely dependent on its (more politically conventional) surrounding regions in order to remain operative, but the ideological complexity of its leaders—and their dexterity in negotiations—have assured its cultural survival in the long term. This is particularly true of their perilous relationship with the United Nations, who have the technological capacity to instantaneously obliterate the community at any time, but who grudgingly recognise that doing so would generate infinitely more awkward logistical problems than it could possibly resolve. MacLeod recognises that their hegemony—as in our own time—is often imposed more by threat of force than by force itself. MacLeod’s scepticism about power and the organisations which wield it throughout the course of the novel is concomitant with Michel Foucault’s examination of power relations. As Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace note: Foucault claimed that all contemporary analyses of power are based on one or another version which portrays it as negative and repressive. They tend to identify power only in the form of a relationship between a sovereign and a subject (or subjects). Most commonly, this mode of analysis depicts the “state” as the more recent equivalent of a sovereign, and posits free “individuals” as the subjects under the state’s control.59

It must be noted that Foucault’s position is a great deal more subtle than the above summation may suggest, however, and proves considerably more diffuse and problematic when compared to MacLeod’s work. Seth Kreisberg, for instance, makes the perceptive point that Foucault “warns, however, against the temptation to develop all-encompassing theories of power”60 and that “he observes: ‘The role of theory today seems to be just this: not to formulate the global systematic theory which holds everything in place, but to analyze the specificity of mechanisms of power, to locate the connections and extensions, to build little by little a strategic knowledge’”.61 The pessimistic examination of state power which MacLeod derives from the actions of national governments and the dynamics of their international foreign policy is in marked contrast to what he sees as the far-reaching influence of individual characters such as Reid or Wilde. This suggests an approach much closer in tone to John Scott’s observation that “the expert maintains power because high-ranking persons in [an] organization are dependent upon him for his special skills and access to certain kinds of information”.62 In this case the relationship between the individual and the state is more one of negotiable reliance rather than unqualified dominion—a fact which, in his frequent engagement with advanced technology and the knowledge economy

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required to effectively harness it, indicates MacLeod’s anxiety with oppressive traits which can potentially be exhibited by both political and corporate organisations. MacLeod’s socio-political fable is skilfully employed, for the story of Wilde’s youth takes the reader from the upheaval of the 1970s industrial action through the mass-unemployment of the Thatcher years, the uncertainty of the 1990s New World Order, and on into a future of increasing geopolitical instability. It may seem tempting to interpret Wilde’s journey through adulthood as an exploration of British socialism at a particular historical moment, but this would be a largely illusory notion. Yet Wilde does undeniably remain true to the essence of his radical beliefs while Reid’s intentions become tainted by the excesses of unfettered free-marketeering from the eighties onwards. It is, in this sense, valuable to compare the characters of William McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975), who are profoundly rooted in the socialist tradition whilst despondent in the face of socio-political change, with the two varyingly left-wing protagonists of The Stone Canal, who consider such change to be a factor which must be harnessed and shaped in order to meet necessity. MacLeod’s extremely dynamic vision of the constantly developing political landscape is an arresting one, if atypical of much traditional socialist thinking of the time. But the Norlonto community is also telling in the way that Wilde’s construction of a new anarchistic social order— which is radically different from the rather more ideologically conventional English socio-political structure that immediately surrounds it—manages to resist cultural influence from without, in a manner similar to the resilience of the customs and practices of the Scottish establishment in the face of the pressures from the broader United Kingdom for greater cultural assimilation. As James G. Kellas notes, writing in the twilight of the Thatcher years and a full decade prior to Scottish devolution: Scotland comes somewhere between Wales and Northern Ireland in political status. While possessing neither a government nor a parliament of its own, it has a strong constitutional identity and a large number of political and social institutions. The Act of Union of 1707, which is the “fundamental law” joining Scotland with England, laid down that Scotland would retain for all time certain key institutions such as the Scottish legal system, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland (the Established Church), the Scottish educational system, and the “Royal Burghs” (local authorities). These became the transmitters of Scottish national identity from one generation to the next.63

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All attempts to tame the anarcho-consumerist state by conventional force in The Stone Canal are thwarted due to the fact that its adversaries are forced to engage it “the economic way, not the political way. They’ll have to do deals and trade combat futures and take disputes to court companies and swap laws and all the rest of it” (The Stone Canal, p. 280). Invaders quickly become bogged down in a miasma of anarchistic bureaucracy; MacLeod’s slyly satirical comment on the red tape, blame culture and pervasive ethos of legal mediation that has become increasingly prominent in our modern age. The remote New Mars colony, in comparison, faces no such external threat from the outset, and over time comes to develop its own internally-developed adversaries instead, ranging from political agitators to new-age religious fundamentalists. New Mars only superficially shares Norlonto’s peculiar anarcho-consumerist economic system, for it comes to refine it over the centuries until it has moved far beyond what Wilde would likely have considered to be its logical conclusion (within a traditional Earth-based environment, at least). As Mendlesohn elaborates, “what is useful cannot easily be repressed and this extends, of course, beyond the basic needs of a society to the provision of luxury. On New Mars as in Norlonto if a market can be found for a product it will be produced”.64 As the novel progresses, we discover that Reid takes this point several stages further than Wilde had done (or, indeed, could have done) given the social limitations of situating Norlonto within an ostensibly autonomous state as opposed to the much greater freedom available to New Mars, founded as it is upon the blank slate of a socio-political vacuum. In this sense, MacLeod derives another interesting parallel between his fictitious communities and the wider notion of national identity. Norlonto proves to be, like any conceptual model of identity, an ideological construct as much as it is the product of a particular and precarious world order. In this specific case, its existence has derived from a rarefied geopolitical arrangement which develops prior to the Third World War and the global domination of the United Nations, an organisation which MacLeod repeatedly emphasises is little more than a homunculus of the American government. The correlation with Scotland’s own international political situation in the modern day is a clear one, if perhaps controversial in the conclusions that it draws: After the war there was a world government. It was officially known as the United Nations, unofficially as the US/UN, and colloquially as the Yanks. It kept the peace, from space, or so it claimed. What it actually did was prevent innumerable tiny wars from becoming big wars. But in order

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to maintain its power, it needed the little wars, and they never stopped. We had war without end, to prevent war to the end. (The Stone Canal, p. 264)

From its basis as “an abandoned North London industrial estate with a few empty high-rise flats thrown in by a local council desperate to get rid of them” (The Stone Canal, p. 190), Norlonto develops into an independent free trade zone, its leaders gradually proving anxious to retain its autonomy. The acquisition of a nuclear deterrent by Norlonto’s nominal governing body (guided by Wilde)—entirely independent of the state— proves capable of protecting the community’s physical borders as much as its unique ideological identity. Here MacLeod operates a sophisticated satire both on the primacy of free market economics, particularly since the 1980s, and also on the state of modern Britain’s own nuclear deterrence— an “independent” national defensive mechanism which, in actuality, is now largely redundant due to the influence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the United Nations and indeed the United States. Norlonto’s polymorphously entrepreneurial character ensures that its free tradeoriented anarchism is able to survive the new wave of political uncertainty which sweeps the globe following the downfall of American hegemony and the eventual withdrawal of the United States from the international stage. While New Mars is far distant from the entropic political corrosion that continues to affect Earth long after the collapse of the United Nations and American disengagement, grave threats are posed to the settlement’s fragile stability. Like Norlonto, only in a more concentrated form, New Mars becomes a global anarchistic community which is free from state interference, fashioned from the energy of positive ideas with only Reid as its nominal master. In ideological terms, this presents a fascinating dichotomy; while Norlonto and New Mars are variously described as being both anarchistic and libertarian in terms of their political system, the self-determination of the individual in their societies is ultimately undermined by, and subordinated to, the much more powerfully motivating influence of single predominant (Scottish) figures, such as Wilde and Reid. With this observation in mind, it can be noted that one key flaw in MacLeod’s approach may be his extremely close study of the characters of Wilde and (to a lesser extent) Reid, to the detriment of The Stone Canal’s numerous supporting characters. Whilst it is, of course, essential that Wilde comes under particularly close scrutiny given that the novel deals with two entirely distinct incarnations of his consciousness (especially given the fast pace of both narratives), this comes at the price of sidelining other significant individuals throughout the course of the narrative. This is

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true, most notably, in the case of Wilde’s wife Annette and her inscrutable robotic avatar, Dee. Even Eleanor, Wilde’s daughter, who is a highly significant character in the present day and near-future sections of the novel, seems rather conveniently sidelined in the thoughts of his far-future self, and Wilde appears to expend far more concern over the ambiguously precarious condition of society on Earth in general than he does on specific familial issues. Although his emotional concern for his daughter is highly pronounced prior to his death, his later disentanglement from such paternal anxiety fits awkwardly with the depth of his aspiration to ensure his wife’s resurrection from her genetic blueprint, a prominent issue which ultimately drives much of the novel’s climax. In so doing, MacLeod regrettably falls foul of a perennial criticism of science fiction: that the genre occasionally (if inadvertently) subordinates character development to conceptual development and narrative drive. On the other hand, it can also perhaps be argued that Wilde’s transformation into posthuman form may have more far-reaching effects on his character than are immediately obvious from his first-person perspective, which goes some way to explaining why he appears much more psychologically relatable and family-oriented when in his earlier “authentic” human incarnation, both in Scotland and in Norlonto. MacLeod does not offer any explicit confirmation of the state of Wilde’s mental condition, however, which leaves the matter ambiguous and largely open to the interpretation of the reader. Interestingly, given The Stone Canal’s dryly satirical tone and unwavering political conviction, MacLeod’s focus on change and the laissez-faire ethos of his anarchistic communities is balanced by a critique of the apparent liberation and self-determination that such a system would theoretically provide. Although Norlonto is led and represented by a nominal advisory council, its direction is largely dominated by Wilde’s compelling powers of persuasion, just as New Mars’ administration— though even more ostensibly organised for the supposed benefit of the collective—is controlled by Reid’s iron will in a manner that is never more than thinly veiled. The considerable prominence of such figures, and indeed the significant effect that they have on the means of production of material forces in their respective societies, shape their histories in ways that are scarcely conducive to traditional Marxist analysis. There is a strong sense that even in MacLeod’s unstable utopias, where centralised government is non-existent, authority is still a source of suspicion even when its bearers exhibit seemingly benign motivations. As Reid and Wilde clash, effectively deciding the fate of New Mars and its inhabitants, their symbolic and political opposition ultimately proves to be redundant;

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although the settlement is founded upon a new, innovative ideological system, Reid and Wilde are both products of a bygone age, relics contaminated by the long-established politics of the past as they strive to influence and conduct the direction of the future. Given that both Wilde and Reid are Scottish, the above analysis does raise questions about the ability of the individual to influence pre-existing ideological mechanisms as opposed to developing their own political systems within self-governing communities. Writing a few years prior to devolution, and with much consideration as to the power and influence of a Scottish parliamentary system, these issues were certainly germane to the ongoing national debate, but MacLeod seems eager to encourage his readers to think beyond the possibilities of tax-raising powers and local issues, challenging them instead to see the extent of the country’s potential for cultural and social adaptability. Comparing Scotland, past or present, with the postulated population centres of The Stone Canal is most productive when viewed via the perspective of MacLeod’s observation that “the societies I present in a reasonably attractive light only exist in unstable configurations of outside forces. When the balance of forces change, they disappear or change themselves. So no final, stable society is postulated”.65 In the case of New Mars, the tangible threat to its continued existence is posed by a potentially critical yet peculiarly intangible threat—that of a posthuman society. The term posthumanism refers to the existence of what is traditionally regarded as human consciousness in forms other than the conventional human biological form; as William S. Haney II succinctly states, “posthumanists tend to define consciousness in terms of the mind’s conscious content, arguing that whatever consciousness may be in-and-of itself, it is not a necessary entity for human existence”.66 In MacLeod’s novel, the term encompasses both vastly evolved human consciousness and artificial intelligence, as well as their complex interactions with each other. With his exploration of the posthuman, MacLeod emphasises one of the key themes in his work, and one which is well-established in the science fiction genre; that of ensuring that technology, while vitally important to the development and support of society, should never be allowed to develop out of the control of its human creators. Although this has been a prevalent node of literary science fiction for many decades, MacLeod manages to avoid over-familiarity with the convention even while he employs it for ideological and philosophical means. As MacGillivray has noted, the use of this long-established trope proved to be as relevant to Banks as it has been to MacLeod, though for markedly different reasons:

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Chapter Two Artificial Intelligence dominates, but whereas MacLeod sees it as something to be combated, Banks sees it ultimately the great ally and partner of humanity against ignorance, prejudice and supestition. I think there is something of a Scottish ideal in both of these stances. MacLeod seems to be articulating as a constant in human life the Burnsian theme of “A man’s a man for a’ that” within a shifting political spectrum. Banks, more philosophically, is championing the claims of the intellect, an enhanced and scientifically-aided collective intellect, against forces of irrational reaction and violence.67

The massively influential premise deriving from Robert Burns’ poetry which is suggested here is indeed deeply relevant to MacLeod’s approach. As Carl MacDougall notes, “Burns bequeathed a powerful idealistic statement of how we should live our lives. It’s been our first principle of social justice and it has permeated our writing since its publication”.68 MacLeod’s futuristic political extrapolation keenly examines issues of social fairness and impartiality, though largely in terms of questioning whether such desirable values can ever be sustained indefinitely within any political system, Scottish or otherwise. Also, MacGillivray’s assertion that “MacLeod writes out of a clearly Scottish sensibility, in that [he is] reacting against the settled assumptions of the traditional tendencies in both English and American science fiction in ways that we have come to associate with the mainstream of Scottish realistic fiction”,69 is also pertinent to an examination of his literary methodology. MacLeod’s subtle suggestion of the alienating effects of posthuman technology, isolating individuals from their corporeal forms and—ultimately—from each other, is evocative of the psychological claustrophobia in the work of James Kelman, where oppressive social forces and harsh realism coalesce in order to confine and ensnare his characters in novels such as How Late it Was, How Late (1994). Although their narrative styles may be considerably at variance, of course, there is a sense of commonality between Sammy, the sight-impaired protagonist of Kelman’s text who finds himself struggling with the shift in perception brought about by sudden blindness, and Wilde’s shock at realising that he has been unwillingly torn from corporeal physicality to be forced instead into a mechanical form which operates quite differently from human norms. There is a stimulating thematic connection between Kelman’s skilled approach to emotional and social alienation and the almost surreal, posthuman mental isolation of MacLeod’s characters, particularly in view of Kelman’s towering reputation—as Watson has termed it—as a “novelist of time and place”,70 fully capable of taking, for instance, “an already minimalist existence [and] raz[ing it] to the ground”71 with the power of

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his prose. Yet there is also correspondence with the mainstream fiction of Iain Banks, most especially novels such as Whit and The Business, where challenges emanating from organised constructs such as religion and the corporation confront the individual in ways which force them to question their adherence to conventional systems and values. Like MacLeod’s Wilde, many of Banks’s protagonists seek to exist outwith the confines of mainstream social and political structures, in search of new personal understanding or enlightenment—just as Linter does in The State of the Art. However, Wilde (in spite of his status as an unabashed political outsider, isolated from the centrist mainstream) is ultimately compelled to become an active force of social and cultural change, moulding ideologies in irrevocable and far-reaching ways. It has been observed that fictional utopian societies have often, in the past, been depicted in monolithic or idealised terms, rarely being shown as pluralistic, emergent or contradictory. Often they are employed in order to resolve the conflicts of actual historical life, doing so by removing discord and contradiction with the aim of imagining a society without such variance. MacLeod, however, does in fact offer up dynamic and evolving utopias, although it seems almost contradictory to define any of the societies depicted throughout the Fall Revolution cycle as straightforwardly utopian in the traditional sense given their focus on the breakdown of established political stability and the formation of new, largely untried social systems rather than the harmonious social synchronisation suggested by Plato and More. The establishment of these communities also proves problematic from a utopian standpoint; Wilde resents Reid’s use of an effectively indentured workforce in order to make travel to New Mars possible; as Reid explains during the wormhole construction process, “like Guevara’s ideal Socialist Man, you’re ‘a cog in the machine, but a conscious cog’. However—unlike Socialist Man—you have some individual incentives, though whether they could be called material incentives is debatable” (The Stone Canal, p. 356). This motivation by commodity-based enticement (or means analogous to it) has consequences which reverberate into the very fabric of life on New Mars; as characters like Eon Talgarth suggest, with his brokering of deals between human businesspeople and conscious machines, the free trade ethos on the colony is so all-encompassing that even conscious life has become a form of marketable commodity. MacLeod’s satirising of late monopoly capitalism could scarcely be more tangible. Yet the eventual dispassionate destruction of the posthuman “fast folk”, whose calculations have made transit to New Mars possible, raises one of the central issues which MacLeod engages with throughout the novel, that of the ideological variance between

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libertarianism and authoritarianism, the conflict between notions of individual freedom and state control. Both Reid and Wilde are responsible for the genocide of this unique yet inherently unstable race of beings, ostensibly on behalf of the New Mars community in order to eradicate a catastrophic threat to its existence. This momentous choice reinforces MacLeod’s concerns that although the authoritarian state is depicted unsympathetically throughout the novel, notions of absolute freedom are likewise not without danger when taken to extremes. It can be observed in The Stone Canal that utopia—in the conceptual sense—is an issue of some consideration for Wilde and Reid. Both take the interesting, unconventional (not to say paradoxical) economic stance that free-marketeering has become a crucial component of liberty within their respective quasi-socialistic political perspectives, and both embrace systems of anarchy to create non-statist communities in which to formulate this emancipated, libertarian position (shaping, as Mendlesohn identifies, a form of distinctively “post-modern utopia”72). Wilde’s Norlonto and Reid’s New Mars may share some stylistic similarities in social terms, but the driving force of their respective creators is motivated by subtly different political causes: in Wilde’s case, revolutionary social change against authoritarianism; for Reid, the primacy of a specific strain of libertarian ideology. There is a sense that Wilde merely employs the free market as a means to an end, and not always willingly, whereas Reid’s ideology has somehow become irrevocably polluted by it. In the creation of their individual utopias, Wilde and Reid form two halves of a complex kind of Hegelian dialectic, with the resultant social synthesis for the future (the end product of their uneasy rapprochement at the novel’s conclusion) remaining highly ambiguous. Yet conversely, MacLeod qualifies his manifest uncertainty over the sustainability of any one human system of government with the novel’s unequivocally optimistic conclusion of cosmic perpetuity, observing that: There was a Big Bang, but it was not the beginning, for there was none. No heat death, no Big Crunch awaits us. These dooms (it now is said) for all their shining mathematical elaborations, were but reflections of a society facing its limits. There is no end. (The Stone Canal, p. 430)

The societies posited by MacLeod may, of course, reflect wider concerns about the direction of present-day society—not only in terms of contemporary Scotland, which Wilde and Reid both gradually abandon, but also with regard to modern fears relating to the reach and control of an

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authoritarian unipolar governmental system. This kind of global dominion is established by the all-powerful America of the near-future, as reflected in the “US/UN” of the post-World War III political environment, which uses advanced space-based technology to manage the world order in a manner which, as Mann observes, “is reminiscent of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in the way in which the US/UN has become an omnipresent force that maintains total control over the country”.73 Yet for all its near-totalitarian administration of society, the US/UN’s insidious micro-management of Earth’s affairs (and the allegory of political imperialism that this suggests) is subtly analogous to Reid’s own hegemony on New Mars. Although Reid appears to hold a position of nominal equality to the other colonists, even appearing in court when summoned so as to prove his apparent subservience to the law (unconventionally as it applies to those within the anarchistic territory), there is little doubt that his subtle manipulations of New Martian society from the time of its foundation has afforded him a position of primacy within its communal strata. In an exploration of these power dynamics, as James Brown comments, MacLeod develops a theme which has become common within the political science fiction subgenre: Much of what’s been classified as political sf has dwelt upon the political (ab)use of technologies – usually by a state which is essentially an even more instrumental continuation of the sovereign state, especially as seen in the light of Totalitarianism, and the increased capacity for social management achieved by most industrialised, western states over the last century.74

MacLeod makes it clear that both the US/UN world order and Reid’s dominion on New Mars have, in their inflexibly authoritarian mindset (though more subtly, in the case of Reid), effectively established the means of their own obsolescence. The common denominator between the breaking of their respective means of suppression is, as discussed, the unanticipated destructive interaction of non-human intelligences with each of their power bases. In the case of the US/UN, the technological core of their supremacy is vulnerable to computer-based attack from within, which proves to be their Achilles’ Heel (following the technological havoc of the Fall Revolution), while Reid is almost fatally undermined by his apprehension at the prospect of engaging with the incomprehensibly advanced “fast folk” again; only through Wilde’s internecine plotting can the deadlock be broken and new solutions presented. It is a complicated process, therefore, to reconcile the complexity of these notions of an altered human condition with any strategy that

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MacLeod may have in relating his narrative to issues of national identity. The crucial element of MacLeod’s argument appears to be that life-forms which have evolved beyond humanistic modes of thought are inevitably a danger to an authentically human way of life—or, to be precise, even if artificial intelligences or “posthumans” are instrumental in breaking the stranglehold of authoritarian governmental systems over their human subjects, any system which requires human beings to co-exist with other life-forms whose thought processes are more evolved (and whose minds operate at inconceivably increased speeds) will ultimately be to the detriment of biologically-based individuals. In this sense, MacLeod may be arguing towards the inherent risks involved in embracing a postmodern, post-nationalist Scotland, where notions of national identity become fragmented and misaligned to the point that traditional concepts of “Scottishness” cease to have any one particular meaning. The interrogation of these values may offer significant potential for national selfexamination, MacLeod seems to be suggesting, but in so doing great care must be taken to differentiate between cultural factors which are adaptable, and those which must remain constant. Given the paramount importance placed by MacLeod on a political system’s need to justify the validity of its purpose to those who it seeks to represent, this incongruity is treated as a cause of major concern. Indeed, the incomprehensible nature of the “fast folk” is analogous to the multiplyfragmented nature of modern life, lost in competing representations. Thinking of the postmodern condition, Jeremy Tambling argues that: Postmodernism has declared a virtual end to rational statement and a narrative that purports to explain. This is what we called a crisis of representation: a sense that twentieth-century narratives do not fit, do not refer to existent reality, which is itself not representable.75

It is conceivable that MacLeod seeks to lay emphasis on the fact that although postmodernism (and post-postmodernism) presents unprecedented opportunities to dismantle and re-examine approaches to the country’s cultural, social and political apparatus, to do so without a probable strategic endpoint in mind carries with it considerable danger. The difficulty of attempting to delineate national identity within the hazilydefined confines of a deconstructed, postmodern worldview is no exception to this approach, a fact which is not lost on MacLeod. He articulates his concerns surrounding the uncertain implications of postmodernity on the national condition through Wilde’s disturbing interactions with the “fast folk” as they enter a super-evolved state of advancement—one that he considers virtually incomprehensible in human

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terms, and consequently almost impossible to translate through conventional human observation: Decay beyond decadence, a stasis of frenzy and fatigue. Indefatigable mechanisms, beneath and beyond the giants’ conscious control, continued their relentless, pointless acceleration of processing speed. [...] Cities were built and torn down in what seemed to me were moments, against an evershifting backdrop of planetary landscapes. Eventually all human analogy and interest ceased. I drifted down endless corridors of geometric abstraction, the chopped logic of interminable arguments filling my mind, as if I were overhearing the trapped ghosts of theologians in a hell that only they could fully deserve. (The Stone Canal, pp. 383-84)

MacLeod’s tongue-in-cheek attack on the perceived inability of theological approaches to reconcile human experience with posthuman existence is particularly telling, for it chimes into a broader debate that in an increasingly secular society, the notion of “the Singularity” has come to supplant traditional religious concepts of “the Rapture”; as Vox Day observes, posthumanists “envision a detente between Man and Machine, wherein artificial intelligence will be wedded to intelligence amplification and other forms of technobiological modification to transform humanity and allow it to survive and perhaps even thrive in the Posthuman Era”.76 It seems, then, that in MacLeod‘s novel no society—regardless of how ostensibly utopian it may appear—can sustain the incorporated existence of members who are, in their thought process and therefore ideological configuration, not authentically human in nature. This presents parallels with discussions of the distinctiveness of national identity, and the degree to which Scotland’s ability to assimilate external cultural influences can ultimately extend. Interestingly, Mendlesohn notes that commentators such as “Ruth Levitas [have] asserted that a postmodernist utopia would need to embrace pluralism, without becoming pathological, and would need to envisage utopia as a process rather than representation”.77 This assertion brings to mind MacLeod’s earlier reflection that his fictional societies are, in a sense, built upon shifting sands, and posits the notion of how a society can exclude members which, although evolved beyond human comprehension, were originally human in nature, or at least (in the case of artificial intelligence) developed from human design. The sense that human interaction with “posthumans” could be an ongoing social process, and one which may change as human beings themselves evolve, is congruent with MacLeod’s consideration of an eternal universe of unending possibilities; as Joan Gordon notes, “recent utopian stories

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eschew actual utopias in favour of ongoing utopian thinking”,78 and this is certainly proven to be true of the Fall Revolution cycle as a whole. MacLeod is a complex political thinker as well as, in the view of Butler, “a true novelist. By this I mean that he is one of the finest practitioners of the novel as described by Mikhail Bakhtin”.79 His dexterous prose style and use of multiple viewpoints, including regular shifts between first- and third-person perspectives, marks out his work from other, more conventionally-written speculative fiction, both in Scotland and beyond; certainly Bakhtin, with his emphasis on the importance of dialogism and heteroglossia, would likely have approved of MacLeod’s incorporation of competing characters’ voices deriving from different social classes and ideological backgrounds, in addition to divergent physical and mental states of being. MacLeod’s complex use of structure, juxtaposing the near-modern day and far future, in addition to situating two parallel versions of the same character within the same timeframe and allowing them to interact with each other, provides a penetrating examination of the nature of the self. Yet it is with his energetic narrative vitality and his acute and far-reaching ideological exploration that MacLeod proves himself to be a significantly defining voice in modern Scottish (and, indeed, British) science fiction’s engagement with political issues. James Brown notes that: Much, even of what appears to be political sf, presents a stalled politics – either because historical transformation as such has been foreclosed as dangerously destabilising, or because, though transformation continues, it does so by seemingly non-political (especially technological) means. [...] For much sf, to the extent that the issue is raised, politics is part of the problem, to which, in its more hopeful moments, it has supposed science to be the solution.80

In considering Banks and MacLeod’s work in relation to other authors in the field of political speculative fiction, it has becomes apparent that while both authors have established a long-running preoccupation with many of their established themes (MacLeod re-engages with themes of socialist utopia and the posthuman in Newton’s Wake, 2004, for instance, while Banks returned to the darker aspects of the Culture’s ostensibly utopian existence in Look to Windward, 2000, and Matter, 2008), so too have these issues been revisited by later authors who have emerged since the turn of the century. The writings of Gary Gibson, for instance, owe much to the style of Banks’s broad-canvas space opera without capturing the same satirical bite or (in general terms) their ideological awareness. The prolific Charles Stross, on the other hand, has presented a number of

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critically well-received works which bear similarity to MacLeod’s work in the cyberpunk subgenre, even though his consideration of political issues is expressed very differently in both ideological and stylistic terms. For the moment, at least, no other Scottish author currently active in the field of political speculative fiction has yet matched the sheer creative vibrancy of Banks’s utopian vision, or the acute left-wing conceptual apparatus demonstrated so energetically and with such panache by MacLeod. Banks’s concept of the Culture has proven to be appealing to many readers for a period of well over twenty years, and his notion of an interstellar economy based upon free abundance of production rather than capital exchange has remained a compelling one. Yet the liberated, utopian vision of the Culture, simultaneously monumental and diffusely anarchistic, is rather different from the highly dynamic social change of MacLeod’s Fall Revolution novels, though both present issues of significance to the subject of national identity. As Carolyn Brown considers, the issue of what comprises a particular utopian state of being is itself a point of contention, and Banks was knowing in his presentation of such a unique socio-political vision as a response to the structure and limitations of modern society, both in terms of the moribund nature of current democratic party politics and the need to constantly re-evaluate and re-energise cultural and ideological imperatives: “Utopia” as a term is necessarily ambivalent; within our cultural heritage and indeed in Banks’ novels, it operates across two terms. The one is the imposition of a certain “Culture” upon all, whether they wish it or not—an imperialist formulation of one destiny and one state of being. One offers too, a consolatory fiction. Hence Foucault’s formulation, and the reluctance of many to speak of “Utopia”. The other is the desire to imagine a world beyond greed and oppression, a world where we are not limited by our class, our race, our gender, where physical and cultural needs are fulfilled. A place from which we can imagine this state of being and criticise “how it is here and now”. A device which stops the other consolatory fiction of “that is how it is and nothing will change it” dead in its tracks. It is through the construction of multiple other worlds, heterotopias, that this utopian project takes place.81

Whether a utopia is galactic in scale, as in Banks, or confined to a particular community as suggested by MacLeod, it is a concept which served both authors well in their respective vectors of thematic engagement. With his emphasis on a specifically (if far from narrow) ideological approach to science fiction, providing dynamic models of future political systems which are pluralistic and contradictory, MacLeod provides a powerful counterpoint to the overly-recognisable conventions

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of the science fiction genre that James Brown has identified, and his distinctive, persuasively argued political views—combined with his willing engagement with, and progression of, traditional science fiction themes—has ensured his retention of a formidable literary reputation amongst contemporary Scottish science fiction novelists. For Banks, who so adroitly subverted many long-held conventions of the space opera subgenre, one of his most lasting achievements may rest in the fact, as Christopher Palmer notes, that he has “embraced these features [of excess and tension] in the course of expressing intuitions about contemporary anxieties. A post-modernizing of the galactic-empire novel—most obvious in the way these novels emulate and exceed other sf—ends up expressing the anxieties of the postmodern condition”.82 MacLeod’s deeply ideological take on the nature of nationhood, which he would later explore further in novels such as Cydonia (1998), is particularly noteworthy given the time of the Fall Revolution cycle’s publication. Carla Sassi notes that “in the changing cultural climate of post-devolutionary Scotland, cyberpunk becomes a powerful tool of revision,” adding that “MacLeod’s relativising journey through different geographical figurations, which challenges us with the possibility of a dynamic, transformative landscape [...], stage[s] the conflict between synthetic globalism and the desire for national/regional identity and envisage new im/possibilities of harmonisation between these opposing pulls”.83 Indeed, MacLeod’s indirect approach to exploring Scottish national identity through the use of futuristic socio-cultural proxies is compelling in its expression of cultural characteristics which are flexible while also essentially durable, and quite possibly robust precisely because of their adaptability. Here too there is congruence with Banks’s Culture, which—for all its technological primacy—owes its sense of permanence more to the integration and inclusiveness of its socio-political apparatus rather than it does to its force of arms. For Banks, as with MacLeod, there is a sense that a national identity is not only a defined phenomenon which must be contested and interrogated, but that it also possesses definitional power of its own: whether reflected in the tacit shunning of the sterile technocratic benevolence of the Culture, or in the ability of Wilde and Reid to replicate distinctively Scottish characteristics of innovation and self-determination in extra-national locales, the emphasis very much remains upon the capacity of national traits to adapt and diversify in order to meet changing social and cultural demands. Yet while it cannot be denied that both authors have a tendency to consider Scottish nationhood only from a remote and rather oblique standpoint, rarely if ever addressing the issue in a manner that addresses

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Scotland explicitly, their contribution to—and scrutiny of—the notion of identity is nevertheless timely in their contemplation of this topic. Their considerations, which provide scant room for any overt celebration of Scottish cultural mores, point to a profound ideological uncertainty over Scotland’s ultimate future, and came at a time when—as Tom Devine and Paddy Logue observe—the distinctiveness of the country’s manifold national characteristics were under increasing scrutiny: “A historic shift seems to be underway in the nature of national identity. For most of the last three centuries, the majority of Scots were comfortable with a dual identity in which the sense of Scottish distinctiveness could complement and indeed reinforce the broader emotional loyalty to Britishness”.84 Both Banks and MacLeod seem guarded at best with regard to their attitude to the issues underpinning any scrutiny of Scottish national identity, apparently eager for the intricacy of their respective conceptual and ideological approaches to reflect their position rather than to address it in anything other than an implicit way. Devine and Logue note that the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a “rich complexity of changing identity from a varied range of opinion. The question, ‘Who are we?’ continues to perplex many Scots today”.85 This question looms large in MacLeod’s Cartesian exploration of posthuman identity, to say nothing of the withering conclusions drawn by Banks’s Culture survey when analysing human society, and yet both authors are at pains to emphasise that no one overarching answer is forthcoming, or perhaps even possible. The force of change and ideological adaptability that is emphasised in the work of both Banks and MacLeod is significant, even if they rarely offer an unconcealed appraisal of Scottish nationhood. With their keen awareness of existing, fixed and recognisable conventions within the science fiction genre, the possibility certainly exists that these authors are so accustomed to creating strikingly inventive social structures of their own invention that an eagerness to address issues of national identity is largely subordinated to more universal concerns which transcend traditional notions of statehood. This is, however, only to examine one particular form of speculative fiction in modern Scottish writing. The following chapter will discuss the manner in which some other novels of Scottish speculative fiction, such as Margaret Elphinstone’s The Incomer, underscore a deep willingness to suppress technological and social development in order to maintain an essentially invariable present, a direct opposition to MacLeod’s The Stone Canal which instead accentuates the benefits of a constantly evolving society, harnessing a technocratic future in order to secure beneficial prospects for all. For Elphinstone, human life

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is a natural cycle which should be synchronous with the needs of the environment. But in MacLeod’s acutely masculinist approach to worldbuilding, nature exists merely to be harnessed for the benefit of humans, and life becomes a mutable concept where corporeal reality is adaptable and death seems far from final. Likewise, we will see that Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go proposes a culturally moribund future, where a jaded population is sustained by advanced but faltering technologies in a cyberpunk dystopia which forms a dark mirror-image of the enlightened technocracy evident in Banks’s Culture. In the work of MacLeod and Banks, change is not only beneficial, but a force to be revelled in, even given its many unpredictable and capricious forms. MacLeod’s starkly political standpoint and celebration of metropolitan futurity, societal malleability and (above all) dynamic change, combined with Banks’s innovative reinvigoration of the space opera subgenre, has meant that the work of both authors has proven to be massively influential upon later Scottish contributions to the science fiction genre, and continues to be so.

CHAPTER THREE MARGARET ELPHINSTONE’S THE INCOMER (1987) AND MATTHEW FITT’S BUT N BEN A-GO-GO (2000)

We have seen in the work of Banks and MacLeod an approach to speculative fiction which is, although in radically different ways, profoundly technological and political in nature. However, to suggest that their work offers anything more than an indirect (and sometimes rather circuitous) assessment of Scottish national identity would seem a tenuous assessment at best. Attention amongst the speculative fiction community has been given to ideological issues appearing in Scottish works in the field which have been published since the 1980s, leading to the publications of critical anthologies such as The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod (2003) by Reading’s Science Fiction Foundation, but discussions of nationhood have remained relatively uncommon. Yet it must be noted that not all Scottish speculative fiction texts are as specifically political as the work of Banks and MacLeod, and neither have the cyberpunk and space operatic subgenres completely dominated the field. Other authors, including Margaret Elphinstone and Matthew Fitt, have produced texts which deal with issues of Scottish national identity in interesting and multifaceted ways, and have engaged with themes relating to environmental and post-apocalyptic fiction within locations based within Scotland itself rather than the far-flung extraterrestrial locales of MacLeod and Banks’s work. These subgenres, while long-recognised within the field of science fiction, have evolved significantly over the past several decades, affected by the rise and dissolution of the Cold War and (more recently) debates over global warming and sustainable development. In this section, by examining Elphinstone’s The Incomer (1987) and Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000), I will discuss the manner in which these two novels—both located within distinctive Scottish environments which are situated in futuristic timeframes—succeed in

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developing a number of themes which have become characteristic to recent speculative fiction, while also relating their narratives to wider issues of individual and national identity. Margaret Elphinstone (1948-) is a Kent-born academic and author who, although raised in England, has achieved prominence in modern Scottish literature due to the critical success of her poetry, short prose fiction and numerous historical novels, including most prominently The Sea Road (2000), Voyageurs (2003) and Light (2005). Her career in fiction has its origins in the late 1980s with texts which have become aligned with speculative fiction, namely The Incomer in 1987 and A Sparrow’s Flight in 1989, and later, an anthology of short fiction which contained elements of fantasy and magical realism (An Apple From a Tree, 1991). It is perhaps significant to note with regard to the duology of The Incomer and A Sparrow’s Flight, her first two novels, that although both books were published as science fiction, Elphinstone herself has expressed surprise at this, claiming that “I considered the fact that, as far as I knew, I never read science fiction. I thought I had written a novel which drew its imagery from the Galloway countryside and folk tradition”.1 Yet in spite of her apparent puzzlement at how these novels have come to be categorised, both texts are of particular interest to the study of this field at the period in which they were written, due to the fact that—as Dorothy McMillan notes—“the special qualities of Elphinstone’s work [...] have something to do with its affinity with and its deviation from the post-apocalyptic fiction of its day”.2 Although the direction of her literary output has changed over the years, Elphinstone remains almost certainly the most recognisable of female contributors to Scottish speculative fiction, and the primacy of this profile has not been seriously challenged by the emergence of later novels such as Jane McCaa’s The Politics of Illusion (2003) or Emma Maree Urquhart’s Dragon Tamers (2004). The Cold War greatly influenced Western popular culture from the 1950s, but had a particularly potent effect throughout the heightened geopolitical anxieties of the 1980s. The threat of nuclear devastation and extrapolated post-holocaust societies, familiar factors to readers and filmgoers for two decades and more, became themes which were to be repeatedly revisited throughout the course of the eighties. Yet postapocalyptic fiction had in fact become one of the most popular subgenres in science fiction literature long before the descent of the Iron Curtain, and indeed it is historically one of the best established. David Pringle observes that: Apocalyptic visions enjoyed a brief literary vogue in the early years of the 19th century, the most notable being Mary Shelley’s great-plague story

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The Last Man (1826) and Edgar Allan Poe’s brief account of “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), but it was not until the end of the century that they became a prominent feature of popular fiction.3

Certainly there have been many renowned British contributions to the post-apocalyptic subgenre over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a number of which have achieved lasting prominence from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) to John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), not to mention another Scottish novelist’s vision of guerrilla survival in the Scottish hills in Ian MacPherson’s Wild Harbour (1936). Although the catastrophes which motivate these fictions can range from the environmental to the elemental, and even the extraterrestrial, Elphinstone’s novels were to avoid any explicit discussion of the nature of the disaster which shapes the post-apocalyptic society that she depicts, instead focusing exclusively on its aftermath. She does, however, stay true to a notable characteristic of the subgenre, namely that “such tales often combine a bleak appreciation of the loss of civilized values with a nostalgic affection for the small-scale rural communities which the survivors must re-establish”.4 Although this approach has been applied widely in literary speculative fiction over the years, perhaps most notably in George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) and, to a lesser extent, in the far-future sections of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Elphinstone’s methodology proves to be quite different in tone, and her work seems more concerned with the relationship between human beings and the natural world than it is with the changing, often hostile dynamics which exist between (and within) societies. One of the most noteworthy factors of The Incomer, as alluded to above, is the extent to which Elphinstone sidesteps any direct discussion of the fate which has befallen the Earth. The reader is told on many occasions that “the world had to change” (The Incomer, p. 223), yet Elphinstone is scrupulous in evading the issue of what precise impetus had brought the planet’s pre-existing social fabric to ruin. Whilst it is not unusual for postapocalyptic narratives to commence long after the initial period of motivating disaster, it is much rarer to observe a narrative which makes no reference at any time to the nature of the catalyst which brought their unfamiliar societies into being. It is a strategy which proves to be uncommonly effective; as McMillan observes, “a nuclear war or accident would have perhaps limited the applicability of the fable which can now take on new meanings in the light of our current ecological concerns”.5 Even on the rare occasions where Elphinstone does allude to the world of the past, it is with considerable ambiguity:

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The reader is never directly confronted with the urban relics of the bygone culture described here, nor indeed is there ever an explanation as to how the many complexities of modern society have been destroyed so thoroughly that humanity has returned to the primitive subsistence state depicted. The novel is set in and around the isolated village of Clachanpluck, and although Elphinstone situates the community’s location within Scotland, its actual geographical position is never explicitly pinpointed. The only clue on offer can be found in the novel’s ambiguous opening paragraph, where we are told that “the crossroads was the reason for the village. The village happened because of the travellers crossing from one town to another” (The Incomer, p. 1). However, given her claim of having been influenced by the literature and legends originating in the Galloway countryside, some commentators have suggested a correlation with the “Clachanpluck” of Samuel Rutherford Crockett’s The Raiders (1894), now known as the village of Laurieston.6 This connection is an intriguing one. Although Crockett was well-known for composing fiction in the Kailyard tradition towards the end of the nineteenth century, The Raiders was in fact an historical adventure novel, removed in tone from his earlier writings which had concerned Scottish village life in the Galloway area. Yet considering that Crockett was one of the most prominent figures of the Kailyard movement, along with authors such as Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie, Elphinstone’s decision to locate her novel almost entirely within the confines of “Clachanpluck” may suggest some evocation of that movement’s involvement with (and examination of) life within rustic rural communities. However, she entirely avoids the romanticised, idealistic approach identified with Kailyard writing in works such as Maclaren’s Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush (1894), Barrie’s Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and indeed Crockett’s own The Stickit Minister (1893), in order to address the physical hardship and drudgery of a nonindustrialised society which is driven entirely by manual labour. Richard Cook notes that traditional attitudes towards the Kailyard school have often been deprecatory:

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Characterised by its simple versions of pastoral Scotland rather than serious historical representation, Kailyard fiction arranges its exotic scenes of caricatured backwards folk figures around interchangeable conventional tropes and themes of love, covenantry, and sentimentalised rural life to contribute to a mythic depiction of Scottish history.7

Elphinstone deftly subverts these long-recognised features of Kailyardism; her characters are never “backwards” and her depiction of rural life is far from “sentimentalised”, but yet her employment of the mythic proves to be crucially important. Just as the Kailyard movement had, at times, employed various aspects of folklore in its fiction, Elphinstone was to make significant use of the legendary throughout The Incomer. Her engagement with this approach during the late 1980s is analogous with Andrew Nash’s observation that “although Kailyard is commonly understood as an event in Scottish literary history it is in fact a critical term that has been used in various ways to help structure the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland”,8 and indeed it is but one connection that exists between The Incomer and previous trends in Scottish fiction. It is, perhaps, of value to examine the manner in which an employment of Kailyard traditions is advantageous to Elphinstone’s approach to the issue of Scottish national identity. Elphinstone’s calculated attempt to harness and rework specific elements of Kailyardism—the folklore and superstitions, the community life of the village, and so forth—hearken back to a bygone age that has lodged firmly within the national consciousness, and allows her to construct a future which is deeply unfamiliar in terms of some social imperatives whilst simultaneously also proving, in cultural terms, immediately recognisable. This subversion of the Kailyard tradition is quite at odds with other applications of the movement’s customs in recent years. Duncan Petrie, for instance, notes that the trappings of the Kailyard have been exploited by popular culture for economic ends: Such images [of the Kailyard] have become particularly allied to the kind of touristic national promotion—memorably dubbed “Scotland the Brand” by David McCrone—consistent with the shift from an era of industrial capitalism to a service-based, leisure economy. [...] What is more important is that alternative cultural expressions and representations are identified, discussed and analysed in order to counter such market-driven distortions.9

Elphinstone’s explicit rejection of the overarching power and influence of late monopoly capitalism throughout her novel does, it seems, speak of a broader preoccupation with the tendency of international market forces

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to challenge and undermine traditional assumptions of any one authentic Scottish national identity. Although she does not address the politics of these concerns either as specifically or as directly as MacLeod, she situates her solution much more firmly within a cultural environment which demonstrates recognisably Scottish underpinnings. Elphinstone postulates a future which has seen Scotland develop towards a kind of post-historical end-point which is presented not as a melange of technological advancement and cultural diversity, but rather as a regression into the preindustrial, subsistence existence of times past, as envisaged through her embrace of traditional agrarian husbandry and assertively non-literary cultural pursuits. In her ambiguous apocalypse there is also, perhaps, a suggestion of an out-of-control market economy in the world that had come before: one which has grown so all-encompassing that it has, in effect, sown the seeds of its own downfall—by offering choice so abundant, providing its own replacement had ultimately become a logical progression of consumer preference. Here, Elphinstone suggests a fairly profound anxiety with the direction of modern Scotland, and perhaps even the Western world at large. In depicting the country’s ability to adapt to extreme change—carving a form of localism from the bones of globalisation—she recognises its progressive aptitude to embrace forces of social transformation while retaining recognisable core cultural imperatives, and yet there is also recognisable apprehension in her consideration of the fact that the re-establishment and flourishing of a fundamental, monolithic Scottish identity can only be achieved by embracing a lost and possibly mythic historical past. However, for all her endorsement of the virtues of the community spirit of the agricultural past in demarcating the essence of a particularly Scottish sense of nationhood, Elphinstone’s posited future also stipulates some radical social shifts which draw upon changes in both class and gender. These combine to empower the female characters in ways that would have been largely impermissible within the Kailyard tradition that Elphinstone seeks to reconfigure. As Carol Anderson and Glenda Norquay suggest, an exploration of these female roles is vitally important in terms of realigning what had been a hitherto male-dominated interpretation of Scottish national identity: If men need to see Scottishness in terms of virility, they must also find a role for women in their schema. As a correlative to their own actively masculine identity, women are seen as objects which romantically symbolise the nation. In this role women are inevitably constrained. In seeking his own identity, therefore, the male Scot contributes to the process of women’s inferiorisation.10

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The inhabitants of Elphinstone’s Clachanpluck have reverted to an unsophisticated agrarian lifestyle, and in place of feudalism or a centralised governing council they are led by an informal hereditary gynocracy assembled from the female heads of prominent families within the village. Much emphasis is placed on the importance of the female role in childbearing, and monogamous sexual relationships have gradually become obsolete as the villagers strive to improve and expand the community’s gene pool by seeking out the most promising available partners irrespective of marital or cohabitational ties. This specifically feminist social structure is particularly intriguing to consider with regard to how the male role is essentially subordinate; while adult men remain crucial to the breeding process, their traditional social roles have become redundant and are now considered distantly archaic. Males are excluded from the community’s decision-making process, and as all of the village’s executive posts are appointed rather than elected there is no obvious democratic system in evidence. John Clute thus describes the world of The Incomer as being both “post-patriarchal [and] post-technological”,11 and indeed the strongly community-oriented system in place throughout Clachanpluck presents a society where manual agricultural labour and a bleakly utilitarian existence is evocative of a long-departed rural tradition. This agrarian way of life has been revived, through necessity, to meet the changing needs of society following the undisclosed disaster which has befallen the planet. It is useful, in this sense, to consider James Berger’s assertion that “post-apocalyptic representations often respond to historical catastrophes and that, either explicitly or obliquely, the apocalypses of post-apocalyptic representations are historical events”.12 If we are to consider Berger’s point of view in relation to The Incomer, however, it must be noted that Elphinstone’s indistinctly-defined holocaust appears to be a reaction against widespread attitudes of acceptance in the modern world towards excessive consumption, overpopulation and a failure to respect the natural environment, as opposed to more common historical anxieties expressed in other post-apocalyptic fictions. This is particularly true of the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the philosophy of mutually assured destruction, which had been comprehensively explored over the course of past decades in novels such as Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) and Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969). As Brian Aldiss notes, the atomic strikes of late World War II sharply altered writers’ perceptions with regard to post-apocalyptic fiction, meaning that from the late 1940s onwards “the old power fantasies were rising to the surface of reality. Many stories were of Earth destroyed, culture doomed,

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humanity dying, and of the horrific effects of radiation, which brought mutation or hideous death”.13 The social relevance of this situation continued to develop throughout the course of the Cold War and beyond, as Peter Nicholls comments: Life after the holocaust is a theme that continues to grip the imagination. The idea of destroying our crowded, bureaucratic world and then rebuilding afresh offers an exciting psychic freedom. The rusting symbols of a technological past protruding into a more primitive, natural, future landscape are among the most potent of sf’s icons.14

There is significant resonance between Nicholls’s observation and Edwin Muir’s poem “The Horses” (1955), for just as Muir creates evocative imagery of a society that has faced catastrophe,15 he also presages Elphinstone’s work by delineating a post-apocalyptic society which is left with no alternative but to revert to traditional agrarian means (with some sense of relief) in order to survive.16 It is this essential need to revive agricultural traditions, in order to better live in harmony with nature as much as to survive following catastrophe, which preoccupies Elphinstone so profoundly. It is useful, in terms of an engagement with Scottish national identity, to note that in retreating from a clear and unambiguous place in history, The Incomer also inevitably affects a withdrawal from modernity: a reversion to Kailyard environmental conditions rather than simply offering a romanticised reflection of them. This is not solely represented by the characters’ suspicion of technology or fear of the social innovations of their more advanced predecessors; Clachanpluck is depicted as a very culturally homogenous community, devoid of ethnic and religious diversity in a manner which was far removed from the increasingly multicultural Scotland of the 1980s. Yet although the world of Elphinstone’s novel appears to have next to no room for orthodox religious matters, at least in terms of the mainstream of organised religion, there is considerable exploration of spirituality which—in its embracing of the natural order and the sacred feminine—almost borders on the pagan or Wiccan in origin, and suggests both a break from the traditional establishment and a revisiting of ancient druidic conventions. Likewise, the novel’s apparent lack of racial diversity once again calls to mind the traditional monolithic Scots ethnicity of the Kailyard tradition, while the progressiveness of its feministic power structure—subordinating the male gender and dispelling traditional notions of monogamy—suggests a rather more permissive and iconoclastic worldview. This intricate series of dichotomies—religious, cultural and social—signals not only a determined

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thematic strategy on Elphinstone’s part to delineate the rupturing of Clachanpluck from the expectations of the present day, but also an homologous evocation of Scotland’s own complex, multipartite national identity throughout the twentieth century. As Cairns Craig observes: Scotland was both a centre and a periphery—was both peripheral (in a United Kingdom) and yet central (to many communities around the world who identified themselves with it). Scotland was a new kind of nation: at once ancient and rooted and yet, at the same time, modern and dispersed; at once local—and often accused of being parochial—and yet at the very forefront of the technologies which were producing a world as globalised as its people. It was a “nation” for which “nation theory”, in the twentieth as much as the nineteenth century, had no explanation.17

Writing in the mid-1980s, contemporaneous with the then-glacial Cold War geopolitics of the Reagan and Gorbachev administrations, Elphinstone’s work reached publication at the time of a considerable resurgence of interest in post-apocalyptic fiction, including texts which dealt with the survival of societies following nuclear holocaust (Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, 1980), global pandemic (Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark, 1984), biological desolation (Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985), and catastrophic cosmological impact on the planet (Greg Bear’s The Forge of God, 1987). Yet even while the plot of The Incomer evades any such straightforward categorisation, being as much involved with a matriarchal political collective as it is with the societal effects of environmental disaster, it can nevertheless be argued that Elphinstone’s novel is very much a product of its time. Alison Phipps notes that “Elphinstone’s early science fantasy writing tilts the world, helping us to view the contemporary through a different lens, that of the past. What is, for us today, is judged in the subjunctive mood, as if it had already been”.18 Certainly her presentation of Clachanpluck is noteworthy for the careful contrast that it strikes between the demanding, laborious lifestyles of the villagers and the thoughtful nature of their individual characters; the way of life that they lead may at face value appear crude and unrefined, but the villagers themselves are largely an erudite and contemplative group, sophisticated in ways that are not immediately apparent. For example, Elphinstone creates a world where virtually no books have been left undamaged in the wake of the holocaust, and only a few villagers have retained the skill to read what little textual material remains. If this suggests a break from received wisdom, wilful or otherwise, Elphinstone is quick to emphasise the importance of oral history as an effective alternative. On the other hand, in this society the subject of consulting

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accounts of historical events—and, by implication, the forces which had caused society to change so dramatically—has become so taboo within Clachanpluck that even the attempted interpretation of bygone texts is a task that has become infused with wariness and suspicion: Emily turned round, the poker still in her hand, and looked at him enthusiastically. “Don’t you ever think, George, there was once so much that was different in the world, so many things written across it like writing on a slate, and suddenly it was all wiped out – but carelessly, so there are just little bits of words left here and there, which would have a meaning if one was able to make a context to them.” “There is no context now,” said George. “We’re in a different world.” “But we’re still people. You know, look at this.” Emily laid down the poker and picked up one of the books, handling it very gently as if it might fall apart at any moment. “Such an ancient thing it is, look, but when you open it, if you can make out the words, there’s a person speaking to you, just as you sit next to me in the same room and speak to me now. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, that so much can happen, so much has been destroyed for ever, and across all that one human being can reach out and touch another with nothing more substantial than a voice?” (The Incomer, pp. 61-62)

Emily’s strangely oblique reference to the past raises interesting questions about the timeframe of the novel’s setting. Her distrust of the written word, and the almost mythic significance that is attributed to it, seems to indicate that The Incomer takes place during a far-future point in time, as does the renewal metaphor situated around the regenerative powers of the forest which surrounds the village. However, other factors are suggestive of a less distant future, such as Patrick’s fully operational shotgun which—although invested with even greater destructive potential than the implied corrupting influence of the printed word—is presented as a less “ancient” or ethereal danger. This ambiguity is never resolved, and lends Elphinstone’s narrative a form of mythic indistinctness that is suggestive of a complex moral fable, albeit an unconventional one. In contrast to literacy, which carries with it a strong suggestion of the perils of a forbidden past, the citizens of Clachanpluck have a much closer affinity to performance art such as music and dance. Whereas the written word’s unequivocal reflection of the society responsible for its production presents an implied peril of somehow transmitting the destructive values of the past into an ostensibly well-balanced post-apocalyptic present, musical performance appears to contain less hazardous undercurrents, preserving the cultural heritage of its origins while communicating nothing of its potentially corrosive danger: “There was no music written down for

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anyone to read in her world, but the music itself had lived on in a chain of memory which remained unbroken when almost everything else out of the previous world had vanished into ruin and forgetfulness” (The Incomer, p. 33). Indeed, the Celtic origins of the village’s social dances and the spontaneously improvised folk music all combine to assist in Elphinstone’s development of an identifiable cultural identity both within Clachanpluck and, to a lesser extent, the wider Scotland which exists tantalisingly beyond its confines. Yet even here, with the emphasis placed on Naomi’s patchwork of different musical styles from bygone ages, the reader must consider the issue of just how distant the origins of her compositions actually are. Music is a vitally important motif in The Incomer; it is a commodity prized by the villagers more than material goods, even given the acute scarcity of their way of life. It is also significant that Elphinstone should choose as the novel’s most prominent symbol a force which carries considerable power yet which can take no physical form, particularly given the intrinsic role played by music in the natural order of folklore: “Seen as a mystical order, music was linked with the origin of life in some traditions [...] where sound is regarded as the primordial vibration of divine energy”.19 This description, from The Complete Dictionary of Symbols in Myth, Art and Literature (2004), seems particularly relevant later in the novel when Elphinstone comes to link music with The Incomer’s wider theme of renewal, and indeed the reader is left in no doubt of its intrinsic significance to the community of Clachanpluck. In solo and ensemble performance, as well as its implementation in dance, Elphinstone continually emphasises the central importance of music as a force of coherence in the village. Yet it is in the nature mythology sections of the novel where the significance of music is most notably stressed in relation to human interaction with the wider natural world, suggesting a new primal Eden which stands apart from social hierarchy: The music reached right in over the walls. The gate had no power against it, and the weapons of violence could not keep it out. The walls around the clearing were flung down, the gate was broken open, the weapons dismantled, and the people came out and joined with the beings of the forest and made music. (The Incomer, p.10)

In spite of this apparent allusion to the Scottish romantic tradition, it is important to note that the mythological underpinnings of music— specifically its function as a kind of genesis catalyst or activator mechanism—have long been established in fantasy fiction. Perhaps the

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most prominent exponent of utilising music as a means of originating all subsequent culture and social narrative was J.R.R. Tolkien, who in The Silmarillion (1977) provides the opening “Ainulindalë” to outline the beginnings of his Middle-earth saga with the revelation that all of creation was weaved into being from an initially harmonious musical theme.20 Yet Elphinstone appears keen to eschew the divine profundity of Tolkien’s celestial approach to the creation fable, instead taking care to present a much more nature-oriented mythology which—with its pensively suspicious (even paranoid) humans and benign, anthropomorphic beasts of the forest—offers the reader a much more ambivalent and earthy genesis story than that of the irrefutable authority of the deities depicted by Tolkien and others. Her employment of quasi-Biblical language, employed as it is within a tale of mythic origin, suggests an attempt to posit a new kind of starting point for society; one which is not predicated upon divine judgement or religious faith, but rather upon an individual and collective responsibility to live in harmony with the planet, its ecosystem and its lifeforms—a Gospel According to Gaia. Central to the action of The Incomer is the arrival of Naomi, a travelling musician who has, for many years, lived in self-imposed exile from her home in Donegal. Naomi is an especially gifted fiddle player, and her music entrances the villagers of Clachanpluck to the point that they invite her to spend the winter with them. Yet given the destruction of written musical notation across the country, her performances are the product of an accumulation of the many recitals to which she has borne witness throughout the duration of her travels, and thus the music that she plays is a complex melange of improvisation and fragmentary reflections of bygone composers: “It came out of the past, that music. It belonged to the time before the world changed, and when she brought it back again into the world it was as new as the leaves are every spring” (The Incomer, p. 51). The invigorating, cathartic power of music is key to the novel’s underlying subject of liberation and the wider theme of regeneration, and in ways that the written text cannot embody. Indeed, there are suggestions throughout the course of The Incomer that the characters are engaged in a continual struggle against the cyclical nature of history, fighting the reemergence of the atavistic brutality evident in the old world and thus working to bring about the emergence of a new, lasting society which is based upon a continual connection with ecology and ecological needs: “The summer dwells in the heart of winter,” she said, “and the promise of the summer is the return of the dark. [...] I thought once that my time would be the time that changed everything,” went on Emily, “I thought

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that in the present the past might be healed, and not carried on into the future. But it can’t be done.” (The Incomer, p. 161)

The link between advanced technology—in particular, weapons technology—and an amplified threat of social devastation within human society on an international scale had, of course, been made before. In terms of Scottish speculative fiction, perhaps the best-known novel to explore these anxieties prior to Elphinstone’s work was Margot Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1955), where a group of African explorers recolonise the United Kingdom following its earlier atomic decimation. More notably influential to a far wider extent within the genre, though composed by an American author rather than a Scottish one, is Walter M. Miller’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), perhaps the quintessential post-apocalyptic work of the post-War period. In that text, fragmentary remnants of society survive the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust and, over the course of several centuries, its people manage to reconstruct a highly developed civilisation which can claim technological achievements on par with the preapocalypse world. They are then forced to witness the repetition of history when warmongering factions bring about an even more destructive catastrophe. Elphinstone, wary of this notion of self-perpetuating annihilation, appears eager to explore alternative strategies. However, as Adam Roberts notes, Miller interprets “nuclear annihilation as a function of mankind’s original sin, rather than as a political or technological dilemma”.21 By contrast, in Elphinstone’s novel the threat of a seeminglyinevitable replication of past historical events—and how it may be combated—remains a prominent consideration. Her concern seems more deeply rooted in the Scottish mythic literary tradition than with conventional science fiction tropes, offering an alternative direction for the national social character which is, in its way, no less revolutionary than the posited futuristic technocracies of Banks and MacLeod. By exploring the ability of a changing environment to shape social mores within a particular locality—and one which is specifically situated in Scotland—Elphinstone displays an approach which is only tangentially correspondent to more customary speculative fiction methodology. As Patrick D. Murphy emphasises, for instance, “living organisms invariably act as catalysts for change within ecologies, sometimes only to the degree of quantitative change and other times to the degree of qualitative change. [...] Numerous sf stories rely on the reversal of self-other/resident-alien/domestic-exotic relationships”.22 Yet Elphinstone emphasises that society must control and even suppress societal and technological development, rather than allow the march of progress to inadvertently control and suppress individuals

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and communities; regression into a pre-technological state may have been brought about by external means, but this unexpected development does carry with it new possibilities for sweeping reconfiguration. The desire for widespread cultural improvement by means of actively impeding the restoration of the preceding social order is an absorbing one which Elphinstone reveals gradually throughout the course of the text: “It’s something out of the past,” said Emily hoarsely, her teeth chattering still. “I think it’s the past. Or perhaps only a possibility. But we carry it into our own time. If a space is left for it, we can make ourselves the inheritors of a dream we never chose.” She slipped, and George staggered and regained their balance. “Do I make sense to you? Do you understand me?” “I could never doubt you for a moment,” said George. “We affect one another. Time is not a strong enough thing to prevent that. Time is no healer. Not if the patient is no longer there.” (The Incomer, p. 158)

Once again, the characters of The Incomer remind the reader of the strange mutability of passing time, reinforcing the mythic status of their current point of existence which seems far from any fixed or documented period of history. Elphinstone makes the point, albeit subtly, that it is as though Clachanpluck exists not so much at the end of time, but rather outside of its invariant confines. Although the villagers’ living conditions are unrefined, and their continued survival dependent upon unremitting hard work, there is no tangible desire to return to the consumer-driven, technologically-aided ways of the past. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. Although bartering between villages is not unknown, most settlements emphasise autonomy and self-sufficiency, and the only character who even tangentially seeks to recapture the apparatus of the pre-holocaust age is Patrick, the novel’s antagonist. Like Naomi, Patrick has travelled beyond the confines of the community, though in his case for very different reasons. After a long journey of self-discovery which takes him to the north of England, he returns to Clachanpluck discontented, newly hardened against the villagers’ harmonious but seemingly unambitious way of life, and in possession of a shotgun which he has purchased on his travels. This weapon serves as a compelling metaphor for the destructive nature of society prior to the apocalypse—as one character notes, at the time of the novel’s events “there’s no craft for making such a thing as that left in the world” (The Incomer, p. 204). His desire for hunting is at odds with the domestic agronomic cultivation favoured by the rest of the villagers, and the shotgun also serves as Patrick’s ultimate downfall; after

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committing a brutal rape on one of the villagers—Anna, a close childhood friend—he is hunted down and shot dead in retribution by his own firearm. Patrick’s violent transgression cannot be forgiven by the villagers, and this is not solely due to the viciousness of his sexually-motivated attack. It is more than the vicious molestation of an innocent which provokes the community’s fury, for there is also a perception of an implied assault on their deeply-held values that all life derives from the land and must therefore be respected, lest the catastrophic mistakes of the past are repeated: “‘There is only one crime,’ said Emily, ‘And that is the crime against the land. The land is within each of us. We only hurt ourselves’” (The Incomer, p. 215). As McMillan notes, contravention of this fundamental law assures Patrick’s demise: “Because the body of the woman figures the land itself, rape is the only crime still recognised”.23 Patrick also embodies something of the conflict of the old world order, with his cold, morose disposition and preference for the efficient, solitary hunting of deer in the forest as opposed to the longer-term labours of working the land and respecting the community. As hunting, in anthropological terms, is a discipline even older than agricultural development, we can discern a clear contrast between the distinctively feminist ideals of the society depicted by Elphinstone and the diffusionism of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s romanticised rural existence, where the huntergatherer is mythologised and upheld as a kind of legendary figure who existed before the ills and tribulations of civilisation. There is, however, no romanticised vision of the distant past to be discerned in Patrick’s character; his inclination towards abrasiveness, unrestrained brutality and refusal to collaborate with the wider community mark him out exclusively as a force of dangerous negativity, a counter-productive encumbrance which the villagers cannot endure. It could be argued that he is the manifestation of traditional Scottish masculinity, which is shown to have no place in Elphinstone’s alternative social structure, and indeed his actions demonstrate clearly that he is diametrically at odds with the pacifistic and communitarian values which are being actively advanced by Clachanpluck’s inhabitants. As Phipps suggests: In her two earliest novels Elphinstone uses science fiction as a vehicle for writing nonviolent fiction. These are fictions of nonviolence which work as science fiction in order to enable worlds to be created where the lessons of violence have been learned. The alternatives offered, through myth, history, feminism, and liberation theology, allow varieties of nonviolent philosophy and theology to take hold imaginatively as well as politically. Through science fiction, Elphinstone is free to explore the evidence of what is feared, and what is often the subject of science fiction writing, the

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It seems ironic to note that Patrick, unquestionably the plot’s most powerful agent, is also the weakest individual in terms of characterisation. While Elphinstone expends considerable effort in foreshadowing Patrick’s violent actions, and makes apparent the villagers’ unspoken acknowledgment of his outsider status following his departure from (and return to) Clachanpluck, the psychological explanation for the coarsening of his behaviour is only hazily delineated—especially given that the reader has no comparative evidence of the character prior to his journey to England. This is particularly apparent given the nuanced approach to other male characters who, deprived of traditional patriarchal roles, make Patrick’s exaggeratedly masculine antagonism all the more apparent. With the community’s ruling council composed entirely of women and directed by appointed female leaders, the subsidiary purpose of the male villagers— unconnected to Clachanpluck’s local government—emphasises that the political focus is firmly placed upon stability rather than progressiveness, with the implied wilfulness and belligerence of androcentric ideologies (which, it is continuously suggested, reflects the political psychology of the destructive past) now having been firmly sidelined. Patrick, rebelliously disregardful of the village’s implicit code of ethics, is presented as a character with no redemptive qualities, and this fact seems to be awkwardly situated within the novel’s theme of the shifting development of traditional moral boundaries as they are understood in the present day. This fact is further emphasised with the nature of his ultimate fate. Few would disagree that rape is a crime which can never be justified under any circumstances. Patrick’s execution, however, is conducted without trial or any opportunity for him to rationalise or defend his actions, and whilst this obviously underscores the seriousness of his breach of trust, it also appears to contradict The Incomer’s general tendency towards the pursuit of mutual support, co-operation and understanding, even in the face of adversity. Additionally, the suddenness and violence of his death at the hands of an otherwise pacifistic community echoes his own transgression, even although it does not surpass it. The retributive act against Patrick does, however, underline Colin Manlove’s argument that in Elphinstone’s science fiction “men are seen as imposing their minds on the natural world and on women alike”;25 as a threat to the gynocratic authority of Clachanpluck, Patrick’s abnormal

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behaviour could not be tolerated, and the savagery of his sexual assault is answered with a death which is more definite and abrupt than the painful, lingering effects of the long-term psychological damage that he has inflicted upon his devastated victim. Patrick’s actions raise another surprising contradiction in The Incomer. Once discovered, his assault on Anna sends a shockwave through Clachanpluck which leads to a state of emergency being declared, the women of the village immediately going into hiding, and the men quickly forming into a retribution-seeking search party. This operation falls into place immediately, almost as though regularly rehearsed by the villagers, and yet the reader is repeatedly reminded of the deeply unusual and unprecedented nature of the crime. It is an inconsistency which is never fully resolved, nor can it be reconciled with the generally noninterventionist structure of society within the village. That a community which publicly eschews aggression of all kinds should respond to a violent criminal act (rape) with arguably the only crime which is even more severe (murder) presents troubling questions about Clachanpluck which owes less to any depiction of an idyllic natural order and more to conventional notions of anarchic post-apocalyptic savagery that had become all too recognisable in the speculative fiction of the time. Patrick’s summary capital punishment by the other villagers emphasises not only Elphinstone’s point that the character’s position had become untenable in Clachanpluck primarily because of his violence and disregard of the new natural order, but also the fact that the hunter of pre-holocaust times has been supplanted by a new generation of farmers and cultivators who have neither need nor desire for the bygone ways. In this sense, we must consider whether Elphinstone is suggesting that the “old” world of capitalism, with its forceful, exploitative acquisitiveness and expansive industrialisation, is more broadly suggestive of the male aggression which sustains the hunter ethic, and thus an influence to be strenuously refuted. The conflict between an agrarian past and technological modernity has a compelling relationship with numerous novels of the early modern Scottish literary renaissance, most strikingly with Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), the first novel in his Scots Quair trilogy (1932-34). In the course of Sunset Song, the story of the novel’s protagonist Chris Guthrie slowly reveals a changing Scotland which, profoundly affected by the outbreak of the Great War, finds many of its old agrarian traditions being mercilessly swept away by the march of progress. In exploring the effects of rapid modernisation (both technological and cultural) upon communities whose foundations had been built upon a long-established agricultural existence, Gibbon raises a social dilemma which has

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remarkable parallels with those explored by Elphinstone in The Incomer. However, whereas Gibbon laments the incontrovertible demise of the traditional farming way of life in Scotland in the early twentieth century, the creation of Elphinstone’s Clachanpluck is instead a consequence of a collapsed technological, commodified past (our own present) where the village’s occupants actively seek to suppress the return of industrially progressive ways. Thus while Gibbon’s novel celebrated the role of both the farmer and hunter-gatherer alike, Elphinstone seeks to endorse working in harmonious balance with the land in a manner which is proficient enough to render obsolete the function of the traditional huntsman. Thus both novels deal with the notion of a “golden age” in subtly different ways; for Gibbon’s Chris Guthrie, the past is something which can never be regained, but for the villagers of Clachanpluck, Elphinstone emphasises that the destructive ways of bygone times must be suppressed by constant vigilance, in order to maintain an essentially timeless present. There is resonance here with Cairns Craig’s assertion that: The loss and recovery of [an] alternative to history structures much of the narrative of the Scottish imagination in the twentieth century, and precisely because the mythic is beyond history its fulfilment must come in a moment which denies the very narrative resources upon which history, and the novel, are based.26

Both novels, moreover, sustain a strong association between the female gender and the land which must be tended in order to survive. Chris Guthrie has an intense and powerfully delineated connection with the land in Gibbon’s text, a singular unchanging factor even in the face of the powerful, unpredictable wave of social change which is sweeping across the country, while Elphinstone’s matriarchal society instead reflects the familiar ideological connotation between nature and female experience. It is important to consider the significance of this parallel; while Isobel Murray notes the achievement of Gibbon’s skilful characterisation, observing that “Chris may be the most convincing female character in Scottish fiction created by a male author”,27 Naomi belongs to a quite different tradition—one which derives from modern fantasy writing, which Elphinstone terms “the dangerous woman”: A significant part of the Scottish heritage for women writers now is the figure of the dangerous woman. [...] She has appeared since the ballads as the daughter of the other world, with all the danger and the glamour that that implies. In modern fantasy her refusal to accommodate herself to a

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world of known boundaries and social realism may be related to her psychological alienation from the patriarchal model.28

By using Naomi, the incomer of the title, as a lens through which to view the unfamiliar society of Clachanpluck, Elphinstone carefully builds a picture of a community which—the reader is instructed—seems unusual even by the standards of the unfamiliar post-apocalyptic world in which it is situated. Naomi is a stranger both to Scotland and to the village, and her curiosity towards Clachanpluck’s highly distinctive social order stimulates her keen observational abilities during her time there. McMillan notes that Elphinstone’s narrative strategy “makes us look intently and differently at what we thought we knew or understood. We never clearly understand what has happened or indeed some of what does happen, but the story teaches us to be attentive and wary, yet at the same time open to new ways of thinking and feeling”.29 Naomi fulfils a complex dual function throughout the novel, acting both as catalyst and observer in the isolated village; her music and indeed her very presence provokes long-suppressed desires in some of the villagers, though by contrast she finds that she can never integrate herself fully into the fabric of their close-knit society. She does, however, win their trust to the extent that she can eventually begin to slowly unravel the underlying mystery which lies at the heart of Clachanpluck, a secret which seems inextricably linked to the holocaust responsible for the village’s creation: “Don’t you know what stories they used to tell, before the world changed? They drove themselves out of their own minds with fear, telling myths of judgment and destruction, of a day when the whole earth would be consumed by fire, followed by darkness and a winter without end?” “Of course I do. The world had to change. Everyone knows that.” “But the people never did bring judgment upon themselves.” “Because the earth heals,” said Naomi dully. “The plagues of the people are famine and pestilence, but the earth has power to heal herself, whereas death is merely a mirror that we hold up to ourselves. The cruelty of the Earth is our salvation, and the promise of the Earth is that we die, and live for ever.” (The Incomer, p. 223)

Clachanpluck, with its long-held traditions and innate disinclination to deal with the mores of the industrial past, appears to be an almost static community; an essentially closed system. Here Elphinstone echoes the general scepticism of the Kailyard school towards the world which exists outside the idyllic confines of the rural communities depicted in the novels of the movement. Indeed, given her particular concern with the customs

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and community mechanisms of the past, it seems to connect the formal qualities of The Incomer to the Kailyard tradition more closely than it does to the more prominent literary fiction of the nineteenth century; as Alan Riach notes: Narrative design is crucial regarding any form of storytelling and has direct political connotation. In the words of Cairns Craig, following the now familiar formulations of Homi Bhabha, “There is a profound similarity between the modern nation, with its implication of all the people of a territory bound together into a single historical process, and the technique of the major nineteenth-century novels, whose emplotment enmeshes their multiplicity of characters into a single, overarching narrative trajectory”.30

While it is true that Clachanpluck’s villagers do at least appear to be functioning as a collective in terms of their historical (or ahistorical) purpose, the same cannot be said for the story’s outsiders, and this is specifically true of its protagonist. In Naomi, who has visited many different settlements in the course of her travels, Clachanpluck is faced with a kind of free radical whose actions and behaviour are unpredictable and incongruent in relation to the familiarity of the villagers. As Elphinstone indicates in her definition of the “dangerous woman”, Naomi shares the other villagers’ isolation from the social and emotional demands of a patriarchal society, yet she is also removed from the authority of the dominant matriarchy which has established itself in Clachanpluck, content to observe without actively engaging with the community and never intending to become resident there. Elphinstone has made the point that “the Scottish tradition has always been particularly subtle in its use of personae, of narrators or subjects who expose themselves and their limitations through ironic self-revelation and who tell a different story from the overt narrative they think that they are authoritatively presenting to the reader”.31 Indeed, there is a nuanced approach to her protagonist’s depiction throughout the course of The Incomer which suggests just such a duality of function. Although Naomi’s temporary habitation inevitably has a disruptive effect on the isolated village, it does not directly challenge the values or stability of the established gynocracy, and thus—when the catalyst of change voluntarily removes herself at the novel’s conclusion— there is a sense that the long-term social condition in the village has not been profoundly altered by her fleeting presence. Indeed, quite the opposite appears to be true; rather than transform or revolutionise the community, Naomi’s presence instead invigorates it, reinforcing the effective nature of its purpose and its status quo.

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Elphinstone’s deeply poetic revelation at the novel’s conclusion, that the forest which surrounds the community has acted as a kind of persistent living agent of renewal, suggests the sustenance of a force for restitution and regeneration which continues to eradicate the horrors of the past by aiding the return of the land to a place of central importance in the lives of the community. Whereas it is suggested that other settlements in the country are merely reacting to the bleak situation which now faces them, Clachanpluck is somehow actively engaged in activating a new cycle of replenishment which is dynamically reshaping human nature to achieve greater harmony and integration with the environment: “The world is already turning under our hands, yours and mine, and between us we can make it turn for ever. There will be no annihilation and no destruction, only the everlasting change which is the unending end of everything” (The Incomer, p. 132). It is expedient to question just how far this assertion holds up to close scrutiny, however: Clachanpluck, after all, is notable precisely for its relative cultural dormancy and its purpose in holding back development rather than encouraging it, and indeed when Naomi departs at the novel’s conclusion the catalytic effect that she has generated moves on with her. Yet the implied relationship to the earth suggested by Elphinstone echoes the central importance of Chris Guthrie’s connection with the land in Sunset Song. “Chris of the land”,32 as Gibbon terms her, is inextricably linked to the rural life and the agriculturally-based community built around it. As Margery Palmer McCulloch observes, “on the whole, the women in [A Scots Quair] hold true to a sense of human values,” adding that “the outstanding example of this is Chris. She appears to go along with the flow of history, yet she acts to shape her life where she can, choosing what is life-giving as opposed to what is imprisoning”.33 The parallels suggested with Naomi’s continual observations of Clachanpluck’s connection with the natural world in The Incomer are unmistakeable, particularly given Gibbon’s exploration of Chris’s intimate connection with the ancient land since early childhood: She’d never forget the singing of the winds in those fields when she was young or the daft crying of the lambs she herded or the feel of the earth below her toes. Oh, Chris, my lass, there are better things than your books or studies or loving or bedding, there’s the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you’re neither bairn nor woman.34

Chris’s relationship with the terrain is also symbolised by her strong repeated compulsion to return to the ancient standing stones near Kinraddie in scenes which recur at the beginning of each section of the book. The stones are one of the few constant aspects of the area which are

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able to endure while new technological and social developments efficiently sweep aside long-held traditions in both farming and culture. As Ian Carter comments: Chris Guthrie retreats to the untamed moorland above Blawearie, with its loch and stone circle. She escapes from the difficulties and complexities of social interaction to a non-social landscape: only the stone circle, built by unalienated men in some unimaginably remote golden age, shows evidence of human labour.35

Here too we can discern similarities with Clachanpluck; the village’s isolation, cut off both from modern civilisation and from other postholocaust settlements, suggests that the nature of its existence is in fact closer in function to an ecological mechanism than a social community: more environmentally integrated than simply a collection of human beings and their dwellings. The inhabitants of Clachanpluck, like Chris Guthrie at the conclusion of the Scots Quair trilogy, must withdraw from conformist expectations of human civilisation in order to contemplate and eventually re-establish their true purpose. The disclosure of Clachanpluck’s perpetual capacity for rejuvenation is made subtly and by degrees, though the point is perhaps made most evocatively in a section where two of the villagers, George and Emily, contemplate the words of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (1935), the first of his Four Quartets and one of the few surviving texts which exist in Clachanpluck. Upon considering that “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past” (The Incomer, p. 65), George finds himself perturbed and compelled to ask “How does this dead person know what it is that we hold here in Clachanpluck?” (The Incomer, p. 66). Quotations from Eliot are scattered throughout the text, and there is a suggestion at the novel’s climax that Naomi has come to the inescapable conclusion, as Eliot did in “Little Gidding” (1942), that life is by nature a continuous cycle, bereft of any clear genesis or endpoint.36 As Naomi resumes her journey, following her sense of recognition and subsequent fulfilment at discovering the true nature of Clachanpluck, the village is emerging from winter into springtime. The sense of natural rebirth is emphasised still further as the villagers ready themselves for the harvest to come. Patrick’s actions, far from challenging the status quo, serve only to underscore the importance of Clachanpluck’s enduring capacity for renewal and regeneration. Again, however, it must be noted that there is a dichotomy between the village’s role as an agent of natural restitution and its moribund state of cultural development. Much of this apparent inconsistency can be attributed

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to the extreme ambiguity with which Elphinstone delineates the mystery of the forest and the role of Clachanpluck and its inhabitants in retaining its safety. This thematic vagueness did not go unnoticed by the critics of the time. Pauline Morgan’s critique is representative of a general view that the deliberate indistinctness of Clachanpluck’s central enigma was somewhat overplayed in The Incomer: “The women of the village [...] are the keepers of a secret. Unfortunately they still hold the secret at the end of the book, at least from this reader”.37 Indeed, if the village is considered to be existing apart from history, and is thus in a sense “out of time”, its retreat from societal and cultural evolution is at variance with the assertion that its key function is to act as a mechanism for the restitution of natural change. Elphinstone’s ability to present such an inventively-depicted feminist utopia built from the post-apocalyptic ashes of an androcentric present is offset by her refusal to fully resolve the underlying conflict between these two juxtaposed—and essentially irreconcilable—functions of the village by the time of The Incomer’s conclusion. This has led to accusations from some critical quarters that the novel is only a qualified success. Morgan notes that because of the vibrancy and uncompromising boldness of its themes “the appeal of The Incomer will be mostly to women and definitely to feminists”38 but, due to the fact that in her opinion “the plot is extremely slight”,39 that its appeal to a wider audience may be limited to some degree: “Margaret Elphinstone has shown that she is extremely competent, and as a feminist writer this is an excellent debut. As science fiction it is less successful”.40 Certainly the novel is far removed from the conventions of much speculative fiction writing, both in the environmental and postapocalyptic subgenres, and its cultural and ideological commentary is employed by subtle and restrained means. Its innovative approach does, however, imbue it with an exploratory vigour with regard to nationalistic matters and social enquiry which can at times appear strikingly inventive. Although these issues are dealt with implicitly, their subtlety makes the novel’s concerns seem no less arresting in their engagement with this subject matter, particularly as Elphinstone’s distinctive methodology proves to be so unconventional within the expectations of the speculative fiction genre both in Scotland and beyond. It is, I would argue, this quietly persuasive power which sets The Incomer apart from so many other literary explorations of the post-apocalyptic in the genre. The thrust of Morgan’s criticism is ultimately restricted by the extent to which The Incomer can be described explicitly as science fiction, particularly given Elphinstone’s ambivalence towards the novel’s generic categorisation. It is therefore perhaps valuable to consider the text with particular regard not just to the speculative fiction field, but also in the

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light of areas where the genre’s boundaries encroach upon other modes of writing, given Elphinstone’s observation that in her opinion, there exists a Scottish fantasy genre which “is neither retrospective nor nostalgic, but which uses traditional elements to produce texts relevant to the modern world”.41 Elphinstone would later—with her anthology An Apple from a Tree (1991)—abstain from her earlier speculative fiction trappings and engage more directly with this form of magical realism, many of its tales explored against the backdrop of contemporary social settings. She has used short fiction such as Rebecca Leach’s The Wall (2000) and Anne Donavan’s The Ice Horse (2001) as examples to illustrate her assertions about the resilience and relevance of Scottish fantasy writing, and indeed her argument is certainly also true of novels such as Neil Gunn’s The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944). Gunn’s text is a dystopian fantasy set first in Scotland against the backdrop of World War II and then in a rich fantasy world which Manlove acknowledges is “a highly political allegory, in the tradition of Yevgeny Zamiatin’s We (trans. 1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), on the consequences of the deification of the state at the expense of the individual”.42 Like Elphinstone, Gunn’s novel explores timely themes of an immediate and imposing threat (fascist totalitarianism and behavioural control in place of nuclear or biological devastation) against a fantasy environment which retains disturbingly recognisable trappings of contemporary society. The Green Isle itself is a variant on the Otherworld myth of Tír na nÓg; as Manlove explains, the island is “a very individual and Celtic world [which] is a kind of utopia, where everyone seems happy in a beautiful pastoral landscape; yet it is also a dystopia, where all these happy people are brain-washed robots overseen by a city full of autocratic intellectuals”.43 There is some resonance here with Elphinstone’s later novel Hy Brasil (2002), which also experiments with the notion of encroaching upon a legendary island state, albeit with a more historically focused narrative than had been the case with her earlier speculative fiction texts. Although its style and locale are completely different, The Incomer also has a degree of affinity with Scottish novels of surrealist fiction such as Alan Warner’s These Demented Lands (1997), a loose sequel to his debut novel Morvern Callar (1995) situated in an exotic and satirical quasi-fantastic island locale, and, more specifically, Naomi Mitchison’s imaginative work The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), which is set in pre-Christian antiquity and contains its narrative within a mythical distant past. Yet Mitchison, with her deep respect for the relationship between femininity and the cycle of life, delineates an elaborate world of mythology much influenced by J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890),

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drawing on myth and anthropology to evoke an ancient world within an historical timeframe. Roderick Watson describes The Golden Bough as “the monumental work that influenced so many poets of the early modern generation to see or to seek mythic archetypes beneath the surface of the everyday”,44 and indeed Frazer’s work has particular resonance with the significant and profoundly elegiac nature narratives which Elphinstone seeds throughout the course of The Incomer with its implied retreat from history. In her discussion of contemporary Scottish fantasy in early 2000, Elphinstone cited Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000) as a significant novel in the genre which, although not yet published at the time of her paper’s delivery, she anticipated with great interest.45 Indeed, Fitt’s novel would come to form perhaps the most significant Scottish work of speculative fiction dealing with environmental danger since The Incomer. However, aside from their shared theme of life in a post-apocalyptic environment and the wide-ranging effects of the planet’s new natural order, the two novels diverge in almost every other conceivable way. Whereas Elphinstone’s mythic parable exhibits roots in Gibbon and Mitchison, Fitt’s novel demonstrates much more conventional origins within the science fiction genre. His central premise of a Britain submerged by catastrophic flooding is reminiscent of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), while his focus on the peculiarities of a human society forced to adapt to extreme climactic conditions is evocative of texts such as Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962). The sub-aquatic theme which is so central to But n Ben A-Go-Go is also in evidence much earlier in Scottish literature, in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Three Go Back (1932), a time-travel story centring on the legendary island of Atlantis. Yet in spite of appearing deeply rooted in pre-existing genre archetypes, Fitt’s novel is never less than distinctive, and he creates an energetic and challenging depiction of a future Scotland in the throes of ecological devastation. Matthew Fitt (1968-) is a poet and novelist, born in Dundee. Having travelled widely and serving as a writer in residence at various establishments, in 2002 he founded a children’s publishing imprint, Itchy Coo, in collaboration with author James Robertson. Fitt has published a number of successful anthologies of poetry, including Pure Radge (1996) and Sair Heid City (1999), but to date But n Ben A-Go-Go is his only published novel. His poetry has proven to be successful among critics; Christopher Whyte notes that “at its best, Fitt’s poetry bursts dramatically off the page, so acutely and authentically observed one can identify the voices that declaim it,” with the caveat that “the problem may be that Fitt is still writing at a time when using Scots cannot be taken for granted and,

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consequently, his choice of the language and the (tired?) agenda it draws after it have to be the subject matter of his poems”.46 However, the publication of But n Ben A-Go-Go has undoubtedly brought Fitt to the attention of many who were not previously aware of his poetic works, and it has proven to be an influential work within the field of Scottish speculative fiction since the turn of the century. The major factor which immediately came to set this text aside from other recent titles in the genre was Fitt’s much-discussed decision to compose his novel entirely in the Scots language. Both the narrative and the characters’ dialect are composed in Lallans, though with occasional departures into Doric and occasional embedded expressions deriving from various other strains of regional colloquialism. This situates the novel just as firmly within a future Scotland as does Elphinstone’s Celtic music and traditional dance, and ultimately creates a stimulating but often demanding narrative, as critic Stephen Naysmith notes: Fitt’s first novel is a multiple challenge to the reader. Not only is it written in Scots, but the author has included plenty of neologisms – based on the way Scots might develop by 2090. New Scots words coined for the book include “plastipokes”, a medical device called a “germsooker” and the allconsuming “incendicowp”.47

Thus while Fitt’s narrative decision is certainly distinctive, its allencompassing employment throughout the book also has the potential to prove controversial—to say nothing of commercially risky. Fitt justifies his choice by emphasising that “Scots is very good for futuristic writing and I wanted to try something completely new”.48 He qualifies this statement, when discussing his literary work in general, by asserting the fact that “I worry that many call the Scots language ‘slang’. But I’m not so concerned that readers will not get the meaning of the less common Scots words”.49 While the implementation of Scots dialect is certainly far from unknown in the mainstream of Scottish literature, it remains something of an innovation in most modern speculative fiction, where a self-conscious aim towards achieving verisimilitude tends to represent ideolect primarily in situations where there is a specific narrative reason for doing so (a similar strategy being evident in the first-person perspective presented in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, 1966, for instance). Yet given Fitt’s strongly-held views on the subject, the inclusion of Lallans and Doric seems an entirely logical one, irrespective of his chosen genre: Scots has also had to cope with the difficulty of its close relation, based on shared origins, to the dominant language English. For all its historical

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neglect and suppression, Gaelic has always been recognisably a completely distinct language from English: Scots has suffered from its proximity to English, being too often dismissed as “bad English”, “the language of the gutter” and so on. Not surprisingly, if people are consistently told that their language is inferior, debased and an impediment to success in life, if they are denied formal access to the great bulk of the literature written in that language, and if they are discouraged from using that language in the context of education, they develop a highly ambivalent attitude towards it.50

One further challenge which faced Fitt, however, was that the ravaged world he was describing in Scots was markedly different from the landscape of contemporary Scotland, replete with major geographical anomalies and new technologies which were both advanced and improvised in nature. In order to achieve a believably evolved version of the language, Fitt uses contemporary Lallans only as a foundation for the improvised form of Scots that he employs throughout the novel (occasionally inserting words which have a Germanic grammatical basis) in order to extrapolate what form the language will have taken by the end of the century. He also firmly establishes Scots as his characters’ natural mother tongue, rather than simply a linguistic strain which is subordinate to Standard English. Its primacy within Fitt’s futuristic society evokes John Corbett’s observation that “the problem for Lallans is largely one of acceptance. In the process of becoming a standard language, a language variety usually goes through various processes [in that] it is codified, used in education, widely used in discourse, and generally accepted as the educated, prestige form by the society that adopts it”.51 In the fictional society which is depicted in But n Ben A-Go-Go, Fitt makes the point that Lallans has reached that point of acceptance, or at the very least is in the ascendancy. It is noteworthy that throughout the course of the novel, Fitt’s use of Scots operates almost as a kind of gesture against Kailyardism; he seems fully aware of the irony in using the language of the Kailyard to challenge and undermine possible negative or nostalgic assumptions about employing regional dialects such as Lallans and Doric and representing them as living, developing languages with the recognition of officialdom. In this sense, although Scots linguistic narratives have been implemented by many realist novelists of Scottish literary fiction—Irvine Welsh and James Kelman perhaps most prominent amongst them—But n Ben A-GoGo is perhaps the most prominent work of imaginative fiction to deal with Lallans since Iain Banks’s memorable character The Barbarian in his 1986 novel The Bridge. Yet there is also the fact that, in Fitt’s novel at least, the

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Scots language has also acquired a far greater international currency: it has obtained such cachet as a mark of national identity that it is even affected by Scandinavian guest-workers living in the Scottish territories, albeit imbued with some vestige of the accent of their homeland (“I come and get you, Scotman. [...] I vait for this lang time.” But n Ben A-Go-Go, p. 45). Mark Abley, however, is of the opinion that—in execution—this strategy does have its limitations: Fitt invents words on occasion—“cyberjanny” was his coinage for a virtual concierge who made an appearance in a Scots cyberpunk novel— but more often he puts into writing the everyday idiom of the Scottish people. Their accent can be so distinctive that many common words— “guid”, for instance—look weird in standard English spelling, like a fullback in a tutu.52

Yet beyond the semantic cleverness of Fitt’s wordplay, distinctly ideological aims lie just below the surface of his dialectic inventiveness. Certainly Carla Sassi has noted that the novel’s use of Scots “can be regarded as an integral part of the author’s personal and institutional commitment to restore the status of language to Scots”, given that “But n Ben A-Go-Go is [...] possibly the only post/cyberpunk novel with an openly nationalist agenda, as the choice of this genre was explicitly motivated by Fitt on the grounds that this was ‘the best way to give people the idea that Scots was something that could be used for the future as well as the past’”.53 For Fitt, however, the future of the country is very much a construct of adaptive necessity as much as it is based upon the evolution of modern social and cultural Scottish mores into a technologically advanced civilisation yet to come. Unlike the nebulous future of Elphinstone’s The Incomer, where time is strangely malleable, Fitt precisely situates his narrative in the year 2090. While he shares Elphinstone’s theme of nature reclaiming the Earth, Fitt’s application of this motif diverges markedly from The Incomer. Rather than nature providing a source of renewal, in But n Ben A-Go-Go it is a hostile force which must be survived through hardship, rather than a nurturing ecosystem which encourages the characters to exist harmoniously with it. Following a catastrophic rise in the global sea level in the year 2039—Fitt terms it “God’s Flood” (But n Ben A-Go-Go, p. xiii), evoking imagery of the Deluge from the Biblical Book of Genesis—the vast majority of the planet’s surface has been rendered uninhabitable, with the surviving population forced to live within artificial environments constructed before the disaster:

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Port, the maist northerly settlement in a triangle o maritime cantons wi Europoort in the sooth and Berlinhaven in the east, had tholed God’s Flood – an the subsequent decade o wud tropical storms as the world’s climate bubbled and fizzed – athoot muckle loss. Port’s cities, officially cried Parishes, had jowed an sweeled successfully hauf a century on the roch North Atlantic, thirled firmly at the sea flair wi seeven-hunner-metrelang alloy cables tae the drooned burgh o Greenock. (But n Ben A-Go-Go, p. 11)

Although much is made of the rarefied nature of life in Port, this allbut-submerged dystopian future Scotland, it is quickly established that mass flooding is only one of many problems facing Fitt’s characters. Along with the dramatic change in climate, the planet’s ozone layer has become badly compromised, meaning that skin cancer is now an endemic threat that regularly affects members of the population: “By bairnish lack o care, he had took skin cancer five times as a wean and twiced in his teens. Scars fae auld ops happed his airms and back like bleared tattoos” (But n Ben A-Go-Go, p. 39). Citizens rarely emerge into the open air if they can possibly avoid it, although the former Highlands – now termed the Drylands – is the only part of the country to remain above water, and is now the location of luxury homes for the wealthy such as the eponymous “But n Ben A-Go-Go”. Furthermore, the surviving population is infected with the Mowdy virus, an evolved strain of HIV, which has rendered conventional reproduction impossible. Breeding can now only be achieved by scientific means, for anyone engaging in biological intercourse runs a high risk of activating Senga, a fatal illness which stems from the Mowdy disease. The afflicted are promptly quarantined until Senga has run its course: “Port couldna dree Sangue de Verde tae skail accidentally fae its purpose-biggit hame. Aw o its citizens cairried the dormant Mowdy smit in their breists an yin micro-guff o Senga wid ignite a Green Bluid pandemic that wid chow its wey throu Port in less than hauf a day” (But n Ben A-Go-Go, p. 9). Taken together, these catastrophic environmental conditions present an unremittingly grim and dystopian future vision which calls to mind Ryder W. Miller’s discussion of John Brunner’s novels of ecological disaster from the late 1960s and early 1970s: The environmental messages have been acknowledged by many, especially by environmentalists and leftists, [but] the message has not been completely heeded. World Society is still on a course where the dystopic visions [...] may not be completely avoidable. One could argue that many of us are already there. We need to change our ways to solve the environmental problems these works explore.54

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Fitt, to his credit, does not posit any comfortable solutions to the perils which face his futuristic Scotland, nor does he moralise over the conditions that ultimately brought it to its current state. He does, however, expend considerable effort in delineating the intrusive totalitarian government which tyrannises the community of Port, and applies much refined satire in his depiction of the shattered society over which it presides (the lavish high security prison for prosperous prisoners is named Inverdisney Timeshare Penitentiary, for instance—less affluent criminals are banished to Submarnock, a community of solitary confinement capsules isolated on the sea bed). Combined with the novel’s pivotal and intensive use of virtual reality, achieved through the “VINE network”, it is understandable that a number of commentators have come to associate But n Ben A-Go-Go with the cyberpunk movement. While this is a reasonable correlation, there is also evidence that the narrative is, in fact, postcyberpunk in nature. In his essay “Notes Towards a Postcyberpunk Manifesto” (originally published in Nova Express in 1998), Lawrence Person marks a number of variations between the cyberpunk and postcyberpunk movements which bear upon But n Ben A-Go-Go, most notably that “postcyberpunk uses the same immersive world-building technique [as cyberpunk], but features different characters, settings, and, most importantly, makes fundamentally different assumptions about the future”.55 Instead of revelling in the myriad possibilities presented by their dystopian social orders, postcyberpunk characters instead “frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders”,56 and are connected to, rather than disconnected from, the culture in which they live: “Far from being alienated loners, postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral parts of society”.57 Yet perhaps the most prominent distinction between the two subgenres is the evocation of social class issues in postcyberpunk texts, as Person explains: Like their cyberpunk forebears, postcyberpunk works immerse the reader in richly detailed and skillfully [sic] nuanced futures, but ones whose characters frequently hail from, for lack of a better term, the middle class. (And we do need a better term; here in the United States, economic mobility has rendered the concept of “class” nearly obsolete.) Postcyberpunk characters frequently have families, and sometimes even children. [...] They’re anchored in their society rather than adrift in it. They have careers, friends, obligations, responsibilities, and all the trappings of an “ordinary” life. Or, to put it another way, their social landscape is often as detailed and nuanced as the technological one.58

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Certainly Fitt’s protagonist, Paolo Stevenson Broon, fits into the above description quite comfortably. Employed as a “cyberjannie” (a modest post which combines video surveillance with waste disposal), he fulfils a blue-collar role that is situated somewhere between the prosperous social elite and flourishing criminal overlords, and the grinding poverty of the sub-proletarian underclass, many of whom (the reader soon discovers) appear to be Danish refugees. Yet the postcyberpunk issue of family which Person raises is also crucial to But n Ben A-Go-Go; the motivating compulsion which drives Paolo’s quest centres around his efforts to free his wife Nadia from the Senga virus, while the novel’s main antagonist is his own father, Desmond “Diamond” Broon, an influential crime lord who wields vast power in the VINE virtual reality network. Paolo’s quest comes to involve the uneasy realisation that the plight of his wife, who he desperately fights to save, has derived from a clandestine love affair between Nadia and his own father, physically ailing but still retaining his iron grip over his incorporeal avatar in the postmodern and posthuman world of VINE. Sassi perceptively notes, however, that for the citizens of this future Scotland, the virtual reality systems provide no real means of escape, being “just an extreme expression of the same type of dramatic changes that have affected Port and the Drylands: deterritorialisation, globalisation and consequent suppression of native cultures/traditions. The author’s gaze, in this case, is consistently nostalgic”.59 Considering both But n Ben A-Go-Go and The Incomer as works of speculative fiction, it is of value to note how the novels compare to other entries in the increasingly well-populated category of the environmental and post-apocalyptic novel. McMillan observes that “in contrast to the noisy and alarmist post-apocalyptic fiction that preceded it, The Incomer is a triumph of control”,60 and indeed it is difficult to dispute that, in its approach, the novel provides a distinctive and contemplative consideration of its subject matter. Elphinstone’s particular concern with the importance of women’s vital role in the perpetuation of the human species is interesting when compared to another well-known science fiction novel of the 1980s, Frank Herbert’s Locus Award-nominated The White Plague (1982), which concerns the creation and propagation of a virus which is lethal to women but which leaves men unharmed. The grim social aftermath which Herbert explores is both contemporary and desolate, and strongly echoes Elphinstone’s concerns by providing, in the words of Gerald Jonas, a “meditation on the war between man’s tendencies towards self-destruction and his instinct for self-preservation”.61 Yet the entropic effects of a virulent and incurable illness also have strong resonance with But n Ben A-Go-Go. Whereas The Incomer offers a counterpoint to the

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“nature horror” scenarios of novels such as Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides (1967) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), where dramatic changes to the planet’s ecology form an agent of catastrophic destruction rather than salvation, But n Ben A-Go-Go fits into this tradition much more comfortably. Elphinstone’s work is closely aligned to an exploration of renewal—specifically, a mythic, matriarchal power of regeneration—which seems acutely at odds with the detailed apocalyptic situations (and their respective aftermath) which are explored by authors like Vonnegut and Disch. Additionally, in contrast to much fiction of the time which dealt specifically with nuclear holocaust scenarios, the political commentary throughout the course of Elphinstone’s narrative is nuanced but deliberately unfocused, though there are definite socialist, even Proudhonist echoes in Naomi’s assertion that “we make nothing new. We take what is given us, and pass it on, and it is a little different because we have made it so. But it is not ours to hoard or hold, or it becomes meaningless” (The Incomer, p. 219). There are parallels between this assertion and Ursula K. LeGuin’s politically-aware novel Always Coming Home (1985), which features the Kesh, a group of humans who live in accord with the land in a far-future period. Like Elphinstone’s novel, Always Coming Home is set many generations after a global apocalypse, and the society it presents is vastly different in cultural and social terms from that of the present day. However, whereas the villagers of Clachanpluck completely reject the use of advanced technology (and, indeed, have no access to it in any regard), the Kesh have retained surviving scientific apparatus such as electricity and computer networks while accepting their use only on their own culture’s terms. Conventional economic systems are redundant, and (as in Clachanpluck, but on a much larger scale) notions of centralised government have been completely abandoned in favour of self-governing anarchistic communities. LeGuin’s future seems even more distant than that of The Incomer, and the Kesh society appears both socialist and pacifistic in ways that are more explicitly pronounced than that of Elphinstone’s work. Again, this seems markedly at variance with Fitt’s futuristic Scotland, where technology is all that stands between humanity’s survival and its destruction by a hostile environment and viral pandemic. For Fitt, therefore, his use of Scots dialect is clearly a specifically anti-Kailyard gesture: in the world that he posits, society cannot afford the luxury of distrusting science. For the citizens of Port, nature offers not salvation but rapid extinction, and its forces must therefore be diligently constrained by technological means at all costs.

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Elphinstone offers little overt polemic against particular developments in the state of modern social and cultural conditions, preferring instead to warn against general dangers of over-commodification and Western society’s pervasive disregard towards preserving natural resources. Attempt to subjugate nature, Elphinstone suggests, and nature’s retaliation will inevitably be considerable. However, Fitt’s politics are even more ambiguously demarcated, particularly in comparison to other postapocalyptic fiction of the 1980s and 90s which so often dealt with catastrophes of an ecological or biological nature. In the oppressive regime of Port, moral corruption is all-encompassing and reaches from the depths of the criminal underworld all the way into the upper echelons of the establishment. Fitt articulates this fact most clearly through the dual identity of Diamond Broon’s criminal associate Sark, a key player in Port’s underworld who is later revealed to be Craw, an executive officer in the same community’s law enforcement service. Yet Fitt is quietly damning in his criticism of the society’s tendency towards unfettered freemarketeering; status is predicated upon material wealth rather than social class, as is influence over authority. State corruption is depicted as an issue to be nimbly worked around, rather than actively challenged. Likewise, the novel’s denouement, with its unanticipated revelations, hidden identities and familial betrayals, demonstrates a long-held connection between the cyberpunk/postcyberpunk subgenre and crime writing (specifically the detective novel), though such a connection became perhaps even more evident in later works of Scottish speculative fiction such as Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002). The criminality at work in Fitt’s future is all-pervasive, and he offers little assurance that the dictatorial forces which control Port can ever be overthrown. Resistant to change, they can merely be subverted—and for the pragmatic but not entirely nihilistic Paolo, this appears to be a satisfactory situation to meet his own ends. Indeed, it is his father’s attempt to steal not only Paolo’s wife but his very biological form that underpins the fact that in this morally and commoditydeficient society, even one’s own body must be protected from theft as much as from disease: The ane Broon had cried Cairns wis injaggin Paolo’s left airm in aboot a thoosan places. In twa mair ticks, the thrawn wee man had rived open the cyberjanny’s tunic an howked oot a lang strip o flesh fae his chist wi a scalpel. Pain skited throu Paolo’s upper body. “Whit the hell is he daein?” he violently speired his faither. “Savin ma skin by takkin yours.” Broon condescended his heid tae look at his son. “Juist like ah taught ye. Trust naebody. Did ah no ayewis

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Chapter Three say that? Dinna trust a livin sowel. Brawest advice a faither could gie. You obviously werena listenin.” (But n Ben A-Go-Go, p. 191)

In spite of its many environmental anxieties, But n Ben A-Go-Go is at least as concerned with the fragility of identity as it is with that of the natural order. Although manipulability of physical characteristics and their manifestation is certainly a long-established tool in the apparatus of cyberpunk (it occurs prominently in the multiple body-swap scenarios of MacLeod’s Fall Revolution cycle, for instance), Fitt breaks from the traditions of the subgenre by placing greater emphasis on inter-human interaction across virtual reality computer networks than he does on the relationship between human and artificial intelligences. There is a sense that, as the Earth’s natural resources are now rapidly dwindling as a result of the catastrophe which has befallen it (as is the ability of human society to harness them), identity is competing with traditional assets to become the new capital. Diamond Broon, having squandered his own health on high living, seeks to hijack the body of his son in order to extend his lifespan. However, Fitt subtly suggests that any apparent success for Broon in this regard would ultimately prove to be illusory. While the privileged elite of this future Scotland are able to enjoy luxurious residences far from the crowded urban metropolis of Port, they are ultimately still faced with the fact that they are bound to a planet where their species is now in its death throes, a fact that none of the characters appears able (or even particularly willing) to change. Fitt makes it clear that the planet, which has become so inhospitable to its population that it is now only barely habitable, has little to no hope of recovery; humans must adapt to cope with the dramatic changes which have occurred, without any expectation of an optimistic outcome even in the long term. He therefore clearly and unambiguously emphasises the fact that any concepts of an organic society, existing in accord with nature, are antithetical to the hostile and destructive natural environment in which the novel is set, thus recalling the warnings of other genre authors such as Brian Aldiss, Kurt Vonnegut and Brian Stableford that the unpredictable and essentially untameable forces of nature are to be trusted only at one’s peril. Whilst Elphinstone’s novel concerns a similar need for social adaptation, her appraisal of the situation is rather more contemplative, if not necessarily more upbeat. If one of The Incomer’s pivotal themes is that of respecting the Earth in order to live in harmony with nature, existing as a component part of the ecosystem rather than attempting to control and constrain it, it is worth noting that Elphinstone does not offer an idealised view of life in Clachanpluck even although the village has been specifically

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founded upon these rules of natural equilibrium. Nor does she suggest that the Lovelockian notions of balanced social accord with nature can act as a panacea for all societal ills. As the character of Emily remarks, “We have done what we can, and the future is for somebody else. A poor, patched up, broken thing we seem to have made of it. Not what I would have chosen to leave for my daughters. But it’s what we did, George, and there is no place for regret in a world that changes” (The Incomer, p. 216). Ecology, of course, is absolutely central to the novel, just as it is in Fitt’s. Elphinstone’s work appears much less concerned with an imminent threat to the ultimate survival of the human race than that which Fitt postulates in But n Ben A-Go-Go, for the society of her own characters has already endured the baptism of fire which has elevated the priority of the natural order. Fitt’s future community, by contrast, must fight to keep nature in check, rather than attempting to appease it. As the narrative of The Incomer progresses, the point is continually reinforced that the role of the village in serving and sustaining the natural world has supplanted current notions of harnessing natural forces solely for human benefit. Yet for Elphinstone it is also a liberating force, a driving stimulus of change which frees humans from the shackles of a restrictive class-based social identity; they have become, in a sense, unfettered by nature rather than controlled by it. But nature is not without its dangers; Elphinstone’s intense descriptions of the forest, treacherous and unpredictable, emphasise the volatility of the untamed wilderness, as McMillan remarks: “if Clachanpluck is a new Eden, it cannot, any more than the old, exclude evil”.62 For Fitt, by contrast, there never was an Eden to embrace; in his future, paradise will forever be irretrievably lost. The nature of the liberation which Elphinstone describes is signficantly different to that which came to be offered in the extrapolated cultures depicted by other Scottish speculative fiction authors of the same period, including the fiercely independent, highly political libertarian societies which would come to be presented by Ken MacLeod and Charles Stross. In a sense, it is the diametric opposite of the morally bankrupt, technologydependent Port that Fitt describes. Clachanpluck may not be the same kind of shifting, adaptable utopia suggested in the novels of MacLeod’s Fall Revolution cycle, but nor is it an entirely false utopia. Elphinstone’s villagers may be reliant on unrelenting agricultural labour to secure their continued survival with no realistic hope of cultural or socio-economic advancement, yet by that same token they are imbued with a sense of actively harnessing their own destiny, choosing to live in accord with the natural cycles of the planet rather than being errantly (and inadvertently) disconnected from them. For Elphinstone’s Clachanpluck, in fact, change

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is the cause of suspicion and apprehension, something to be avoided at all costs. To this end, the world that she creates is timeless precisely because it is pitched in a constant struggle against social and technological progression. Although Elphinstone does not offer explicit political commentary within The Incomer, the implied communitarian nature of the village and palpable suspicion towards the commodification of the modern world combine to suggest an indirectly anti-capitalist agenda. Her approach to mythic folklore and the connection between human existence and the natural world, combined with a contemplative and poetic prose style, offers the reader no Levi-Straussian mythic archetypes, no heroes and villains of folklore, but rather an essentially untameable environment into which humans must integrate rather than attempt to dominate. It is a world where change is resisted and denied, one which is totally at odds with the carnivalesque celebration of revolution and transformation found in much of MacLeod’s work. For Elphinstone, this retreat into myth is a result of a conscious withdrawal from history, a neverending struggle to avoid Scotland’s future becoming its past (our own present day). Yet in the world posited by Fitt, Scotland discovers that its future rests upon a precarious confluence of societal pressures and environmental factors, forever pulling its ultimate destiny in contrary directions. As Sassi comments, “Paolo Broon’s titanic effort, that of conferring some sort of organic unity to what used to be Scotland through his epic journey is revealed to be what it is—a temporary, precarious, achievement”.63 But Broon’s involvement in nation building, of a sort at least, has more than a practical function; Fitt utilises his protagonist’s efforts in order to make the point, albeit subtly, that the new national identity of this future Scotland is as much a paradigmatic, imagined construct as his extrapolated society itself proves to be. The narrative of But n Ben A-Go-Go proves to be more obviously in tune with established traditions of science fiction subgenres such as postcyberpunk and the ecological disaster novel, as well as the postapocalyptic. When compared to The Incomer, Fitt’s approach is by far the more conventional of the two, and his profoundly action-based narrative— to say nothing of the novel’s mystery-thriller elements and his recurring use of the well-worn device of cyberspace—situates But n Ben A-Go-Go comfortably within the practices of the genre, though its all-embracing Scots narrative remains undeniably distinctive. Elphinstone’s novel, however, with its rejection of technology and its feministic approach, is much more difficult to categorise. Whereas Fitt’s future society is deeply masculine in its interpretation, Elphinstone’s gynocratically-organised and female-oriented community stands apart from other writing in recent

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Scottish speculative fiction, and whose precedents (such as Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin) are more easily found in the wider field. By directly connecting the nature of human existence with the environment of the natural world, Elphinstone offers an effective correlation between the life-giving properties of the female body and the earth’s capacity for restitution and rebirth. As McMillan observes: In keeping with the matriarchy of dangerous women, the myths replace the word of the father with the body of the mother – at the centre of the myths are the dark places of the womb, the forest and the land in which the seed is sewn. [...] The first gardener is a woman and the transcendent imaginative force is music which can reach “over the walls”.64

Thus by elaborating on this Edenic theme, Elphinstone justifies both the matriarchal administration of the village, acting as custodian of Clachanpluck rather than governing it, and also the gravity of Patrick’s crime not only against one individual, but by implication against the very fabric of the community. This seems highly relevant to Elphinstone’s general approach to speculative fiction; as Manlove remarks, “music, creation, giving, sharing [...] catch that simple, tentative, delicate quality of woman that Margaret Elphinstone puts over rather less as plain description than as a programme for living”.65 As opposed to the rusted, crumbling dystopia of But n Ben A Go-Go, the gynocentric society that Elphinstone postulates is, like the post-apocalyptic world around it, something entirely new, quite different from the cultural traditions from which it has grown, and prefigures the power feminism of Naomi Wolf in the compelling, liberating force of change that it implies. The reader has been offered no assurance at the conclusion of The Incomer that the ills of the past can be suppressed indefinitely, nor is there any guarantee that the baser instincts of human nature can ever be disciplined by subservience to the land, even provisionally. However, there is instead a subtle but pervasive sense of systematic and progressive negotiation between the planet and its offspring, of a seemingly unsophisticated and ostensibly inert society fulfilling a vital role which is subtly but dynamically adaptable even as it appears inactive, albeit that the ultimate cost is inevitably a kind of societal stasis. This may in fact be Elphinstone’s most enduring and distinctive observation within The Incomer; rather than deteriorating into barbarism following apocalyptic calamity, her fictional society is instead required to recognise that the gravest threat facing it emanates not from the manifest anxieties of their uncertain future, imperilled with harsh and untamed natural hazards, but from the spectre of a less civilised technocratic past:

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the world of our own modern day. In But n Ben A-Go-Go, on the other hand, the reader must instead consider a ravaged world which is still populated by the most extreme forms of current societal excesses, simultaneously demonstrating their destructive end-point. Fitt projects controversial contemporary issues such as climate change, sexual health crises and political disenfranchisement onto his dystopian future in a manner which presents a society that is no less bleak than that of Clachanpluck, and yet simultaneously much less hopeful, emphasising that optimism is dying out along with the disease-riddled human race that he depicts. Whereas Elphinstone calls attention to the need for profound change so as to restore sustainable order to the world, Fitt instead presents a society for which no such recovery is likely to be possible. These observations raise wide-ranging implications for the national imaginary, as Lisa Harrison has noted: Contemporary Scottish science fiction authors transmogrify and reimagine their present, spring-boarding from reality into speculation. For those Scottish writers placing their narrative reimaginings in their own country, Scotland is a new nation, borne from the machine age, adapting to technologically-driven contexts, and an integral part of the history of modern technology. From this perspective, the simple existence of a culturally-identifiable “Scotland” after such travail evokes a nearly indestructible sense of Scottishness.66

Their respective approaches prove that both Elphinstone and Fitt are unconventional figures in the field of speculative fiction, though in markedly different ways. Whereas Fitt’s postcyberpunk evocation of a dystopian future uniquely exploits distinctively Scottish linguistic nuances—and a deeply altered Scottish social environment—in order to explore a potential future that is extrapolated from modern anxieties, the exuberance of his narrative style and vibrant depiction of his eccentric ecosystem conceal an approach to his subject matter which is actually fairly conservative in the way in which it draws upon long-held generic apparatus. This cannot be said for Elphinstone, however, whose methodology is in stark variance not only to Fitt’s, but also to much of modern speculative fiction. With a stylistic approach deeply rooted in Scottish literary tradition, her strangely ageless and almost mythical depiction of a golden age of agrarian life seems divorced from both the ravages of time and the destructive qualities of unbridled progress. It is, perhaps, this quality—to actively question the effects of human development rather than to celebrate the possibilities which human development presents—that ultimately marks the most striking distinction

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of The Incomer in comparison to much of the other speculative fiction of the period. Both novels convey distinct aspects of Scottish national identity, though their articulation of these issues varies wildly. Fitt, for instance, with his travelogue of a vastly altered Scotland in the near future, manages to make an unfamiliar society recognisable through his employment of Scottish regional dialect as well as constructing, as Sassi terms it, “a complex picture which involves spatial, political and cultural reorganisation in the light of an ongoing ‘dialogue’ between regional/national and global politics”, adding that “[Fitt’s] virtual geographies [...] are also negotiated in the interplay of individual and collective memory of Scotland’s past, and thus represent a meaningful act of re-vision of the nation’s memorial landscape”.67 For Fitt, therefore, Scotland’s natural environment is only one element of what makes it a distinctive national entity and, as we can witness in the renaming of the Highlands and the establishment of installations such as “Submarnock”, he makes the point that the country’s sense of identity is adaptable enough to take into account radical changes to its material composition without its sense of distinctiveness being entirely compromised. Indeed, Elphinstone also posits a future Scotland which has been radically stripped of its traditional institutions: its organised religion, education system and legal establishment are all distant memories, not even surviving in the form of oral histories. Yet her sweeping removal of religious authority, and indeed the notion of criminal trial by jury being replaced by mob rule, is more in tune with the conventions of traditional post-apocalyptic fiction than is her substitution of democratic elections with a gynocratically appointed system of local government. Thus Elphinstone’s future Scotland, with its amorphously demarcated geography and social history, appears much more remote than Fitt’s; in her embrace of archaism she attempts to capture the essence of a country which predates any precise analysis of nationhood, yet which still avoids outright primitivism by emphasising its communitarian character and retention of cultural traditions. Consequently it is more difficult to situate Clachanpluck explicitly in terms of distinctively Scottish notions of cultural identity, even in spite of Elphinstone’s close alignment with the traditions of the Kailyard. Craig makes the useful observation that delineation of a particular examination of national identity can be highlighted in its relation to other comparative social or cultural entities: If we think of our national “self” as being like our individual self, then we can think of it as defined not by its confrontation with a hostile Other (even if some Others are hostile), or determined by an exclusive Self-

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The above comment suggests a further striking similarity which exists between both novels: the removal of extra-cultural pressures acting upon the future Scotlands which are being presented. Whether in Elphinstone’s post-apocalyptic nation, composed of a patchwork of remote villages existing far from foreign influence, or in Fitt’s rarefied social dystopia, where the last remnants of Scotland remain geographically cut off from other settlements, both authors allow their postulated societies room to develop and to establish themselves, darkly reflecting the modern world in order to highlight contemporary anxieties. In examining communities which are effectively existing in microcosm, Fitt and Elphinstone collectively succeed in addressing recent issues of the challenge to Scottish national identity from the cultural influence of other societies (geographically proximate and otherwise), thus situating their work within a broader wave of contemporary writing which takes account of Scotland’s historical past and the development of Scottish culture in order to concentrate on the ways in which the country continues to adapt to sociopolitical change while also resisting challenges to the underlying fabric of the country’s national identity. As Douglas Gifford and Neil McMillan note: The application of postcolonial theory to Scottish literature is now under way. In a paper published in Scotlands, Berthold Schoene argues provocatively that “many Welsh, Irish and Scottish people perceive themselves as citizens of colonised nations which neither represent fully equal constituents of Great Britain nor independent member states of the Commonwealth”, a situation which calls for the analysis of Scottish writing in terms of its relation to dominant English culture. [...] Only now is Scottish writing realising its postmodern heterogeneity, according to Schoene, a view which reduces the literature of the past to a totality against which our new-found plurality can be affirmed and valorised.69

The above certainly applies to Elphinstone’s celebration of cultural tradition, irrespective of its form—oral history, folk music and so on—but can just as relevantly be related to Fitt’s commemoration of the adaptability of Scottish language and dialect. Whether a future Scotland is depicted as a society defined by the individual (as in Fitt) or by the community (as in Elphinstone), there is some degree of social relevance in both of the discussed texts. Certainly Elphinstone was to return to the issue of Scottish heritage and its relation to modern Scotland with her novel The Gathering Night (2009). Set in the Scotland of the Mesolithic Era, the

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novel moves beyond her usual remit of historical fiction into the realms of the pre-historical novel. Like The Incomer, the text seeks to raise issues of the danger of the technological and materialistic excesses of modern life by contrasting them with another age—in this case, the distant past rather than a regressive distant future. Yet it also moves beyond the Arcadian nostalgia of agrarian life to contemplate the traditional role of the huntergatherer (a function which The Incomer, through the antagonistic character of Patrick, specifically questions). The Gathering Night marks an interesting development from Elphinstone’s more conventional historical dramas in recent years, and suggests that her concerns about the materialistic and possibly unsustainable direction of modern society remain since the time of The Incomer’s publication. While Fitt has yet to produce another novel following the general critical success of But n Ben A-Go-Go, and indeed the emotionally-charged final chapter of the novel more or less precludes the prospect of a direct sequel, his lasting legacy to speculative fiction appears not to be in the form of his memorably downbeat, crumbling Port cityscape or the disdainful bite of his satire of commercialism and political corruption, but rather his linguistic agility in bringing a specifically Scottish voice to a subgenre which has all too often relied on a rather anonymous, even lacklustre international approach to its narrative and milieu whilst leaving scarcely any space to develop notions of specific cultural identity and nationhood. While the work of Elphinstone and Fitt demonstrates that Scottish speculative fiction does indeed exhibit qualities which are of relevance to wider discussions of national identity, these connections often remain vague. In their engagement with Scottish characters and locales, albeit in futuristic and unfamiliar configurations, they undoubtedly deal with issues of nationhood—what it is to be Scottish, culturally and personally, at a particular point of time—in a much more direct manner than was the case with Banks’s writing and, usually, has been the case with MacLeod’s novels. But their willingness to engage with explicitly Scottish social and cultural characteristics also allows their texts to stand apart from more recently-emerging authors in the field, such as Stross, Morgan and Gibson, whose market-conscious work exhibits a far more internationalist awareness which tends to sit uncomfortably with nation-specific discussion. Instead, the novels of Elphinstone and Fitt can be situated more convincingly alongside those of lesser-known speculative fiction writers such as Chris Boyce and Jack Deighton, whose work has likewise emphasised elements of the Scottish character—its politics and social conditions—without necessarily exploring issues of cultural identity in anything approaching an explicit manner. While Elphinstone writes

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from—and promotes—a tradition which is more recognisably Scottish in nature than a majority of her contemporaries, and indeed Fitt’s use of the Scots language throughout the entirety of his narrative distances him from other authors in the field, the greater proportion of their peers have instead dealt with issues surrounding Scotland’s identity in much more tangential ways, if at all, which makes these authors’ voices seem all the more distinctive—both at the time of their publication and in the present day.

PART II: SCOTTISH CRIME FICTION

CHAPTER FOUR SCOTTISH CRIME FICTION: AN INTRODUCTION

Scottish crime fiction has, for the past several decades, proven to be one of the country’s most commercially significant literary exports, popular with readers both foreign and domestic. Yet, in a similar manner to the wideranging literary category of speculative fiction, it has proven to be a multifaceted genre with boundaries which can prove difficult to define in absolutely precise terms. John Scaggs observes that “it is the centrality of crime to a genre that otherwise, in its sheer diversity, defies any simple classification” which has led to the convenient umbrella title of “crime fiction” being applied to such a significant corpus of different subgenres, adding that “the majority of critical studies of the genre over the past twenty years employ the term ‘crime fiction’ to classify an otherwise unclassifiable genre”.1 However complex the field’s composition may be to define, the vast success—in both critical and commercial terms—of published work in the genre cannot be denied. Since the publication of William McIlvanney’s seminal Laidlaw in 1977, Scottish crime fiction has experienced a veritable explosion in the awareness of the reading public, with a great many new authors—many of them extremely prolific— emerging to considerable acclaim. As Duncan Petrie notes: While Scottish crime writing may have been a somewhat limited field prior to the emergence of Laidlaw, it subsequently burgeoned in the 1980s and 1990s with key contributions made by Frederic Lindsay, Quintin Jardine, Paul Johnson and Christopher Brookmyre. At the same time, the impact of feminism has also given rise to an equally important group of Scottish women crime writers including Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Manda Scott.2

The authors mentioned by Petrie form only the most concise selection of contributors to the field, for to consider a roll-call of Scottish crime fiction writers is to run the gamut of the genre in all of its stylistic complexity. Among the most commercially successful works of crime

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fiction from Scotland, or concerning Scotland, some do not always prove neatly congruent to modern critical expectations of crime writing. Alexander McCall Smith’s long-running The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series (beginning with The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, 1998), set in the African state of Botswana, sometimes adheres more to the customs of the comparatively genteel murder-mysteries of Agatha Christie than the hardboiled detective fiction which has typified so many modern entries in the genre, while Marion Chesney (writing as M.C. Beaton) has produced new entries in her humorously macabre Hamish Macbeth series of Highlands-situated thrillers for more than a quarter of a century.3 There have, of course, been many other crime novels set within rural Scottish locales, their authors ranging from Bill Kirton, Marten Claridge, M.G. Kincaid, Gwen Moffat and Bruce Durie, though few have reached the level of durability or long-term success garnered by the works of Chesney. Yet for all their undeniable longevity, these examples are far from typical works in a field that has been dominated for years by the gritty urban subgenre which has come to be known across the world by the term Tartan Noir. There has been some contention in critical circles over the genesis of “Tartan Noir” fiction. Andrew Taylor has noted the widely-attributed account that “it was James Ellroy, the reigning godfather of American crime fiction, who dubbed Ian Rankin ‘the king of tartan noir’”.4 Others have come to consider the above account to be less straightforward than it initially appears, leading commentators such as Stuart Kelly to instead voice the opinion that “in Laidlaw, [McIlvanney] effectively created the genre now stereotypically referred to as ‘tartan noir’—a term that McIlvanney calls ersatz, pointing out that it was a Scot who coined it and co-opted an American into saying it”.5 But whatever its origins, there is no doubting the fact that texts which have been categorised as existing within the boundaries of the Tartan Noir subgenre of crime fiction have had a massive impact upon the reception of Scottish literature—and, most especially, Scottish crime writing—in both the national and international market. Peter Clandfield is one of many scholars who have evaluated the success of Tartan Noir not just in terms of its commercial triumphs, but also its ability to employ the established tropes of the crime fiction genre in order to critically assess and comment upon political, cultural and social issues in contemporary Scotland: Distinctive crime and detective novels are part of the international success of Scottish writing. Vivid urban settings and other cannily deployed genre conventions in these works have attracted the tag “Tartan Noir”. The novels most often grouped into this category, such as those of Ian Rankin,

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Christopher Brookmyre, and Denise Mina, are quite different from one another, and are most significantly and similarly “noir” not in their use of specific settings, plots, or tropes, but in their mutual interest—which they share not just with American writers but also with longer-established Scottish ones, such as William McIlvanney—in using genre-based fiction toward social commentary and critique.6

McIlvanney’s contribution to the field cannot be understated, his novel Laidlaw now generally considered to be responsible for the establishment of the Tartan Noir movement. Prior to McIlvanney’s work, Scottish crime fiction was perhaps best represented by authors such as the prolific William Knox—author of the Thane and Moss cycle—or Hugh C. Rae, whose work exhibited a dark, unsentimental realism which would prove to be a clear precursor to McIlvanney’s novels, most especially demonstrated in Rae’s novels Skinner (1968) and A Few Small Bones (1968).7 McIlvanney, however, was responsible for bringing Scottish crime fiction into the public consciousness in a manner hitherto unseen in previous decades. His memorable protagonist—the morally-complex, Glasgowbased Inspector Jack Laidlaw—was later to appear in two other novels (The Papers of Tony Veitch, 1983, and Strange Loyalties, 1991), and would form the inspiration for many later authors. McIlvanney’s influence appeared particularly unambiguous in Glenn Chandler’s early screenplays for the ground-breaking STV Television series Taggart (1983-). Chandler’s gruffly morose but analytically astute creation, DCI Jim Taggart—portrayed by distinctive veteran character actor Mark McManus—was a senior officer in Glasgow’s Northern Division CID, and a character whose often grisly investigations have resonated in many later works by other authors. Ian Rankin’s cycle of novels involving police detective John Rebus, starting with Knots and Crosses (1987), exhibit the most obvious Laidlaw influences in their earliest entries, but this series—set almost exclusively in and around Edinburgh—would quickly establish a highly distinctive literary identity of its own. Carole Jones observes that “the great variety of Scottish crime fiction is particularly laden with crisis-ridden existential anti-heroes like William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw and Ian Rankin’s Rebus”,8 and indeed there is no denying that by the end of the 1980s much of the groundwork of what has come to be characterised as Tartan Noir had been firmly established. The massive success of Rankin’s Rebus novels was to lay the foundation upon which many later authors would contribute, his Macallan Gold Dagger-winning Black and Blue (1997) in particular proving to be almost as influential as Laidlaw had been two decades earlier. Taken together, these two unconventional protagonists have come to form twin

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totems of the Tartan Noir subgenre, typifying the general nonconformity of characters within this category of writing whilst also defining some of its key characteristics. Gill Plain has highlighted the fact that: Scottish crime fiction emerges from a hybrid tradition that owes more to American than English popular culture. From the existential isolation of McIlvanney’s Laidlaw to Rankin’s introspective, anti-establishment Rebus, Scottish crime fiction has adopted and adapted the hard-boiled private investigator of modernist American legend while also, of course, drawing upon an indigenous tradition of Scottish urban working-class fiction.9

Indeed, the metropolitan elements which have emerged so strongly in American detective fiction since the golden age of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, coupled with the free-thinking nonconformity so often exhibited in crime novels of the hardboiled crime subgenre, can be found in the work of many modern Scottish crime writers. These have included novels such as Peter Turnbull’s The Killing Floor (1995), Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning (1996), Denise Mina’s Garnethill (1998), Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room (2002), Lin Anderson’s Driftnet (2003), Allan Guthrie’s Kiss Her Goodbye (2005), Stuart MacBride’s Cold Granite (2005), Quintin Jardine’s Dead and Buried (2006) and Val McDermid’s A Darker Domain (2009), though the field has also recently been encroached upon by a number of writers whose main body of work lies outwith the confines of the crime fiction genre, including historical novelists such as Manda Scott (Hen’s Teeth, 1999) and mainstream literary figures including Irvine Welsh (Crime, 2008). As the above selection of authors demonstrates, the gender balance within Scottish crime fiction is far more evenly weighted than has been the case with the predominance of male voices which have driven Scotland’s speculative fiction field. The large number of female authors who have achieved critical and commercial success in the literary category of Tartan Noir has lent further diversity to an already-varied subgenre, not least in the opportunity that is presented to expound gender-specific observations in a popular and widely disseminated textual form. Crime novelist Denise Mina notes that: Perceptions of crime fiction have fundamentally changed in the past twenty years, largely because of the work of writers like McDermid and Rankin. The new wave of British writing came as a result of the influence of American urban noir. From the cosy, Christie-esque puzzle thrillers set in country houses British, and particularly Scottish, crime fiction has moved the genre into new disturbing areas. The early lesbian and feminist

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work of writers like [Laura] Wilson, [Sara] Paretsky and Mary Wings have made the form uniquely attractive to writers who feel themselves alienated from mainstream writing. McDermid says that straight literature “became so self-referential that it all but disappeared up its own arse. The success of crime fiction shows that there is a place for narrative. Readers want to read it and writers want to write it”.10

Elements of many existing subgenres of the modern crime novel are to be found in Tartan Noir, which spans many examples of the police procedural story, the detective novel, and—as has been mentioned— hardboiled crime fiction. Yet this form of writing does more than merely superimpose established tropes of the genre onto Scottish locales. National cultural and political issues are explored by many writers in the field, in ways which are often intensely socially aware. In the case of authors such as Rankin and Brookmyre, it allows for direct ideological points to be made, whereas others including McDermid and Mina instead explore social conditions to articulate wider cultural observations. Yet some commentators have identified a degree of conflict between the articulation of specifically Scottish concerns and their interpretation in a modern world of deconstructed, often contradictory globalising factors. Willy Maley and Sarah Neely, for instance, observe that Tartan Noir “is revered for displacing the Scotch ‘myth and mist’ tradition with cosmopolitan flair,” but also note that the movement is “representative of a new postmodern sensibility that undermines identification with place in favour of a rootless cosmopolitanism”.11 Some have claimed that this essential conflict is also characteristic of a self-conscious engagement with the notion of the Caledonian Antisyzygy within the Tartan Noir movement, but in truth this appears to be little more than a superficial parallel. It may seem obvious to state that as crime fiction inevitably deals with the inherent variance between justice and criminality, an intrinsic duality of purpose will generally make itself apparent within the narrative, and it is this sense of paradox and contradiction that has led a few commentators to perceive elements of the Antisyzygy through the lens of, as Tom Nairn puts it, “the realm of an anguished examination of conscience and consciousness”.12 Yet while there is little doubt that the moral complexities of crime—and criminality—are usually dealt with by Tartan Noir authors in a subtle and multifaceted manner which teases out innate contradictions in often remarkably perceptive ways, it does not signify any particular connection to the Caledonian Antisyzygy beyond initial, tangential similarities of purpose. Nor has Tartan Noir become encumbered with the kind of essentialist baggage that has come to characterise discussions of the

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Antisyzygy in more recent years. The movement’s examination of the nature of crime is as intricate as it is timely, given the entrenched, deeply partisan political upheaval of the 1970s and especially the 1980s which provided the background to the genesis of Tartan Noir, and as a result most novels in the subgenre generally posit neither easy answers or straightforward ethical posturing in relation to the crimes which are investigated within their respective narratives. Plain notes that “crime writing has been a vibrant dimension of Scottish literary culture since the 1980s, when a range of writers adopted the genre as a means of exploring systemic rather than individual criminality,” also reflecting that “the alienated figure of the detective was a trope well suited to the articulation of opposition to Thatcherism, and from these polemical roots crime fiction developed into an ideal formula for investigating the state of Scotland”.13 This complexity and ambiguity of moral purpose, combined with the duality of political standpoints, the conflict between corruption and redemption, and the complex nature of the Scottish national character, all combine to ground Tartan Noir inescapably within wider debates in Scottish literature which defy any simple correlation to characteristics deriving from the Caledonian Antisyzygy. Instead, authors such as Rankin and Welsh—being acutely aware of the long shadow cast by the Antisyzygy—seem willing to employ the concept as a kind of trope rather than engaging with it directly per se, demonstrating a heightened appreciation of its applications without allowing their approach to become involved in its wide-ranging ramifications and historical encumberances. The fact that Tartan Noir texts belong to a popular genre of writing has, naturally, caused some degree of variance amongst commentators on the subject of its classification alongside literary fiction of the time. Yet perhaps due to the extreme realism to which this particular mode of writing aspires, the genre often avoids the brunt of the most derisive criticism that is so regularly borne by speculative fiction, including the perennial disparagement—true of some crime fiction, just as it is of science fiction—that characterisation is often subordinated to plot in many novels, including some of the most commercially popular. Doreen Alvarez Saar observes that in recent years “several of the acknowledged masters among the practitioners of the British detective novel have felt obligated to speak out in the popular press about the need for greater critical attention to and acclaim for the detective novel”, noting that “Ian Rankin, the prolific writer of crime novels set in Scotland, and perhaps the doyen of the school called Tartan Noir, stated ‘“literary snobs” turn up their noses when it comes to crime fiction’ even though ‘[t]he best crime writing is as good as anything else in the literary canon”’.14 Interestingly, however,

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some critics have found themselves in an unusual situation in recent years whereby crime fiction texts are pointedly excluded from analysis on account of their perceived “inferior” formal qualities, and yet—because of their significant commercial popularity in relation to other genres—they cannot entirely escape the notice of commentators either. Gerard Carruthers, for instance, raises this very point in the conclusion to his recent survey of Scottish literature: Just as it might be argued there can be no singular Scottish literature, so too it might be proposed that there is no singular way of studying Scottish literature. If this book has argued that some writers are left out to suit certain vested critical narratives or practices, perhaps it too is guilty of something of the same. There are always gaps, or writers and concerns being excluded, in any work of criticism, most especially one that undertakes a long historical survey. In the case of the present book, one issue that might be raised, for instance, is its exclusion from the discussion of the best-selling mode of Scottish literature: crime fiction. Absent from the foregoing chapters have been the names of Christopher Brookmyre, Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith or Val McDermid. The present writer would claim that this is because of the main concerns of his book, but might the accusation of wrongly ignoring the most popular form of Scottish literature be levelled against me here?15

Perhaps even more noteworthy is the fact that the term “Tartan Noir” itself has not proven to be entirely free from censure, with some critics and journalists taking issue with the manufactured image that the expression has come to embody. The debate continues as to whether Tartan Noir can be considered a legitimate subgenre of crime fiction, or merely a convenient marketing tool for the publishing industry which has ultimately proven to be as “ersatz” as McIlvanney has considered the term. Certainly there can be no denying the commercial significance of the genre: Ian Rankin, speaking in 2001, noted that his sales figures were so high that they had generated interest from the Guinness Book of Records, adding that “I’ve got 12 Rebus titles; that’s 60,000 books a month selling on the back list. Multiply that by 12 months and then add in a new book every year – that’s a million sales in the UK”.16 McIlvanney’s denunciation of the term Tartan Noir continues to loom large, however; commentators such as Charles Taylor have made observations on the matter which remain widely representative of this particular strain of criticism: There’s an inescapably condescending tinge to the phrase “tartan noir”, devised to describe the contemporary school of Scottish crime writing. It’s a touristy phrase, suggesting that there’s something quaint about hard-

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Chapter Four boiled crime fiction that comes from the land of kilts and haggis. The cozy appellation calls up visions of some new niche market of genre fiction, and it gives readers no idea that this crop of Scottish mystery writers [...] is currently doing the strongest work in the form.17

Perhaps the most significant fact raised by Taylor is that Tartan Noir has become, due to its continued commercial popularity, more than simply a “touristy phrase”. Exceeding the explicit confines of literary classification, the term has certainly extended to embrace a wider marketing purpose than its original concern of promoting and selling novels. Ian Duncan notes that “the discourses of crime fiction and tourism quite happily collaborate: ‘Rebus’s Edinburgh’ is now featured on walking-tour itineraries, while Mary King’s Close has just been reopened to the public as an Old Town theme park”.18 Tartan Noir itself has become a commercially targeted commodity in ways which exhibit a distinct sense of adaptability, offering relevant socio-cultural discourse to domestic audiences whilst simultaneously contributing a peculiarly Scottish urban ambience in order to appeal to overseas purchasers. This is epitomised by David Martin-Jones’s consideration that “in Scottish literature it is only fairly recently that crime fiction has taken centre stage as a filter through which to examine the changing face of Scottish society. Writers like Ian Rankin have thrived, his Rebus novels, which began in the 1980s [...] becoming bestsellers in the 1990s, and painting a grim, rainy, murderous image of contemporary Edinburgh for worldwide consumption”.19 There is no doubt, for instance, that the Rebus novels have charted major social change in Scottish society between their inception in the late eighties and the series’ conclusion in the new millennium, but other authors such as Denise Mina have also used the genre to explore and interrogate factors such as immigration, cultural attitudes and societal injustice. The realism and political vigour of crime fiction have afforded the genre multiple functionality as an instrument of social commentary, and Tartan Noir texts are certainly no exception to this rule. There is, I would venture, a distinct advantage in choosing the literary strategies of Scotland’s crime writing by way of comparison with the country’s speculative fiction, as opposed to other popular genres such as— for instance—metaphysical fantasy fiction, which has included landmark texts such as Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) and James Robertson’s The Fanatic (2000). With its emphasis on contemporary social values and often extreme forms of realism, the crime fiction genre employs markedly different methodology from that which has proven common to the overwhelming majority of speculative fiction, and certainly the work of crime novelists in Scotland has enjoyed greater critical and

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media attention than that of their science fiction counterparts over the course of the past few decades, not least due to their monumental commercial success. Irrespective of its ongoing commercial viability, Scottish crime writing continues to remain well-regarded by specialists in the field, and it is this persisting relevance to rapidly-changing modern cultural conditions which have maintained its prominent stature on the international stage. Ian Rankin himself has observed that writing in the genre remains highly attuned to changing social mores in comparison with the majority of mainstream fiction, noting that Tartan Noir has evolved considerably since the 1980s, the subgenre’s formal qualities and subject matter demonstrably developing in order to subvert reader expectation and retain social and cultural relevance to readers: Crime fiction deals with contemporary issues in a way that the literary novel is refusing to do. If you look at the Booker and Whitbread shortlists, there’s an awful lot of looking back, and not much about what’s becoming of us, in this new Internet age, this corporate age, this leisure industry age. Crime novels and thrillers are the ones dealing with that.20

The following chapters will discuss the development of what has become known as Tartan Noir, charting its evolution from Rankin’s influential Knots and Crosses in the late 1980s to Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning in the mid-1990s, before examining the changes which had become apparent in the subgenre leading to the turn of the century and beyond, via an examination of Denise Mina’s Garnethill and Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room. In so doing, I will investigate the extent to which these novels have engaged with issues of topicality which were being actively addressed by the mainstream literary fiction of the time, and also examine the manner in which this mode of writing has confronted notions of identity and national culture during a period which has seen tumultuous shifts in political power and rapid social and cultural change throughout Scotland.

CHAPTER FIVE IAN RANKIN’S KNOTS AND CROSSES (1987) AND CHRISTOPHER BROOKMYRE’S QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING (1996)

As mentioned in the introduction to this section, the category of crime fiction which has become known as Tartan Noir is generally regarded as having its genesis in William McIlvanney’s 1977 novel Laidlaw. This text, more than any other, laid the groundwork for the style and content of much later work in the field, with its careful balancing of the police procedural and hardboiled subgenres with the social and cultural observations of contemporary Scotland. Given its enormous contribution to later work in Scottish crime fiction, it is difficult to overstate the novel’s deviation from genre expectations at the time of its publication. Beth Dickson states that McIlvanney’s detective fiction has “been influenced by the American detective fiction of Raymond Chandler”: This influence can be seen in [the Laidlaw novels’] air of gritty reality, their doubting and often unhappy hero and their use of fast, witty dialogue. [...] They are quite unlike the English tradition of detective fiction where an intelligent, eccentric and sometimes aristocratic hero solves a murder as someone would solve a puzzle.1

Ian Duncan has described Tartan Noir as Scotland’s “local, masculine mutation of crime fiction”.2 By establishing a new and distinctively Scottish approach to crime writing in ways which have engendered commercial and critical success over the past three decades, and by demonstrating the ability not simply to borrow freely from the American model of crime fiction but also to refine it for employment in a specifically Scottish national context, McIlvanney’s texts were to provide inspiration for an entire generation of authors in the years ahead: Ian Rankin is one of Scotland’s most successful writers, having written one in every ten books sold. He was thinking of writing a crime novel when he came across William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw, about a Glasgow

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Chapter Five detective. McIlvanney was a respected novelist who’d won the Whitbread Prize, and, “At the 1985 Edinburgh Book Festival I went up to him to get my copy of Laidlaw signed. I said, ‘I’m writing a book that’s got a [sic] Edinburgh detective in it,’ and he wrote ‘Good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw’ on the inside of the book and I’ve still got it upstairs. It’s got pride of place in my library”.3

Ian Rankin (1960-) was born in Cardenden, Fife. He graduated from Edinburgh University and has since taught English literature there, also beginning what was to be an ultimately uncompleted PhD dissertation on the work of Muriel Spark. His first novel, The Flood (1986) was written contemporaneously with his doctoral thesis; he was later to move to London and, in the following years, France as he further developed his literary career, eventually returning to Scotland some time later. Although he has written in a number of different genres, including non-fiction and action thrillers (most notably those published under his literary pseudonym Jack Harvey), it is for his monumental contribution to Scottish crime writing that Rankin has become best-known. Crime fiction expert Barry Forshaw has termed Rankin “incontrovertibly the bestselling male crime writer in the UK, [with] his tough Scottish copper Inspector Rebus part of the zeitgeist”,4 and indeed the straight-talking plain-clothes policeman has been an indelible part of Scottish crime writing from the series’ inception in 1987 through to its conclusion in 2007, the cycle’s huge influence continuing to inspire other authors even following the eponymous character’s “retirement”. The popularity of Rankin’s novels has been further enhanced by a series of television adaptations broadcast on the ITV network, first by Clerkenwell Films starring John Hannah in the lead role (2000-04) and later by STV Productions with Ken Stott assuming the portrayal of John Rebus (2005-07), while Rankin’s prominence in the genre has been firmly cemented by the immense (and well-documented) profitability of his work. Writing in 2005, Guardian columnist Nicholas Wroe noted that: Ian Rankin was recently named the tenth bestselling fiction writer in Britain since 1998 and it is has been estimated that he accounts for 10% of all UK crime fiction sales. These are remarkable figures, but a look at the only other crime writers to make the top 10—John Grisham and James Patterson—reveals that his achievement is more than just commercial. Rankin does share some attributes with these behemoths of the global book racks; the way he has become a strong and reliable brand allied with a Stakhanovite willingness to promote his work.5

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The stimulus provided by McIlvanney’s work has motivated Rankin’s prolific output in a number of ways. In a discussion of Rankin’s crime fiction writing, Roderick Watson observes that “the Laidlaw books have proven to be remarkably influential, or at least prophetic, for a growing number of young Scottish writers have since engaged with genre fiction while maintaining high literary quality”.6 Yet Rankin inherits more than McIlvanney’s cultural authenticity and social realism; his approach to the police procedural, fundamentally interlaced with elements of the hardboiled detective novel, also indicates a clear line of influence between Laidlaw and the early development of Rebus. As Martin Priestman notes: In more fully urban settings Rankin’s Rebus has many pre- and postechoes. William McIlvanney’s two Laidlaw novels [...] did not become a series, but created an influential symbiosis between a crime-ridden yet vital Glasgow and the divorced, hard-drinking but intellectually literate hero.7

In this sense, Rankin also became heir to the figure of the nonconformist, free-thinking detective hero, a working-class protagonist with a firm grounding in both the dangers of his profession and the shortcomings of society at large. The character’s non-privileged background gives him a clear, focused and sometimes jaundiced view of the more advantaged members of Edinburgh society, from politicians to the upper echelons of his own profession. The origins of this, too, can be witnessed in longstanding traditions of American crime writing. As Dickson remarks in relation to McIlvanney’s work: It is important to recognise that Laidlaw’s antiauthoritarian stance is a feature of much American detective fiction where detectives are in conflict with their superiors, continually defying the orders of a boss who seems blind to the realities of a case. This emphasis on the individual who is so talented he must “go it alone” is a motif which recurs widely in American fiction and is one which McIlvanney easily transfers into a Scottish context.8

From a critical standpoint, however, it would be injudicious to align the Rebus novels too closely to any one particular genre archetype, for much of the cycle’s praise amongst commentators has been derived from its successful amalgamation of long-established tropes drawn from this wide-ranging mode of fiction. John Scaggs notes that although the Rebus series conforms to many conventions of the police procedural subgenre, there are also disparities which set it apart from other entries in this category of crime writing: “Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, for example, is an

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unorthodox, anti-authoritarian, alcoholic divorcee police detective [whose methods] conform more to the hard-boiled model of the rule-bending individualist than they do to the idea of police officer working as part of a team”.9 (The hardboiled approach has continued to gain ground in Scottish crime fiction in recent years, being especially apparent in novels such as Allan Guthrie’s Two-Way Split, 2004.) Yet irrespective of the Rebus novels’ undeniable accomplishment in adapting a stylistic approach that had hitherto been largely associated with American crime writing, reworking it to appear relevant within a specifically Scottish cultural milieu, a great deal of the enduring popularity of Rankin’s texts among reader communities stems from the complexity of the series’ eponymous protagonist. The character of Rebus is as intricate as it is conflicted; simultaneously worldly-wise and self-destructive, he seems unable to form any kind of stable domestic partnership due to his borderline-obsessive professional determination. Andrew Taylor comments that: John Rebus falls into a familiar mould for a detective in crime fiction: he is a hard-drinking misfit, frequently at odds with his superiors, his private life littered with the debris of broken relationships. But the depth of characterisation makes him anything but formulaic, as does the grimly plausible picture of crime, policing and punishment in Scotland’s Jekylland-Hyde of a capital city. [...] The novels are shot through with a sense of foreboding, with the fear of impending personal and social disintegration.10

Taylor is correct in his observation that Rankin’s multifaceted (and, at times, intensely insightful) characterisation of Rebus elevates this lone figure from many other crime fiction protagonists of the time. Yet the author’s handling of the character deepens and improves throughout the course of the series: Rankin himself has admitted that in Knots and Crosses in particular, Rebus “was a cipher, a way of telling a story. It was going to be a one-off, and I nearly killed him at the end of the first book”.11 Even the character’s surname, Rebus, is unsubtle in its rather laboured suggestion of a symbolic puzzle or conundrum. Rankin has since voiced regret at his choice of name for the character, stating frankly that “I came up with it when I was a smart-arse Ph.D. student who was doing lots of semiotics and deconstruction, and I thought that since the crime novel was playing a game with the reader, I’d do more of the same—give him the name of a puzzle. Now I just think it’s a stupid name”.12 It may seem difficult to reconcile Rankin’s apparently laissez-faire attitude towards his craft in press interviews with his disciplined, stringent defence of crime fiction in critical discourse, for instance in his robust response following

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James Kelman’s attacks on the genre at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2009. But whatever the reason for the character’s distinctive moniker, it certainly did not hinder the process of Rankin’s novels becoming firmly cemented in popular culture, and by the early nineties Rankin had greatly embellished Rebus’s personality traits, refining the inspector into a much more rounded, nonconformist and occasionally selfdestructive figure. Even from his earliest appearance in Knots and Crosses, Rebus is depicted as an unconventional character: contemptuous of internal politics within the police force, he often finds himself frustrated by Edinburgh’s rigidly hierarchical social structure. Yet for all his disdain for elitism and an occasional disrespect for some (though not all) of his superiors, he nonetheless retains an active role in defending the very system that he perceives as being, in a number of key factors, essentially corrupt. Scaggs takes note that “through a project of realism that presents the police as ‘credible operators against crime’, the police procedural becomes a powerful weapon of reassurance in the arsenal of the dominant social order”,13 and indeed Rebus does focus considerable effort on upholding the law at all costs, even if he occasionally discovers that he must bend any number of rules in order to do so. Many would claim that this narrative methodology is, by its very nature, inherently conservative in nature, and yet Scottish authors have deftly negotiated this expectation in order to provide a rather more radical approach to assumptions which derive from this aspect of the crime fiction genre. Rebus’s propensity towards defiant behaviour does have limits, for instance. Although he has a tendency to view many of his immediate superiors in an unflattering light, he is also keenly aware that the more senior a colleague is situated in the ranks, the less likely it is that his insubordination will be tolerated without resulting damage to his career (even taking into account his disregard throughout the series towards advancing his promotion prospects). Faced with a high-ranking officer, for instance, Rebus’s compliance is considerably more pronounced than the deference that he would generally afford an immediate superior: Chief Superintendent Wallace looked from Rebus to Gill Templer and back again. [...] The room was large and uncluttered, a self-assured oasis. Here, problems were always solved, decisions were made—always correctly. (Knots and Crosses, p. 186)

In spite of the character’s unorthodox attitude towards the establishment, Rankin is at pains to emphasise that Rebus’s disillusionment is borne out of

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a combination of bitter life experience and general world-weariness, rather than iconoclasm for its own sake. His concerns about social justice are not only exacerbated by his anxieties about the insidiousness of the criminal mentality, but by a deep-seated apprehension about a changing and unpredictable Scotland where the increasingly fragile social democratic consensus is shown to be continuously under threat—as much from the attitudes of the authorities as it is from external influences. Crucially, his disenchantment rarely gives way to out-and-out cynicism without good reason: Rebus’s mindset tends to be reactive to individuals and situations around him, rather than reflexively disparaging. Nor does he give a free hand to other would-be nonconformists that he encounters, particularly if he regards them as essentially bogus in nature. He is, for instance, quick to deflate the posturing affectations of a middle-class student activist whom he encounters selling hard-left publications, using a seemingly-innocuous discussion of an Edinburgh University professor (whose lateral thinking inadvertently provides the breakthrough which allows Rebus to crack the case) as a means to undermine the young woman’s political pretensions: “You’re a student, I suppose?” “That’s right,” she said, shuffling uncomfortably. She knew a buyer when she saw one. This was not a buyer. “Edinburgh University?” “Yes.” “Studying what?” “English and politics.” “English? Have you heard of a guy called Eiser? He teaches there.” She nodded. “He’s an old fascist,” she said. “His theory of reading is a piece of right-wing propaganda to pull the wool over the eyes of the proletariat.” Rebus nodded. “What was your party again?” “Workers Revolutionary.” “But you’re a student, eh? Not a worker, not one of the proletariat either by the sound of you.” Her face was red, her eyes burning fire. Come the revolution, Rebus would be first against the wall. But he had not yet played his trump card. “So really, you’re contravening the Trade Description Act, aren’t you? And what about that tin? Do you have a licence from the proper authority to collect money in that tin?” (Knots and Crosses, pp. 195-96)

The fact that Rebus’s character and personality are a conflicting mass of contradictions, sometimes inclining him to a peculiar intensity of behaviour, have led some to comment on Rankin’s self-conscious evocation of duality throughout the novel, a common denominator in a

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number of Tartan Noir novels including Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room (2002) and several others. Gill Plain gives voice to the opinion that “through fiction, the inarticulable resentments of a stateless nation find form and expression, and this symbiotic relationship between text and context is equally manifest in crime fiction. Furthermore, Scottish crime writing draws extensively upon its literary forebears: nearly every selfrespecting crime novel carries an obligatory reference to Stevenson or his seminal novel”.14 This is especially true of Knots and Crosses, which contains repeated (and sometimes rather overwrought) references to Deacon Brodie, Jekyll and Hyde, and Burke and Hare (Knots and Crosses, p. 102), while—in a further acknowledgement of the novel’s McIlvanneyan antecedent—Stevens the investigative journalist at one point assumes the pseudonym Jim Laidlaw (Knots and Crosses, pp. 18182). Some years after the novel’s publication, Rankin claimed that he had not initially intended to produce a text that would be specifically aligned with the crime fiction genre; his objective had instead been to provide a contemporary reinterpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with much ongoing emphasis upon the real possibility that Rebus himself is psychologically unstable to the point where he could conceivably be responsible for the very murders that he is investigating.15 (Indeed, Rankin has described Stevenson’s novel as a landmark influence on his writing: “The meek, kind-hearted Jekyll begins to yield to his baser instincts, feeling shame but also power. The question is: why do we humans do bad things to one another? The answer is not altogether comfortable: because it feels good to transgress. This is a theme at the heart of everything I write”.16) The notion of Rebus’s implied instability is lent considerable credence throughout the narrative, and in a manner that could not easily have been achieved later in the series given greater familiarity with Rebus’s character amongst readers. The gradual revelation that Rebus has suffered extreme trauma earlier in his life, during a military training exercise which pushes him to his furthest physical and mental limits, causes the reader to doubt the efficacy of his psychological fitness throughout the narrative; that the extent of his emotional damage has been suppressed so heavily that it only becomes apparent under hypnosis causes even his lover and colleague to question the integrity of his faculties: The notion still niggled at her that, no matter how absurd it might appear, John was somehow behind this whole thing: no Reeve, the notes sent to himself, jealousy leading him to kill his wife’s lover, his daughter now hidden somewhere—somewhere like that locked room. (Knots and Crosses, p. 191)

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It is clearly no coincidence, then, that Rankin’s work should contain such prominent echoes of works such as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) (which he describes as having been “an influence on Scottish literature and certainly on my own Inspector Rebus stories”17) and of course Stevenson’s aforementioned The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the latter of which Catherine Spooner considers to be “the classic literary exploration of duality”.18 Even the title of Rankin’s novel, referring as it does to a game which features a contest between polar opposites, has resonance throughout the text’s narrative: Rebus plays the game with his later nemesis, Gordon Reeve, when they are held in confinement by the SAS as part of a disastrous training mission. The serial-killer antagonist Reeve later sends Rebus a variety of anonymous correspondence featuring crosses made from matches and knots tied in string, while he later assumes the nom de plume Ian Knott to goad Rebus. Although traditionally considered a game which can exhibit no real tactical advantage during play, the deranged Reeve claims to have discovered a stratagem which delivers him an unlikely winning move: a line of attack which he later employs, in devastating fashion, as he attempts to achieve revenge against Rebus for “abandoning” him (having been able to withstand the gruelling training at the hands of his armed forces superiors, the mentally-scarred Rebus was released from confinement while Reeve is left to suffer indelible psychological damage).19 Priestman perceptively notes that: Rankin’s Knots and Crosses combines a classic serial-killer plot with the idea of high-level corruption, in a hushed-up military training scheme whose extreme mental cruelty has driven Rebus from the SAS into the police, and the killer over the edge via a traumatic moment of sexual selfrecognition. Rebus’s name denotes a code in which images or objects replace words, and the fact that the killer communicates with him using the symbolic knots and crosses of the title suggests, along with several references to Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that they are linked as two halves of the same personality.20

In this sense, it is important to note that while Rebus and Reeve are situated in traditional adversarial roles in a manner that has been common to crime fiction from the time of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Professor James Moriarty, one on the side of justice while the other breaks the law in serious and increasingly disturbing ways, Rankin takes care to project the fact that there are more common factors between the two men than there are divisions. Rebus may have an official responsibility to defend the law, but Reeve is seeking his own form of

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twisted justice for what he perceives as the cruellest of betrayals. The experiences they share during their harrowing period of incarceration create a strong but unsettling emotional bond between the pair, though one which Rebus’s subconscious has obscured from his memory, and which Reeve’s insanity has perverted into a parody of the true, harrowing reality of their earlier experiences. Rankin’s close adherence to the conventions of earlier Scottish literary antecedents undoubtedly impacts upon the novel’s formal qualities, though in elevating Knots and Crosses beyond the formulaic strategies common to many crime fiction texts of the time he ultimately aligns it more self-consciously with “Scottish literature” as a specific genre in its own right, its recognisable traditions indicating his keen awareness of his predecessors’ thematic concerns in addition to the employment of his own contemporary socio-political agenda. Plain comments that “hard-boiled detective fiction represents an assertion of both masculinity and national identity,” adding that “this is the fiction of identities forged in opposition, and its legacy offered an ideal template for the fiction of pre-devolution Scotland”.21 I would be inclined to argue that this observation can only be taken so far, however. Care must be taken when considering this juxtaposition of opposites—the convention of circumscribing a notional identity in order to define national characteristics through a process of conflict or a contrast of diametrically contradictory qualities—as a trope specifically aligned to Scottish writing in this genre. American crime fiction has long been replete with explorations of maverick police officers whose prodigious talents of detection are etched out in stark distinction from their conventional, often reactionary superiors, the progress of their investigations concurrently illuminating aspects of cultural and socio-political observation. There does exist, however, some compelling evidence of cross-pollination between crime fiction and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction which implies a connection between the overriding concerns of Tartan Noir writing and themes which have been established in the prose fiction of earlier Scottish authors. Christopher J. Ward, for instance, has observed that there is now: [A] suggestion [...] that many of the generic traits of crime fiction are already present in Scottish literature, played out again and again with variations on the same basic theme of surface versus reality, just as crime writers adapt the same basic plot templates as those who came before them to suit their own purposes. This is not to say that Jean Brodie is the same book as Jekyll and Hyde is the same book as Justified Sinner, but there are undeniable similarities, persistent fascinations and clear thematic recurrences running through all three, and there is a direct line connecting this perennial subject matter to the Rebus novels: Edinburgh itself.22

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It is, perhaps, in this sense of the dual nature of Edinburgh’s social and cultural composition—and, by extension, that of Scotland’s own shifting conception of national identity articulated through a study of its multifaceted capital—that Rankin’s work bears its closest comparison to the concerns of its antecedents, whether in the finely-drawn social hypocrisies portrayed so mercilessly by Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) or the manifold ideological intricacy of Hogg’s masterpiece. Yet although this is a stratum that Rankin taps relentlessly throughout the course of his novel, the moral and psychological duality which he generates is expressed in a variety of other ways within Knots and Crosses. Rebus’s brother Michael, a successful stage hypnotist who (unbeknownst to Rebus) is also moonlighting as a middle-man for an Edinburgh drug dealer, is established as an additional opposite to the novel’s protagonist: Michael belongs to the middle classes and is driven by social aspiration, but his seemingly harmonious family and personal life is at least partly funded by his clandestine criminal activities. This stands in stark contrast to the resolutely proletarian Rebus, an “authentic” Scots hero whose values make him scornful of the trappings of social pretension but unable to achieve a lasting domestic partnership due to his compulsive tendencies regarding his professional duties. (Even the journalist Stevens, who has been doggedly tracking Michael’s movements, plans to use a representation of the brothers as two sides of the same criminal coin in order to add a degree of sensationalism to his story.) Yet Rebus himself is, in spite of his professional adherence to legality, sometimes inclined to doubt his own ethical integrity; while he and a colleague search criminal records in a hunt for the murderer, Rebus is forced—with no small amount of distaste—to question his inner demons: The two men sat in silence for twenty minutes, flicking through the facts and fantasies of rapists, exhibitionists, pederasts, paedophiles, and procurers. Rebus felt his mouth filling with silt. It was as if he saw himself there, time after time after time, the self that lurked behind his everyday consciousness. His Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburghborn. (Knots and Crosses, p. 28)

There is little doubt, of course, that Rankin takes considerable care in drawing lines of comparison between Rebus’s own contradictory mental constitution and the paradoxical inconsistencies which he insists are inherent in the detective’s adopted city. This kind of thematic association was not uncommon to the golden age of American detective fiction—there is certainly a clear literary precedent in the relationship between detective

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Sam Spade and the Californian coast in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930)—though the comparison which is invited between Rankin’s work and his Scottish authorial forebears is even more striking. Ward astutely notes that “Edinburgh to Stevenson, Spark and Rankin is a city where the actions of the individual can go unquestioned and unchecked, through a combination of the anonymity of life in any city, the realisation that a refined front can mask a multitude of sins and a sense of innate propriety prohibiting the asking of too many impolite questions”.23 Rebus is certainly never unaware of these unspoken codes of social conduct, which reverberate throughout Rankin’s entire series of novels; even on later occasions when the detective spends much of the narrative outside the capital (as in novels such as Black and Blue, 1997), the city’s distinctively polarising effect on Rebus and his policing still tends to loom large. As with later Tartan Noir literature, Rankin extends his articulation of duality beyond the novel’s characters and into their surrounding environment and conditions. Kirsten Stirling has stated that “Scottish critics [...] have used the idea of the ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’ as the basis of a view of Scottish literature which sees it essentially built on splits, schisms and dualities, and, even worse, that Scottish national culture is fundamentally incoherent and indeed ‘neurotic’”.24 Certainly the thorny issue of Scottish cultural imperatives is central to Rankin’s writing; the topicality of the Rebus novels has extended to the ramifications arising from the establishment of the Scottish Parliament midway through the series’ run, and examinations of government policy that have ranged from drug abuse to immigration. (This is especially evident in Set in Darkness, 2000, which centres upon Rebus’s involvement with a murder during the construction of the then-new Scottish Parliament building, and the political ramifications which follow.) Watson acknowledges the widely-held observation that Rankin is at least as concerned with commenting on contemporary social concerns as he is with the successful employment of the traditional mechanics of his chosen genre: Rankin stays closer to the convoluted plotting conventions of the crime mystery genre, although he too uses the form to explore aspects of Scottish society. In fact it has become a feature of the Rebus novels that they should reflect, directly or indirectly, political or economic issues of the day in novels that have steadily grown in complexity and sophistication.25

Thus in spite of the undeniable American influence on Tartan Noir there is, in this sense, also a demonstrable inspiration upon the work of

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Rankin and others which derives from European crime fiction. The social criticism of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Story of a Crime cycle (1965-75), centring on Swedish police inspector Martin Beck and beginning with the novel Roseanna (1965), lays considerable groundwork for commentary upon cultural and political issues within modern crime fiction, an approach which has been evident both in Scotland and elsewhere. Although Rankin is certainly all too aware that national identity is, at best, a nebulous and problematically-defined notion, his general strategy throughout much of the Rebus series is to employ Edinburgh as a kind of microcosm of Scottish anxieties both current and enduring. Considerable emphasis is laid upon the capital’s “split personality”, of the glossy, wellmaintained tourist safe-havens and of the burgeoning harbours of criminality which lie just beneath the veneer of the established social order: Edinburgh’s an easy beat, his colleagues from the west coast would say. Try Partick for a night and tell me that it’s not. But Rebus knew different. He knew that Edinburgh was all appearances, which made the crime less easy to spot, but no less evident. Edinburgh was a schizophrenic city, the place of Jekyll & Hyde sure enough, the city of Deacon Brodie, of fur coats and no knickers (as they said in the west). (Knots and Crosses, p. 193)

It is, perhaps, because the conflicted Rebus is situated within this urban sprawl of elegant buildings and internecine plotting, of wide-eyed sightseers and criminal actions (both organised and casual), that Rankin’s use of dramatic contrast is rendered so effectively. Mike Ashley makes the insightful observation that Rankin “has taken a cynical and antisocial individual and placed him in a secretive, repressive and conspiratorial city,” adding that Rebus “gets results, often at great personal cost, partly through his pig-headedness but mostly because of his knowledge of Edinburgh, its people and its life”.26 This approach has, of course, benefited Rankin in ways other than the furtherance of his examination of duality—both individual and collective—throughout the city and, by extension, Scottish society at large. Situating the action in a city replete with historical landmarks and well-known political establishments has had the result that, just as the novels have grown in popularity, so too has the public interest in their setting, which has in turn fuelled further curiosity in the series.27 MacDougall notes that “Rankin shows us the Edinburgh we know, the tourist place. Then he flips the coin and shows us the other side. Tourists can now take a pint in the Oxford Bar, and then see where Rebus lives and where certain crimes were committed in the Rebus walking tours. This is possible because the books are set in a real place”.28 This has

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the cumulative effect, as the cycle continues, of engendering a growing sense of self-consciousness of Rebus’s surroundings as Rankin introduces such events as the establishment of the devolved Scottish government at the end of the 1990s, the construction of the new Parliament building, and even the G8 Summit held at the Gleneagles Hotel near the end of the series. The repetition of fixed formulae may be a characteristic of genre fiction which is often held in critical contempt, but the establishment in the public consciousness of the recognisable conventions of the Rebus novels has gained the series unparalleled commercial success precisely because of their relatability to actual metropolitan locales as much as their narratives’ ready correlation with popular generic archetypes. Rankin himself has stated that “the great thing about putting in historical detail is that you get that suspension of disbelief in the reader. In [The Naming of the Dead (2006)], half of the stuff really happened and only half was fiction, and people immediately thought they were reading a non-fiction account of what was going on in Edinburgh”.29 The drawback of this particular strategy, however, is that Rankin has a tendency to employ it ad nauseum: the notion of Edinburgh having a dark and sinister underside, concealed by a tourist-friendly façade, recurs again and again throughout Knots and Crosses, to the point that it becomes repetitive and eventually tedious. Although this approach is utilised by Rankin right throughout the Rebus series, it appears less monotonous in later entries such as The Falls (2001), where aspects of Edinburgh’s history play a pivotal role in the plot rather than—for the most part—providing an evocative backdrop to the action. Yet beyond the social authenticity which is inevitably evoked with such a detailed observation of a particular city—its social mores and dialects reproduced with varying degrees of faithfulness throughout the series—so too does Rankin strive to ensure that the characters are not only believable in and of themselves, but also that they function as convincing players upon the Edinburgh stage. Here he alludes to a wider debate in Scottish literature, namely the delicate balance between emphasising cultural nationalism on one hand and socio-political distinctiveness on the other. Rankin’s depiction of a globalised Edinburgh, exhibiting an increasingly internationalist worldview as the series continues, is far from devoid of cultural markers and environmental factors which ground it in a recognisable and contemporary Scotland. As Malcah Effron takes note: In many cases, as in the cases of Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels [...], the real setting provides an underlying basis of reality to confirm the legitimacy of the events portrayed in the narrative as a description of the society and culture represented in the novel: the real setting generates the basis of reality that authenticates the speech. As such, the speech of the

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It is perhaps worthwhile, at this point, to question exactly how far Rankin succeeds in implementing such a strategy. As Ramu Nagappan has usefully commented, “when we enter into the mimetic contract with an author, we are partly and temporarily committing ourselves to a particular political and ethical perspective”,31 and certainly Rankin demonstrates an obvious eagerness to articulate the social and cultural milieu of modern Scotland in both its pre- and post-devolutionary eras. This is achieved by means of a number of often subtle methods, in line with Jonathan Culler’s assertion that: If the basic convention governing the novel is the expectation that readers will, through their contact with the text, be able to recognise a world which it produces or to which it refers, it ought to be possible to identify at least some elements of the text whose function it is to confirm this expectation and to assert the representational or mimetic orientation of fiction. [...] The pure representation of reality thus becomes, as Barthes says, a resistance to meaning, an instance of the “referential illusion”, according to which the meaning of a sign is nothing other than its referent. Elements of this kind confirm the mimetic contract and assure the reader that he can interpret the text as about a real world. It is possible, of course, to trouble this contract by blocking the process of recognition, preventing one from moving through the text to a world, and making one read the text as an autonomous verbal object. But such effects are possible only because of the convention that novels do refer.32

Considering Rankin’s work in this light does tend to focus attention beyond his heavily-signposted subversion of the historical, tourist-oriented Edinburgh into a misty metropolis of veiled intrigue, and instead allows increased awareness upon more intimate details such as his construction of the dialogue and psychologically suggestive mannerisms of his characters. Especially in the earlier Rebus novels, Rankin’s use of colloquial accentuation is generally sparing, barely venturing into anything approaching Lowlands Scots parlance or broad idiomatic expression in the manner of, for instance, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993). Yet he provides just enough evidence, in terms of dialect and inflection, to suggest important facets of individual characters which are conveyed through the articulation of their speech—the genteel posturing of the upper-middle classes, the contrasting pretensions and world-weariness of Rebus’s peers and superiors, and even the unhinged Reeve’s iron projection of apparent mental stability while concealing his identity in

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public. Just as the puzzle-based origin of Rebus’s name may suggest, Rankin appears to be engaging in what Christopher Prendergast describes as a “game, which modern critical theory has taught us to play with considerable ingenuity, [which] is that of breaking the ‘rules’ of the mimetic contract, in the effort to liberate the text from the accumulated weight of customary expectation”.33 Rankin does admittedly engage in carefully exploring the contours of genre expectation, pushing the boundaries where he feels it necessary, and accomplishes most in this regard when concentrating on the febrile nature of Rebus’s own psychology: the veracity of the flashback sequences in particular succeeds in throwing considerable doubt onto the character’s mental fitness both in the present and in the past. As Culler’s comments upon the mimetic contract suggest, Rankin utilises his keen knowledge of the format of the detective novel in order to anticipate and then toy with the reader’s anticipation of specific genre conventions. Although Rebus conforms to a particular archetype within detective fiction, our lack of familiarity with the complexities of his character at the beginning of the series, coupled with the obscurity of his motivations, inevitably lead us to question the likelihood of his involvement with serious criminal activities: his dogged Manichean pursuit of criminality is balanced against his many moral ambiguities, just as his single-minded professional focus is offset—and in many ways foregrounded—by the personal and emotional traumas of his past. This challenges the reader to question whether the rational (and plausible) likelihood of Rebus’s complicity in the murders outweighs their expectation—based upon the recognised conventions of the genre—that he is on the right side of the law. Viewed from a third-person viewpoint, as the novel’s events are, almost any outcome becomes possible: concerns over Rebus’s own involvement in the investigated crimes do mount in a manner which genuinely raises suspense throughout the course of the narrative. The essential timelessness inherent in this psychological anxiety—that is, whether the events of Rebus’s past remain active in directly influencing and even controlling his present—leads to a valuable observation made by Alain Robbe-Grillet in his essay “Time and Description in Fiction Today” (1963), that: In the modern narrative, time seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no longer passes. It no longer completes anything. And this is doubtless what explains the disappointment which follows the reading of today’s books. [...] As much as there was something satisfying in a “destiny”, even a tragic one, by so much do the finest works of our contemporaries leave us empty, out of countenance. Not only do they claim no other reality than that of the reading, or of the performance, but further they

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Robbe-Grillet’s interpretation can only be carried so far into a study of Rankin’s work, however. The separation suggested between time and temporality, for instance, cannot similarly be correlated as severance between cause and effect. For example, Rebus’s hypnosis by his brother Michael robs the past of its ability to conceal hidden truths, but because of the uncertainty of his mental state it simultaneously introduces doubt over the reliability and timescale of the hypnotic narrative that is introduced. Although the novel admittedly becomes so entrenched in a study of binary opposition that the motif becomes decidedly laboured as the text reaches its conclusion, so too is a clear attempt being made to actively legitimise one particular sequence of events, where the subconscious and the mesmeric are dispelled in favour of immediate and concrete certainties, rather than to entrust the reader with ascertaining their own conclusion as to the authenticity of Rebus’s perceptions. Yet the subliminal nature of Michael’s hypnotic suggestion is only one manner by which Rankin engages in an exploration of the otherworldly, for another factor which distinguishes Rebus from similarly-portrayed detectives in modern crime fiction is the character’s approach to religion. Knots and Crosses depicts him as a Christian, albeit more of a moral believer than a spiritual one. In a genre that has proven to be largely secular in nature, Rebus’s pronounced theological beliefs add another layer of dimension to his moral profile in a manner which is generally uncommon in writing of this type (although there are occasional exceptions, as in mystery novels such as William P. Young’s The Shack, 2008). Robert Crawford is just one commentator who has noted that “in Scottish fiction where crime is of the essence many writers take the opportunity to explore the darker aspects of masculinity, but there is rarely a sense of spirituality”.35 There is some degree of inference that Rebus’s faith has been inculcated from his youth, the reassurance that it brings him proving to be a holdover from a more formative time of life, though it is made clear that it is not a theological worldview shared by his brother Michael. There is certainly the suggestion of a distinctive Scottishness in Rebus’s Presbyterian work ethic (the author himself has described Rebus as “a dour Presbyterian Edinburgh cop”36), though pointedly no acute attention is paid to his denominational leanings throughout the novel. Rankin uses the vacillation between piety and transgression to further enhance his depiction of the innate duality of Rebus’s nature (subsequent entries in the series, for instance, show the

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character becoming so disenchanted with life as a result of his traumatic experiences that even his faith cannot deter him from seriously considering suicide). Rebus reads the Bible faithfully, deriving obvious comfort from its teachings, and yet later appears to have no problem with indulging in casual promiscuity or even committing theft: Near his flat, he passed a little grocery shop outside which were stacked crates of milk and morning rolls. The owner had complained in private to Rebus about petty and occasional thefts, but would not submit a complaint proper. The shop was as dead as the street, the solitude of the moment disturbed only by the distant rumble of a taxi on cobblestones and the persistence of the dawn chorus. Rebus looked around him, examining the many curtained windows. Then, swiftly, he tore six rolls from a layer and stuffed them into his pockets, walking away a little too briskly. [...] Looking round again, he lifted a pint of milk out of its crate and made his getaway, whistling silently to himself. Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin. (Knots and Crosses, pp. 37-38)

Rebus is certainly among the least conventional of Christians, and he does not remotely conform to mainstream expectations of any faith-based denomination. This is likely a deliberate attempt by Rankin to align the character with the national crisis of religious identity which, as has been argued by William Storrar and others, has come to affect followers of established conduits of organised religion throughout Scotland in the modern age: “We see a profound reluctance to think theologically within a Scottish context in order to develop a theological understanding of the nation. [...] We are too sure of our national identity as Christians but not sure enough of our Christian identity as Scots”.37 Yet in a different sense, his nondenominational status provides another example of Rebus’s lack of congruence within Scotland’s established institutional order. An inkling of the character’s philosophical beliefs is also useful in identifying Rebus’s actions and viewpoint in relation to other protagonists within the crime fiction genre. To all intents and purposes he appears to be engaged in a moral crusade against evil, a virtuous but essentially fruitless conflict against a pervasive and infective malevolence which—as a result of the human condition—is ultimately self-perpetuating. (This is not an uncommon trope in detective fiction, though it is rarely articulated in such direct religious terms.) There is an undeniable sense that it is the nature of criminality, rather than the actual details of a specific crime, which provides much of the psychological impetus behind the character’s

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relentless drive for justice. Rebus, for instance, tends to avoid the absolute refusal of some fictional police detectives, such as Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret,38 to judge the criminals with whom he has contact; he is, to put it succinctly, not above the notion of dispensing a sharp moral pronouncement of his own: He had cuffed an unruly bastard one night in the cells. God forgive him, he had simply lost his head for a minute. There had been more trouble over that. Ah, but it was not a nice world this, not a nice world at all. It was an Old Testament land that he found himself in, a land of barbarity and retribution. (Knots and Crosses, p. 25)

The above is a telling example of Rebus’s turbulent internal struggle between a desire for the tantalising notion of an unequivocal form of order offered by authoritarianism, and his own indelible streak of libertarian individualism: a conflict which continues to manifest itself throughout the cycle. Here can be discerned a broader parallel with other crime fiction writing in Scotland, namely an acknowledgement that criminality is fuelled, shaped or influenced by particular social conditions, while similarly recognising the fact that the authorities responsible for combating lawless tendencies are themselves the apparatus of a state which is, at least in part, accountable for the maintenance of these same social conditions. This has significance for many other Scottish crime novels beyond the Rebus cycle, though it does appear particularly striking within the series due to Rebus’s own status as a government employee: a police officer rather than a private detective or other independent figure. Rankin has noted that “the things that make [Rebus] a good detective make him a very bad social human being, because he investigates other people’s lives like a voyeur. He does that as a defence, because then he doesn’t have to look at the problems in his own life”.39 In another passage later in the novel, religion is used to reveal a fundamental and revealing truth about Rebus’s character. From his hospital bed, the detective is forced to confront the prospect that his ongoing struggle against injustice is ultimately a futile one, and yet it still proves to be an effort which— because of his nature—he feels compelled to continue regardless: “What were you reading in the book?” She tapped the red, fake-leather binding of the Bible. “Oh, nothing much. Job, actually. I read it once a long time ago. It seems more frightening now though. The man who begins to doubt, who shouts out against his God, looking for a response, and who gets one.

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‘God gave the world to the wicked,’ he says at one point, and ‘Why should I bother?’ at another.” “It sounds interesting. But he goes on bothering?” “Yes, that’s the incredible thing.” (Knots and Crosses, pp. 127-28)

Rebus is not generally given to moral hand-wringing, and although his religious convictions are far from orthodox, they are also disinclined to waver in the face of challenge. Intriguingly, of course, the crime that is perpetrated against Rebus is as complex as it is difficult to define. After the murder of several innocent schoolgirls, largely to make a point (and eventually to guide Rebus towards identifying him), Reeve hospitalises Rebus’s ex-wife and comes close to killing the policeman’s own daughter, Samantha. Yet Reeve is himself a victim of the establishment, his life and even his sanity ruined by the intrigues of shadowy figures operating within the upper echelons of the armed forces. He is undeniably a serial killer, and yet for all his mass murder he is no less a casualty of dark influences which lie beyond his control. Rebus is all too aware that while he has the ability (and one which he readily exercises) to combat crime at the grassroots level, he is largely powerless to act against institutional corruption occurring within higher strata, even when it is ultimately fuelling the very kind of misconduct that he is attempting to oppose. Here Rankin echoes the concerns which emanate from authors of American crime fiction such as Ed McBain, and yet he employs the issue of an incipient, surreptitious threat from within by means of chilling understatement: Where did you start looking if you wanted to find a needle? She remembered Superintendent Wallace’s words: they’ve got the same boss we have. That was a truth well worth contemplating in all its complexity. For if they had the same boss, then perhaps a cover-up could be arranged at this end, now that the ancient and terrible truth had surfaced again. If this got into the papers, all hell would be let loose at every level of the service. Perhaps they would want to co-operate in hushing it up. Perhaps they would want Rebus silenced. My God, what if they should want John Rebus silenced? That would mean silencing Anderson too, and herself. It would mean bribes or a total wipe-out. (Knots and Crosses, pp. 190-91)

In spite of its many effective qualities, Knots and Crosses is a text which is not without narrative flaws. When Rebus’s superior, Chief Superintendent Wallace, describes the convoluted relationships which have been established between Rebus’s colleagues and their various family members as “incestuous” (Knots and Crosses, p. 188), his understatement

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of the matter is considerable. It is no exaggeration to remark that the most serious imperfection in Rankin’s novel lies in the fact that such a diverse range of characters find themselves interrelated in ways that often stretch credulity to breaking point, and this aspect of the novel undermines much of Rankin’s otherwise painstaking approach to situational realism. The itinerant poet son of Rebus’s superior, Detective Inspector Anderson, is embroiled in an affair with Rebus’s former wife, both of whom eventually fall victim to the machinations of Gordon Reeve. Rebus, who is working on the same serial murder case as Anderson, becomes romantically linked with another colleague, Gill Templer. Yet Templer was previously involved with Jim Stevens, the investigative journalist who is surreptitiously tracking both Rebus and his brother Michael. And Michael, it is later revealed, has been reporting to a drug dealer who eventually transpires to be Reeve. While the eventual interlinking of seemingly-unrelated characters is a long-standing trope in crime fiction, it is one which can be overplayed, and by the conclusion of Knots and Crosses it is difficult to designate any of the main characters (or many of the supporting ones) who have not somehow found their paths connected in one way or another. Some others have taken issue with the near universal acclaim that has come to accompany the Rebus series, questioning this high praise from commentators in comparison with other crime fiction of the time. Richard Bradford is one such critic: Rebus is prone to depressive bouts of introspection, often accompanied by infusions of alcohol, and he seems by temperament and background to fit in with the rough urban working classes who are responsible for much of Edinburgh’s day-to-day fabric of criminality. At the same time, however, he never quite dishonours his profession, his litany of failed relationships is presented as a tragic consequence of his commitment to the job and he views, and has the reader view, with circumspect disdain the pomposities of the Edinburgh middle classes and nouveau riche. Some have treated Rebus’s fictional environment as comparable with that created by Irvine Welsh, but this is part of the false mythology of the Scottish literary renaissance. In truth, Rebus is only a little more unorthodox than the likes of [Reginald Hill’s] Dalziel and [R.D. Wingfield’s] Frost. He makes something of his existential crises and coat-tails his working-class Scottishness, with its collision of roughness and vulnerability, but beyond that the formulae that inhibit the mainstream of British crime fiction remain undisturbed.40

Bradford’s dismissal of comparisons between the verisimilitude of Rebus’s milieu and that of Welsh’s more extreme forms of realism is telling, of course, and one which bears closer scrutiny in relation to the

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work of later authors to enter the field of Tartan Noir. Yet in spite of censure from some critical circles Rankin has forged a position of unquestionable prominence amongst writers of popular Scottish fiction, and has firmly established himself at the forefront of the British crime fiction scene. He has used his leading status in the field to uphold the genre’s merits in the face of its detractors, and has done so unswervingly. David Robinson has remarked that Rankin’s “key defence of the crime novel is that no other form of fiction reflects society as perfectly or spreads fiction’s footprint over [a] wider area”,41 and indeed Eleanor Bell also notes that Rankin’s spirited defence of crime fiction literature has fully considered “the ethical imperatives at the heart of crime writing, suggesting that it ought to invoke a self-conscious interrogation of the dark underside of society, inviting the reader to probe beneath everyday appearances in order to better understand the complexities of modern identity and belonging”.42 Certainly Rankin appears to have been eager to prove that he is not simply attempting to justify the validity of a particular mode of writing, but rather to emphasise that his work, and the work of others like him, is capable of delivering greater functionality of purpose than is generally recognised in the greater majority of literary criticism: “By drawing attention to the ethics of crime fiction, Rankin defends the genre against the common criticism that it is a debased form of literature. For Rankin, crime fiction allows access to the deepest recesses of society, to usually restricted areas, spaces the average reader would only want to engage with voyeuristically in print or on screen”.43 That he has chosen to do so by use of Scottish locations, venues and characters has been one of the key driving forces which have encouraged the rapid growth in fiction which has been grouped together under the Tartan Noir banner since the early 1990s. However, the twin antecedents of much early Tartan Noir—the stylistic conventions of American detective fiction on one hand, and an inescapable awareness of Scotland’s literary and cultural influence on the other—can also be found outside of popular genre writing. With his novel You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004), James Kelman examines a young Scottish protagonist living in an America still experiencing the cultural aftershocks of the September 11th 2001 terror attacks, and uses Jeremiah Brown’s ambitions to write political crime fiction (amongst other aspects of the character) as a means to illuminate aspects of a changing national character on both sides of the Atlantic. Employing highly inventive quirks of accentuation to convey a Scottish accent that has been shaped by twelve years of American influence, Kelman is able to construct, as Irvine Welsh has noted, “encounter[s

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which] say more about American and Scottish culture than volumes of bland pontification. And that’s the recurrent theme of this novel: our identity and status within the globalised order”.44 Whereas Tartan Noir has a tendency to localise issues of national identity within Scottish geographical boundaries, Kelman instead explores such subject matter in opposition to a very different cultural environment. This is, as H. Gustav Klaus observes, ample evidence in and of itself that “to read the novel as targeting solely the political climate of one country in the throes of security paranoia would be to take a narrow view”.45 Instead, Kelman teases out aspects of the Scottish character sparingly, and to enormously perceptive effect, as Jeremiah Brown fends off stereotypical preconceptions being made by the denizens of his host country towards his beliefs and attitudes while, simultaneously, confirming others through his notions and behaviour. By the use of an international platform, Kelman is able to effectively delineate the contradictory nature of a changing Scottish national identity in a manner that Rankin and his peers had previously hinted at on a much more intimate, domestic level. The comparison does, however, suggest a shared concern about the challenges that globalisation poses to the distinctiveness of Scotland’s social and cultural characteristics which transcends genre boundaries, proving itself as relevant to literary fiction as it does to Tartan Noir. The relationship between Kelman’s literary fiction and popular genres does not end with this correlation, however, for he has made controversial remarks about the popularity of Scottish genre novels in recent years which have sparked considerable debate. As mentioned in the general introduction to this book, when speaking in 2009 he mounted a robust censure of what he considered to be the recent tendency of Scotland’s publishing industry to lionise the “mediocrity [of] writers of detective fiction or books about some upper middle-class young magician”.46 This in turn has led commentators such as Alan Bissett to opine that far from nearing any kind of consensus, the contested relationship between genre fiction (including crime writing) and the mainstream of literary fiction continues to divide commentators: It’s not as though writers such as [Denise] Mina, Val McDermid or Christopher Brookmyre aren’t working a left-wing agenda into their books; they are. But genre fiction is, by definition, generic. Mina’s disdain [...] for pushing the boundaries of form is palpable. The genre writer’s first responsibility is to the genre itself: they must fulfil readers’ expectations for convention, or they have failed. It’s easy to see how this becomes part of a capitalist enterprise, which requires market “product” and fears innovation as a “risky sell”. At a time when capitalism is

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scouring livelihoods, however, we must empower writers such as Kelman to speak out against it, and put forth new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves.47

Certainly the view that Kelman posits has not gone uncontested. Rankin has long been a stalwart defender of the perceived virtues of genre fiction, emphasising that it should not be considered either a superior or inferior mode of writing, but simply one which can—under certain circumstances—be employed to fulfil a different function; to expound social and cultural concerns not necessarily through psychological characterisation or the conventional expectations of realism, but rather to promote and explore them through the employment of tropes which have become familiar within an increasingly flexible generic framework. During an interview in 2001, for instance, he noted that “it seems to me, looking at the Whitbread short list or the Booker, that the literary novel is actually looking back. The crime novel is dealing with illegal immigrants, paedophiles, drugs, and it’s dealing with the big moral questions of good and evil”.48 Yet if Rankin’s work exhibits a melange of heritage and modernity, combining contemporary social issues with the occasional ambience of ancient Edinburgh, Christopher Brookmyre (1968-) aggressively embraces the zeitgeist of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, tackling both ethical and cultural subjects with considerable gusto. Like Rankin, Brookmyre is a writer whose crime fiction conforms to the notion, as Tzvetan Todorov has put it, that within certain crime texts “we find a duality [in that the] novel contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation”,49 and that subsequently “we might further characterise these two stories by saying that the first—the story of the crime—tells ‘what really happened’, whereas the second—the story of the investigation—explains ‘how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it’”.50 Certainly Brookmyre’s work often adheres to this description: his scathing exposure and deconstruction of white-collar crime, which is often revealed to entail anything from grand theft to mass-murder, exists as a sobering counterpoint to the larger-than-life exuberance of his main character and his wildly unorthodox investigations. Brookmyre is also able to extend the notion of the outsider investigator one step further than Rankin, his protagonist Jack Parlabane being an independent journalist whose exploration of crime is unfettered by the kind of red-tape which so often frustrates police detectives such as John Rebus. Brookmyre was raised in Barrhead, attending St Luke’s High School before graduating from the University of Glasgow. Prior to embarking upon his literary career he has been active as a sports journalist, has

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written on the subject of film, and latterly has also worked as a television football pundit. His first novel to reach publication, Quite Ugly One Morning (1996), was actually the fourth that he had written.51 The book has also become well-known due to it containing the original appearance of Jack Parlabane, who remains to date Brookmyre’s most-used protagonist. Though quite markedly different from the work of Rankin and other Scottish crime writers who had come before him, Quite Ugly One Morning52 was to prove an instant commercial and critical success for Brookmyre: in the year of its release, the novel was the recipient of the inaugural Critics’ First Blood Award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year.53 He quickly attracted the notice of crime fiction commentators, with Ashley’s précis of Brookmyre’s early career being largely typical: “Although his first book published was the fourth he had written it seems he hit the ground running and was instantly hailed a new literary genius. His novels are undoubtedly distinctive. [...] The stories are violent, fastpaced and witty, the writing assured and heavily into Scot’s [sic] argot, and the whole package, dubbed ‘Tartan Noir’ [...], is keenly observed and highly contemporary”.54 Quite Ugly One Morning has also proven popular enough in the long term to warrant an adaptation for prime-time television (currently the only Brookmyre novel to have received this treatment), being broadcast in 200455 with Irish actor James Nesbitt cast in the role of Parlabane.56 Brookmyre’s departure from earlier entries in the category of Tartan Noir is quite striking, no more so than in his liberal use of dark humour and an irreverent disdain of the establishment which makes the nonconformity of Rebus seem positively tame by comparison. Although, like Rankin, aspects of his fiction can be seen to be influenced by the work of several American authors—such as James Ellroy’s highly distinctive exploration of the criminal underworld and Lawrence Block’s slightly offbeat genre offerings (in particular his Bernie Rhodenbarr cycle, where the traditional crime narrative is turned on its head due to the novels being set from the point of view of a highly inventive burglar)—Brookmyre freely acknowledges his primary inspiration as being the texts of Floridian writer Carl Hiaasen: I think it’s fairly well documented that I wrote three novels that weren’t published before I wrote Quite Ugly One Morning and then I read just about everything by Carl Hiaasen in the space of about six months, shortly before writing Quite Ugly One Morning. It was very much my style of humour, but I think the thing that inspired me was that he was doing something that I had never seen in British thrillers: making them

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outrageously funny and very over the top and yet still dealing with issues that were heartfelt on the part of the author.57

Brookmyre not only shares Hiaasen’s aptitude for witty prose and acidic one-liners, but also his disdain for political corruption and corporate greed. Whereas Hiaasen’s work is largely set within the confines of Florida and its surrounding States, and voices concern most regularly over issues of environmentalism, Brookmyre develops his own disdain for the establishment within a Scottish locale by broadening the range of his ideological attack to encompass self-interest and right-wing policy decisions with intense ferocity. As Richard Bradford notes, Brookmyre “debuted as the Scottish version of Carl Hiaasen. The latter’s novels are slapstick derivatives of the trend pioneered by Elmore Leonard with armed robbery and murderous intuition routine features of US daily life. This does not come across as particularly aberrant when set in Florida but Brookmyre’s location is provincial Scotland”.58 Interestingly, it is these two defining characteristics of Brookmyre’s work—his copious employment of biting wit, and bitter condemnation of the authorities—which are most likely to divide readers, for a positive reception towards his novel is most likely to be predicated upon an appreciation of both of these factors, and humour is by nature a deeply subjective aspect of any text. Peter Clandfield observes that: Brookmyre’s books offer intriguing plots, engaging third-person narrative voices, and sharp dialogue. They also rely on comparatively simplistic moral schemes: The protagonists are progressive, public-spirited, brave and witty; their antagonists are often neo-Thatcherite and always ruthlessly dishonest, hypocritical, and self-important. The protagonists are proudly though not chauvinistically Scottish; the antagonists are often contemptuous of Scottish aspirations. The underdog protagonists triumph; the overconfident antagonists are violently destroyed or spectacularly humiliated. These features are appealing to a reader who shares Brookmyre’s sympathies, but what makes the books particularly interesting is their combination of what Brookmyre himself has described as “rant[ing]” with less direct and more allusively intriguing kinds of commentary on contemporary issues.59

By choosing an investigative reporter as his protagonist, rather than a police detective or private investigator, Brookmyre allows himself additional scope to explore the dynamics of the establishment from the outside looking in. John Scaggs observes that Rankin “emphasises how even an anti-authoritarian loner like John Rebus ultimately serves the interests of the dominant social and political order. [...] Rebus’s

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investigations [...] serve not only to restore the social order disrupted by the crime of murder, but also to maintain Scottish political stability and credibility”.60 But Brookmyre regularly chooses to instead examine how far the stability of this social order can actually be trusted, and coldly regards the factors which underpin it by strikingly different means. Whereas Rankin’s Rebus regularly finds that his engagement with the hypocrisy and injustice he encounters in society is inevitably curtailed to a degree by his own function as a figure of law and order, the freelance Parlabane remains (un)safely outside the confines of the establishment and is therefore subject to no such conflict of interest. Brookmyre describes him as a “Glasgwegian catastrophe magnet” who, if dispatched “to look for a stolen box of fireworks [would] probably find an international nuclear missile smuggling network” (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 249). Parlabane is not averse to relying on unabashedly criminal activities in order to achieve his ends, and he has no qualms about breaking and entering in the furtherance of his investigative aims. (One of Brookmyre’s later novels—Boiling a Frog, 2000—sees the character serving a criminal sentence for burglary.) Brookmyre has claimed that Parlabane was based upon the character of Ford Prefect, a genial but somewhat maladroit itinerant alien from the Betelgeuse system popularised in Douglas Adams’s highly satirical The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cycle of comedic speculative fiction novels (1979-92): “The truth is that Parlabane was entirely inspired by Ford Prefect: I always adored the idea of a character who cheerfully wanders into enormously dangerous situations and effortlessly makes them much worse”.61 Certainly there is no denying Parlabane’s catalytic function throughout the novel as the primary mechanism through which many of the main events are activated and driven, either intentionally or otherwise. Yet even more pronounced than the character’s fierce independence and ethical ambiguity is his almost constant (and consistently vitriolic) condemnation of private business, the public sector, political leanings of all persuasions, and indeed almost every identifiable organ of the state. A bitter broadside, aimed at an NHS doctor who is the former wife of a murder victim, is largely representative of the character’s views of the Conservative government of the time: As Michael Portillo fearlessly said, in this country, as opposed to those wog-ridden foreign sites—I’m paraphrasing here, although only slightly— if you win a contract, it’s not because your brother is a government minister or you blatantly bribed an official. Of course not. That would be corruption. In this country, you win contracts because you are ‘one of us’, you went to the right school, give money to the right party, and have awarded an executive post to a member of the cabinet’s family, or have

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promised a seat on the board to the appropriate minister when he resigns to spend more time with his bankers. (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 71)

Brookmyre uses Parlabane as a rather blatant mouthpiece for genuine anger towards the state of the Scottish nation, particularly where he perceives it to be compromised by external socio-economic influences: everything from the modern media’s perceived lack of impartiality through to corrupt practices within the police force is served up for vociferous and repeated admonition. Unfortunately he rapidly overplays his hand to no small degree, for these relentless attacks—which appear genuinely arresting at the beginning of the novel—eventually become predictable before simply turning wearisome. Largely this is due to the fact that, in some cases, Brookmyre interrupts a scene solely in order to accommodate a diatribe, even at the high cost of disrupting a dramatic moment in ways that are emotionally inappropriate. The effect is often jarring: “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” [Sarah] sniffed. “I didn’t even like the bastard. It’s just hard to accept that the person you were once married to has outstripped Fred West and Bev Allitt in the murder prolificity stakes. It could be as many as thirty. That would make him the British alltime number one.” “No, no,” said Parlabane in a gentle whisper. “Don’t torture yourself. Think of the money you’ll make flogging his sexual secrets to the tabloids. Besides, he’d only be number two, behind Margaret Thatcher, unless I’m the only one who thought that winning an election was not ample mitigation for the slaughter of thousands of young Brits and Argentinians.” “This is not helping,” she said sternly, pulling her blotchy and tearful face up. (Quite Ugly One Morning, pp. 229-30)

Brookmyre engages in a delicate balancing act between delivering a humorous narrative on one hand and presenting genuinely disturbing events in a realistic fashion on the other. It is, however, a balance that he is unable to maintain throughout the whole duration of the novel: as Bradford astutely observes, “in all of his books [...] one senses that the battle between exhilaration and farce will always favour the latter”.62 Certainly Brookmyre brings a very distinctive sense of comedic excess to the novel’s events, most notably in its two main antagonists: a strikingly violent but ultimately inept assassin, and the staggeringly corrupt chief executive of an NHS trust. The latter is presented as such a stereotypically

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gluttonous, cigar-smoking capitalist grotesque (pointedly given the somewhat unsubtle punning name of S. Lime) that his depiction almost immediately adopts an exaggeratedly cartoonish quality, even in spite of the seriousness of his crimes. Yet it is the assassin, Mortlake, who is continually subjected to injury and humiliation; following the horrific murder which opens the novel (a gleeful and rather inventive display of grand guignol on the part of Brookmyre), Mortlake finds himself outwitted by an elderly Edinburgh landlady and even randomly robbed of several body parts as he struggles to evade capture. Here, too, Brookmyre acknowledges his literary debt to Hiaasen, claiming that Mortlake is “a tribute to all of the goons in [Hiaasen’s] books who are seemingly big and dangerous, yet ultimately rather useless, ending up further debilitated page by page”.63 But for an author who has generally proven to be fairly iconoclastic in terms of his regard for the stylistic conventions of crime writing, the above engagement with the actions of the establishment within Scotland—and strong criticism thereof—actually marks out an area of shared territory between Brookmyre and other contributors to the Tartan Noir movement, and even earlier iterations of Scottish crime fiction. As Christopher Harvie takes note: The investigation of the dysfunctional and the corrupt is more illuminating than attempts to establish general theories, because it exposes the paths and channels of power. With this argument in mind, there seems to be the structure of an interpretation of Scottish misfortune in crime fiction, from Eddie Boyd’s thrillers of the 1960s to the more recent work of Frederic Lindsay, Val MacDermid, William McIlvanney and Christopher Brookmyre—or, given a more documentary slant, Andrew O’Hagan’s The Missing. Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels have become a cult for good reasons, in the attention justifiably paid to them for their consistency of moral view and a cohesive, if less than optimistic, view of society.64

Brookmyre’s ethical viewpoint is certainly unswerving, if often heavily overstated, but so too is his rather despondent view of contemporary social mores and the trajectory that he perceives them to be taking—within both Scotland and the United Kingdom at large. He mounts a particularly voracious attack on the incursion of corporate ideals into caring professions, such as charities and the public sector, and the inevitable aftermath resulting from the inherent incompatibility which exists between compassion and consideration on the one hand, and avaricious materialism on the other: Nursing “efficiency” was going to be “improved” on several wards, by which Parlabane understood that a number of P45s were in the post.

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Auxiliary staff were going to be “streamlined”, and the number of geriatric beds were going to be “rationalised”. However, it wasn’t all bad news—the Trust’s increasingly healthy balance sheet meant big pay rises were in the offing for the people who had worked hardest to achieve that success. (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 179)

Again and again, Brookmyre is at pains to bemoan what he so obviously feels are the diminishing moral standards which govern the public sector, lamenting the takeover of institutions such as the NHS by individuals who hold an antagonistic view towards the very function that the organisation was intended to fulfil. While he clearly ascribes the majority of the blame to the Conservative government policy of private ownership being advanced at the time, there is no small amount of rancorous censure launched towards the ruthlessness of the corporate mindset, which seems entirely antipathetic to the ostensibly caring goals of government-funded hospitals. There is a clear anti-Thatcherite agenda in the novel’s attempts to stress an identifiably Scottish social democratic moral compass which was manifestly at odds with the policies of the incumbent Major administration—and, by extension, to illuminate a variance in specifically Scottish cultural and political concerns against those of Westminster. This strategy was widely in evidence within much Scottish literature of the time, both in literary fiction and crime writing, though Brookmyre came to be one of its shrillest proponents. In the pursuit of such aims, however, there is a growing sense as the novel continues that its central crime has been constructed predominantly as a means to promulgate Brookmyre’s ideological views, rather than viceversa. Such ire is often drawn out in typically uncompromising terms by Sarah Slaughter, an NHS anaesthetist who is powerless to interfere as her Trust changes its operational priorities—in order to maximise its profit margin—much to the detriment of its patients: You see, Jack, no matter what they get their PR people to say, or whatever slogans they put under their logos, the Trusts don’t give a shit about patient care. They only care about pounds, shillings and pence, and that’s why they were set up in the first place, and filled with accountants and bankers and a whole legion of grey zeroes in suits. (Quite Ugly One Morning, pp. 188-89)

Brookmyre’s disgust at the above corporatisation of the care sector— and, by extension, many other organs of the public sector—is acutely tangible, and forms one of the novel’s most striking qualities. Yet here, as with so many of the book’s humorous sequences, the practice is eventually

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overdone through repetition, robbing the concerns that he voices of much of their potency as the text continues. This is also evident in Brookmyre’s outspoken antipathy towards religious faith, most obviously when he abruptly (and somewhat incongruously) suspends a sequence where Parlabane is facing near-certain death in order to insert a pithy rebuttal of mainstream Christian beliefs in favour of materialist rationalism: What was the saying? There’s so such thing as an atheist in a foxhole? Something like that. Typical ignorant Christians. As if the non-belief in God was a posture, a luxury, some kind of decadent modern affectation, rather than a completely irreversible understanding. Truth was, you did get atheists in foxholes; they were just more acutely, agonisingly aware of the inescapable reality of their predicament. (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 217)

Brookmyre’s hostility towards organised religion is not surprising; in 2008 he was appointed President of the Humanist Society of Scotland,65 and he has voiced strong views on the subject of spirituality, asserting, for instance, that “organised religion [should] be disregarded and ignored”.66 However, in practice he often betrays his own views as being just as uncompromising and dogmatic as certain of the more extreme elements of the religion that he so vociferously opposes, in that the reader is presented with the unmistakeable impression (intentionally or otherwise) that a competing worldview must be belittled, undermined or attacked outright simply because it does not conform to a particular set of personal expectations. Anti-religious themes have played a part in several of his novels, arguably reaching an apex in Boiling a Frog where Parlabane investigates corrupt practices within the Catholic Church. Certainly there can be no greater contrast with the traditionalist (but unconventional) religious convictions of John Rebus than in Parlabane’s blunt, austere strain of atheism. But once again, Brookmyre has a tendency to include these views irrespective of whether the scene requires them or not, denying the narrative a vital sense of dramatic tension at exactly the wrong moment. Nonetheless, in disavowing any connection with the established church—along with his strongly-stated political and cultural concerns— Brookmyre moves beyond the anxieties expressed by many of his peers within Scottish crime fiction, positing a new, inclusive social dynamic which he argues is currently being repressed by traditional cultural pressures and establishment self-interest. As Clandfield states:

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Distinctive crime and detective novels are part of the international success of recent Scottish writing. Vivid urban settings and other cannily deployed genre conventions in these works have attracted the tag “Tartan Noir”. The novels most often grouped into this category, such as those of Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, and Denise Mina, are quite different from one another, and are most significantly and similarly “noir” not in their use of specific settings, plots, or tropes, but in their mutual interest— which they share not just with American writers but also with longerestablished Scottish ones, such as William McIlvanney—in using genrebased fiction toward social commentary and critique. Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series has noted the enduring legacies of imperialism, sectarianism, and class inequity, and its recent installments [sic] also address prospects for Scotland in the current era of increasing political autonomy. More recently still, however, Brookmyre and Mina have looked even farther beyond historical Scottish-English or Catholic-Protestant tensions to register the enriching effects upon Scotland of postwar patterns of immigration and demographic evolution. They not only acknowledge the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of Scottish society, but suggest cautiously that the embrace of this diversity offers ways around traditional religious, social, and political tensions and toward a cosmopolitan future for Scotland within and beyond the Britain of New Labor [sic].67

Thus it seems that as far as Brookmyre is concerned, rather than the talented misfit Parlabane being forced into conforming to the norms of Scottish society, it is society which must instead measure up to him and his radically progressive (if often shibboleth-shattering) view of the established order. But here lies a crucial shortcoming in Quite Ugly One Morning: Parlabane’s apparent infallibility. Though at the beginning of the novel he has only just returned to Scotland from Los Angeles after narrowly evading a contract killing, he is instantly propelled into the thick of a crime investigation and thinks nothing of immediately offering expert advice to the police (which later turns out to be equal to, or better than, the findings of their own specialists), breaks into heavily-guarded NHS premises with little apparent effort, hacks security-restricted mainframe computers with consummate ease, and manages to remain one step ahead of the novel’s antagonist until the concluding chapters. Not only does this present a character who rapidly becomes difficult to identify with, given his apparent inability to professionally or personally err on any occasion, but it also serves to drain the novel of a sense of credible threat. Even when Parlabane is being held at gunpoint by the antagonist Lime at the novel’s conclusion, facing the real prospect of imminent death, his reaction is not one of fear or panic but rather mild inconvenience:

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Chapter Five Parlabane slowly backed up, turning his head slightly to see Lime staring wildly at him down the shaft of the weapon. He looked tremulous and very pale, his eye twitching and his beard flecked with what looked suspiciously like vomit. “Hands in the air,” he hissed, giving Parlabane a blast of his breath. “Jesus,” Parlabane reeled, lifting his arms. “Breath’s worse than the Princess of Wales’. You know, bulimics are supposed to be a bit skinnier than that.” (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 257)

It is, in fact, true to say that many of the novel’s dramatis personae seem to be an awkward fit within their surroundings. Brookmyre’s Edinburgh is depicted as a much more utilitarian place than Rebus’s city of hidden history and concealed peril, its intrigue more steeped in globalisation and corporate facelessness than it is in the mists of dark times gone by. He takes time to delineate the ordinary day-to-day events of the city, emphasising the mundane in addition to the criminality that drives the narrative. Yet the overstated characteristics of most of the main characters—among them the Bacchanalian detective constable Jenny Dalziel, world-weary anaesthetist Sarah Slaughter and put-upon police inspector Hector McGregor—often seem too exaggerated or embellished to appear entirely believable. Indeed, one short but particularly effective section of the book—told in flashback—which explains the attempt on Parlabane’s life during his stay in California is much more efficiently defined, Brookmyre’s satirical eye seeming much better suited to the culture of Los Angeles and the cadence of West Coast argot. Here his literary debt to Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy seems more explicitly delineated, and indeed Brookmyre has openly admitted to the inspiration that he has drawn from American authors of this vintage: [The] thing that I found quite inspiring with regard to a lot of American writers is they weren’t afraid to create heroes that you actually liked, that you enjoyed spending time with. You could give a few one liners to them and even make them a little more resourceful than is entirely plausible. I’d rather have such a guy as my hero than another maudlin alcoholic; a character who is so beset with marriage problems and such that he’s not much fun to be around—by the end he’s solved the mystery in spite of having a really miserable time.68

By putting this approach into practice in the creation of Parlabane, Brookmyre has, of course, developed a highly idiosyncratic character who (as he suggests above) stands apart from other similar fictional investigators common to the genre. In spite of its flaws and the occasional implausibility

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of its events, the novel’s commercial success cannot be overlooked. The profile of Quite Ugly One Morning, and Brookmyre’s output in general, has grown to the point that it has transcended the confines of literary commentary to reach a much wider audience in recent years; the Lonely Planet Edinburgh City Guide (2004), for instance, pinpoints the novel’s capital-based locale as being of interest to visitors to the city, with travel writer Neil Wilson celebrating it as “laugh-out-loud entertainment” and praising its “outrageous characters (an investigative journalist-cum-cat burglar), preposterous plots [and] biting wit”.69 It is precisely because of its deviation from the grimly cheerless Edinburgh of Rebus and his ilk that Brookmyre’s evocation of the city seems so dynamic at times; though he grudgingly acknowledges the weight of history which inevitably defines a particular sense of place, he very much injects the novel with a sense of looking forward rather than back: “I’m thinking international class hotel with extensive conference facilities, maybe a shopping complex,” he said. “Underground parking, centrally located office spaces, very exclusive residential development... whatever. Except that the deal’s off if some wee scrote of a doctor opens his gub. “Acres of prime site in the centre of one of Europe’s most prestigious and historic capital cities for three mill. Now that’s a bargain worth killing for.” (Quite Ugly One Morning, pp. 193-94)

In his contrast between Edinburgh’s extensive history and the aggressive modernity of a technocentric and globalised present, Brookmyre mirrors the concerns of other authors in the field such as Kate Atkinson. There are, however, similar precedents in literary fiction, most notably Andrew Greig with novels which have included Electric Brae: A Modern Romance (1992), In Another Light (2004) and Romanno Bridge (2008), all of which starkly render changing notions of Scotland’s national identity by way of contrasting elements of the country’s past and present. Brookmyre is by no means unaware of the significance of the Scottish literary history which bears upon the production of his work, though he reacts in unpredictable ways to the demands of critical expectation. Keith Dixon, for instance, makes the point that Brookmyre “very much shares Grassic Gibbon’s unCalvinist delight in the pleasures of the flesh, [going] even further than this in One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (1999), where he has one of his characters describe Gibbon as one of the major culprits in teenage alienation from literature as taught in contemporary Scottish schools”.70 Though far from oblivious to prevailing trends within crime writing and in Scottish literature generally, Brookmyre appears intent on carving himself

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a niche of his own; although his work may not be classed as literary fiction, he seems reluctant to categorise it explicitly as crime writing.71 As was the case with the early works of Ian Rankin, Brookmyre has asserted that he was to pursue the crime fiction genre as a natural progression of his writing career, rather than as a conscious choice: I didn’t read much crime fiction but grew up reading stuff with good guys and bad guys—[Ian Fleming’s] James Bond and Robert Ludlum. I didn’t know the stuff I was writing would come under the crime genre. I thought of them as adventures or thrillers. I didn’t know how those specifications worked.72

The above admission certainly buttresses the boldly Manichean dynamic within much of Brookmyre’s work, where the protagonists are skilled, unconventionally virtuous and inevitably pitted against adversaries who are entirely lacking in moral refinement or even, in most cases, the most basic of ethical apparatus. Because Brookmyre’s texts have marked a sharp departure from established norms of Tartan Noir fiction—in style, if not in terms of plot structure and generic tropes—his work has remained apart from that of other authors in the field, his use of black humour and overarching moral concerns with the actions of the authorities lending him more in common with the mainstream conspiracy thrillers of Iain Banks, such as Complicity (1993) and The Business (1999). Yet Brookmyre lacks the subtle complexity of political principle that is typical to a majority of Banks’s works, literary or otherwise, instead allowing his ideological views to be articulated in a manner which is abrasive, often assertive to the point of outright antagonism, and thus ultimately much less compelling. (That said, Banks had also occasionally been known to employ characters as a mouthpiece to deploy strongly-worded ideological views, not least in the form of Ken Nott, the outspoken disc-jockey protagonist of Dead Air, 2002.) There is also a sense that, like Rankin before him, Brookmyre’s self-consciousness about the blossoming market in Edinburgh-situated fiction, in both literary and genre forms, has profoundly influenced his work. The literary landscape of the mid-nineties, with which Brookmyre was engaging, was to prove quite different to that which Rankin claims had faced him a decade beforehand: I came to Edinburgh as an outsider. [...] It seemed to me a very strange place, a city that liked to hide itself away. It presented this facade of history, as if you weren’t allowed to look at Edinburgh in the present day. At that time nobody was writing Trainspotting-style books about Edinburgh. In the Eighties, when I was first trying to write, the modern

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Edinburgh novel was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie which had been published in 1961 and was set in the 1930s.73

In contrast to Rankin’s early literary experiences, the monumental impact of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting was already well-established by the time of Quite Ugly One Morning’s publication, and the inspiration of that text—in particular, its gritty and uncompromising realism and embrace of urban modernity—can clearly be seen reflected in Brookmyre’s writing. He even goes so far as to make unambiguous reference to Welsh’s landmark text, and possibly the visual style of the influential Danny Boyle film adaptation which followed it: at one point, Parlabane ponders the notion that the novel’s murder victim may have been “killed by some malnourished-looking Trainspotting character the police had picked up and charged, with a history of smack and aggravated burglary. Just chance. Plain old bad luck” (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 44). Interestingly, just as Trainspotting provides an influence to the style and authorial intent of Brookmyre’s work, there is also some evidence that his novels—and Tartan Noir generally—may have also inspired Welsh himself in recent years, specifically in the form of his novel Crime (2008). But in truth, all of these authors take a wildly different approach to exploring the dynamics of the fight against crime. Rankin maintains a projection of the police force as a traditional “thin blue line”—the keepers of law and order in a society where long-established moral boundaries have become blurred and ambiguous—which calls to mind John Buchan’s famous quote that “Civilization is a conspiracy. [...] Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences”.74 Brookmyre, on the other hand, has no such illusions, depicting instead an organisation that values expediency at least as much as the enforcement of justice: At that point, [Inspector] McGregor came back into the room, and all was quiet. “Right, Mr Parlabane,” he said with a strangely light, almost cheerful tone. “We’ve been through your flat and your belongings. We tried to mess the place up as is standard procedure, but as you don’t seem to own very much it was a bit of a poor effort, I’m afraid. [...] You’re free to go when you wish, but I’d ask you not to stray too far for a few days—it’s just that if we draw a total blank on this one, we’ll need someone to fit up for it, and you’re the obvious choice.” (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 23)

Although Brookmyre’s depiction of modern policing is satirical in nature, it is not—in and of itself—exceptional: many crime novels refer to the notion of corruption within the constabulary, sometimes as their very

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basis. This is quite different from Rankin’s Rebus novels, where his adherence to the recognised formula of the police procedural narrative is rigid enough that Rebus’s purported lack of orthodoxy must prove to be reasonably pliable in order to comply with the formal terms of the subgenre, rather than the opposite proving to be the case. Scaggs, for instance, has remarked that “the stress of the methods and procedures of police investigations that characterises the police procedural is [an] example of [a] commitment to realism, as is the celebration of teamwork”, adding that “central to the development of Rankin’s John Rebus novels, for example, is the growth of a team of police officers who both function collectively to solve crime, and serve as a foil for Rebus’s rule-bending and intuitive investigations”.75 In Quite Ugly One Morning, however—and in line with Brookmyre’s wider cynicism about the conduct of the public sector and its effect on the Scottish cultural condition—corruption is presented as a casual, almost spontaneous occurrence, more or less taken for granted by both the establishment and the accused. This may be one node of Brookmyre’s pessimistic social commentary, but it is certainly far from the most prominent. The use of police corruption as a means to explore social decline in Scotland is a theme which has emerged from crime writing to penetrate literary fiction in recent years. With his novel Filth (1998), for instance, Irvine Welsh examines the issue of vice and excess to an extreme level, constructing in the character of Bruce Robertson a most radical depiction of a crooked police sergeant and the resultant effects of his corrosive and immoral actions upon his colleagues and those around him. By means of an unusual narrative device involving a tapeworm lodged in Robertson’s intestine, an elaborate backstory is established which sketches out a life that has been blighted by poverty, violence and sexual abuse. Thus the reader is faced with an uncompromising rendering of a character who is irretrievably devoid of scruples, entirely capable of subjecting his colleagues to labyrinthine schemes intended to disable them and put their lives in danger solely in order to advance his own position—or, on occasion, simply for his own amusement. The irony of employing the machinations of a police officer—the archetypal defender of civic values—as the epitome of immoral behaviour is fully realised by Welsh, who uses the character’s actions to emphasise the many negative factors which have come to scar the working class (or underclass) experience: alcoholism and substance abuse, extreme pornography, sex abuse and prostitution. Dougal McNeill makes the point that Welsh’s social concerns, explored in his novels throughout the nineties, continue to have ramifications for today’s reader:

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The dilemmas Welsh turned to, in the era of Labour’s disintegration as a vehicle for working-class political aspirations, and as deep uncertainties still afflict the revolutionary socialist tradition, are still our dilemmas. Some shocks force an audience into confronting an unwelcome fact or reality.76

The crimes and perversions committed by Welsh’s Robertson may seem far removed from the white-collar offences outlined by so many of Brookmyre’s antagonists, but the anxieties surrounding an irrevocable deterioration in the standards and experience of the modern social condition in Scotland—leading to, and driven by, a disaffected and disenfranchised proletariat—remains a compelling one, not least given their shared concern with the long-term ramifications for the state of cultural attitudes. There is a general sense that, for Welsh as much as for Brookmyre, the erosion of justice in society is a symptom as well as a cause of general cultural decline: an indication that Western civilisation has become increasingly and perhaps hopelessly dishonest, thus ceasing to serve its constituents in any kind of meaningful way. What is perhaps more notable is the fact that having identified this regressive state of affairs, Brookmyre is either unwilling or unable to posit any means by which it may be slowed or reversed. Although Parlabane is a journalist (as Brookmyre himself had been), the character is hugely sceptical of the reliability of the modern mass-media to project events in a factual or satisfactory way. There is a strong underlying impression throughout the novel that the freedom of the British press has likewise been compromised by cynicism and commercial expediency, rendering its one-time power and veracity essentially moribund: The success of popular reporting since the Eighties had lain in the practice of massively increasing the ratio of column inches to facts. Facts were both expensive and time-consuming to procure, so you had to use them as sparingly as possible. (Quite Ugly One Morning, p. 49)

Brookmyre’s Nietzschean abyss-gazing does unquestionably lend his work a conspicuously bleak, even misanthropic quality, but its power is blunted by his evasion of how best to rectify the modern malaise that he conjures so wrathfully. The reader is left in no doubt of which forces the author holds responsible for the elevation of profit-margins over the public good, but by the novel’s conclusion no clear hypothesis has been postulated for any viable social alternative. Rankin too is keenly aware of crime’s function as a barometer of cultural degeneration, but also of its essential timelessness; the historical qualities of Rebus’s Edinburgh often

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serve to make the point that criminality is as old as the city itself. Like Parlabane, Rebus is always fully engaged with his urban environment, never simply reacting to events as they erupt around him. However, where Rebus retains a moral compass which has been calibrated by traditional theological teaching (albeit one which is constantly challenged and renegotiated in the light of changing moral behaviour in society), Parlabane’s rejection of conventional moral absolutism may superficially appear better suited to the detached modernity of a present-day globalised capital—though, in actuality, it tends to divest his novels of exactly the kind of ethical nuance that they appear to be so desperately in search of. Both authors had succeeded in developing their respective strains of Tartan Noir beyond the traditions established by McIlvanney in the 1970s, but in their social concerns and cultural commentary ensured that they had also remained true to the spirit of the movement. Although the figure of the rule-bending police detective is a firmly-established trope of the crime fiction genre, rooting Rebus in the role of a particular archetype, there is something innately postmodern and liberating about Parlabane’s gleeful employment of illegal means to snare and frustrate criminality, and this moral paradox was to have profound resonance on the work of other Tartan Noir authors in the years which were to follow.

CHAPTER SIX DENISE MINA’S GARNETHILL (1998) AND LOUISE WELSH’S THE CUTTING ROOM (2002)

In the previous chapter, I noted the observation of critic Ian Duncan that Tartan Noir has come to be considered by some as Scotland’s “local, masculine mutation of crime fiction”.1 It is of particular interest to this study, therefore, to observe that many of the most prominent authors to emerge in the supposedly male-inclined field of Scottish crime writing over the past thirty years have, in fact, been female. This period has seen the emergence of a large number of significant Tartan Noir texts from often-prolific women novelists, among them Manda Scott’s Hen’s Teeth (1997), Morag Joss’s Funeral Music (1998) and Lin Anderson’s Driftnet (2003), though perhaps best-known of all has been the creatively industrious Val McDermid, who came to public attention with Report for Murder (1987), the first novel in her Lindsay Gordon series. McDermid has arguably become even better regarded for her Dr Tony Hill cycle, which commenced with The Mermaids Singing (1995), a novel which received much critical praise as well as a Gold Dagger Award presented by the Crime Writers’ Association,2 and today she enjoys a reputation as one of Britain’s best-known crime writers of either gender. In sharp contrast to the field of Scottish speculative fiction, where female voices have been restricted to a handful of comparatively lone figures such as Margaret Elphinstone, the work published by women writers of Scottish crime fiction has populated at least as much of the commercial shelf space as that which has been occupied by the novels of their male counterparts over the years, and with a similarly loyal readership. Commentator Lorna MacLaren makes the point that “on joining the Detection Club of the 1930s, fledgling members had to forswear a long list of cheap plot devices which suddenly included, rather high up, feminine intuition. Today the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain reports more or less an equal membership of both sexes”.3 Yet even now, with so many women writing high-profile novels in the

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genre, a residuum of critical curiosity remains with regard to female involvement with a particular mode of crime writing (the dark realism of the hardboiled detection story, as opposed to the mannerly murder mysteries of Agatha Christie and her ilk) that has for so long been considered an overwhelmingly male enterprise. Authors such as McDermid, for instance, have suggested “that sexism [is] widespread in the industry”: Have you ever heard a male crime writer being asked, “As a man, how do you feel about writing about violence?” [...] There’s a profound disassociation, it seems to me, as if somehow it’s wrong for us to be writing about violence against women, as though somehow we need permission to write about violence against women.4

One particularly prominent Scottish crime novelist to emerge in the past twenty years has been Denise Mina (1966-), a Glaswegian author whose work has often engaged with exactly the kind of gynocentric violence which McDermid so lucidly describes. Born in Glasgow, though travelling widely with her family before settling in the city in her late teens, Mina assumed various different employment positions over the years including working as a nurse for patients in terminal care.5 In her early twenties she was awarded a degree in law from the University of Glasgow, before working towards a PhD at the University of Strathclyde. As Dinitia Smith notes: Ambivalent about a law career, [Mina] studied for a doctorate in law and psychiatry and won a grant for a thesis proposal on “differential ascription to male and female offenders.” But reading the work of the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida taught her how subjective language was. She realized that her ideas would reach a wider audience if they were in a story. So, she said, “I used my grant money to write a novel,” Garnethill, published in 1998.6

Mina has liberally drawn upon her professional and academic experience throughout the course of her literary career, which so far has encompassed the Garnethill trilogy (1998-2001), the Paddy Meehan series (ongoing since 2005),7 and, from 2009, the Alex Morrow novels, as well as a standalone novel, Sanctum (2003). Although best known for her crime fiction, Mina has also proven to be a successful playwright, her stage play Ida Tamson (2006) being performed at Oran Mor while her performance poem A Drunk Woman Looks at a Thistle (2007)—a latter-day gendered response to Hugh MacDiarmid—enjoyed success at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008. Additionally, she has been active in the field of comic writing, penning the narrative and dialogue for several of DC Comics’ Hellblazer

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series between 2006 and 2007 as well as a graphic novel, A Sickness in the Family, in 2010. It is intriguing to note that while Mina’s later crime novels have focused on more conventional protagonists such as an investigative reporter (Paddy Meehan) and a police detective sergeant (Alex Morrow), Garnethill—a novel which received the John Creasey Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel from the Crime Writers’ Association8 in 1998— instead features as its central character the less traditional figure of a civilian who has no particular connection with crime detection either in personal or professional terms, thus providing her story with a type of “everywoman” character which remains relatively uncommon within Tartan Noir (if not in crime writing generally). Peter Clandfield has thus underscored the irregular nature of the character within the mechanics of the genre’s conventions: Maureen O’Donnell, central character of Denise Mina’s Garnethill trilogy, is not a police officer. [...] Sexually abused as a child by her father, Maureen has also survived a breakdown brought on in her early twenties by the after effects of the abuse and by the inability of her lowermiddle-class Catholic family to acknowledge what has happened to her. Like McIlvanney’s Gus Hawkins, she uses intellectual interests to gain perspective on her home environment: she has a degree in art history, which she aspires to build upon, and she is a committed feminist.9

Although O’Donnell’s mental illness and the conditions which surrounded its treatment are absolutely central to the novel, it is to Mina’s great credit that the issue is never trivialised or subjected to any degree of sensationalist exploitation. That said, although the author delineates the debilitating psychological and social effects of emotional trauma in a keenly-drawn and sympathetic manner, she takes equal care to emphasise the social stigma which continues to cling to issues of mental health and the way that these issues affect the actions and attitudes of supporting characters. This exploration is further heightened by the fact that Garnethill’s plot chiefly concerns the murder of Douglas Brady, a psychiatric therapist whose affair with O’Donnell—a patient attending his practice—is used by Mina to raise many issues of professional accountability and medical responsibility. Mary Hadley denotes a gendered response to this subject, commenting that “Mina examines a woman’s sense of marginalization when she is forever regarded as unreliable, in this case because of her history of mental illness”, adding that this point is crucial to the novel’s plot rather than merely subordinate to it: “Although Maureen receives help from her brother, Liam, and her best friend, Leslie,

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when her lover [Douglas] is murdered, she finds herself doubted not only by the police, but by her family and even at one point by herself as well”.10 While this approach to the crime novel is by no means completely innovative, Mina certainly employs it in a manner which is as efficient in terms of its psychological effectiveness as it is in its literary technique. While Ian Rankin had earlier employed an inherent element of confusion over his protagonist’s uncertain identity in Knots and Crosses, at times making Rebus’s character, actions and even motivations appear intentionally fractured and fragmentary, it is also a technique which a number of American authors of crime fiction have engaged with in recent years. The same practice is crucially important to Paul Auster’s postmodern text The New York Trilogy (1987)11, most especially his opening novella of the cycle City of Glass (1985), where uncertainties surrounding the protagonist’s true identity eventually displace the narrative’s ostensibly-conventional central mystery as the key issue of the plot. Laura Marcus states that Auster “deploys and subverts the conventions of detective fiction, and in particular the private eye novel, in [his] explorations of identity, authorship and narrative”,12 and in so doing he was to lay the groundwork for many who would come after him. More recently, Dennis Lehane has exploited perceptions of authentic and inauthentic reality in his period mystery novel Shutter Island (2003), where the protagonist’s discernment between reality and a delusional, illusive (yet entirely tangible) nonreality—and his eventual inability to distinguish one from the other—leads to an emotionally devastating climax. In Garnethill’s first act in particular, much scepticism is allowed to develop with regard to O’Donnell’s plausible culpability for her lover’s death; her motive, and her painstakingly rendered history of psychiatric instability, lead the reader to consider the character as—at the very least— a credible if inadvertently unwitting suspect. Mina’s novel contains one particularly adroit twist, however, in that the murderer of O’Donnell’s partner is eventually revealed to be neither the protagonist herself nor any of the numerous supporting characters who are being treated for mental illness, but rather O’Donnell’s one-time therapist Angus Farrell—a close colleague of the murder victim, and a serial sex offender who transpires to be far more dangerous than any of his psychologically damaged or emotionally unstable patients. The difference, quite simply, is that while the victims’ mental illnesses have been diagnosed, Farrell’s psychosis and perversions remain painstakingly hidden from the view of the authorities. As Clandfield has remarked: Mina’s characterizations are notable, especially next to some of Brookmyre’s, for their complexity. The only member of Maureen’s family

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who accepts her account of the abuse is her brother Liam, and he is also a drug dealer, though uneasy about this vocation. Maureen’s other main ally, her best friend Leslie, is sympathetic but not always reliable. Douglas too is complex. His relationship with Maureen is predatory, since although he has not actually treated her, he knows her history and her fragility; he is also, as Maureen has just discovered at the time of his death, married. Yet he proves to have been killed because of his conscience-driven inquiries into a series of sexual crimes against patients of the “Northern,” the psychiatric hospital. Their perpetrator and his killer, a fellow psychologist called Angus Farrell, has been one of Maureen’s own doctors; in a further twist of irony, Farrell, a kind of Jekyll/Hyde figure, has been by far the most effective of those who have treated her. Maureen draws upon her memory of his professional help even as she struggles to uncover his personal crimes, to bring him to some form of justice, and—in the second and third books—to escape his counter-attacks.13

If the psychological aspects of Mina’s approach lend Garnethill a distinctly dark and introspective aspect, her treatment of her characters’ environment is similarly evocative. Whereas Rankin’s novels (and, to a lesser extent, Brookmyre’s) have come to be largely associated with Edinburgh, Mina’s choice of Glasgow-based venues for much of her published fiction invites comparison not only with William McIlvanney’s crime texts, but also later authors in the field such as Reg McKay and Alex Gray, creator of the Detective Chief Inspector Lorimer series. Yet Mina has also capitalised to great effect on Rankin’s practised ability of ensuring that the action of his novels are eminently translatable to an audience outwith Scotland; as novelist Meg Henderson has described it, “Ian Rankin solved [the issue of achieving international success] by skilfully making sure that, although his excellent Rebus books are set in Edinburgh, they could be set anywhere”.14 Mina herself has noted this metropolitan commonality, stating that “I keep setting books [in Glasgow] because I think most cities are universal. They’re organic and many features of one city will invariably be true of any other. Except for the restaurants and the quality of the coffee”.15 She also employs a playful subversion of her readers’ expectations of Glasgow-based crime drama by referring, on more than one occasion, to Glenn Chandler’s long-running STV drama Taggart as shorthand for the characters’ awareness of crime investigation in the city: Liam was exasperated. “Look, some scary fucker cut Douglas’s throat when he was helpless and tied to a fucking chair. Nice people don’t do that. These are unpleasant, dangerous people. This isn’t Taggart. Bad things happen to the good guys.”

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Chapter Six “Bad things happen on Taggart.” “Maureen,” he said, “there are very nasty people in the world. You’re not like them, you’re not fit for them. You’ve no idea what people are capable of doing to each other, no idea.” (Garnethill, pp. 76-77)

Mina takes care to weave long-established tropes drawn from fictional depictions of the criminal underworld into the novel’s narrative in ways which are logical, plausible and often innovative. O’Donnell makes use of her drug dealer brother’s contacts to gain access to illegal hallucinogenic narcotics which she later uses to exact revenge on her lover’s killer, for instance, while her attempts to protect her own safety from the same murderer lead her to encounter new depths and customs belonging to a transgressive underclass which is all but ignored by the police and mainstream society. Peter Clandfield and Christian Lloyd have noted that “bleak housing projects provide natural settings for crime narratives; however, leading Scottish writers in the genre, such as Denise Mina in her Garnethill trilogy and Ian Rankin in his Inspector Rebus series, have used Scottish housing schemes not only for generic purposes but also to point metonymically to social and political dysfunctions”.16 This is certainly true of Garnethill, which, like so many of Mina’s other works, is a novel that is intensely concerned with social conditions and the cultural and economic circumstances of the country. Although her concerns are acutely contemporary, at times she specifically indicates a kind of necrotising malaise which has resulted from long-term social decline, lamenting Scotland’s misspent promise and a tragically squandered potential: It was much darker now. The tide was coming in and the river flowed backwards, slapping against the wall far below her feet. She thought about the ships passing down the river many years ago, taking emigrants to America, whole families of Scots lost to their own people for ever. Lost to drizzling rain and a fifty-year recession, to endemic domestic violence and armies of drunk men shouting about football. (Garnethill, p. 224)

Although she is sometimes given to circumscribing these issues in fairly broad strokes, as above, Mina’s general tendency is instead to explore the direct effects that Scotland’s perceived social decline has had on the specific lives and conditions of those who are suffering most as a result of it. Of Mina’s work, Jules Smith has stated that: The obvious comparison is with Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, whose use of specific locations in his “Rebus” crime series surely inspired Mina’s. But,

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while hers is also a brilliantly choreographed fiction of police pursuing criminals, the focus is much more on victims (usually vulnerable women) and their wretched lives. There are other contrasts: her books are far more outspoken, often using vernacular Scottish expressions. They are harrowing at times, graphic in depicting mental illness, sexual abuse and extreme violence.17

Social responsibility is clearly a subject which is of genuine and central relevance to Mina’s literary output. The theme of familial disharmony and alcohol abuse which winds through Garnethill is unmistakably mirrored by issues that she has raised in interviews concerning the country’s perceived lack of awareness with regard to its current social condition: “We don’t talk about children growing up in families with addictions. [...] We don’t talk about children growing up in alcoholic households. It’s the biggest thing that affects children in Scotland. We need to look at what is available to children in those situations”.18 Although she has regularly issued rallying cries for greater personal accountability in order to bolster a sense of national social duty, Mina is ultimately a staunch realist, devoid of wide-eyed idealism or impracticable optimism. She is far-sighted not only in terms of Scotland’s changing cultural condition over the years, but in terms of the likelihood of an increasingly cosmopolitan future due to emigration, immigration and assimilation which will irrevocably alter the country’s social composition into new and unfamiliar configurations. Doreen Alvarez Saar has perceptively noted that “the younger members of Tartan Noir, Christopher Brookmyre and Denise Mina, integrate ethnic characters into their novels while avoiding the authorial pitfalls of idealization of the other. Particularly noteworthy is that many of Brookmyre and Mina’s ethnic characters speak naturally in Scots”,19 while Clandfield observes that “Mina, in her Garnethill trilogy, [implements] generic hybridity as a fitting vehicle for the investigation of cultural hybridity”.20 In this sense, Mina’s approach to the issue of Scottish identity is an intricate one, inclined towards exploring cultural nationalism indirectly via an examination of Scotland’s assimilative qualities at least as much as it comments upon the effects of globalisation as they bear upon the country’s social and political conditions. Although Mina employs a number of characters with ethnic backgrounds throughout the Garnethill trilogy, in Garnethill itself the primary supporting character with a non-Scottish heritage is Shan Ryan, a nurse who provides O’Donnell with the identity of the serial killer who has been systematically murdering a chain of sexual abuse victims. Ryan’s selfsacrifice in offering this information to O’Donnell, even while knowing that contributing such evidence will put his own life in jeopardy, contrasts

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effectively with the novel’s other noteworthy character with an explicitlystated—if rather more notional—ethnic background, Jim Maliano. (A third-generation Italian, Maliano is a self-important, socially inept peeping tom who—aside from providing the police with evidence of the killer’s accomplice, Brendan Gardner, breaking into O’Donnell’s apartment— appears to be depicted in as unsympathetic and generally repellent a light as possible.) Ryan’s evidence confirms O’Donnell’s suspicions that the murderer, Farrell, is methodically killing psychiatric patients whom he had brutally raped several years previously, in order to avoid them giving testimony and identifying his culpability in their abuse. This is ultimately linked to the slaughter of her lover, Douglas Brady, who had been a professional colleague of Farrell. Although not directly involved in this catalogue of sexual molestation, Brady’s guilt over having remained silent during the period that the abuse was taking place eventually causes him to feel obliquely complicit, leading him to track down the victims years later and personally offer them financial recompense for their suffering. It is this act of remorseful philanthropy that alarms Farrell, and which eventually causes him to instigate the execution of Brady and then each of the patients themselves. Brady’s murder, which is the central mystery of the novel, is well constructed not simply due to the ongoing—and genuine—uncertainty surrounding the identity of the killer, but also in the manner that the nature of his death casts a disturbing light upon both his assassin and O’Donnell herself. Having supervised O’Donnell for psychiatric treatment, Farrell is able to efficiently structure the crime in order to make his former patient’s culpability seem obvious to the investigating officers. This reaches its apex when he severs Brady’s testicles and secretes them in a cupboard under the apartment’s stairs, thus mirroring the location of O’Donnell’s childhood hiding place during traumatic periods when she herself had been sexually abused by her father in youth: “You were right,” muttered Maureen to Leslie, “it is a man.” “How do you know?” asked Leslie. “Douglas’s bollocks were cut off. That’s what was in the cupboard.” “And that makes it a man?” “A woman would’ve cut his dick off. Bollocks aren’t exactly loaded with symbolic meaning for us, are they?” “Dunno,” said Leslie. “I’m not all women.” (Garnethill, p. 342)

The repeated theme of violent male-instigated sexual abuse at all levels of society—within families, amongst partners, and as a result of professional

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misconduct—lends Garnethill a distinct suggestion of misandry which is difficult to ignore. Almost all of the male characters in the novel are depicted as either dangerous or somehow inadequate, ranging from the preening, narcissistic investigating officer Joe McEwan—who, we are told, “didn’t yield to other people’s moods: he decided where he wanted to go and just crashed on through like Godzilla in a suit, certain always that he was centre stage and the world was full of extras” (Garnethill, p. 319)—through to O’Donnell’s brother Liam, a directionless and often feckless drug-dealer who flirts with criminality more by default than as a defined choice of career. Although Liam’s loyalty to his sister, even in the face of their fractured family life, is crucial in assisting her to snare Brady’s killer (and, inevitably, her own intended assassin), he is shown to have a barely-controlled temper and willingly resorts to extreme violence when he considers it necessary to do so. Even Brady himself, in spite of the gruesomeness of his murder, is a deeply unsavoury character; a serial philanderer, his reputation is consistently attacked throughout the course of the novel due to his unprofessional conduct in having instigated an affair with O’Donnell, a mental patient with whom he became acquainted through indirect professional channels. Perhaps most notable of all, Farrell’s crimes have profoundly misogynistic motivations; his intentions are entirely driven by the sexual mistreatment of vulnerable females, an offence which stands in sharp contrast to the rather more conventional avaricious materialism of many of Brookmyre’s villains, or the psychological disturbance and relatively conformist notions of criminality which are evident in several of Rankin’s antagonists. Other ineffectual male characters in Garnethill include a succession of disaffected police officers, almost always more focused upon attempts to impress their overbearing superior McEwan than in substantiating the guilt of their suspects, and Gardner, a long-time friend of O’Donnell who betrays her in collusion with Farrell—with potentially lethal consequences—in order to protect his own professional interests. Only a very few male characters are cast in a favourable light throughout the novel; they include Martin Donegan, a hospital orderly whose altruistic concern for O’Donnell (and a desire to see Farrell brought to justice) promptly leads to his brutal death, and Hugh McAskill, a sympathetic police detective who is able to identify with O’Donnell in ways that his colleagues are unable to, due to the fact that he himself has suffered from incestuous abuse in earlier life. In this respect, the social commentary of Mina’s crime fiction is somewhat removed from that of her male counterparts within Tartan Noir, whose accounts of endemic societal violence—whilst similarly graphic—tend to be much less

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specifically gendered in nature. This, perhaps, is as much to do with the shift of perspective away from that of protagonists who are professional male crime investigators over to the viewpoint of a central character who is both female and also a member of the public who is normally dissociated from the professional analysis of illegal actions, thus being able to observe the causes and effects of such criminality in a more detached and objective manner. As Mina herself has stated, “crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids”.21 Yet there are signs that in attempting to redress this balance, Mina is at times guilty of tilting the equilibrium too far in the opposite direction. At some points, the effort to emphasise the depths of male perversion and manipulation, particularly in response to innocent or comparatively defenceless women, is laboured so strenuously that the effect becomes contrived, ultimately compromising the intended shock value of the approach: Pauline was released a few months after Maureen. She wasn’t given a house: apparently she’d been told that she would have to wait another three months. She’d been offered bed and breakfast in a bad area and turned it down. Within a week of her return to the family home she went to the woods near her house and took an overdose. She was missing for three days before a woman out walking her dog stumbled across her body. She was lying on her side, curled into a ball under the base of a tree. Her skirt had blown up over her face. At the funeral a nurse told Maureen that, until they found a goodbye note in her bedroom, the police thought it was a murder because they found dried semen on her back. Someone had wanked on her as she lay dead or dying. (Garnethill, pp. 203-04)

The correlation between male-gendered characters and sexual abuse is drawn most explicitly through O’Donnell’s interactions with Leslie, her closest friend, who works at a women’s refuge which is in perpetual danger of closure due to local authority budgetary cutbacks. Leslie is a caustic, straight-talking individual who has become embittered by her professional experiences; the sanguinity of her world-view has eroded to the point that in spite of her involvement in a caring profession she has come to the opinion that the most “effective technique for dealing with needy people” is to “tell them to fuck off” (Garnethill, pp. 444-45). The character’s mordant, pithy sarcasm is the source of much of the novel’s dark humour, but the bite of that acidic drollness is inevitably divisive, likely to alienate as many readers as it will appeal to depending on their appreciation of Mina’s comedic aptitude. Jules Smith has observed that:

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Mina brings out a compassion and dry wit in creating a totally believable world of mental patients and therapists, survivors’ groups [...] and police, in which issues of trust and authority are fully explored. Harshness is also lightened by her command of brutally funny Glaswegian speech and numerous exotic similes. And, above all, by observing warm female solidarity amongst aggressive or downtrodden women.22

Perhaps inevitably, then, the objective of this solidarity tends to focus on the shortcomings of men and the perception of their unchecked excesses within a hostile, disinterested society. But as Leslie comments, merely identifying the problems of domestic abuse is not sufficient; action, not reaction, is what is required: It’s all right for you and me to worry about our moral standing—neither of us are getting our faces kicked in every night in the week. These women are treated as if they were born on the end of a boot and we set up committees and worry about our moral standing. It’s a fucking joke, the movement’s turning into the WRVS,23 it pisses me off. We’re not fucking helpless, we’re fucking cowards. (Garnethill, p. 312)

Clearly there is a frustration at the lack of recognition towards—and subsequent unwillingness to combat—familial abuse in the Scotland of the post-feminist age, whether it should manifest itself by physical, emotional or sexual means. Mina often alludes to the country’s breakdown of communitarian values over the decades, and the estrangement which has sundered the working class and the state, ultimately leading to the cultural rudderlessness and casual brutality which is so keenly illustrated throughout Garnethill. Yet the social commonality that is discerned by Smith provides one way of acting as a barrier, if not necessarily an inoculant, against such cruelty; Hadley notes that “Maureen’s relationship with Leslie is typical of the feminist detective in that it is an extremely supportive one. Leslie is her drinking partner, her shoulder to cry on, and, above all, her sounding board”, additionally observing that “Leslie works as a counselor [sic] at a battered women’s shelter and occasionally voices her personally felt horror at the way many of these women are treated by their husbands”.24 Throughout the novel, Leslie’s loyalty to O’Donnell is unflinching; although she expresses considerable trepidation at putting her life at risk, she never willingly fails to do so. The abrasive Leslie also acts as a counterbalance to the condescension of officialdom which relentlessly weighs down on O’Donnell throughout the course of the murder investigation, providing her with stalwart support in times of need:

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It is perhaps germane to note that such camaraderie between the female characters is certainly not entirely exclusive throughout Garnethill; social class neatly bisects this sense of cohesion, the most prominent exponent of this divisiveness being Brady’s formidable mother, Carol. A Member of the European Parliament for Strathclyde, Carol Brady wastes no time in arbitrarily deciding that O’Donnell has the only plausible motive to kill her son (a desire for revenge after he had revealed to O’Donnell his hitherto-concealed marriage), and is thus determined to act as judge, jury and executioner, putting intense pressure on the police to abandon any other avenue of investigation and simply place O’Donnell in custody with a view to a speedy conviction. Carol Brady’s egregious exploitation of her political influence proves to be a none-too-subtle allegory for Mina’s perception of the vindictiveness and self-interest of the modern elite; this MEP may represent the preservation of the universal merits of social order, but she simultaneously has no compunction in bending these same rules in order to ensure that her own ends are met. The character performs an important function, in that she becomes an embodiment of the concept of abuse of power; aghast at the notion of her middle-class psychotherapist son having an affair with a working-class customer assistant, she voices consternation that any woman would hold to an aspirational worldview which conflicts with her own: “I suppose he gave you money?” continued Brady. “Is that why you never bothered to get a decent job?” “Look, I’d only known Douglas for the past eight months. I’ve had that job for three years.” “But you have no ambition,” said Brady, disparagingly. “You’ve never sought promotion.” “It isn’t everyone’s ambition to become an authority figure.” Brady looked sceptically at her, “Oh, come on now.” She sipped at her coffee with a tiny drawstring mouth. (Garnethill, p. 113)

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Carol Brady is arguably the least sympathetic of all the adjuncts of bureaucracy to appear in the novel, and yet her disparaging view of O’Donnell is one which permeates almost all of the protagonist’s dealings with state bodies. Clandfield notes, for instance, that Garnethill “depicts the police critically: though not all bigoted or brutal, they are often selfinterested or simply obtuse. Maureen must rely on her own mettle, and that of a few allies, in order to survive the complicated physical and psychological dangers that the initial crime unleashes on her”.25 Yet crucially, in spite of the coercion applied by Carol Brady to force the police into adhering to her own version of events, the independentlyminded (and glory-seeking) officer in charge of the investigation nevertheless insists on drawing his own conclusions. O’Donnell’s social background and psychological profile certainly do not aid her in convincing the police that she was not culpable in Brady’s murder; Hadley states that “Maureen is suspected and treated in a harsh and unsympathetic way, not only because she has just had it confirmed to her that [Douglas] is married and she could conceivably have killed him in a fit of anger, but also because Liam is a known drug dealer and her mother an undesirable alcoholic”.26 Furthermore: Although [Detective Chief Inspector] McEwan is not particularly cruel to her because of the time she has spent in psychiatric care, he clearly feels that since she has lied about receiving treatment at the Rainbow Clinic, she is probably lying about the murder. Mina stresses the woman-asvictim. In McEwan’s eyes, Maureen is totally unreliable as a woman and especially as a former mental patient.27

It could be argued that in attempting to emphasise O’Donnell’s intrinsic worth in the face of mortal threat and official suspicion, Mina tries a little too hard to underscore the character’s resourcefulness even in spite of her protagonist’s ingenuousness and occasional naivety. In spite of never having engaged directly with issues of serious criminality prior to the murder, for instance, with little effort O’Donnell repeatedly outmanoeuvres an experienced team of police officers who are highly trained in tracking suspects. Her own amateur investigations soon prove to be far more fruitful than McEwan’s, quite in spite of this senior officer’s established ambition and high degree of professional instruction. But regardless of this depiction of the police as establishment bureaucrats who repeatedly seem more interested in obtaining a plausible and expedient conviction than seeking justice, Mina appears eager to stress that their main transgression is to disparage O’Donnell on account of her gender and her social class. The investigators’ motivations actually prove to be far

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from straightforward, largely due to the complexity of the case which faces them. McEwan resists Carol Brady’s vindictive calls for a rapid conclusion to the investigation, even in spite of the professional damage that she has the potential to inflict upon him, which provides a rare occasion in the novel where Mina concedes that the establishment is not all-encompassingly hostile and disreputable in its dealings. Indeed, the accuracy of the initial police investigation is further hindered by the involvement of O’Donnell’s mother, who is in such complete denial of her daughter’s earlier sexual abuse that she is entirely willing—particularly under the influence of alcohol—to deny that any such incestuous acts ever took place, thus further undermining the credibility of her testimony. Yet ironically, even this most serious of acrimonious family rifts has its match in the scorn directed at Marie, O’Donnell’s older sister, who has been branded the worst kind of class traitor. As critic Dick Adler astutely observes, “O’Donnell’s mother, Winnie, is an overly dramatic alcoholic who could ‘scene-steal from an eclipse,’ and her brother Liam is a bumbling drug dealer. But the black sheep of the family is a sister who went to London and became a Thatcherite banker”.28 This immense political incongruity, particularly given the family’s heavily-stated working class roots, is perhaps surprisingly the cause of more turbulence than the catalogue of social dysfunction which plagues O’Donnell’s mother and siblings: Marie was the eldest. She moved to London in the early eighties to get away from her mum’s drinking, settled there and became one of Mrs Thatcher’s starry-eyed children. She got a job in a bank and worked her way up. At first the change in her seemed superficial: she began to define all her friends by how big their mortgage was and what kind of car they drove. It took a while for them to realize that Marie was deep down different. They didn’t talk about it. They could talk about Winnie’s alcoholism, about Maureen’s mental-health problems, and to a lesser extent about Liam dealing drugs, but they couldn’t talk about Marie being a Thatcherite. There was nothing kind to be said about that. (Garnethill, pp. 25-26)

Such social concerns are crucial to Tartan Noir, and Mina’s principled notions towards the need to reinvigorate communitarian values—in addition to her sense of class consciousness—are mirrored elsewhere in Scottish crime writing. While they have formed a fundamental element of the genre writings of William McIlvanney, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Christopher Brookmyre—mirroring the concerns of mainstream literary authors such as Janice Galloway, Alan Spence, Andrew O’Hagan and Ron Butlin—more recent authors in the field of crime fiction have

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likewise engaged with social commentary in ways which are incisive, stark, and often bleakly despairing. Authors of crime narratives, including Lin Anderson, Kate Atkinson and Zoë Strachan, have dealt with issues of social decay and cultural malaise in various different ways over the course of the past decade, and their work has often bordered upon acceptance as literary fiction in the eyes of many commentators due to their adroit interweaving of social realism with established genre conventions. But few have so eloquently depicted the issues of deteriorating social values and moral decline than Louise Welsh, who examines this subject matter with explicit regard to modern Scotland in her debut novel The Cutting Room (2002). Louise Welsh (1965-) graduated with a degree in history from the University of Glasgow, and operated a second-hand bookshop in the city for a number of years before the publication of The Cutting Room, a novel which immediately brought her to the attention of critics on a national and international level. In addition to generating considerable appeal amongst commentators, The Cutting Room was to earn Welsh a number of prestigious literary plaudits including the John Creasey Dagger Award, a BBC Underground Award and the Saltire First Book Award, as well as receiving a nomination for the Orange Prize.29 Amongst her many other literary honours in later years are the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award, which she received in 2003; the Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award in 2004; a Hawthornden Fellowship in 200530 and, in the United States, the Stonewall Book Award for Honour in Literature in 2004.31 Following the success of The Cutting Room she has written a further four novels to date. They include the historical drama Tamburlaine Must Die (2004), international murder mystery The Bullet Trick (2006), a thriller based in the world of academia, Naming the Bones (2010), and a Germany-situated psychological thriller, The Girl on the Stairs (2012). Additionally, Welsh has written short fiction and work for the stage, and has contributed numerous non-fiction articles for the national press.32 In December 2010 she was appointed Writer in Residence at the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow School of Art. Ostensibly, at least, The Cutting Room shares a number of similarities with Garnethill. Both occupy a modern Glaswegian setting, which leads to a gradual exploration of a criminal underbelly that lurks just beneath the city’s everyday facade. They also have in common an unconventional protagonist, whose engagement with the apparatus of detection and criminality is unanticipated. Like Mina’s Maureen O’Donnell, Rilke—the protagonist of The Cutting Room—is vaguely aware of the illicit undercurrents which operate throughout Glasgow, but generally works to

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keep himself at a safe distance from them when it suits him to do so. However, whereas Garnethill is a novel which is acutely concerned with social injustice and the psychological perception of the self, The Cutting Room is instead focused primarily upon the examination of the twin themes of sexuality and morality, and the overlapping areas of commonality which occur between these two issues. Rilke (as Lesley McDowell notes, “like all the best heroes, Welsh’s protagonist goes by one name only”33) is an auctioneer at a middling Glasgow auction house, and he proves to be one of the least orthodox of all central characters in recent Scottish fiction. Capturing Rilke’s thoughts and actions in first-person perspective, Welsh’s compelling exploration of the dark side of the city has marked her out as one of the most erudite and articulate of crime fiction authors currently active in Scotland. The Glasgow of The Cutting Room is a strikingly different one from that which is depicted by Mina or other genre authors such as Alex Gray. In place of the gritty depictions of urban deprivation are the observations of a city in transition, a metropolitan clash of cultures which is depicted as a locus of divisions and complexity. Yet it is also a place of isolation and abandonment: as Gavin Miller has put it, “glazed indifference to others is a recurring motif in Welsh’s Glasgow”.34 In one sense, this characteristic has been described by Miller as a deliberate aspect of Welsh’s wider literary strategy; he notes that “The Cutting Room is part of a strand of post-war Scottish writing that focuses on the phenomenology of personal relations, and on how, in particular, other people may be depersonalized, rather than encountered in an ‘I-thou’ relationship”.35 Yet it should also be noted that there is a highly distinctive cultural, as well as social, facet which Welsh adroitly imparts to her biting interpretation of this city in flux: At Charing Cross I was absorbed into the late-afternoon tide of office workers. Here, then, was sanity. The industrial age had given way to a white-collar revolution and the sons and daughters of shipyard toilers now tapped keyboards and answered telephones in wipe-clean sweatshops. They shuffled invisible paper and sped communications through electronic magic. Dark suits tramped along Bath Street, past the stormblasted spire of Renfield St Stephen’s, home to prepare for another day like the last and another after that. (The Cutting Room, p. 65)

It is made plain from an early point in the novel that Welsh shares Mina’s anxieties concerning the gradual depreciation and transformation of Glasgow’s cultural identity, though she expresses it by markedly

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different means and explores it through the selection of different targets. In The Cutting Room, the focus of criticism tends to fall more squarely on the challenge to individualism posed by the corporate mindset and economic compartmentalisation than it does the struggle between a self-destructive underclass and an unsympathetic establishment. As Alan Bissett has observed, the city as observed by Welsh is a place in rapid transition, a patchwork of corporatisation and economic self-interest which is aggressively sweeping away the old order that has sustained it in times past: Welsh’s Glasgow is a city transformed by de-industrialisation and its economy’s shift towards the tertiary sector. Welsh not only invokes images from Glasgow’s past, but also acknowledges both religion (“Renfield St Stephens”) and labour emigration (“the Chicago skyline”). Glasgow’s traditional heritage has been supplanted and erased by Thatcher’s “white collar revolution”, which augured much but which has delivered only, according to Welsh, a life of gridlock, alienation, commuting, computing, stress and long hours in “wipe-clean sweatshops”. It is an economy of consumption which barely slows by night. [...] Welsh’s Glasgow comprises a restless, postmodern panorama of neon light, “late-night office work” in tower blocks, and twenty-four hour media and advertising, resembling a perpetual simulacrum which, as Welsh intimates through her reference to [Marilyn] Monroe, promises and commodifies sexuality as a consumer good as much as it recycles literally “dead” images.36

As Bissett’s summation suggests, Welsh’s consideration of sex and death as two sides of the same coin is as effective as it is thoughtprovoking. As Rédouane Abouddahab and Josiane Paccaud-Huguet have so insightfully noted, “the more we move into the area of the contemporary novel, the less constraining narrative frames seem to be, and the more porous and receptive to such disturbing knowledge as the erotic stimulation of death, the ambivalent co-presence of Eros and Thanatos among men and women”.37 It is precisely this derivation of sexual gratification from death that so piques Rilke’s curiosity, driving him to a point of near-obsession as he attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding a woman, possibly dead, whose photograph he finds in a hidden collection of erotic ephemera belonging to the estate of Roddy McKindless (a wellto-do elderly man who is believed, at least, to be recently deceased). Although Rilke has no relationship to the mysterious woman, and believes that her supposed murder is likely to have taken place several decades beforehand, the matter begins to consume him as he struggles to confirm her identity and the true nature of the photographs. In spite of being

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repelled at the notion of a murder being engineered solely for the sexual gratification of another human being, eventually Rilke’s preoccupation with the stranger’s fate engulfs him to the point that the matter intrudes into his professional interests, his social life, and eventually his own copious sexual encounters: It was coming now... getting close... blood-red vision of the orgasm blackout... Here it came... a wound, deep and red and longing... the dark basement... the slash of blood against her throat... the reflection imposed on the inside of my retina as true as if I was looking at the photograph... the girl, used and bound, lying dead on her pallet. I came, spurting into him, grasping his buttocks for support, rocking with the force of my orgasm. (The Cutting Room, p. 153)

Rilke becomes simultaneously repulsed and aroused by the notion of the woman’s sexualised murder, captured in all its tragic immediacy by means of photography, a form which allows the fatal act to transcend temporality. But ultimately his inexplicable drive to uncover the truth leads Rilke to reach beyond his professional sources for assistance, causing him to drift into a netherworld of illegal pornography and sexual slavery. The knife-point balance which is drawn between Rilke’s distaste and fascination towards the twilight sphere of eroticism which exists between rape and necrophilia is one which intersects with Welsh’s wider preoccupations concerning the aesthetic considerations of the female form, a subject which she has discussed repeatedly over the years in connection with her literary work. In an interview with The Guardian’s Paul Hamilos in 2005, for instance, Welsh has noted that she “was very interested in the way in which we look at the prone, naked female, the attractiveness of this image in advertising. That idea that the woman is much better when she’s naked and lying down, with a disengaged, glazed look, when she could be dead”.38 Yet Welsh’s concerns are far more pronounced than the above discussion of the aesthetic may suggest.39 In discussion with Jennie Renton during the same year, she argued that the function of the photographic image, even when employed for seemingly innocuous purposes, can be exploitative or even abusive in application: I’m very concerned with the way women’s bodies are sometimes used, especially in films. You’ll see a movie and the woman’s body will be there to just hold your interest as a prop, like this table—there’s been a murder, and there’s a naked female body on the floor. This idea of the dead supine female somehow being more arresting in a way—you see it a lot in advertising, this very passive naked female who might as well be

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dead, so when I came to write The Cutting Room I was worried about writing about what I don’t like, in a sense. How do you write about sexual exploitation or its visual use without recreating it? In the end you come down to your own tightrope, and some people will think you’ve got it right, some people might think you haven’t. That was part of the idea of using photographs as well, trying to make one removed from this body on the floor, and also try to point up the way in which photography is very much a powerful medium that we can use in that way.40

Clearly, then, Welsh’s concerns reach beyond the sexual politics of the aesthetic, instead questioning the nature and appliance of the power that has become ascribed to imagery. In Rilke’s case, the photograph which so fascinates him also forms a dark curiosity to the reader, who is encouraged not only to attempt to decode the meaning which lies behind the enigmatic image’s mise en scène (as Rilke does), but also to question the psychological effects of the character’s own mounting obsession with the central mystery. The photograph’s effect on Rilke proves problematic to the character precisely because of the incongruity of his erotic desire, suspended somewhere between the vital energy of life and the ethereality of death, which proves to be so crucial to understanding the somewhat irregular driving force which lies behind his fixation. As Miller observes: Like a cinema viewer, or a crime reader who has paused to conjure up a gory scene in his mind, Rilke, Welsh’s protagonist and narrator, is confronted with a representation of a mutilated female corpse. Unlike the viewer or reader, however, he has none of the usual assurances that the image is fictional. This is why Rilke consults a photographic firm, a student film maker, and even the owner of a Glaswegian porn emporium. Is the photo a fake, or a real “snuff” image? Whatever the image’s resemblance to the photographic work of David Bailey (shown to him by Trapp, the porn dealer), it cannot for Rilke be glossed as a purely aesthetic object if it is predicated on a murder.41

The Cutting Room’s macabre preoccupation with death leads Welsh’s work into more than a fleeting dalliance with the Gothic. It is noteworthy, given that the novel is so innately concerned with modernity and transition into uncharted social waters, that Welsh occasionally—and strikingly— draws some striking comparisons between Glasgow’s present and a cultural past that has become so vividly embedded in the national psyche. There are a number of sections within the novel where Welsh knowingly engages with elements of the Gothic tradition in playful but highly effective ways. She has stated in conversation with Len Wanner that:

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It is interesting, given Welsh’s above summation, to note that her stylistic engagement with the Gothic generally avoids the trap of becoming backward-looking; instead, she remains true to the sentiment of Gothic traditions that, as Fred Botting has described it, emphasise the fact that Gothic “anxieties varied according to diverse changes: political revolution, industrialisation, urbanisation, shifts in sexual and domestic organisation, and scientific discovery”, adding that “in Gothic productions [...], passion, excitement and sensation transgress social proprieties and moral laws”.43 There is thus little incompatibility in evidence between the novel’s concern with shifting cultural mores in the modern world and the underlying apprehension towards social transition that Botting emphasises in Gothic texts of the nineteenth century. The combination is, in actual fact, often employed by Welsh to striking effect: The Necropolis. Glasgow’s first “hygienic cemetery”, established in the early nineteenth century, designed to avoid the spread of cholera and a slippage of corpses from ill-dug graves, which had become a city scandal. A convenient stroll across the Bridge of Sighs from the hospital. John Knox pointed down at us sinners from his vantage point high on the hill, “next only to God”. I gave him a V sign and steered the van into the hospital courtyard. (The Cutting Room, p. 196)

Discussing the early origins of the crime novel, John Scaggs has noted that “from the Gothic novel, a concern with secret or hidden knowledge and the narrative and thematic sphere of social disintegration are evident”,44 and indeed if The Cutting Room’s Gothic tendencies and sensitively-rendered social commentary may tend the reader towards a consideration of Welsh’s text as an explicitly literary novel, rather than one which has been unequivocally written for consideration within the remit of a specific popular genre, it should be observed that its qualities as a work of crime fiction remain unmistakable, hence its subsequent categorisation as both Tartan Noir and literary fiction. Although Rilke is far from a conventional crime novel protagonist, he is nonetheless

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recognisably that, and his dissimilarity from other noteworthy characters in Tartan Noir texts can be delineated in a number of ways. In crafting a central character who is both an archetypal outsider and a homosexual, for instance, Welsh’s work is not entirely without precedent, particularly since the turn of the millennium. Douglas Gifford notes that “in [a] linguistically exuberant investigation and celebration of Scotland’s diverse identities, old moral boundaries [are] pushed aside. Writers like Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and Christopher Whyte deal with cross-gender and gay issues with assurance and insight [...]. Louise Welsh’s dark Glasgow study of child pornography in The Cutting Room [...] introduces a gay investigator, as does the detective fiction of Manda Scott”.45 Rilke’s own sexuality is far from the most prominently presented in a novel which is deeply engaged with the nature and mechanics of sexual desire and emotional needs. Welsh’s own homosexuality effectively inoculates her against any accusation of negative stereotyping in the articulation of Rilke’s promiscuous lifestyle and voracious sexual appetite, and indeed she appears keen to play down (within reason) the politics of sexuality that are implicit in the employment of a homosexual protagonist, seeming particularly restrained in a mode of writing which has become— in the views of commentators such as Duncan—so firmly wedded to notions of the masculine. Of the connection between her literary output and issues of sexual orientation, for instance, Welsh has stated that “I don’t mind being described as a gay writer, as long as it’s not used to confine me. [...] To be a gay writer, a Scottish writer—it’s all fine as long as you get to be on the mainstream shelves”.46 Although Rilke’s homosexuality is arguably not crucially fundamental to the plot, it is sympathetically expressed throughout the course of the book, allowing Welsh to use the character to give voice to sentiments that may seem incongruous if operating within the traditional square-jawed masculinity of the conventional male detective figure: I see many reasons youth should be attracted to old age; all of them can be folded and put in your wallet. I also know that there are not a few who would happily transport all the dykes to some Hebridean colony. So, unlike Mr Wilde, I am cynical about Greek motifs. Still, I cannot walk into the Chelsea Lounge without feeling that the look of the place would be enhanced by a toga-only dress code, some laurel leaves and a few naked, curly-haired youths in the mould of Caravaggio’s young Bacchus. (The Cutting Room, p. 100)

Although Rilke’s sexual orientation is unmistakeable, it is ultimately depicted in a highly realistic fashion in the sense that it is a key attribute of

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his identity rather than simply employed in a contrived fashion as a single, all-encompassing characteristic which is used to define him stereotypically. (Similar complexity of character can be observed in Leslie, one of Rilke’s underworld contacts, a witty transvestite drug dealer who provides much of the novel’s comic relief.) Welsh invests Rilke with a dry, often sympathetic sense of humour, one which renders the character relatable to the reader while also suggesting a listless vulnerability quite different from the serrated, defensive wit of Brookmyre’s Parlabane. Even more immediately palpable throughout the novel is the notion of Rilke as an interloper, a distinctively-voiced blank canvas upon whom the foreign and at times disturbing nature of Glasgow’s hidden underside is projected: There are always some whose tastes are difficult to satisfy and for them there are quiet little shops away from the main drag, hidden palaces of strange delights. It’s as if the everyday shopper doesn’t see the dreary storefront, the unwashed window that displays nothing, nothing at all. But if you are sympathetic, if you have the motivation, you can be in any town, any city, in the world, a stranger on your first day, and it will sing to you. Some people run from Grandma’s house, they long for the bite of the wolf. (The Cutting Room, p. 63)

Rilke is far from naive, socially or emotionally, and his own sexual appetites are frequently shown to border upon the prodigious. But when he encounters the dark and clandestine world inhabited by McKindless and his associates, he cannot help but be shocked at the perversions and deviance which slowly emerge from his investigations. In so doing, Welsh emphasises Rilke’s humanity in the face of a seemingly unending parade of sexual cruelty and licentiousness, accentuating the fact that such depravity is actively ongoing beneath the surface of the apparent decorum and propriety of civil society. This is effectively foreshadowed early in the novel, when Rilke visits the McKindless estate for the first time and notes—in light of later events, rather ironically—that “I hate Hyndland. You’ll find its like in any large city. Green leafy suburbs, two cars, children at public school and boredom, boredom, boredom. Petty respectability up front, intricate cruelties behind closed doors” (The Cutting Room, p. 2). And quite aside from any issue of his sexuality, it could also be convincingly argued that there is a kind of grim, incipient melancholy lurking within Rilke with regard to his inability—or lack of willingness—to conform to established views of social expectation: The same scene repeated itself around the ward, a timeless image, recurring over like a distorted mirror-carousel, a family grouped round a

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bed. Nativity or death? From a distance it was hard to tell. I watched them. Normal-looking people. Punters, we called them, thinking ourselves different, better. I tried to imagine myself working in an office, travelling home to a warm hearth, children, a salary at the end of the month, pension for old age. It was too difficult; the image refused to appear. (The Cutting Room, p. 201)

In his isolation, Rilke is not alone among crime fiction protagonists; the subtle distance that he keeps from the mores of the mainstream gives him the detachment required to offer impartial comment on the sometimes menacing curiosities which take place in the world around him. This is a particularly useful characteristic given that, in The Cutting Room, the sordid stratum of criminality which the novel offers up for examination is more intimate both in terms of scale and intention, and yet rather less tangible, than that which is exhibited by most other Tartan Noir fiction. McDowell notes succinctly that “all heroes have an Achilles heel, and it is Rilke’s rejection of intimacy itself, rather than with whom he may be intimate, that points to weakness. That’s not an unusual character trait for amateur detectives who prefer to play it alone, but the reasons for his emotional isolation give him added depth”.47 The force of Rilke’s growing motivation to uncover the secret behind the woman in McKindless’s photo, and inadvertently plumbing the depths of the apparently-dead man’s degeneracy in the process, is the crucial factor which drives both the character and the narrative. But it is also the key characteristic which elevates Rilke from the conventions which typify so many other protagonists of novels of the genre. Charles Taylor, for instance, has noted that: Rilke is spurred by nothing more than his sense of decency. It’s a mark of the way Welsh avoids any trace of genre familiarity. Rilke is not the typical sentimental figure of hardboiled fiction—the lone, good man who cares. He’s a cynic, as adept at summing people up as he is at mentally cataloging [sic] the effects of someone’s estate. He takes a seen-it-all attitude towards the professional scavengers who inhabit the city’s auction houses, understanding them as creatures who feed off carrion. If he doesn’t condemn them it’s only because he knows he’s in the same trade.48

Indeed, it is this nuanced ethical awareness which blurs the lines between Rilke as hero and anti-hero; his moral stance is nebulous at best, assured in some ways and yet unreliable in others. But though an outsider in many ways, often by choice, Rilke is unable to completely dissociate himself from the social mechanisms which surround him, and ultimately

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he finds himself being drawn further into immediate peril as the novel continues. Miller questions whether the “claim that Rilke is a spectator [...] seem[s] haphazard. Is he therefore unlike the private detective—an agent of law and retribution, who steps in where the state cares not to tread?”,49 eventually concluding that: There are of course clear differences between Rilke and the archetype. Rilke is an often ineffectual agent, and the closure of McKindless’s defeat is accomplished by a minor character, Anne-Marie, who would normally be a standard-issue “victim” in the genre. However, there is a great deal of continuity between the traditional detective and Rilke in their shared tendency to spectate.50

Clearly, then, the reader—like Rilke—is left in a state of uncertainty, never able to entirely anticipate the rewritten rules of this particular crime fiction narrative due to Welsh’s subtle but implacable undermining of genre conventions. Yet here, too, all is not quite as it seems. In knowingly subverting many crime fiction tropes in order to build a sense of mystery and peril, the uneasy sense of danger which Welsh gradually invokes ultimately, in any respect, leads to a similar end result exhibited by much conventional writing in the genre. Literary critic Paul Magrs notes of The Cutting Room that: Like any genre plot it makes us want more, and its world is strangely cosy. We know we’re confined by the safe walls of certain conventions. Welsh self-consciously uses these conventions to draw us in. She understands that every fictional detective is a fetishist. They don’t really want to find all the answers: the body in question, the confrontation with actual flesh. At that point their story would be over. Genre always wants to kill character, to grind it up in the merciless, mechanical drive towards resolution.51

Magrs’s observations invite a closer examination of The Cutting Room as genre fiction quite in spite of (or, perhaps, precisely because of) its skilled employment of literary devices more commonly observed within mainstream fiction. The novel is so intrinsically focused upon issues of cultural decline, the erosion (and relativistic notions) of social responsibility and mutability of sexual characteristics that there is a temptation to concentrate on these aims rather than to consider the novel as an example of crime fiction, a popular genre so often defined not so much by its literary qualities but in the employment of its accepted conventions. Certainly the novel deals with issues of social and cultural relevance specific to contemporary Scotland in ways which comfortably

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situate it within the remit of Scottish literary writing, though it is perhaps fair to observe that the novel is actually a more consistent entity when viewed as literary fiction than when considered through the lens of crime writing: although the central mystery is an intriguing one, with the protagonist in growing danger as the narrative continues, its resolution seems nebulous and strangely unsatisfying, while the denouement appears rushed and oddly contrived. Miller is highly perceptive in his observation of the shortcomings of the plausibility of The Cutting Room’s fluctuating sense of internal logic: A further, perhaps more complex subversion of the detective-versusserial-killer genre occurs in Welsh’s welding of high-literary narrative technique onto the implausible devices of this popular narrative form. Even the most charitable of critics will notice that Welsh’s plot stretches the bounds of probability. Why doesn’t Rilke go to the police? Why doesn’t Inspector Anderson—Rilke’s police contact—check that McKindless is dead? Shouldn’t Rilke require Miss McKindless to provide proof that her brother is dead, and that she is authorized as executor? Why doesn’t McKindless just ask a criminal associate (Trapp, for example) to clear out his private possessions, and why does he remain in Glasgow risking exposure? The Cutting Room is apparently something of a failure in terms of plausibility, and necessarily so, for the grand guignol scenes that it toys with fare best in an environment populated by stupid characters. But Welsh cleverly feeds her “idiot plot” into self-reflexive high-literary devices. Rilke’s idiocy is also an ambiguity in his character: he appears more as a horrified spectator—as a reader or viewer—than as an agent.52

The level of effectiveness of the approach that Miller alludes to can arguably only be carried so far, however, due to the fact that some of the novel’s characters ultimately strain reader credulity beyond any reasonable threshold of plausibility. The most egregious illustration can be found in Welsh’s depiction of Steenie, a stereotypically staunch Christian and antiquarian book-dealer who—in the latter stages of the novel—makes a ham-fisted attempt upon Rilke’s life. Steenie’s homicidal motives are nebulous at best; it is obliquely inferred that his murderous intentions may have been galvanised by a moral objection to Rilke’s unconventional lifestyle, or in hostility towards Rilke’s sexuality. There is, however, a fine line which exists between a writer who produces an edgy, off-kilter depiction of a character, and one who engages in a kind of angry, forced overkill in the process of that depiction. With Steenie, Welsh crosses that line, producing an archetypal religious lunatic who is so preposterously exaggerated in his small-minded bigotry and grandiloquent King James

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Bible speech that it is impossible to tell whether the reader is intended to consider the character to be a dangerous, mentally-unstable extremist or a mildly ridiculous figure of fun: “He was a pervert, a filthy degenerate. Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revellers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.” “Plenty of room, then. Other than that, what did you have against him?” “Did you see his library?” “Aye, I did. A fine collection.” “That’s what you would say. It was a disgrace, an offence to God.” “Stick to the point.” I moved towards him and he cringed. [...] “I was glad when I heard McKindless had died. I hoped John would renounce his past and choose salvation. Then you came to the bar and I realised you were one of them. I left last night because I knew you were there to corrupt my brother and I wished you harm. When you came here today, to persecute me, I knew that it was a sign. The Lord wanted me at His right hand.” (The Cutting Room, pp. 181-82)

Like Brookmyre before her, Welsh has been outspoken on the subject of religion in interviews. Of her own religious stance, she has noted that “I instinctively thought there is no God. There is no philosophical contract for me. It’s a huge delusion to believe in God”.53 Yet she has gone further than that in the propagation of her personal views; not content to defend her own atheistic standpoint, she has also publicly gone on the offensive at times, attacking opposing spiritual beliefs which do not correspond with her own position of anti-religious rationalism. Hamilos notes that following the publication of Tamburlaine Must Die, “she enjoyed reading a particularly anti-religious extract at an event [where] there was a Christian author in attendance”;54 in an interview following the event she observed that, in her opinion, the action was justifiable because “Christians like to be persecuted. It makes them feel at home”.55 Unfortunately her unabashed derision and outspoken predisposition in this regard bleed into The Cutting Room in unhelpful ways; even after the assault Rilke seems unsure exactly how seriously he should consider Steenie as a threat, given the older man’s overblown, moralistic Old Testament piety, which divests the character of his presumably-intended

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menace. Steenie’s hypocrisy in intending to commit murder in the name of his faith, despite his obvious belief in observing the tenets of the Ten Commandments, is also heavily (and somewhat sneeringly) overstated, making the character and indeed the incident seem awkwardly conceived and even affected in comparison to the stark realism of the rest of the novel. Indeed, his incongruity is such that, in a very real sense, the character almost appears to have been erroneously transplanted from another novel entirely, which is particularly inopportune given that Steenie’s apparent function—that is, to provide a kind of ethical polar opposite of Rilke—has the potential to be highly effective had its execution not been quite so heavy-handed. In Knots and Crosses, Rankin’s use of polarity in the investigator Rebus and the killer Reeve becomes effective precisely because of his varying use of contrast and comparison, examining the common characteristics which exist between the two men and—perhaps even more successfully—shrewdly suggesting areas of intersection and convergence in the characters’ drive and motivation. With Steenie, however, Welsh is singularly lacking in any such nuance or refinement. Her intention seems to be to establish a diametric polarity: the empathetic Rilke, who his intended murderer (and, by extension, the organised religion to whom he belongs) considers an unrepentant sinner and hedonistic malefactor, is cast in stark contrast to Steenie, who aspires to a kind of moral purity but is impeded by the incompatibility which exists between the philosophy of his spiritual beliefs and the duplicity of his actions. The underlying strategy appears to stress the superiority of Rilke’s humanistic concerns over Steenie’s somewhat amorphous religious motivations: Rilke is occupied with a defined, self-imposed task which has a benevolent impetus, whereas Steenie seeks to defend a more abstract moral convention which—though more explicitly codified—is cast in the light of appearing less concerned with the wellbeing of the individual than it is with the sustenance and preservation of the intangible. With such thematic promise, it is regrettable that the above juxtaposition comes to be expounded with such a lack of finesse that it squanders its potential almost completely. While it certainly cannot be denied that attacks on organised religion are far from an unprecedented modus operandi for authors of most genres of fiction, particularly in recent years, direct statements of condemnation towards individual religiosity are often rather different in nature and frequency. There is a clear disparity between a non-religious and anti-religious sensibility and, for many writers, the key to effectively undermining spiritual concerns often lies in the subtlety of contrasting humanistic concerns with religious issues in order to undermine the grandiosity and

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perceived absurdity of specific faith-based claims in comparison to the certainties of materialist rationalism. In appearing so single-mindedly determined to deflate Steenie’s double standards and “delusional” views— and, in so doing, making a none-too-subtle attempt to emasculate the vestigial tenets of the Christian faith in the mainstream of modern secular society—Welsh ultimately falls foul of a particularly unedifying characteristic of modern atheistic trends: as historian Tim Stanley has noted, “the most frustrating thing about the New Atheism is that it [...] approaches metaphor and mysticism as if they were statements of fact to be tested in the laboratory. Worse still, it takes the crudest equations of faith (total submission to an angry sky god) and assumes that they apply to all its believers at all times equally”.56 Quite aside from such religious concerns stand the distinct issues of ethicality and moral framework, separate concerns with which The Cutting Room is intrinsically linked. Rilke’s unconventional (and rather idiosyncratic) ethical system marks out his motivations as being quite distinct from those of John Rebus’s moral crusade against the socially transgressive nature of crime, or Maureen O’Donnell’s attempts to utilise her own bitter experience of victimhood in a positive way, so as to protect others from criminality and perversion. Rilke, by contrast, appears to be motivated more by intellectual curiosity in the first instance, with compassion more of a secondary consideration in his efforts to investigate the murder at the heart of the narrative. Although this observation alone suggests the fact that Rilke is operating from within an unconventional moral framework, one which is largely dissociated from typical expectations of the defence of justice and common empathy, the ambiguity of his actions adds further intricacy to the character’s impulses. He has no qualms in surreptitiously stealing from the McKindless estate, in spite of the professional and even criminal implications of so doing, but baulks at the attempts of his employer, Rose Bowery, to enact a large-scale fraud when auctioning the estate’s assets. Perhaps more prominently, his promiscuity (rendered through a variety of graphic casual sexual encounters) often borders on the predatory, and yet in spite of the selfinterest suggested by these rapacious proclivities, Rilke is never depicted as unlikeable. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. There is something quietly affecting about the rawness of Rilke’s occasional bleak reflections on the perceived pointlessness of his life, which become more plaintive as his investigations progress: My body seemed the repository of a dead man. I could think and smoke but all feeling was gone. Inside was nothing. Beneath my slack skin was a skeleton framed by blood and gore. I possessed the required internal

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organs but the soul was missing. I felt like taking the lit end of the joint and placing it against my arm, cauterising despair in one definite act of pain. (The Cutting Room, p. 154)

In imbuing Rilke with so many layers of moral complexity, Welsh hearkens back to the golden age of the detective novel and, most clearly, to the work of Dashiell Hammett, author of the seminal crime mystery The Maltese Falcon (1930). More specifically, Rilke’s strange motivation— driven by an inexplicable sense of loyalty to a stranger who, if actually murdered, was likely killed many decades beforehand—is vaguely analogous to Hammett’s landmark novel The Glass Key (1932). In Hammett’s text, the devoted reverence of Ned Beaumont—a gambler and fraudster—towards corrupt political official Paul Madvig is one which closely mirrors the journey of Welsh’s protagonist; like Rilke, Beaumont finds himself motivated by a vaguely unfathomable sense of loyalty, a personal dedication which eventually leads him into conflict with both the criminal underworld and the establishment as he investigates the mysterious death of a senator’s son on Madvig’s behalf. The perplexing constancy of Beaumont’s devotion to the nefarious Madvig is strangely reminiscent of Rilke’s similarly mystifying dedication to the unnamed stranger in McKindless’s photo. It is said of Hammett’s work in detective fiction, and of the private eye story in particular, that he “forg[ed] the template from which all other practitioners would draw”,57 and there is definite—if sometimes subtle—resonance between the work of this figure from the golden age of pulp crime fiction and the skill of Welsh’s approach towards her own subject matter. The sheer ambiguity apparent in Hammett’s representation of moral issues is frequently remarkable. Like Georges Simenon, Hammett takes care never to explicitly judge the actions taken by any specific character, instead leading the reader to draw their own opinion from the situations and details which are presented to them. Irrespective of whether they are central or supporting characters, the dramatis personae of Hammett’s novels were invariably filled with imperfect, realistically-portrayed individuals whose humanity was inevitably all too obvious. The parallels with Rilke could scarcely be clearer. The intricacy of Rilke’s moral makeup is mirrored in the novel’s enigmatic antagonist, Roddy McKindless, whose internal motivations are—if anything—even more difficult to pinpoint with any degree of accuracy. Like Mina’s Angus Farrell, McKindless is a brazen misogynist, entirely capable of—and willing to—abuse and discard the lives of women merely for the furtherance of his own sexual gratification. While Farrell’s

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cruelty is partially explained by his apparent psychotic tendencies (explored further by Mina later in the Garnethill trilogy, most especially in the final instalment, Resolution), McKindless’s drive ultimately proves to be more nebulous. Like Farrell, he destroys his victims as an inescapable result of satiating his sexual urges, and yet McKindless differs in the application of his lethal malice due to the fact that he proves entirely able to dissociate the notion of the conscious self from the aesthetic qualities of the female form. For McKindless, it seems, his victims are unworthy of a personal identity, and he appears to have next to no concern about the lives or interests of his prey; his retention of “trophy” keepsakes from the women whom he has murdered seems more indicative of perverse selfsatisfaction than it is a memento of a once-living being. Farrell, by contrast, seeks instead to vent his malignity upon the defenceless and vulnerable, and as such his capture at the conclusion of Garnethill is met with satisfaction from the protagonist and much fanfare from the media. McKindless’s unceremonious demise seems almost like an anticlimax when considered in comparison, and the only real contentment that appears to result from his death seems to emerge from within Rilke, who finds both closure and a modestly renewed sense of self-purpose. Although Garnethill and The Cutting Room can both be seen to be representative of Tartan Noir, the two books are also useful illustrations of the changing nature and general adaptability of crime fiction—in Scotland and beyond—over the past few decades. Marcus notes that “detective fiction has played and continues to play a complex and curious role in relation to the broader field of literature”:58 On one hand, detective fiction, like other genre fictions, is seen as a popular and lesser subset of high or “proper” literature. On the other, the literature of detection, with its complex double narrative in which an absent story, that of a crime, is gradually reconstructed in the second story (the investigation), its use of suspense, and its power to give aesthetic shape to the most brute of matter, has been seen as paradigmatic of literary narrative itself.59

In this sense, it seems germane to observe that although literary fiction and crime fiction take different approaches to the articulation of their subject matter, their resolution is often mutually pertinent and applicable to both modes of writing. (This is also true in the field of speculative fiction, where a handful of culturally important novels have come to claim cross-genre appeal: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, for instance, has now become equally accepted both as dystopian speculative fiction and as literary political fiction.) Welsh’s work exhibits acute

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awareness of this generic distinction and, as Taylor has commented, her conscious attempt to bridge the two genres is unmistakeable: The Cutting Room is further proof of the renaissance of Scottish fiction, a movement often credited to the likes of Irvine Welsh, James Kelman and Geoff [sic] Torrington. With the exception of Alan Warner (author of Morvern Callar), however, the vitality of Scottish writing has been better represented by crime novelists like Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina and John Harvey. Louise Welsh may prove able to straddle the two camps, attracting the readers of both literary and genre fiction. You can find traces of morality tales, urban fiction, crime stories and Gothics in The Cutting Room without finding any single point of comparison that mirrors the book’s unique voice or hardened humanism.60

Taylor’s assertion that Scottish crime fiction is now overtaking the literary novel in the vibrancy of its writing is, I would contend, rather to overstate the point, but it is difficult to argue that it has now achieved greater qualitative parity than has been the case in years gone by. It is not entirely unreasonable to assume that the crumbling postmodern edifices of Unthank in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) are paralleled in the decrepitude of Welsh’s dilapidated Glaswegian backstreets, or that Hannah Luckraft’s catalogue of emotional turbulence in the face of subtle social cruelties which are depicted in A.L. Kennedy’s Paradise (2004) is darkly reflected in Mina’s Glasgow, where the most intimate forms of mortal danger lurk in the shadows of seemingly innocuous, mundane locations and institutions. Both Mina and Welsh suggest a Garden City that is rapidly receding from its glory days, which is undergoing a massive social transformation that is leading towards an unforeseeable endgame, and where hope is in pitifully short supply. As Rilke notes in The Cutting Room, “The best was not yet to come. It had vanished forever” (The Cutting Room, p. 8), and there is a sense too that for Mina’s characters, optimism is at variance with the starkness of reality: surviving against the odds in an essentially hostile society, rather than expending futile hope for a brighter but indistinctly defined future, often proves to be their goal. These sentiments certainly provide fertile ground for the aspects of social decay which are so keenly drawn throughout both novels: the alcoholism, trade in and abuse of illegal narcotics, and multi-generational family dysfunction are all depicted unsentimentally as part and parcel of modern life in a society where lifestyles and relativistic notions of traditional morality are in a constant state of flux. Neither author suggests that they are willing to present a panacea for these societal ills; they are content instead to depict the state of the nation as they see it, and both of them are

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at pains to emphasise that the catalysts of this corrosion—shown to be at work in many aspects of modern life—are no respecter of gender, ethnicity or class. One inescapable fact which must be considered is that both of the novels’ antagonists are white, middle class (in the case of McKindless, upper-middle class) men in late middle age who have misogynistic motivations, and who are willing to abuse their money and position to advance their squalid goals. Yet while it can be said that the respective victims of both men are clearly defined by the conclusion of the novels in which they appear, both Mina and Welsh betray a wider consideration: that society itself has, in many ways, become the ultimate victim due to the emergence of (and its tacit tolerance of) perverse grotesques such as Farrell and McKindless. But even the homicidal deviance of the novels’ antagonists is cast in a light that makes their crimes seem more like a symptom of modern social apprehension and cultural decline than its root cause; a malaise of hard-heartedness and economic desolation which leads directly to Mina’s warnings of a country which is epitomised by “drizzling rain and a fifty-year recession, [...] endemic domestic violence and armies of drunk men” (Garnethill, p. 224). Although such social concerns had been significant to the work of earlier authors writing crime fiction in the Tartan Noir mode, including McIlvanney, Chandler, Rankin and Brookmyre, they are arguably positioned more centrally in latter novels to emerge in the field, where anxieties about the state of—and ultimate direction of—society are made more explicit. Yet Welsh, and particularly Mina, nonetheless situate their social commentary within a recognisable generic framework, making their work perceptibly crime fiction as opposed to literary fiction per sé. The extent to which this distinction remains relevant in the current age of genre cross-pollination is, of course, an area of considerable debate, but it is worthy of note that while Mina has gained deserved recognition from crime fiction award-making organisations, Welsh has been equally successful in being conferred mainstream literary honours as well as genre plaudits. McDowell comments that: It has become a staple complaint of some crime writers that literary awards never come their way. Snobbery towards genre writing prevents a true appreciation of their craft, so their argument goes. The problem is that genre writing, by its very nature, demands a certain adherence to formula. So much crime fiction sacrifices depth of characterisation, feel for landscape and intellectual rigour to the demands of a racily paced plot.61

The underlying sentiment of this statement is, in a sense, challenged by Welsh’s work in a more direct manner than is the case in Mina’s.

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Although Maureen O’Donnell is an unconventional protagonist, Rilke’s variable anti-hero status and intricately multifarious moral code (highly honourable at some points of the narrative, yet totally amoral at others) adds an additional layer to the novel’s already-complex exploration of social mores. Doug Johnstone observes that “using the crime novel format, Welsh does much more than tell a whodunnit story, employing the novel’s backdrop to examine society’s reaction to so-called sexual deviation, suggesting that what is and isn’t acceptable is never a black and white issue, but rather a spectrum of shades of grey”.62 This powerful combination of cultural investigation and the articulation of moral unease is effective largely due to the way in which Welsh laments social decline largely without offering unequivocal judgement as to its perceived causes. The Cutting Room extends its concerns from the specific to the general, asking first what it means to be Scottish in a period of rapid social transition and then, secondly, enquiring how exactly a moral being can be defined in an uncertain world where absolute ethical certainties are an intangible and unformulated proposition at best. In Welsh, as with Mina, there can be discerned social democratic values which, though threatened by the forces of reactionary conservatism and (it is implied) urban moral decay, retain a sense of cultural authenticity. Both authors actively showcase and enact the values of this progressive ideal, even while lamenting the manner in which it is being undermined and eroded by the social decline that they chart so vividly. It is interesting to observe the extent to which crime writing—which at times departs from literary realism in stylistically profound ways, such as the cartoonish embellishments of Brookmyre, or the harrowing hyperrealism of Welsh—should grapple so profoundly with these major cultural issues, acting as a barometer of national identity and the social environment in a manner which is at least as direct as the engagement of mainstream literary writing with this subject matter. The Cutting Room, like Garnethill, reaches a point of narrative termination without imposing (or requiring) an entirely conclusive resolution; although both O’Donnell and Rilke succeed in surviving the machinations of the novels’ respective antagonists, their futures remain far from certain. This, too, is a characteristic of modern writing in the crime fiction genre, where the conventions which once so firmly defined this category of writing have proven to be more mutable in recent years than had previously been the case. As Mina has described it: Crime fiction now is big enough not to need tidy resolutions. But an openended resolution has to be made to work in another way. The concept of justice goes with achieving a pleasing solution for the reader, one which doesn’t just have the bad guy shot but which answers those questions

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Chapter Six about what is just. There’s a deep-rooted belief in a just world—and that makes for good mental health—but all the evidence is that the world isn’t just, so people have to shift reality all the time to get a sense of justice. And I think that’s what crime fiction explores in a really deep way.63

In its exploration of moral uncertainty and flexibility, Scottish crime fiction is now actively engaging in perceptive explorations of ethics and changing social attitudes which had hitherto been the province of autobiographical narratives such as Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom (1977) and John Burnside’s Living Nowhere (2002), or literary fiction such as Janice Galloway’s elaborate exploration of communication and existence The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), a caustic, penetrating indictment of the urban underclass drugs culture. In a real sense, the past twenty years have seen Tartan Noir come of age, evolving considerably and developing in new, sometimes unexpected directions. Authors such as Mina and especially Welsh have built solidly upon the foundation of earlier writing in the field, employing traditional genre tropes in unanticipated ways and even subverting acknowledged conventions to frequently compelling effect. In abstaining from an examination of malign machinations being borne out of the upper echelons of society (as in Brookmyre and Rankin) in favour of engaging more directly with the end-results of political decisions and social developments as they affect working class individuals, Mina and Welsh address issues of Scottish identity and nationalism in a less overt manner, though one which arguably presents a more immediate impact upon the reader due to the way in which their narratives bear upon more recognisable social environments. In so doing, they and other Scottish authors—among them Anderson, McDermid and Atkinson—have succeeded in shifting the boundaries of expectation, newly blurring the lines of demarcation between crime writing and literary fiction with sensitivity and judicious assurance of both form and content.

CONCLUSION

This book began with one key question, namely to enquire whether popular genres of Scottish fiction had engaged, from the mid-1970s until the mid-2000s, with the same socio-political themes and cultural concerns that had been established in the mainstream of literary fiction in Scotland. I would assert that from the evidence provided that this is indeed the case, even though the breadth and depth of engagement with the above issues has varied from genre to genre, and indeed from text to text. We have seen that literary writing shares with genre fiction a capacity for social commentary: to enframe the social world in a particular way, and to examine its cultural and ideological qualities. Yet while the mass popularity of writing such as crime fiction and speculative fiction has allowed these texts to expound Scottish political and social themes to both a national and an international audience, they do so in a manner which conforms to an identifiable generic formula, and yet they nonetheless maintain a distinguishable social priority in their representation of reality. Thus while the two modes of writing maintain shared social, cultural and ideological concerns, they also continually exhibit different forms of address in their engagement with these topics, albeit with the undeniable caveat that genre boundaries have become increasingly equivocal in recent years. In this sense, the answers that I have provided to this book’s central line of enquiry do not always posit an entirely straightforward relationship between literary writing and genre fiction—but then, a similar underlying uncertainty has also been reflected in the often fragmentary nature of the Scottish national identity which is constructed by the texts that have been discussed throughout the course of this book. Whereas the speculative fiction texts under examination have, in many cases by necessity, limited their exploration of national identity to a purely allegorical or symbolic one, it is valuable to note that the work of crime fiction authors has also varied radically in engagement with the ideological and cultural constituency of Scottish nationality, albeit in markedly different ways. In MacLeod’s work, for instance, the reader witnesses an investigation of distinctive Scottish characters which takes into account varied political and theoretical approaches that are applied to unfamiliar and shifting social constructs—dynamic, shifting utopias, and radical posited ideologies—but which allows itself little to no direct interrogation

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of the dynamics of contemporary Scotland in explicit terms. For MacLeod as in the speculative fiction of Banks, the universality of cultural and ideological concerns become so crucially important to their respective narratives that anything other than the most cursory examination of national identity seems largely obsolete to their creative agenda. This trend can also be found (albeit to a lesser extent) in the work of Elphinstone, whose cast of characters and rural, agrarian setting—both of them Scottish in origin—may acknowledge and even celebrate the cultural and social traditions of a bygone national golden age, but which often remains content to establish thematic concerns which are more general than specific. Fostering sustainable environmental conditions, the triumph of the community over individual self-interest and the potential destructiveness of unchecked economic avarice have all proven to be common themes in the speculative fiction of decades past, but Elphinstone’s situation of these premises within a Scottish milieu also lends them tangential credence with regard to considering the specificity or cultural qualities of the nation. Even Fitt, whose satirical novel’s darkly sardonic bite comes closest to raising candid enquiries about the current trajectory of Scottish society, is less than complimentary in his oblique summation of cultural mores; seeming particularly timely in its publication soon after the establishment of the devolved Scottish Parliament, Fitt’s postulated society is indeed a truly independent Scotland, but one which finds itself blighted by every kind of environmental impediment and social vice. Each of the above authors of speculative fiction choose as the central background of their texts locations which are either futuristic in nature, are not immediately recognisable as Scottish in the light of modern cultural experience, or both. Yet perhaps precisely because their engagement with issues of national identity tends to be so tenuous and ambiguous in nature, it is difficult to establish any concrete certainties or characteristics with regard to the Scotland which they construct. Whereas for Banks and MacLeod the country’s characteristics seem, at least at face value, to serve as little more than a launch-pad for the implementation of complex intellectual and conceptual notions which have global (or even extraterrestrial) relevance, their engagement with nationhood proves to be a partial and even indistinct one, suggesting that—from their point of view, at least—adherence to a particular ideological ideal is a more unifying factor of commonality than patriotic fervour or comforting demotic truisms. With their specifically Scottish settings, albeit situated in unfamiliar timeframes, Fitt and Elphinstone address more directly the potential futures which can be projected from the present nation in which they were written, but they too posit an extrapolation of modern cultural

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expectations which is just as deeply divergent as their fictional societies prove to be. For Elphinstone, it seems, a rejection of modernity (and postmodernity) is the preferred manner in which to establish a community that is based upon natural harmony rather than enlightened self-interest; her encouragement of a more symbiotic connection to the planet, however, stands in stark contrast to Fitt’s dire warnings of environmental chaos and the unpredictability of nature. Whereas Elphinstone appears to suggest a world which largely rejects an all-encompassing awareness of national character, content instead to explore life in individual community settlements while implicitly disregarding issues of nationhood in favour of localism and self-sufficiency, for Fitt the Scottish national identity has become by necessity a mutable and fluctuating concept, struggling to adapt to a hostile environment which has destroyed familiar cultural landmarks and indeed much of the country in its wake, leaving behind only a dwindling remnant of Scotland’s people and their distinctive language to fend off the creeping imposition of incipient global sociocultural heterogeneity due to the influx of a desperate (and disparate) immigrant population. Fitt postulates that Scotland’s capacity for cultural assimilation may act as a safeguard against uncompromising challenges to its national identity, stressing that its “melting pot” characteristics allow for significant adaptability rather than perceiving forces of cultural tension to necessitate a threat to the cultural status quo, and this notion is shared with crime fiction authors such as Mina and Brookmyre. They, and others writing in their field, not only acknowledge the phenomenon of economic migration but also actively rejoice in its ability to reinvigorate cultural perceptions and challenge long-standing convictions about the Scottish condition through an examination of the country’s aptitude for integration, often inadvertently casting internationalist attitudes in a more optimistic light as a result. Welsh also acknowledges the effects of sweeping social changes upon established concepts of national identity, though her broader concerns seem to focus more upon shifting cultural attitudes from within the country and the vast developments which had been brought about— particularly from the 1980s—to traditional industry and employment as a result of turbulent economic conditions. This progressive if measured embrace of modernity sits somewhat awkwardly with Rankin’s Edinburgh, where the juxtaposition of the historical and the contemporary is employed in so many of the Rebus novels. Thus while all of the above crime fiction authors have dealt, to varying degrees, with ideological and social issues which are relevant to an exploration of the distinctiveness of modern Scottish nationhood at the

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time of their texts’ publication, they do not evoke one monolithic interpretation of the nature of this identity. Whereas Rankin acknowledges the existence of rigid social strata in Edinburgh, for instance, he does so in recognition of long-held class divisions which provide context for Rebus’s world and which inform his investigations; in the work of Brookmyre, however, the varying echelons of the establishment signify an inequitable division of wealth in society and thus point to a phenomenon which is to be contested and distrusted. Mina similarly voices consistent scepticism surrounding the motives of the authorities, particularly with regard to their indifferent treatment of the vulnerable (whether socially or medically at risk), and bemoans the opportunities which have been squandered by successive governments to create a more even-handed social order. Mina eschews Brookmyre’s Manichean approach towards criminality, and does not posit any one overriding panacea to counteract her perceptions of society’s dangerous and essentially entropic journey into brutality and moral apathy. Welsh mirrors these concerns to a point, though her Glasgow appears a more complex and nuanced place, a cosmopolitan but polarised contemporary metropolis which accommodates both progressive modernity and depraved perversion. Here, cultural authenticity is a vaguely-defined concept, and economic prosperity is certainly no guarantor of happiness. Welsh shares Mina’s moral anxieties, but perceives the underlying dangers of modern Scottish society in a different manner; for Welsh, the country is a collective victim of its own ethical malaise, which, she ventures, has led to a crisis of purpose and has thus emphasised the need for greater moral responsibility both on the part of the government and that of the individual. As the above summation suggests, there may at face value appear to be a division in primary concerns between the two genres, with speculative fiction relating itself more closely to issues of ideology and culture while crime fiction has largely focused on matters of society and morality. In practice, however, this classification is by no means as clearly demarcated as it may at first appear. Certainly there can be observed explorations of political nationalism and cultural nationalism in both modes of writing. When MacLeod engages in nation-building, for instance, his futuristic and technologically-advanced societies function mainly as a didactic apparatus—designed to propagate specific political and socio-economic concepts—leaving himself little scope to accommodate conventional explorations of cultural identity at the national level. For Fitt, however, even when dealing with a view of Scottish society which retains similar trappings of futuristic technocratic attitudes, there is a definite sense of a morality tale lurking at the heart of the novel, where the ills of the nation

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have derived not just from natural disaster but also from a growing emphasis upon the individual at the expense of the collective—a concern which has acute resonance with the Scotland of Mina and Welsh. Likewise, Brookmyre’s often pedagogic approach to ideology—which has resonance with Banks’s speculative fiction work, though with markedly less subtlety—appears more immediate because of his engagement with (and enthusiasm towards) the vibrancy of contemporary Scottish culture, and the break away from traditional cultural values that it indicates, whilst also simultaneously bemoaning the perceived dissolution and iniquity of the ruling classes. Thus while it may be argued convincingly that a clear if nuanced relationship exists between the themes raised in the work of Scottish crime fiction authors and those addressed in texts written by their counterparts in literary fiction, the correlation which can be discerned in a comparison between Scottish speculative fiction and the mainstream of Scottish literary writing is often much less obvious. Although this is not specifically to say that all particular thematic connections which exist between these two modes of writing are entirely implicit, it would nonetheless be disingenuous to argue that such a relationship is either as coherent or as convincing as the compelling parallels which can be distinguished between Scotland’s literary fiction and Scottish crime writing. As this book has been so closely concerned with the sometimes fraught relationship which exists between popular genre fiction and the mainstream of literary writing, it seems germane to conclude with an examination of the status and commercial performance of genre novels at the current time. The field of speculative fiction, for instance, has continued to gather momentum both in terms of its international profitability and its recognised acceptance amongst a truly global readership in recent years; The Guardian columnist Damien G. Walter is among the commentators who have suggested that we may at last have reached the point where “Science Fiction enters the ‘mainstream’”: [Lauren] Beukes[’] upcoming novel The Shining Girls, recently purchased by HarperCollins, is one of a number of SF novels to win a major advance from a mainstream publisher this year. Terry Pratchett’s Snuff became the fastest selling adult hardback novel since records began, SF imprint Gollancz have signed three six figure deals this year alone, and the HBO adaptation of [George R.R. Martin’s] Game of Thrones has reinvigorated epic fantasy. Following on from the British Libraries major SF retrospective, it seems SF is poised to dominate the popular consciousness of 2012.1

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If this increasing acknowledgment of the genre amongst publishers and the reading public may suggest a new age of cultural prominence for this mode of writing, it is also important to note that the long-held critical concerns surrounding speculative fiction are also evolving. With reference to greater cross-pollination between mainstream literature and speculative fiction in recent years, novelist China Miéville has recently proposed the notion that the traditional critical division between the two categories of fiction has become increasingly irrelevant, and that future years are likely to bear witness to newly-directed analytical debates; as Sarah Crown notes, “the real schism, [Miéville] has suggested, lies not between ‘litfic’ and fantasy/SF, but between ‘the literature of recognition versus that of estrangement’. [...] It’s a fascinating distinction, and one that also has the neat effect of moving the debate on from the contentious territory of the SF/litfic turfwar into that of value-neutral literary theory”.2 This observation has particular relevance to explorations of culture-specific interpretations of speculative fiction texts, such as the interrogation of national identity, and invites exciting new analyses of the relationship between realism and literary nationalism precisely because of the oblique manner in which many Scottish authors have addressed such social and ideological approaches: not in explicit terms of contemporary cultural phenomena, but in projections of such factors into unfamiliar territories to achieve figurative or allegorical ends within their respective narrative frameworks. As Gavin Miller has noted: Scottish science fiction makes a virtue out of a cultural necessity. Early science fiction, with its vision of technological, capitalist, and masculinist innovation and expansion, could not be easily accommodated by a Scottish canon that preferred what was outside of positivist visions of historical progress. Nonetheless, this early handicap turned out to be advantageous when science fiction later responded to the failure of the techno-capitalist vision of the future. Scottish literature’s affinity with what seemed to be “out of history” meant that it was a reservoir for cultural materials that challenged and modified ideas of historical progress. Scottish science fiction writes Scottish literature “back into history”, and it does so by drawing upon what is seemingly ahistorical in order to critique Western progress: motherhood, domesticity, childhood play, parental nurture—such seemingly historically irrelevant dimensions of human culture are mobilised to provide alternative visions of progress.3

Scottish crime writing has also retained its long-running commercial success both at home and abroad in recent years, with the conclusion of Rankin’s long-running Inspector Rebus series4 having no discernible negative impact on the genre’s popular cachet with the reading public.

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Indeed, crime fiction continues to remain among Scotland’s most immediately recognisable literary exports at time of writing, and the prolificacy of authors in the field shows little sign of slowing down. As commentator Christopher Nicol has observed, “Tartan Noir is one of Scotland’s growth industries [...], some [texts] with varying degrees of Scottishness, others with varying degrees of literary merit”,5 venturing that “as well as providing a well-grounded sense of place and a convincing reading experience, Tartan Noir is beginning to occupy a niche, largely abandoned by mainstream British fiction”.6 Although this book has discussed some of the ways in which Tartan Noir has engaged with issues that are often of secondary consideration—if considered at all—within literary fiction, it remains to be seen how long this particular form of crime writing will persist in its current form before it undergoes further significant generic development, adjusting itself in order to meet the shifting requirements of its readership to the extent that its peculiar modal traits are no longer recognisable. Some critics, such as Tony Black, have voiced the opinion that the movement’s texts have become so diverse in their approach and subject matter that it may already be in the process of evolving into a new subgenre altogether. As Black notes, even Ian Rankin “has his doubts about the Tartan Noir tag being used to pigeonhole Scotland’s crime writers; though many undoubtedly share the dark traits the term infers, he believes Scottish crime writers are now too many and too varied to group under one label”.7 Thus with the already-proven versatility of this category of writing, and indeed its prominence amongst other popular genres of Scottish fiction, conditions appear to augur well for further scrutiny of socio-cultural issues within the field of crime literature in Scotland, whether situated in future Tartan Noir or in its subsequent offshoots. As the introduction to this book commenced with a summary of debates which took place in the Scottish Review online journal, it seems only fitting that it should also conclude with more recent observations made in that same electronic periodical. In February 2012, and no doubt still mindful of the vociferous literary discussions which had taken place the previous year, writer Paul F. Cockburn took issue with comments which novelist Alan Bissett had made in The List to the effect that Bissett’s “personal view is that ‘Tartan Noir’, while written by some highly skilled writers and clearly appreciated by audiences, has become such a saleable brand that it has eclipsed the more radical and experimental tradition which last flourised [sic] in Scotland in the 1990s”.8 Cockburn’s spirited response in defence of popular genre writing proves

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that the perennially febrile debate over its status and salience remains fervently contested at the present time: All three writers in The List article betrayed a somewhat blinkered vision to any writers outside their ken; plenty of writers living north of the border write neither crime nor literary fiction. Many of the most prominent SF and fantasy authors currently published in the UK are based in Scotland; while two Scots, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, are arguably at the top of the American comic book industry. Much of their work is as individualistic and innovative as any so-called literary author; yet, they’re still less likely to be taken seriously, at least by Scotland’s literati. [...] Bissett, Fitzgerald and Wilson are right in one sense, though; this is certainly a good time to be a writer in Scotland. There’s a genuine vibrancy in the air, in part because people are finding new ways to get their work out there. That’s exciting and a challenge. But let’s just drop the fallacy that artists and literary writers are innately more deserving of praise and attention than skilled practitioners who do their job equally well and attract a large and loyal audience.9

It is my genuine hope that this book has demonstrated something of the sheer breadth and diversity of writing in popular genres by Scottish authors over the past few decades, and that in exploring the thematic concerns of a selection of work composed by these writers I have proven that although their engagement with specific issues of Scottish culture and nationhood varies between authors as much as it does from genre to genre, there exists nonetheless an energetic, diverse and adaptable tradition of Scottish writing in the two popular genres which have been discussed. Although a strong and compelling connection between the themes presented in speculative fiction and those of Scottish literary fiction tends to be less obvious—and frequent—than those which can be established between crime fiction and the mainstream fiction of Scottish literature, it is also true to note that there are also rarely any manifest contradictions between the ideological, social and cultural concerns raised in popular genres of literature in comparison to those which are dealt with by the literary mainstream during the period under discussion. Although these different modes of writing have dealt with such subject matter in radically dissimilar ways, their political methodology and even moral anxieties have exhibited considerably more commonality than divergence, and it is difficult to discern any serious tensions which arise between their subtexts, even in spite of the fundamentally dissimilar stylistic manner in which these genres engage with their core issues.

NOTES GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1

2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11

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Sophie Cooke, “What does it mean to be a ‘Scottish’ writer?”, in Scottish Review Online. Last modified 28 October 2011. Accessed 11 January 2012. http://www.scottishreview.net/SophieCooke188.shtml (para. 1 of 26). ibid. (para. 5 of 26) Stuart Kelly, “Scotland might be about to enter the world. Will our writers want to see it?”, in Scottish Review Online. Last modified 8 November 2011. Accessed 11 January 2012. http://www.scottishreview.net/ StuartKelly192.shtml (para. 3 of 16). ibid. Joe Fassler, “How Zombies and Superheroes Conquered Highbrow Fiction”, in The Atlantic Online. Last modified 18 October 2011. Accessed 19 October 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/howzombies-and-superheroes-conquered-highbrow-fiction/246847/2/ ?single_page=true#slide6 (para. 6 of 41). Gavin Miller, “Scottish science fiction: Writing Scottish literature back into history”, in Études Écossaises, December 2009, 121-133. Last modified December 2009. Accessed 11 January 2012. http://etudesecossaises.revues.org/index197.html (para. 1 of 24). David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1. Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching (London: Taylor and Francis, 1980), 72. ibid., 68. Robert Crawford, Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 685. Steve Arnott, “Iain Banks & The Culture”, in Bella Caledonia. Last modified 18 May 2011. Accessed 21 May 2011. http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2011/ 05/18/iain-banks-the-culture/ (para. 5 of 30). James Kelman, in Anon., “Kelman blasts mediocrity of boy wizards and crime bestsellers”, in The Herald Online. Last modified 27 August 2009. Accessed 11 January 2012. http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/morearts-entertainment-news/kelman-blasts-mediocrity-of-boy-wizards-andcrime-bestsellers-1.824818 (paras. 5-6 of 9). Anon., “Man Booker Prize 2011: Sales for all the Booker Prize winners, including Julian Barnes”, in The Guardian Online. Last modified 26 July 2011. Accessed 12 March 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/

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Notes 2011/jul/26/man-booker-prize-2011-winners#data (para. 11 of 11). Jason Bennetto, “Crime writers are denied prizes by literary snobs, says Rankin”, in The Independent Online. Last modified 19 December 2005. Accessed 12 March 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertain ment/books/news/crime-writers-are-denied-prizes-by-literary-snobs-saysrankin-520011.html (para. 1 of 18). Dietmar Boehnke, “Double Refraction: Rewriting the Canon in Contemporary Scottish Literature”, in Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film, ed. by Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 54. Alan Riach, Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 231. ibid. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, “Introduction”, in Scotland as Science Fiction, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 1-14, 1. Anon, “Ian Rankin”, in Encyclopedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present, 2nd edn, ed. by George Stade and Karen Karbiener (New York: DWJ Books, 2009), 401-03, 403. McCracken-Flesher, “Introduction”, 13. Riach, 3. McCracken-Flesher, “Acknowledgements”, in Scotland as Science Fiction, p. vii. Crawford, 686. CHAPTER ONE

1

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6 7

Alan MacGillivray, “Genres in Scottish Writing: Science Fiction”, Conference paper, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Last modified 14 May 2000. Accessed 7 October 2007. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ ScotLit/ASLS/AMacGillivray.html (para. 14 of 19). Brian Aldiss, with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Paladin, 1988) [1986], 15. ibid., p. 18; p. 23. Peter Brigg, The Span of Mainstream and Science Fiction: A Critical Study of a New Literary Genre (Jefferson: McFarland, 2002), p. 9. Thomas Kent, Interpretation and Genre: The Role of Generic Perception in the Study of Narrative Texts (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986), 38. Alan Massie, “Cultural Arena: Sorry, but grown-ups don’t read Tolkien”, in The Scotsman, 20 December 2003, 3. Sven Birkerts, “Oryx and Crake: Present at the Re-Creation”, in The New York Times Online. Last modified 18 May 2003. Accessed 25 March 2009.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/books/review/18BIRKERT.html (para. 1 of 5) Brian Stableford, “Amazing Stories”, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 2nd edn with update, ed. by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 25-27, 25. John Rieder, “Life Writing and Science Fiction: Constructing Identities and Constructing Genres”, in Biography, Vol 30, No 1, Winter 2007, v-xvii, xiii. Eric Rabkin, Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1983), 5. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, “Introduction”, in Scotland as Science Fiction, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 1-14, 5-6. Ryan Britt, “Genre in the Mainstream: The (Depressing) Science Fiction Novels That Cross Over”, in Tor.com. Last modified 7 June 2011. Accessed 8 November 2011. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/genre-in-themainstream-the-depressing-science-fiction-novels-that-cross-over (paras. 4-5 of 12). Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching (London: Taylor and Francis, 1980), xiii-xiv. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 33. The Golden Age of prose science fiction, when the genre reached a high point of public (if not critical) recognition within popular culture, is generally recognised as having occurred between the late 1930s until the mid- to late-1950s. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 196-97. Parrinder, 1980, 23. Lindsay’s novel received a belated sequel, The Flight to Lucifer, written by American literary critic Harold Bloom and published in 1979. Jack Deighton, “Consider Phlebas: Towards a Scottish Science Fiction”, in A Son of the Rock. Last modified 8 February 2010. Accessed 11 January 2012. http://jackdeighton.co.uk/2010/02/08/consider-phlebas-towards-a-scottishscience-fiction/ (para. 2 of 22). MacGillivray (paras. 14 and 16 of 19). Gavin Miller, “Iain (M.) Banks: Utopia, Nationalism and the Posthuman”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 202-09, 202. ibid., p. 203. Andrew M. Butler, “Introduction: The True Knowledge?”, in The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod, ed. by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn (Reading: Science Fiction Foundation, 2003), vii-xiii, xii. Cristie L. March, Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean, Warner, Banks, Galloway and Kennedy (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2002), 93.

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Notes MacGillivray (para. 15 of 19). Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2005), 18. Colin Manlove, Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994), 214. Roberts, Science Fiction, 2nd edn, The New Critical Idiom series (London: Routledge, 2006), 1. CHAPTER TWO

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Alan Riach, Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 182. John Clute, “Iain M(enzies) Banks”, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 2nd edn., ed. by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 88-89, 88. George Mann, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Constable, 2001), 52. Michael Levy, “Fiction, 1980-1992”, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 153-162, 161. Iain M. Banks, “Interview with Iain M. Banks,” in SFFWorld.com. Last modified 1 June 1997. Accessed 12 October 2009. http://www.sffworld.com/ interview/2p0.html (para. 7 of 17). Banks, in Jonathan Wright, “The Culture Show”, in SFX, 167, March 2008, 62-66, 64. ibid. James Brown, “Not Losing the Plot: Politics, Guilt and Storytelling in Banks and MacLeod”, in The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod, ed. by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn (Reading: Science Fiction Foundation, 2003), 55-75, 61. ibid. Gavin Miller, “Iain (M.) Banks: Utopia, Nationalism and the Posthuman”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 202-09, 207. Banks’s novella The State of the Art, first published by Mark V. Zeising in 1989, was later published in an eponymous anthology by Orbit, which also includes other short fiction dealing with the Culture. David Langford, “Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (1987)”, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Themes, Works and Wonders, Vol 3, ed. by Gary Westfahl (Westport: Greenwood, 2005), 980. Steve Arnott, “Iain Banks & The Culture”, in Bella Caledonia. Last modified 18 May 2011. Accessed 21 May 2011. http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2011/ 05/18/iain-banks-the-culture/ (para. 24 of 30).

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26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33

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Cristie L. March, Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean, Warner, Banks, Galloway and Kennedy (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2002), 87. ibid., 94. Carolyn Brown, “Utopias and Heterotopias: Iain M. Banks”, in Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation, Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature series, ed. by Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell (New York: Rodopi, 1996), 57-74, 60. Banks, “A Quick Chat with Iain Banks”, in The Richmond Review. Last modified 1996. Accessed 12 October 2009. http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/features/banksint.htm (para. 2 of 26). John Garrison, “Speculative Nationality: ‘Stands Scotland Where It Did?’ in the Culture of Iain M. Banks”, in Scotland as Science Fiction, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 55-66, 64. Darko Suvin, “Theses on Dystopia 2001”, in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (London: Routledge, 2003), 187-202, 200. Miller, p. 203. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture”, in Nations and Identities, ed. by Vincent P. Pecora (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), 264-76, 274. Jonathan Hearn, Claiming Scotland: National Identity and Liberal Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 11. Banks, in The Richmond Review (para. 26 of 26). Gray was to make his own contribution to the field of Scottish speculative fiction some years later with his novel A History Maker (1994). Thom Nairn, “Iain Banks and the Fiction Factory,” in The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies, ed. by Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson, 127-35, 129. Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 254. Farah Mendlesohn, “Religion and Science Fiction”, in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 264-75, 264-65. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin, 1972) [1962], 76. Alan MacGillivray, “Genres in Scottish Writing: Science Fiction.” Conference paper, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Last modified 14 May 2000. Accessed 7 October 2007. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/AMacGillivray.html (para. 15 of 19). Carolyn Brown, 72. Brian Stableford, “Space Opera”, in Clute and Nicholls, 1038-40, 1138. ibid. Paul Kincaid, “Hard Right”, in Argento, 2008, 2-4, 3.

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Notes Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form”, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 128-31, 130. Race Mathews, “Iain M. Banks: The ‘Culture’ Science Fiction Novels and the Economics and Politics of Scarcity and Abundance”, in The Metaphysical Review, Issue 28/29, August 1998, 9-12, 10-11. Banks, in The Richmond Review (para. 26 of 26). Duncan Lunan, “Chris Boyce”, in ASTRA: The Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics. Last modified 31 July 1999. Accessed 15 October 2009. http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~portwin/ASTRA/People/ obituaries/chris_boyce.html (para. 5 of 11). John Clute, “Chris Boyce”, in Clute and Nicholls, 148. Ken MacLeod, “Ken MacLeod: Science Fiction can help us learn to change the world”, in Socialist Worker Online, 1976. Last modified November 2005. Accessed 5 January 2008. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php? article_id=7729 (para. 12 of 22). Mendlesohn, “Impermanent Revolution: The Anarchic Utopias of Ken MacLeod”, in Butler and Mendlesohn, 16-28, 16-17. MacLeod, “The Falling Rate of Profit, Red Hordes and Green Slime: What the Fall Revolution Books are About”, in Nova Express, 6, Spring/Summer 2001, 19-21, 19. Mann, 211. MacLeod, in Andrew Leonard, “An engine of anarchy”, in Salon Online. Last modified 27 July 1999. Accessed 3 January 2008. http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/07/27/macleod_interview/ (para. 19 of 25). MacLeod, in Duncan Lawie, “A Veritable People’s Palace”, in The Zone. Last modified 2001. Accessed 5 January 2008. http://www.zonesf.com/kenmacleod.html (para. 60 of 62). MacLeod, “Science Fiction after the Future Went Away”, in Infinity Plus. Last modified 1998. Accessed 7 October 2007. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/kensf.htm (para. 15 of 16). Jesse Walker, “Anarchies, States and Utopias—The science fiction of Ken MacLeod”, in Reason Online. Last modified November 2000. Accessed 5 January 2008. http://www.reason.com/news/show/27843.html (paras. 1 and 2 of 31). Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 142. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction, 2nd edn, The New Critical Idiom series (London: Routledge, 2006), 125. Krishan Kumar, “Utopianism”, in The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 2nd edn, ed. by Alan Bullock, Oliver Stallybrass and Stephen Trombley (London: Fontana, 1977), 888-89, 889. Dietmar Böhnke, Kelman Writes Back: Literary Politics in the Work of a Scottish Writer (Berlin: Galda & Wilch, 1999), 24.

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ibid., 24-25. Jonathan Wild [sic] was also an infamous criminal of eighteenth-century London, known for masquerading as a thief catcher: John Mullan and Christopher Reid, Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 205. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65): a socio-anarchic figure of the nineteenth century best known for his assertion that “property is theft” (What is Property?, 1840). MacLeod, in Leonard (para. 8 of 25). MacLeod, The Star Fraction (London: Orbit, 1995), 88-89. James Brown, 57. MacLeod, in Walker (paras. 12-13 of 31). MacLeod also discusses the political influences that he experienced from childhood through to his student life at Glasgow and Brunel Universities in an interview with Andrew Leonard for Salon Online: MacLeod, in Leonard (paras. 4-8 of 25). John H. Arnold and Andy Wood, “Nothing is Written: Politics, Ideology and the Burden of History in the Fall Revolution Quartet”, in Butler and Mendlesohn, 29-46, 29. Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (London: Routledge, 1995), 64. Seth Kreisberg, Transforming Power: Domination, Empowerment and Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 87. ibid. John Scott, Power: Critical Concepts (London: Routledge, 1994), 189. James G. Kellas, The Scottish Political System, 4th edn (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1989), 2. Mendlesohn, in Butler and Mendlesohn, 20. MacLeod, in Walker (para. 8 of 31). William S. Haney II, Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction: Consciousness and the Posthuman (New York: Rodopi, 2006), viii. MacGillivray (para. 15 of 19). Carl MacDougall, Writing Scotland (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004), 72. MacGillivray (para. 14 of 19). Watson, 235. ibid., 233. Mendlesohn, 16. Mann, 211. James Brown, 57. Jeremy Tambling, Narrative and Ideology (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991), 110. Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2008), 25. Mendlesohn, 16.

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Notes Joan Gordon, “Utopiant: Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division”, in Butler and Mendlesohn, 49-54, 54. Butler, ix. James Brown, 57. Carolyn Brown, 61. Christopher Palmer, “Galactic Empires and the Contemporary Extravaganza: Dan Simmons and Iain M. Banks”, in Science Fiction Studies, Vol 26, No 77, Part 1. Last modified March 1999. Accessed 12 October 2009. http://www.depauw.edu/SFs/backissues/77/palmer77.html (para. 51 of 51). Carla Sassi, “Virtual Caledonia, or the (de-)nationalisation of landscape in recent Scottish science fiction.” Conference paper, The Lie of the Land conference, University of Stirling, 27 July 2006. Tom Devine and Paddy Logue, eds, Being Scottish: Personal Reflections on Scottish Identity Today (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2002), xi. ibid., ix. CHAPTER THREE

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Margaret Elphinstone, “Contemporary Feminist Fantasy in the Scottish Literary Tradition”, in Tea and Leg-Irons: New Feminist Readings from Scotland, ed. by Caroline Gonda (London: Open Letters, 1992), 45-59, 45. Dorothy McMillan, “Introduction”, in Margaret Elphinstone, The Incomer (Glasgow: Kennedy and Boyd, 2007) [1987], vii-xv, vii. David Pringle, ed, The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: The Definitive Illustrated Guide (London: Carlton, 1996), 26-27. ibid., 27. McMillan, in Elphinstone, 2007 [1987], xi. Roger McCann, “Samuel Rutherford Crockett”, in Dumfries and Galloway Online. Last modified 28 March 2008. Accessed 8 May 2008. http://www.dumfries-and-galloway.co.uk/people/crockett.htm (para. 4 of 10). Richard Cook, “The Home-Ly Kailyard Nation: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Highland and the Myth of Merrie Auld Scotland”, in English Literary History, vol 66, 4, Winter 1999, 1053-73, 1054. Andrew Nash, Kailyard and Scottish Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 11-12. Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 209. Carol Anderson and Glenda Norquay, “Superiorism”, in Cencrastus, no.15, New Year 1984, 10. John Clute, “Margaret Elphinstone”, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 2nd edn with update, ed. by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1993) [1995], 379.

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James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19. Brian Aldiss, with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Paladin, 1988) [1986], 289. Peter Nicholls, “Holocaust and After”, in Clute and Nicholls, 581-84, 584. Edwin Muir, “The Horses”, in The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots, and English, 1380-1980, ed. by Roderick Watson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 563. ibid., 564. Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture Since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 238. Alison Phipps, “Introduction”, in Margaret Elphinstone, A Sparrow’s Flight (Glasgow: Kennedy and Boyd, 2007) [1989], vii-xiv, viii. Jack Tresidder, ed., The Complete Dictionary of Symbols in Myth, Art and Literature (London: Duncan Baird, 2004), 333. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (London: HarperCollins, 1994) [1977], 15. Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2005), 215. Patrick D. Murphy, “Environmentalism”, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 373-381, 374. McMillan, in Elphinstone, 2007 [1987], xii. Phipps, “Nonviolence, Gender and Ecology: Margaret Elphinstone’s The Incomer and A Sparrow’s Flight”, in Scotland as Science Fiction, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 101-16, 114. Colin Manlove, Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994), 215. Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 161. Isobel Murray, “Gibbon’s Chris: A Celebration with Some Reservations.” Conference paper, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Last modified 10 June 2001. Accessed 24 August 2008. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/Gibbon%27s_Chris.html (para. 3 of 39). Elphinstone, in Gonda, 45. McMillan, in Elphinstone, 2007 [1987], ix. Alan Riach, “Other than Realism: Magic and Violence in Modern Scottish Fiction and the Recent Work of Wilson Harris”, in The International Journal of Scottish Literature, 4. Last modified Spring/Summer 2008. Accessed 6 December 2008. http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue4/riach.htm (para. 10 of 42). Elphinstone, “The Quest: Two Contemporary Adventures”, in Gendering the Nation, ed. by Christopher Whyte (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 107-37, 109.

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Notes Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, in A Scots Quair (London: Lomond Books, 1998) [1946], 44. Margery Palmer McCulloch, “Ideology in Action: Modernism and Marxism in A Scots Quair.” Conference paper, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Last modified 10 June 2001. Accessed 24 August 2008. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/Ideology.html (para. 37 of 37). Gibbon, 33. Ian Carter, “Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair, and the Peasantry”, in History Workshop Journal, Vol 6, No 1, 1978, 169-85, 183. T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn, vol 2, ed. by M.H. Abrams (London: W.W. Norton, 1993), 2164-70, 2169. Pauline Morgan, “The Incomer”, in Science Fiction and Fantasy Review Annual 1988, ed. by Robert A. Collins and Robert Latham (Westport: Meckler, 1988), 166-67. ibid., 167 ibid. ibid., 166-67. Elphinstone, “Fantasising texts: Scottish fantasy today.” Conference paper, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Last modified 14 May 2000. Accessed 3 May 2008. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/ MElphinstone.html (para. 1 of 34). Manlove, 171. ibid., 172-73. Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 58. Elphinstone, 2000 (para. 32 of 34). Christopher Whyte, “Twenty-one Collections for the Twenty-first Century”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 78-87, 86. Stephen Naysmith, “Book Festival 2000: A Speyside Odyssey”, in The Sunday Herald. Last modified 13 August 2000. Accessed 25 March 2008. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/smgpubs/access/72552473.html?dids=72552473 :72552473&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Aug+13%2C+2000&autho r=Stephen+Naysmith&pub=Sunday+Herald&edition=&startpage=6&desc= Book+Festival+2000%3A+a+Speyside+Odyssey (para. 5 of 18). Matthew Fitt, in Naysmith (para. 8 of 18). Fitt, in Roddy Lumsden, “Roddy Lumsden Interviews Matthew Fitt”, in Books From Scotland. Last modified 2006. Accessed 24 March 2009. http://www.booksfromscotland.com/News/Roddy-Lumsdens-Blog/150906Matthew-Fitt (para. 12 of 16). James Robertson and Matthew Fitt, The Scots Language in a Future Scotland: A Submission to the Cultural Commission (Edinburgh: Itchy Coo, 2004), 5.

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John Corbett, Language and Scottish Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 16. Mark Abley, The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 9-10. Carla Sassi, “Virtual Caledonia, or the (de-)nationalisation of landscape in recent Scottish science fiction.” Conference paper, The Lie of the Land conference, University of Stirling, 27 July 2006. Ryder W. Miller, “Environmental Dystopias Still To Be Avoided: John Brunner’s Classic Environmental Science Fiction Diptych as Agent of Social Change”, in Internet Review of Science Fiction. Last modified June 2004. Accessed 26 March 2009. http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10056 (para. 1 of 44). Lawrence Person, “Notes Towards a Postcyberpunk Manifesto”, in SlashDot. Last modified 9 October 1999. Accessed 25 March 2009. http://slashdot.org/ features/99/10/08/2123255.shtml (para. 8 of 17). ibid. (para. 11 of 17). ibid. (para. 8 of 17). ibid. (para. 10 of 17). Sassi, 2006. McMillan, in Elphinstone, 2007 [1987], ix. Gerald Jonas, “Madman’s Revenge”, in The New York Times Online. Last modified 26 September 1982. Accessed 25 May 2008. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801EED91038F935A1575 AC0A964948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print (para. 2 of 7). McMillan, in Elphinstone, xiii. Sassi, 2006. Macmillan, in Elphinstone, xii-xiii. Manlove, 215. Lisa Harrison, “Brave New Scotland: Science Fiction without Stereotypes in Fitt and Crumey”, in Scotland as Science Fiction, 153-70, 165. Sassi, 2006. Craig, 2009, 268. Douglas Gifford and Neil McMillan, “Scottish Literature and the Challenge of Theory”, in Teaching Scottish Literature: Curriculum and Classroom Applications, ed. by Alan MacGillivray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 3-24, 19-20. CHAPTER FOUR

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John Scaggs, Crime Fiction, The New Critical Idiom series (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 1. Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 159.

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Notes Chesney’s best-selling series of novels, which began with Death of a Gossip (1985), was adapted for television by BBC Scotland, with episodes airing between 1995 and 1997. McCall Smith’s series has more recently been adapted by the BBC in a co-production with HBO, beginning with a television pilot written by Richard Curtis and Anthony Minghella which was broadcast in 2008. Andrew Taylor, “Ian Rankin: The King of Tartan Noir”, in The Independent Online. Last modified 1 April 2001. Accessed 11 November 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/span-classh2-ian-rankinthe-king-of-tartan-noir-span-754403.html (para. 1 of 16). Stuart Kelly, “A Writer’s Life: William McIlvanney”, in The Telegraph Online. Last modified 27 August 2006. Accessed 29 October 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3654866/A-writers-life-WilliamMcIlvanney.html (para. 5 of 16). Peter Clandfield, “Putting the ‘Black’ into ‘Tartan Noir’”, in Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story, ed. by Julie H. Kim (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2005), 211-38, 211. Hugh C. Rae (1935-) has contributed texts to a number of different genres over the years under several different pseudonyms, including thrillers (as Robert Crawford), military fiction (under the pen-name of James Albany), and, most recently, romantic fiction (written as Jessica Stirling). Carole Jones, Disappearing Men: Gender Disorientation in Scottish Fiction 1979-1999 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 25. Gill Plain, “Concepts of Corruption: Crime Fiction and the Scottish ‘State’”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene, 132-140, 132. Denise Mina, “Denise Mina Talks to Val McDermid”, in ValMcDermid.com. Last modified February 2002. Accessed 8 January 2011. http://www.valmcdermid.com/pages/interviews4.html (para. 10 of 21). Willy Maley and Sarah Neely, “‘Almost afraid to know itself’: Macbeth and Cinematic Scotland”, in Scotland in Theory: Relections on Culture and Literature, ed. by Eleanor Bell and Gavin Miller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 97-106, 101. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: Big Thinking, 2003), 138. Plain, p. 132. Doreen Alvarez Saar, “Writing Murder: Who is the Guilty Party?”, in The Journal of Modern Literature, Vol 31, No 3, Spring 2008, 150-58, 150. Gerard Carruthers, Scottish Literature, The Edinburgh Critical Guides series (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 198. Ian Rankin, in Robert McCrum, “Gothic Scot”, in The Observer Online. Last modified 18 March 2001. Accessed 18 April 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/18/crime.ianrankin1 (para. 3 of 44).

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Charles Taylor , “Paint It Noir”, in The New York Times Online. Last modified 22 February 2004. Accessed 20 October 2010. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E0DD103AF931A1575 1C0A9629C8B63 (para. 1 of 8). Ian Duncan, “The Last of Edinburgh: The City in Fiction, 1979-1999”, in Culture, Nation and the New Scottish Parliament, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007), 44-56, 53. David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 153-54. Ian Rankin, in Christopher Nicol, “Tartan Noir: Scottish Crime Fiction Beyond Rankin”, in Suite 101. Last modified 29 November 2010. Accessed 14 January 2011. http://www.suite101.com/content/tartan-noir-scottishcrime-fiction-beyond-rankin-a314510 (para. 7 of 8). CHAPTER FIVE

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Beth Dickson, “William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw Novels”, in Laverock, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Last modified 1996. Accessed 24 January 2011. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/LaverockMcIlvanney-2.html (para. 1 of 10). Ian Duncan, “The Last of Edinburgh: The City in Fiction, 1979-1999”, in Culture, Nation and the New Scottish Parliament, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007), 44-56, 46. Carl MacDougall, Writing Scotland (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004), 32. Barry Forshaw, The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (London: Penguin, 2007), 105. Nicholas Wroe, “Bobby Dazzler”, in The Guardian Online. Last modified 28 May 2005. Accessed 25 January 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ 2005/may/28/crime.ianrankin (para. 1 of 35). Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 175. Martin Priestman, “Post-war British crime fiction”, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. by Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 173-190, 185. Dickson (para. 2 of 10). John Scaggs, Crime Fiction, The New Critical Idiom series (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 90. Andrew Taylor, “Ian Rankin: The King of Tartan Noir”, in The Independent Online. Last modified 1 April 2001. Accessed 11 November 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/span-classh2-ian-rankinthe-king-of-tartan-noir-span-754403.html (para. 3 of 16).

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Notes Ian Rankin, in Robert McCrum, “Gothic Scot”, in The Observer Online. Last modified 18 March 2001. Accessed 18 April 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/18/crime.ianrankin1 (para. 27 of 44). J. Kingston Pierce, “Ian Rankin: The Accidental Crime Writer”, in January Magazine. Last modified January 2000. Accessed 17 January 2011. http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/ianrankin.html (para. 29 of 98). Scaggs, 98. Gill Plain, “Concepts of Corruption: Crime Fiction and the Scottish ‘State’”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 132-140, 133. Rankin, Rebus: The Early Years (London: Orion, 2000), vii-viii. Rankin, “Ten of the Greatest Literary Crime Novels”, in Daily Mail Online. Last modified 27 March 2010. Accessed 19 April 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1260343/IAN-RANKINTen-greatest-literary-crime-novels.html (para. 4 of 10). ibid. (para. 1 of 10). Catherine Spooner, “Crime and the Gothic”, in A Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley (Chichester: Blackwell, 2010), 245-57, 250. Rankin was to revive the character of Gordon Reeve as the protagonist of a later novel, Blood Hunt (1994), written under his pen name of Jack Harvey. Although Reeve is killed at the conclusion of Knots and Crosses, Rankin uses the subsequent text to project an alternative history for the character where he had been spared the elite SAS training prior to the novel’s events. Priestman, 183. Plain, 132-33. Christopher J. Ward, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City: Notions of City in the Rebus Novels of Ian Rankin” (unpublished MPhil (R) thesis, Department of Scottish Literature and Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2010), p. 39. Ward, 52. Kirsten Stirling, Bella Caledonia: Woman, Nation, Text (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 103-04. Watson, 175. Mike Ashley, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction (London: Robinson, 2002), 405. Rankin was to publish a non-fictional account of the settings behind the Rebus novels, Rebus’s Scotland: A Personal Journey, in 2005. MacDougall, 33. Rankin, in David Robinson, “A new inspector calls”, in The Scotsman Online. Last modified 5 September 2009. Accessed 17 January 2011. http://www.scotsman.com/critique/Interview-Ian-Rankin--A.5620879.jp (para. 16 of 30).

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Malcah Effron, “Fictional Murders in Real ‘Mean Streets’: Detective Narratives and Authentic Urban Geographies”, in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol 39, No 3, Fall 2009, 330-346, 333-34. Ramu Nagappan, Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering and South Asian Narratives (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 103. Jonathan D. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge, 2002) [1975], 225-26. Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, The Cambridge Studies in French series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 75. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Time and Description in Fiction Today”, in Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. by Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989) [1965], 143-157, 155. Robert Crawford, Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 686. Rankin, in McCrum (para. 37 of 44). William Storrar, Scottish Identity: A Christian Vision (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1990), 202. Simenon’s Maigret series, which consisted both of novels and short fiction, was published between 1931 and 1972. Rankin, in Greg Lowe, “Ian Rankin: A Question of Blood interview”, in Spike Magazine. Last modified 15 April 2008. Accessed 17 January 2011. http://www.spikemagazine.com/ian-rankin-a-question-of-bloodinterview.php (para. 21 of 43). Richard Bradford, The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 103. Robinson (para. 17 of 30). Eleanor Bell, “Ian Rankin and the ethics of crime fiction”, in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol 26, No 2, 2008, 53-63, 53. ibid. Irvine Welsh, “A Scotsman Abroad”, in The Guardian Online. Last modified 22 May 2004. Accessed 15 April 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ 2004/may/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview18 (para. 9 of 12). H. Gustav Klaus, James Kelman, The Writers and Their Work series (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004), 95. James Kelman, in Alan Bissett, “Why Kelman’s rage at the genrefication of Scottish literature concerns us all”, in The Guardian Books Blog. Last modified 31 August 2009. Accessed 14 April 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/aug/31/james-kelmanscottish-literature (para. 2 of 7). Bissett (para. 7 of 7). Rankin, in McCrum (para. 37 of 44). Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 44.

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Notes ibid., 45. Ashley, 71. The idiosyncratic title of the book may be inspired by the title of a track on the album Mr Bad Example (1991), recorded by singer Warren Zevon. Anon., “About the Author”, in Brookmyre.co.uk. Last modified 2009. Accessed 12 April 2011. http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/about (para. 5 of 9). Ashley, 71. The television adaptation of Quite Ugly One Morning was produced by Clerkenwell Films and was broadcast by ITV in September 2004. Anon., “Star is set to be Quite Ugly One Morning in TV drama”, in Scotland on Sunday Online. Last modified 16 February 2004. Accessed 12 April 2011. http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/entertainment/Star-is-set-tobe.2503937.jp. Christopher Brookmyre, in Jennie Renton, “Christopher Brookmyre in Conversation”, in Textualities.net. Last modified 2005. Accessed 15 April 2011. http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/christopher-brookmyre-inconversation/ (para. 2 of 27). Bradford, 106. Peter Clandfield, “Putting the ‘Black’ into ‘Tartan Noir’”, in Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story: Ten Essays, ed. by Julie H. Kim (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), 211-38, 218. Scaggs, 96-97. Brookmyre, in Anon., “Hitchhiker Memories”, in BBC Radio 4 Online. Last modified November 2005. Accessed 12 April 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ radio4/hitchhikers/memories.shtml (para. 15 of 21). Bradford, 106. Brookmyre, in Renton (para. 4 of 27). Christopher Harvie, “The Case of the Postmodernist’s Sore Thumb, or the Moral Sentiments of John Rebus”, in Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature, ed. by Eleanor Bell and Gavin Miller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 51-69, 64. Anon., “The HSS Today”, in the Humanist Society Scotland website. Last modified 2011. Accessed 12 April 2011. http://www.humanismscotland.org.uk/about-us/the-hss-today.html (para. 13 of 13). Brookmyre, in Rosie Free, “Gateway to a life of crime”, in The Scotsman Online. Last modified 20 November 2002. Accessed 12 April 2011. http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/education/Gateway-to-a-life-of.2379670.jp (para. 20 of 21). Clandfield, 211. Brookmyre, in Renton (para. 3 of 27). Neil Wilson, Edinburgh City Guide (London: Lonely Planet, 2004), 26. Keith Dixon, “The Gospels According to Saint Bakunin: Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Libertarian Communism”, in A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader: Text and Debates, ed. by Suman Gupta and David Johnson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 62-64, 62.

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Interestingly, Brookmyre has made a conscious shift towards a much more conventional approach to crime fiction in recent years with Where the Bodies Are Buried (2011), a text—published under the name “Chris Brookmyre”— which eschews many of his more self-indulgently humorous interpolations. Brookmyre, in Andrew Williams, “Brookmyre talks up rejection”, in Metro Online. Last modified 2008. Accessed 15 April 2011. http://www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/interviews/252939-brookmyre-talks-uprejection (para. 11 of 31). Rankin, in McCrum (para. 3 of 44). John Buchan, in Peter Jobes, “Huntingtower by John Buchan”, in Peter Writes. Last modified 31 December 2009. Accessed 17 August 2012. http://www.peterwrites.co.uk/blog/?p=31 (para 1 of 3). Scaggs, 93-94. Dougal McNeill, “Is Life Beautiful? Narrative Uncertainty and ‘Literary anti-Trotskyism’ in Trainspotting”, in The International Journal of Scottish Literature, Issue 5. Last modified Autumn/Winter 2009. Accessed 14 April 2010. http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue5/mcneill.htm (para. 41 of 42). CHAPTER SIX

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Ian Duncan, “The Last of Edinburgh: The City in Fiction, 1979-1999”, in Culture, Nation and the New Scottish Parliament, ed. by Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007), 44-56, 46. The public profile of the Tony Hill novels has been considerably enhanced by their adaptation for television by Coastal Productions for the ITV network between 2002 and 2009. Lorna MacLaren, “Out to make a killing: It’s the biggest mystery of all. Why is the fair sex hooked on crime?” in The Scottish Herald. Last modified 21 February 2001. Accessed 28 August 2011. http://www.heraldscotland.com/ sport/spl/aberdeen/out-to-make-a-killing-it-s-the-biggest-mystery-of-allwhy-is-the-fair-sex-hooked-on-crime-lorna-maclaren-reports-1.197716 (para. 1 of 1). Val McDermid, in Richard Lea, “Rankin accused of insulting female crime writers”, in The Guardian Online. Last modified 16 August 2007. Accessed 19 August 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/16/ ianrankin/print (para. 9 of 10). Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay, Great Women Mystery Writers (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 178. Dinitia Smith, “Denise Mina and the Rise of Scottish Detective Fiction”, in The New York Times Online. Last modified 22 July 2006. Accessed 19 August 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/arts/22mina.html? pagewanted=print (para. 13 of 19).

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Notes The first of Mina’s Paddy Meehan novels, The Field of Blood (2005), was adapted for television by Slate North Productions and broadcast on BBC Scotland between August and September 2011. Denise Mina, “Garnethill: Author’s Note”, in DeniseMina.co.uk. Last modified 2011. Accessed 21 August 2011. http://www.denisemina.co.uk/ contents/books/garnet_auth.htm (para. 7 of 8). Peter Clandfield, “Putting the Black into Tartan Noir”, in Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story: Ten Essays, ed. by Julie H. Kim (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), 211-38, 227. Mary Hadley, British Women Mystery Writers: Authors of Detective Fiction with Female Sleuths (Jefferson: McFarland, 2002), 142. Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, first compiled for publication by Faber and Faber in 1987, comprises three thematically interlinked novellas: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1987). Laura Marcus, “Detection and Literary Fiction”, in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. by Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 245-67, 258. Clandfield, 227. Meg Henderson, “A writing great, an acting legend and a spat that altered literary history: Say McIlvanney’s name and I’ll never speak to you, roared Connery”, in The Daily Mail, 20 August 2011, 46. Mina, in Stephanie Padilla, “August author of the month, Denise Mina, author of a stunning new series featuring intrepid reporter, Paddy Meehan!”, in New Mystery Reader. Last modified August 2005. Accessed 30 August 2011. http://www.newmysteryreader.com/denise_mina.htm (para. 22 of 46). Peter Clandfield and Christian Lloyd, “Redevelopment Fiction: Architecture, Town-planning and ‘Unhomeliness’”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 124-31, 126. Jules Smith, “Denise Mina”, in The British Council Contemporary Writers. Last modified 2010. Accessed 21 August 2011. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth02c26l474812627104 (para. 1 of 7). Mina, in Maureen Ellis, “Face to Face: Denise Mina”, in The Scottish Herald. Last modified 13 December 2010. Accessed 30 August 2011. http://www.heraldscotland.com/life-style/real-lives/face-to-face-denisemina-1.1074064 (para. 7 of 25). Doreen Alvarez Saar, “Writing Murder: Who is the Guilty Party?”, in The Journal of Modern Literature, Vol 31, No 3, Spring 2008, 150-58, 154. Clandfield, 211. Mina, in Peter Guttridge, “Murder she wrote—and plenty of it: Denise Mina’s Garnethill and Paddy Meehan novels are dark but compelling. She tells us what inspires her”, in The Observer Online. Last modified 29 July 2007. Accessed 21 August 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/ jul/29/crimebooks.features/print (para. 5 of 14).

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Jules Smith (para. 2 of 7). The Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, a charitable organisation originally founded in 1938 as the Women’s Royal Volunteer Service. From 2013, the organisation was rebranded as the Royal Voluntary Service in recognition of its increasing number of male volunteers. Hadley, 143. Clandfield, 227. Hadley, 142. ibid., 142-43. Dick Adler, “Euromayhem: Tracking Killers and Other Criminals on Both Sides of the English Channel”, in The Chicago Tribune Online. Last modified 4 April 1999. Accessed 28 August 2011. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-04-04/entertainment/9904040092_1_ jean-casson-sex-abuse-mental (para. 2 of 7). Susan Tranter, “Writers: Louise Welsh”, in The British Council for Literature Online. Last modified 2006. Accessed 29 September 2011. http://literature.britishcouncil.org/louise-welsh (para. 17 of 17). ibid. (para. 2 of 17). ibid. (para. 17 of 17). ibid. (para. 3 of 17). Lesley McDowell, “The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh: The literary beauty of a Glaswegian beast”, in The Independent Online. Last modified 9 August 2002. Accessed 13 October 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/reviews/the-cutting-room-by-louise-welsh-639353.html (para. 4 of 10). Gavin Miller, “Aesthetic Depersonalization in Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room”, in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol 36, No 1, Winter 2006, 7289, 77. ibid., p. 72. Alan Bissett, “The ‘New Weegies’: The Glasgow Novel in the Twenty-first Century”, in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 59-67, 60-61. Rédouane Abouddahab and Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, “Introduction”, in Fiction, Crime, and the Feminine, ed. by Rédouane Abouddahab and Josiane Paccaud-Huguet (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), vii-xvii, xiv. Louise Welsh, in Paul Hamilos, “Capital Encounter: In the shadow of the London bombings, Paul Hamilos talks to novelist Louise Welsh about sex, history and unpalatable truths,” in The Guardian Online. Last modified 5 August 2005. Accessed 14 October 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ 2005/aug/05/fiction.paulhamilos (para. 21 of 24). Welsh’s consideration of the female form and its aesthetic qualities has resonance with John Berger’s 1972 BBC television documentary series (and

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Notes later book) Ways of Seeing, which interrogated the concealed ideologies which are contained in visual images including that of the female nude. Welsh, in Jennie Renton, “Death and Literature”, in Textualities.net. Last modified 2005. Accessed 14 October 2011. http://textualities.net/jennierenton/death-and-literature/ (para. 5 of 22). Miller, 76-77. Welsh, in Len Wanner, Dead Sharp: Scottish Crime Writers on Country and Craft (Uig: Two Ravens Press, 2011), 215. Fred Botting, Gothic, The New Critical Idiom series (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. John Scaggs, Crime Fiction, The New Critical Idiom series (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 106-07. Douglas Gifford, “Breaking Boundaries: From Modern to Contemporary in Scottish Fiction”, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: Volume 3: Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918), ed. by Ian Brown (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 237-252, 250. Welsh, in Hadley Freeman, “Black magic: Louise Welsh’s debut, The Cutting Room, won her awards and a cult following as a crime writer. With her latest novel, about a conjuror in Berlin, she defies such easy categorisation”, in The Guardian Online. Last modified 12 August 2006. Accessed 14 October 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/ aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview27/ (para. 3 of 16). McDowell (para. 7 of 10). Charles Taylor, “The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh: A Glasgow antiques dealer finds horrible pictures in a dead man’s house, in this captivating thriller from a new Scots writer”, in Salon Online. Last modified 8 April 2003. Accessed 13 October 2011. http://entertainment.salon.com/2003/ 04/08/cutting_2/ (para. 8 of 14). Miller, 84. ibid. Paul Magrs, “More tease, less strip: Paul Magrs on Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room, a detective novel that effortlessly glides into literary fiction,” in The Guardian Online. Last modified 31 August 2002. Accessed 13 October 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/31/ featuresreviews.guardianreview18 (paras. 4-5 of 9). Miller, 83. Welsh, in Hamilos (para. 13 of 24). Hamilos (para. 14 of 24). Welsh, in Hamilos (para. 14 of 24). Tim Stanley, “Richard Dawkins is either a fool or a coward for refusing to debate William Lane Craig”, in The Telegraph Online. Last modified 21 October 2011. Accessed 28 October 2011. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ timstanley/100112626/richard-dawkins-is-either-a-fool-or-a-coward-forrefusing-to-debate-william-lane-craig (para. 6 of 7).

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Barry Forshaw, The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (London: Penguin, 2007), 63. Marcus, 245. ibid. Taylor (para. 14 of 14). McDowell (paras. 2-3 of 10). Doug Johnstone, “The Cutting Room”, in 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time, ed. by Willy Maley (Edinburgh: The List, 2005), 17. Mina, in Guttridge (para. 6 of 14). CONCLUSION

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Damien G. Walter, “Why Science Fiction is the literature of change”, in DamienGWalter.com. Last modified 6 January 2012. Accessed 11 January 2012. http://damiengwalter.com/2012/01/06/why-science-fiction-is-theliterature-of-change/ (para. 1 of 5). Sarah Crown, “What the Booker prize really excludes”, in The Guardian Online. Last modified 17 October 2011. Accessed 19 October 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/17/science-fictionchina-mieville?newsfeed=true (para. 3 and 5 of 5). Gavin Miller, “Scottish science fiction: Writing Scottish literature back into history”, in Études Écossaises, December 2009, 121-133. Last modified December 2009. Accessed 11 January 2012. http://etudesecossaises.revues.org/index197.html (para. 24 of 24). Rankin has since brought John Rebus back from retirement in a later novel, Standing in Another Man's Grave (2012), which takes place some years after the character departed from the police force. Christopher Nicol, “Tartan Noir: Scottish Crime Fiction Beyond Rankin”, in Suite 101. Last modified 29 November 2010. Accessed 14 January 2011. http://christopher-nicol.suite101.com/tartan-noir-scottish-crime-fictionbeyond-rankin-a314510 (para. 1 of 8). ibid. (para. 7 of 8). Tony Black, “The Past, Present and Future of Tartan Noir”, in Mulholland Books. Last modified 8 September 2011. Accessed 30 January 2012. http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/2011/09/08/the-past-present-and-futureof-tartan-noir/ (para. 10 of 21). Alan Bissett, in Alan Bissett, Helen Fitzgerald and Allan Wilson, “Is this a golden era for Scottish literature?”, in The List Online, 693. Last modified 1 February 2012. Accessed 7 February 2012. http://www.list.co.uk/article/ 40243-is-this-a-golden-era-for-scottish-literature/ (para. 1 of 14). Paul F. Cockburn, “The blinkered vision of Scotland’s literati”, in Scottish Review Online. Last modified 7 February 2012. Accessed 7 February 2012. http://www.scottishreview.net/PaulCockburn227.shtml (paras. 9 and 13 of 13).

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INDEX 2

City of Glass ......................... 166 The New York Trilogy .......... 166

2001 A Space Odyssey................. 39

A Abley, Mark ................................ 98 Abouddahab, Rédouane .............179 Act of Union, The ....................... 55 Adams, Douglas ...................31, 150 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .......................31, 150 Afghanistan ................................. 43 Africa .......................................... 83 Aldiss, Brian W. .. 13, 17, 23, 77, 95, 104 Hothouse ................................ 95 Allitt, Beverley ...........................151 Amazing Stories......................15, 18 anarchism ................. 27, 44, 56, 102 anarcho-libertarianism ................. 21 Anderson, Carol .......................... 76 Anderson, Lin ..... 118, 163, 177, 196 Driftnet ..........................118, 163 androcentrism .........................86, 93 apocalyptic fiction ..... 18, 32, 48, 73, 77, 78, 83, 87, 93, 95, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110 Argentina....................................151 Arnold, John H. ........................... 53 Arnott, Steve ............................4, 30 artificial intelligence.. 22, 30, 32, 46, 60, 64, 104 Ashley, Mike ......................136, 148 atheism ................. 37, 154, 188, 190 Atkinson, Kate ........... 157, 177, 196 Atlantis ........................................ 95 Atwood, Margaret ..................15, 79 The Handmaid’s Tale ............. 79 Auster, Paul ................................166

B Bacchus ..................................... 183 Bailey, David ............................. 181 Bakhtin, Mikhail.......................... 66 Ballard, J.G.................................. 95 The Drowned World ............... 95 Banks, Iain..................... 28, 97, 158 Complicity ...................... 26, 158 Dead Air ............................... 158 The Bridge .......18, 25, 26, 36, 97 The Business........28, 37, 61, 158 The Crow Road .......... 26, 36, 37 The Wasp Factory ............ 25, 30 Transition ......................... 18, 26 Walking on Glass ....... 18, 25, 36 Whit .................................. 37, 61 Banks, Iain M.3, 4, 7, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 59, 60, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 83, 111, 158, 198, 201 Consider Phlebas ....... 20, 25, 43 Feersum Endjinn .................... 26 Inversions ............................... 28 Look to Windward .................. 66 Matter..................................... 66 The Culture ..4, 5, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 The State of the Art.... 23, 25, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 61 Use of Weapons...................... 32 Barrhead .................................... 147

264 Barrie, J.M................................... 74 Auld Licht Idylls ..................... 74 Barthes, Roland ..........................138 BBC .......................................26, 43 BBC Underground Awards ........177 Bear, Greg ................................... 79 The Forge of God ................... 79 Beaton, M.C. ..........................7, 116 Hamish Macbeth series .........116 Bell, Eleanor...............................145 Bennett, Margot........................... 83 The Long Way Back ............... 83 Berger, James .............................. 77 Berlin........................................... 38 Beukes, Lauren...........................201 The Shining Girls ..................201 Bhabha, Homi ............................. 90 Bible, The ............... 82, 98, 141, 142 Genesis................................... 98 King James VI Edition ..........188 Old Testament, The .......142, 188 Ten Commandments, The .....189 Big Bang Theory, The ................. 62 Birkerts, Sven .........................14, 15 Bissett, Alan ....... 146, 179, 203, 204 Black, Tony ................................203 Block, Lawrence ........................148 Bernie Rhodenbarr cycle .......148 Blyton, Enid .................................. 4 The Faraway Tree .................... 4 Boehnke, Dietmar ....................5, 49 Bolshevism .................................. 53 Botting, Fred ..............................182 Boyce, Chris ......... 6, 20, 43, 44, 111 Brainfix .................................. 43 Catchworld .........................6, 43 Boyd, Eddie................................152 Boyle, Danny .............................159 Boyle, Jimmy .............................196 A Sense of Freedom ..............196 Bradbury, Ray ............................. 17 Fahrenheit 451....................... 17 Bradford, Richard ....... 144, 149, 151 Brennan, Timothy ....................... 41 Brigg, Peter ............................13, 14 British Commonwealth ..............110

Index British Libraries......................... 201 British Science Fiction Association Awards ............................. 26, 44 Britt, Ryan ................................... 17 Brodie, Deacon William .... 131, 136 Brookmyre, Christopher ..... 37, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 166, 167, 169, 171, 176, 184, 188, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 201 Boiling a Frog .............. 150, 154 One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night ......................... 157 Quite Ugly One Morning..... 118, 123, 125, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161 Brown, Carolyn ............... 32, 39, 67 Brown, James .......28, 52, 63, 66, 68 Brunner, John .............................. 99 Buchan, John ............................. 159 Burgess, Anthony ........................ 38 A Clockwork Orange .............. 38 Burke, William .......................... 131 Burns, Robert .............................. 60 Burnside, John ........................... 196 Living Nowhere .................... 196 Butler, Andrew M........................ 21 Butler, Octavia .................... 79, 107 Clay’s Ark .............................. 79 Butlin, Ron ................................ 176

C Cadigan, Pat ................................ 46 Caledonian Antisyzygy .... 119, 120, 135 California........................... 135, 156 Calvinism .................................. 157 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) .................................... 51 Camus, Albert.............................. 36 capitalism .. 45, 61, 75, 87, 106, 146, 152

Notional Identities Caravaggio, Michaelangelo Merisi da ..........................................183 Cardenden ..................................126 Carruthers, Gerard ......................121 Carter, Ian.................................... 92 Catholic Church .........................154 Chandler, Glenn ......... 117, 167, 194 Chandler, Raymond............118, 125 Chesney, Marion ........................116 Chicago ......................................179 Christianity ...... 37, 82, 94, 140, 141, 154, 187, 188, 190 Christie, Agatha.......... 116, 118, 164 Church of Scotland ...................... 55 civil rights movement .................. 86 Clandfield, Peter 116, 149, 154, 165, 166, 168, 169, 175 Claridge, Marten ........................116 Clerkenwell Films ......................126 Clute, John ....................... 25, 44, 77 Cobley, Michael .......................... 27 Humanity’s Fire cycle............ 27 Cockburn, Paul F. ...................2, 203 Cold War . 22, 31, 39, 44, 49, 71, 72, 78, 79 commercialism ...........................111 Communism ...........................38, 51 communitarianism ..... 106, 109, 173, 176 Conrad, Joseph .......................29, 36 Heart of Darkness .................. 36 conservatism. 40, 149, 150, 153, 195 Cook, Richard ............................. 74 Cooke, Sophie ............................... 1 Corbett, John ............................... 97 Cornell, Paul................................ 43 Craig, Cairns ............ 79, 88, 90, 109 Crawford, Robert................4, 8, 140 Crime Writers’ Association, The ......................................163, 165 Critics’ First Blood Awards .......148 Crockett, Samuel Rutherford ....... 74 The Raiders ............................ 74 The Stickit Minister ................ 74 Crown, Sarah ..............................202 Crumey, Andrew ......................... 50

265

Sputnik Caledonia .................. 50 Culler, Jonathan ................. 138, 139 cyberpunk 18, 19, 22, 46, 48, 67, 68, 70, 71, 98, 100, 103, 104 Czerkawska, Catherine .................. 2

D Darien Scheme ............................ 48 Dashiell Hammett Sam Spade series .................. 135 Day, Vox ..................................... 65 Deighton, Jack ............... 20, 44, 111 A Son of the Rock ................... 44 Derrida, Jacques ........................ 164 Descartes, Rene ........................... 69 Detection Club, The .................. 163 deterritorialisation ..................... 101 Devine, Tom ................................ 69 devolution ...... 16, 30, 41, 53, 55, 59, 133, 138, 198 dialogism ..................................... 66 Dickson, Beth .................... 125, 127 Disch, Thomas M. ..................... 102 The Genocides ...................... 102 Dixon, Keith .............................. 157 Donavan, Anne ............................ 94 The Ice Horse ......................... 94 Donegal ....................................... 82 Doric...................................... 96, 97 Doyle, Arthur Conan ................. 132 druidism....................................... 78 Duncan, Ian ........122, 125, 163, 183 Dundee ........................................ 95 Durie, Bruce .............................. 116 dystopia ... 30, 34, 46, 47, 48, 49, 70, 94, 99, 100, 107, 108, 110

E Eden .......................................... 107 Edinburgh 4, 52, 117, 122, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 144, 147,

266 152, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 167, 168, 199, 200 Mary King’s Close ................122 Old Town ..............................122 Oxford Bar, The ....................136 Edinburgh Book Festival 4, 126, 129 Edinburgh Fringe .......................164 Effron, Malcah ...........................137 Elder, Michael ............................. 43 Nowhere on Earth .................. 43 Eliot, T.S. .................................... 92 “Burnt Norton” ...................... 92 “Little Gidding” ..................... 92 The Four Quartets.................. 92 Ellroy, James .............. 116, 148, 156 Elphinstone, Margaret22, 23, 27, 47, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 163, 198, 199 A Sparrow’s Flight............47, 72 An Apple from a Tree .. 23, 72, 94 Hy Brasil ................................ 94 Light ....................................... 72 The Gathering Night .....110, 111 The Incomer ... 23, 47, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111 The Sea Road ......................... 72 Voyageurs .............................. 72 England ... 21, 49, 50, 55, 60, 72, 84, 86, 110, 118, 125 Eros ............................................179 European Parliament ..................174

F Fanon, Frantz .............................. 35 On National Culture .............. 35 Fassler, Joe .................................... 2

Index feminism .... 77, 85, 86, 93, 106, 107, 115, 118 Fife ............................................ 126 film noir ......................................... 7 Fitt, Matthew ... 6, 23, 46, 47, 70, 71, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 198, 199, 200 But n Ben A-Go-Go ... 23, 47, 70, 71, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 111 Pure Radge............................. 95 Sair Heid City......................... 95 Fitzgerald, Helen ....................... 204 Fleming, Ian James Bond series ................ 158 Florida ............................... 148, 149 Forshaw, Barry .......................... 126 Foucault, Michel.................... 54, 67 France ........................................ 126 Frank, Pat .................................... 77 Alas, Babylon ......................... 77 Frazer, J.G. .................................. 94 The Golden Bough............ 94, 95

G G8 Summit ................................ 137 Gaelic .......................................... 97 Gaia Hypothesis .......................... 82 Galloway ............................... 72, 74 Galloway, Janice ............... 176, 196 The Trick is to Keep Breathing ........................................ 196 Garrison, John ............................. 34 Gernsback, Hugo ......................... 15 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic ... 23, 85, 87, 88, 91, 95, 157 A Scots Quair ............. 87, 91, 92 Sunset Song ...................... 87, 91 Three Go Back ....................... 95 Gibson, Gary ............22, 27, 66, 111 Against Gravity ...................... 27 Gibson, William .............. 46, 48, 49 Neuromancer.................... 46, 49

Notional Identities Gifford, Douglas ................110, 183 Glasgow .... 36, 50, 51, 52, 117, 125, 127, 147, 150, 164, 167, 173, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 193, 200 Bath Street ............................178 Charing Cross .......................178 Hyndland...............................184 Necropolis, The .....................182 Renfield St Stephen’s ....178, 179 Glasgow School of Art ...............177 Gleneagles Hotel, The ................137 global warming ........................... 71 globalisation .... 39, 42, 76, 101, 146, 156, 169 Godzilla ......................................171 Gold Dagger Awards..................163 Golden Age of science fiction ..... 19 Gorbachev, Mikhail..................... 79 Gordon, Joan ............................... 65 Gothic......................... 181, 182, 193 Grace, Wendy.............................. 54 Gray, Alasdair .................. 3, 36, 193 Lanark .............................36, 193 Gray, Alex ..........................167, 178 Detective Chief Inspector Lorimer series ..................167 Greig, Andrew ............................157 Electric Brae: A Modern Romance ..........................157 In Another Light ....................157 Romanno Bridge ...................157 Grisham, John ............................126 Guardian, The ............ 126, 180, 201 Guevara, Ernesto "Che" .............. 61 Guinness Book of Records, The .121 Gunn, Neil ..............................20, 94 The Green Isle of the Great Deep.............................20, 94 Young Art and Old Hector ..... 20 Guthrie, Allan.....................118, 128 Kiss Her Goodbye .................118 Two-Way Split .......................128 gynocentrism ......................107, 164 gynocracy ..... 77, 79, 86, 88, 90, 109

267

H Hadley, Mary ..............165, 173, 175 Hames, Scott.................................. 2 Hamilos, Paul ............................ 180 Hamilton, Edmond ...................... 40 Hammett, Dashiell ......118, 135, 191 The Glass Key ...................... 191 The Maltese Falcon ...... 135, 191 Haney, William S. ....................... 59 Hannah, John............................. 126 Hare, William ............................ 131 Harrison, Lisa ............................ 108 Harvey, Jack .............................. 126 Harvey, John.............................. 193 Harvie, Christopher ................... 152 Hawthornden Fellowships ......... 177 Hearn, Jonathan ........................... 35 Hebrides, The ............................ 183 Hegel, George.............................. 62 Heidegger, Martin ....................... 22 Heinlein, Robert .................... 13, 27 Starship Troopers ................... 27 To Sail Beyond the Sunset ...... 27 Hellblazer series ........................ 164 Henderson, Meg ........................ 167 Herbert, Frank ........................... 101 The White Plague ................. 101 heteroglossia ................................ 66 heterotopia ................................... 32 Hiaasen, Carl ..............148, 149, 152 Highlands, Scottish ...... 99, 109, 116 Hill, Reginald ............................ 144 Daziel and Pascoe series ...... 144 Hoban, Russell ............................ 79 Riddley Walker ....................... 79 Hogg, James .............................. 132 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ...............132, 133, 134 Holyrood ............................. 46, 135 Home Box Office (HBO) .......... 201 Hugo Awards......................... 26, 44 Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) ...................................... 99 humanism .................................. 193

268 Humanist Society of Scotland .... 37, 154 Huxley, Aldous ................ 17, 20, 94 Brave New World ........ 17, 18, 94 hyperrealism ...........................4, 195

I Interzone ..................................... 18 Itchy Coo Publishing ................... 95

J James, P.D. .................................. 15 Jameson, Fredric ......................... 48 Jardine, Quintin .............. 2, 115, 118 Dead and Buried ...................118 John Creasey Dagger Awards ...165, 177 John W. Campbell Memorial Awards ................................... 26 Johnson, Paul .............................115 Johnstone, Doug .........................195 Jonas, Gerald ..............................101 Jones, Carole ..............................117 Joss, Morag ................................163 Funeral Music .......................163

K Kailyard movement ... 74, 75, 76, 78, 89, 90, 97, 102, 109 Kay, Jackie .................................183 Kellas, James G. .......................... 55 Kelly, Stuart ...........................1, 116 Kelman, James ...... 4, 5, 60, 97, 129, 145, 146, 147, 193 How Late It Was, How Late 5, 60 You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free ..............145 Kent ............................................. 72 Kent, Thomas .............................. 14 Keyes, Daniel .............................. 96 Flowers for Algernon ............. 96 Kincaid, M.G..............................116

Index Kincaid, Paul ............................... 40 Kipling, Rudyard ......................... 29 Kirton, Bill ................................ 116 Klaus, H. Gustav ....................... 146 Knox, John ................................ 182 Knox, William ........................... 117 Thane and Moss cycle .......... 117 Kreisberg, Seth ............................ 54 Kubrick, Stanley .......................... 39 Kumar, Krishan ........................... 49

L Lallans ........................... 96, 97, 138 Langford, David .......................... 29 Laurieston .................................... 74 Leach, Rebecca............................ 94 The Wall ................................. 94 LeGuin, Ursula K. ............. 102, 107 Always Coming Home .......... 102 Lehane, Dennis .......................... 166 Shutter Island ....................... 166 Leonard, Elmore ................ 149, 156 Leonard, Tom ................................ 4 Levi-Strauss, Claude ................. 106 Levitas, Ruth ............................... 65 Levy, Michael.............................. 26 liberalism ......................... 40, 45, 48 liberation theology ....................... 85 libertarianism . 21, 22, 27, 44, 51, 52, 53, 57, 62, 105, 142 Lindsay, David ............................ 20 A Voyage to Arcturus ............. 20 Lindsay, Frederic ............... 115, 152 List, The ............................. 203, 204 Lloyd, Christian ......................... 168 localism ..................................... 199 Locus Awards .............................. 26 Logue, Paddy ............................... 69 London .....................50, 53, 57, 126 Los Angeles ....................... 155, 156 Lovelock, James ........................ 105 Lucas, George.............................. 39 Luckhurst, Roger ......................... 19 Ludlum, Robert ......................... 158 Lunan, Duncan ...................... 43, 44

Notional Identities

M Macallan Gold Dagger Award ...117 MacBride, Stuart ........................118 Cold Granite .........................118 MacDermid, Val.........................152 MacDiarmid, Hugh ....................164 MacDougall, Carl .................60, 136 MacGillivray, Alan ... 13, 21, 39, 59, 60 Maclaren, Ian .............................. 74 Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush 74 MacLaren, Lorna ........................163 MacLeod, Ken ..... 3, 6, 7, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 37, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76, 83, 104, 105, 106, 111, 197, 198, 200 Cydonia .................................. 68 Fall Revolution cycle . 21, 45, 46, 47, 53, 61, 66, 67, 68, 104, 105 Newton’s Wake ...................... 66 The Cassini Division .............. 45 The Sky Road ......................... 45 The Star Fraction . 27, 45, 46, 50, 52, 53 The Stone Canal ... 23, 25, 28, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 69 Macpherson, Ian .......................... 73 Wild Harbour ......................... 73 magical realism ........................3, 94 Magrs, Paul ................................186 Major, John ................................153 Maley, Willy ..............................119 Man Booker Prize ..................5, 123 Manlove, Colin.......................22, 86 Mann, George................... 25, 46, 63 March, Cristie L. ....................21, 31 Marcus, Laura ....................166, 192 Martin, George R.R. ...................201 Game of Thrones series .........201 Martin, Graham Dunstan ............. 20

269

Martin-Jones, David .................. 122 Marxism .......................... 38, 51, 58 Massie, Allan ......................... 14, 15 Mathews, Race ............................ 42 McAllister, Angus ....................... 20 The Canongate Strangler ....... 20 The Krugg Syndrome.............. 20 McBain, Ed................................ 143 McCaa, Jane ................................ 72 The Politics of Illusion ........... 72 McCarthy, Cormac ...................... 15 McCracken-Flesher, Caroline ... 7, 8, 16, 17 McCrone, David .......................... 75 McCulloch, Margery Palmer ....... 91 McDermid, Val..115, 118, 119, 121, 146, 163, 164, 176, 193, 196 A Darker Domain ................. 118 Dr Tony Hill series ............... 163 Lindsay Gordon series.......... 163 Report for Murder ................ 163 The Mermaids Singing ......... 163 McDowell, Lesley ......178, 185, 194 McHoul, Alec .............................. 54 McIlvanney, William...... 6, 55, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 125, 127, 131, 152, 155, 162, 165, 167, 176, 194 Docherty................................. 55 Laidlaw .... 6, 115, 116, 117, 118, 125, 126, 127, 131 Strange Loyalties.................. 117 The Papers of Tony Veitch ... 117 McKay, Reg .............................. 167 McManus, Mark ........................ 117 McMillan, Dorothy ....72, 73, 85, 89, 101, 105, 107 McMillan, Neil .......................... 110 McNeill, Dougal ........................ 160 Mendlesohn, Farah ....38, 45, 56, 62, 65 Merril, Judith ......................... 13, 77 Shadow on the Hearth ............ 77 Mesolithic Era ........................... 110 Miéville, China .......................... 202 Millar, Mark .............................. 204

270 Miller, Gavin3, 21, 28, 35, 178, 181, 187, 202 Miller, Ryder W. ......................... 99 Miller, Walter M. ........................ 83 A Canticle for Leibowitz ........ 83 mimesis ..............................138, 139 Mina, Denise . 6, 115, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 146, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 201 A Drunk Woman Looks at a Thistle ..............................164 A Sickness in the Family .......165 Alex Morrow series.......164, 165 comic book writing ...............164 Garnethill ..... 118, 123, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 190, 192, 194, 195 Ida Tamson ...........................164 Paddy Meehan series.....164, 165 Resolution .............................192 Sanctum.................................164 Mitchison, Naomi ............. 23, 94, 95 The Corn King and the Spring Queen................................ 94 Modernism ...........................19, 118 Moffat, Gwen .............................116 Monroe, Marilyn ........................179 More, Thomas ............................. 61 Morgan, Pauline .......................... 93 Morgan, Richard .... 22, 27, 103, 111 Altered Carbon ...............27, 103 Morris, William ........................... 47 News from Nowhere ............... 47 Morrison, Grant ..........................204 Muir, Edwin ................................. 78 “The Horses” .......................... 78 Murray, Isobel ............................. 88 Mutually Assured Destruction..... 77 mythology 76, 80, 81, 83, 85, 88, 94, 95, 102, 106

Index

N Nagappan, Ramu ....................... 138 Nairn, Thom ................................ 36 Nairn, Tom ................................ 119 Nash, Andrew .............................. 75 National Health Service (NHS) 150, 153, 155 National Secular Society ............. 37 Naysmith, Stephen....................... 96 Nebula Awards ............................ 44 Necropolis, The ......................... 182 Neely, Sarah .............................. 119 Nesbitt, James............................ 148 New Renaissance ......5, 28, 144, 193 New World Order ........................ 55 New York City ............................ 38 New York Times, The ................... 14 Nicholls, Peter ............................. 78 Nicol, Christopher ..................... 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich................... 161 Nobel Prize .................................... 4 Norquay, Glenda ......................... 76 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) .................................. 57 Northern Ireland .................. 55, 110 Nova Express ............................. 100

O O’Hagan, Andrew ............. 152, 176 The Missing .......................... 152 Oran Mor ................................... 164 Orange Prize for Literature ........ 177 Orwell, George .........17, 20, 63, 192 Nineteen Eighty-Four 17, 18, 63, 192 Oxford Bar, The ........................ 136

P Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane ........... 179 paganism ..................................... 78 Palmer, Christopher ..................... 68 Paretsky, Sara ............................ 119

Notional Identities Parrinder, Patrick................3, 17, 19 Patterson, James .........................126 Peace Pledge Union..................... 51 Person, Lawrence ...............100, 101 Petrie, Duncan ......................75, 115 Phipps, Alison ............................. 79 Plain, Gill ........... 118, 120, 131, 133 Plato ............................................ 61 Poe, Edgar Allan ......................... 73 “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” ........................ 73 Portillo, Michael.........................150 Post-Apocalypse.. 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 89, 101, 102, 106, 107 postcyberpunk .... 100, 103, 106, 108 post-feminism.............................173 Posthumanism22, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 69, 101 Postmodernism .... 19, 39, 62, 64, 68, 101, 110, 119, 166, 179, 199 Pratchett, Terry...........................201 Snuff ......................................201 Prendergast, Christopher ............139 Presbyterianism ..........................140 Priestman, Martin .......................127 Pringle, David ............................. 72 Prometheus Awards .................... 44 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph.......51, 102

Q Queen Margaret Union ................ 51

R Rabkin, Eric ...........................16, 17 Rae, Hugh C. ..............................117 A Few Small Bones ...............117 Skinner ..................................117 Rankin, Ian 5, 6, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144,

271

145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 155, 158, 159, 160, 161, 166, 167, 168, 171, 176, 189, 193, 194, 196, 199,Ộ200, 202, 203 Black and Blue ............. 117, 135 Inspector Rebus series ...... 5, 117, 118, 121, 122, 126, 127, 128, 137, 149, 152, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 162, 168, 190, 199, 202 Knots and Crosses 117, 123, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 166, 189 Set in Darkness..................... 135 The Falls .............................. 137 The Flood ............................. 126 The Naming of the Dead....... 137 writing as Jack Harvey ......... 126 Ransford, Tessa ............................. 2 Rapture, The ................................ 65 Reagan, Ronald ........................... 79 Renton, Jennie ........................... 180 Riach, Alan .................... 5, 8, 25, 90 Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography ................. 5 Rieder, John................................. 15 Robbe-Grillet, Alain .......... 139, 140 “Time and Description in Fiction Today” ............................ 139 Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award................................... 177 Roberts, Adam ............22, 23, 49, 83 Robertson, James ............. 2, 95, 122 The Fanatic .......................... 122 Robinson, David ........................ 145 Roddenberry, Gene ...................... 39 Rowe, Nicholas ......................... 126 Roy, Archie ................................. 20 Deadlight................................ 20

S Saar, Doreen Alvarez......... 120, 169

272 Sacred Feminine, The.................. 78 Saltire Awards............................177 Sassi, Carla ..... 68, 98, 101, 106, 109 Scaggs, John ...... 115, 127, 129, 149, 160, 182 Schoene, Berthold ......................110 Science Fiction Foundation ......... 71 scientifiction ................................ 15 Scotland on Sunday ....................... 1 Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award.......177 Scott, John................................... 54 Scott, Manda ...... 115, 118, 163, 183 Hen’s Teeth ...................118, 163 Scottish Diaspora ........................ 33 Scottish Parliament.. 9, 46, 135, 137, 198 Scottish Review ......................1, 203 secularism...................................190 Seed, David ................................... 3 Shelley, Mary .............................. 72 The Last Man ......................... 73 Sherlock Holmes series ..............132 Shute, Nevil................................. 77 On the Beach.......................... 77 Simenon, Georges ..............142, 191 Inspector Maigret series ........142 Simmons, Dan ............................. 26 Singularity, The ........................... 65 Sjöwall, Maj ...............................136 Sjöwall, Maj, and Per Wahlöö Roseanna...............................136 The Story of a Crime cycle ....136 Smith, Alexander McCall ......7, 116, 121 The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency .............................116 Smith, Ali ...................................183 Smith, E.E. “Doc” ....................... 40 Smith, Jules ........................168, 172 social democracy ........................130 socialism . 21, 22, 26, 27, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 61, 62, 66, 67, 102, 146, 161 Soviet Union .................... 38, 43, 51 Space Invaders ............................ 16

Index space opera .... 18, 25, 34, 40, 43, 66, 68, 70, 71 Spark, Muriel ..................... 126, 134 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie .........................133, 134, 159 Special Air Service (SAS) ... 44, 132 Spence, Alan.............................. 176 Spencer, Lady Diana, Princess of Wales ................................... 156 Spooner, Catherine .................... 132 Stableford, Brian ................. 40, 104 Stakhanov, Alexei ..................... 126 Stanley, Tim .............................. 190 Star Trek .......................... 22, 39, 41 Star Wars ......................... 22, 39, 41 Stephenson, Neal ......................... 46 Sterling, Bruce ....................... 46, 48 Stevenson, Robert Louis .... 131, 132 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ...128, 131, 132, 133, 136, 167 Stewart, George R. ...................... 73 Earth Abides........................... 73 Stirling, Kirsten ......................... 135 Stonewall Book Award for Honour in Literature .......................... 177 Storrar, William ......................... 141 Stott, Ken................................... 126 Strachan, Zoë ............................. 177 Strathclyde................................. 174 Stross, Charles ...22, 27, 37, 66, 105, 111 Accelerando ........................... 27 STV Productions .........117, 126, 167 Sunday Times, The................. 20, 43 Suvin, Darko................................ 34

T Taggart .......................117, 167, 168 Talisman Productions .................. 26 Tambling, Jeremy ........................ 64 Tartan Noir 3, 7, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 131, 133, 135, 145, 146, 148, 152, 155, 158, 159, 162, 163, 165,

Notional Identities 169, 171, 176, 182, 183, 185, 192, 194, 196, 203 Taylor, Andrew ..................116, 128 Taylor, Charles ... 121, 122, 185, 193 Thanatos .....................................179 Thatcher, Margaret .... 39, 44, 49, 55, 120, 149, 151, 153, 176, 179 Tír na nÓg ................................... 94 Todorov, Tzvetan .................18, 147 The Fantastic - A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre .......................................... 18 Tolkien, J.R.R. ............................ 82 Middle-earth........................... 82 The Silmarillion ..................... 82 Torrington, Jeff ..........................193 totalitarianism........... 44, 63, 94, 100 Trotskyism .............................27, 53 Tucker, Wilson ............................ 40 Turnbull, Peter ...........................118 The Killing Floor ..................118

U United Kingdom .... 7, 13, 16, 25, 26, 28, 35, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 66, 73, 79, 83, 110, 118, 120, 126, 144, 145, 148, 151, 152, 161, 163, 201, 203 United Nations ..... 50, 54, 56, 57, 63 United States of America 21, 22, 26, 39, 43, 44, 45, 50, 56, 57, 60, 63, 100, 116, 117, 118, 125, 127, 128, 135, 143, 145, 148, 155, 156, 166, 168, 177, 204 University of Edinburgh .............130 University of Glasgow 51, 147, 164, 177 Queen Margaret Union........... 51 University of Strathclyde ...........164 urban noir ...................................118 Urquhart, Emma Maree ............... 72 Dragon Tamers ...................... 72 utopia. 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 49, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 93, 94, 105, 197

273

V Vietnam ....................................... 51 Vonnegut, Kurt .................. 102, 104 Cat’s Cradle ......................... 102

W Wahlöö, Per ............................... 136 Wales ................................... 55, 110 Walker, Jesse ......................... 47, 53 Walter, Damien G...................... 201 Wanner, Len .............................. 181 Ward, Christopher J. .......... 133, 135 Warner, Alan ....................... 94, 193 Morvern Callar .............. 94, 193 These Demented Lands........... 94 Watson, Roderick ....36, 60, 95, 127, 135 Wells, H.G. .................................. 73 The Time Machine ............ 18, 73 The War of the Worlds ........... 73 Welsh, Irvine97, 118, 122, 138, 144, 145, 159, 160, 161, 193, 196 Crime ........................... 118, 159 Filth...................................... 160 Marabou Stork Nightmares .. 122 Trainspotting .138, 158, 159, 196 Welsh, Louise ......37, 118, 120, 123, 131, 163, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 201 Naming the Bones ................ 177 Tamburlaine Must Die . 177, 188 The Bullet Trick .................... 177 The Cutting Room .118, 123, 131, 163, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195 West, Fred ................................. 151 Westminster ............................... 153 Whitbread Prize ..........123, 126, 147 Whyte, Christopher ............. 95, 183 Wicca........................................... 78

274 Wilson, Allan .............................204 Wilson, Laura .............................119 Wilson, Neil ...............................157 Wingfield, R.D. ..........................144 A Touch of Frost series .........144 Wings, Mary...............................119 Wolf, Naomi...............................107 Women's Royal Voluntary Service ..............................................173 Wood, Andy ................................ 53 World Trade Center terrorist attack ..............................................145 World War I ................................ 87 World War II ..........................77, 94

Index Wyndham, John ........................... 73 The Day of the Triffids ........... 73

Y Young, William P. ..................... 140 The Shack ............................. 140

Z Zamiatin, Yevgeny ...................... 94 We 94 Zelazny, Roger ............................ 77 Damnation Alley .................... 77