On Being Scottish
I have just finished James Robertson’s 2010 novel And the Land Lay Still. It is an epic, nay, sweeping and panoramic tale of Scotland in the latter half of the twentieth century, a big book with a cast of characters including gangsters, spies, tramps, miners, journalists, rich Tories, and photographers, a real testament to Scottish life in all its multiplicitous, transcendent, deplorable glory. Reader, I loved it. Its richness, its breadth, its depth: Robertson is, as far as I am concerned, a master.
I first came across Robertson through a university course on fiction and espionage, wherein we studied his 2013 novel The Professor of Truth, an excellent fictionalised examination of the Lockerbie bombing. The course organisers, Penny Fielding and Simon Cooke, finagled we students a (virtual) meeting with the author, which was delightful and illuminating. During the course, I searched up Robertson and discovered And the Land Lay Still, the epic nature of which compelled me to buy it. I didn’t get round to reading it until last week and have just, as I said, put it down.
I cannot possibly do justice to the book here, so I only offer a recommendation to all lovers of the English (!) language. Whether you are Scottish or Slovakian or South African or Senegalian, it is a novel worth reading. Its themes, as with all great literature, are universal as well as specific. But it is as a Scot that I write here, so forgive (ah, there goes the famous Scottish cringe!) the parochialism.
Land deals with, I repeat, so much modern Scottish culture and politics that I can’t discuss it in any real depth here. It weaves together so many characters, places, and events, from the end of the Second World War to the achievement of the Scottish Parliament and beyond, that I repeat again: you must just read it to appreciate its beauty. And it is beautiful. It contains some of the most moving scenes and words I have ever read.
But one of its central concerns, if not the central concern, is what it means to be Scottish. The clue is in the title: the land lies still, always has, always will (barring a tectonic rearrangement or two). However much Scotland changes, it will always, somehow, be Scottish, be Scotland. In this, Robertson reflects a seemingly very different author: Salman Rushdie. Robertson and Rushdie are writers concerned with multiplicity and connections in an ever-shifting world and the nations and people within and across it. One of Robertson’s heroes reflects as he speechifies at a photography exhibition whose audience climactically unites many of the main characters:
… Now he catches Isobel's eye and she gives him a discreet, happy smile.
Bob Syme, worker of miracles.
Who else? Other photographers and artists and scores of folk from Duncan Roxburgh's contact database - patrons, founder-members, Friends and sponsors of the NPG, arts-administration heid-bummers and apparatchiks, media persons, critics, reviewers - the usual suspects, in other words. A handful of high-heid-yins from the world of politics: the Presiding Officer of the Parliament, the Deputy First Minister, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh; a smattering of cooncillors and MSPs. The great and the good and the not so. The worse for wear and the better by far. Scotland's a wee country. When you put a couple of hundred of these folk in a room you're looking at a spider chart of how the place works. They don't need to network much because the web's already there, they were at school together or are cousins or played in a band or were in a folk club or are married to each other or once were or had sex when they were students or last week or grew up in the same street or support the same team or work in the same building. They don't all like each other and some of them are eaten away with hatred and bile but that's not the point. The point is there's always a connection.
'So in doing what I've done, making the selection [of his father’s photographs of Scottish life across the decades] I have, have I laid a false trail? Or am I simply able, from where I am now, from where we are now, to see the route we came, to look back and see the trail clearly marked? If my father were alive we would have an argument about that too. I’d say I can see the lines on the map, and he'd say the map is covered with many lines, you only see the ones you want to see. And we'd both be right.'
The story, the story is what matters, what endures, as Mike Pendreich, the above-quoted speechifier, learned from another of the novel’s vividly penned characters. Is this reactionary nationalism, though? Not so much. The elderly lifelong socialist Don Lennie reflects on a photo at the exhibition:
[He sees a picture of] a string of men in shorts and singlets with numbers on their backs, heads bent into driving wind and rain with the Wallace Monument in the distance. The caption says STRATHALLAN GAMES, AUGUST 1966, but apart from the running gear the white-legged, mud-streaked, wiry men could be medieval peasants running straight out of history towards the lens. Don loves it.
He thinks of Saleem’s nephew, who has the village shop now. A nice-enough fellow, but not as talkative as Saleem. The nephew has a daughter who helps out behind the counter. Almost every day this summer Don has seen her, setting off on a long run in the early evening, tall and lithe and graceful in her immaculate tracksuit, so different from the bauchlie wee men in the photograph yet somehow he can see her in it, following them, overtaking the stragglers. She runs easily, effortlessly, she's sixteen or seventeen he thinks, he sees her from his window, loping down the street, fair weather or foul she's almost always out there. He is familiar with her long, even strides, the way she turns her head to check for traffic, he checks too because he wants to protect her, but she is careful, she is quick, she is safe. He wants her to be safe, he wants her to have a good life. Once in the shop he asked her what she was training for and she smiled her bonnie smile and said she was building up to do a marathon. When he sees her running he wants to be her age again, to be her friend, to run with her like a deer, he wants to have life all over. She fills him with the joy of life just as [his partner] Marjory does, but in a different way. She fills him with the joy of the future that will not be his.
No, as much as I remain a Unionist of an old Labour bent, with an admiration for the radical achievements of the Union and the part Scots have played in those, it must be said that Scottish pride needn’t be ethnic or racial in character. It is, at its best, cultural, specific but universal and, to employ a buzzword, inclusive. In this it is similar to the US at its best: a mixture of peoples and cultures and religions and philosophies, radical and united. Perhaps that is no accident, given the huge influence the Scots had on the American colonies and the nation that emerged from them.
This, however, is not to excuse the crimes of the Scots. It is a feature of some of the stupider Scottish nationalists to claim that we are simply another nation historically oppressed by the English, one that gained nothing from its subjugation. Well, for all the corruption involved and the unpopularity at the time, among some, of it, the Union was a negotiated and voluntary arrangement. And the Scots benefitted from it: we were, as it has been said, the shock troops of the Empire. Many are the Scots who enthusiastically participated in the theft and murder and slavery perpetrated by the British Empire: let us not forget this for a second.
And so, as with any nation or culture, Scotland is a complex and unfinished tapestry. We agreed to the Union and we didn’t agree to it; we claim we were and are oppressed yet we benefitted from and were gleefully complicit in the oppression meted out by the British Empire; we are the most civilised of peoples with the heartland of the Enlightenment as our capital and we are mired in drug deaths. So it goes. So it always will go, perhaps.
But even though I am a Unionist of a peculiar bent (bring on the British Republic!) and Robertson, I believe, a supporter of independence, his novel is in my view exquisite. I feel there might be a slight nationalist bias in his narrative, but he is fair to all viewpoints. And I feel a true kinship with him and his characters: a lover of Scotland, proud to be Scottish, but not in a reactionary or exclusive sense. I used to be a sceptic, in my younger, sillier days, of the Scottish Parliament. But now I feel great pride in its existence. I don’t wish to leave the Union, but I do want, I do believe in, Scottish sovereignty within it. For all its problems, and for all the shame I feel at its recent foolishness (the absurd Hate Crime Bill prime among them), Holyrood is a source of pride. I’ve even warmed to the architecture of the Parliament building, which I also wasn’t sure of for a long time. I have a friend, who may be reading this, who refers to Holyrood as the ‘toy parliament’. I am sorry, dear friend, to so publicly disparage your opinion: it is not a faux legislature but a powerful one, a legitimate one, an achievement of which we ought to be proud.
And what of the future? Robertson’s novel was published over a decade ago, and the past decade has been chock-full of developments. Unending Tory government (again), an independence referendum, Brexit, unending Sturgeon, parliamentary corruption and idiocy, and another referendum on the cards. Who knows? Who ever knows? It is my own view that, despite my preferences, Scotland will be an independent country in the next decade or so. I don’t think the Union can last much longer. Margaret Thatcher saw to that and the supposed solution offered by Blair and Brown will turn out to be, I suspect, merely a last gasp delaying tactic. Had there been no Scottish Parliament, perhaps there would have been no SNP predominance and thus no independence agitation. And then again, had there been no Scottish Parliament perhaps extra-parliamentary agitation would have reached such a pitch as to render Scottish self-governance within the Union unsustainable. Who knows? Who ever knows?
So what does it mean to be Scottish? Independence, Unionism, Protestantism, Irn Bru, whisky, whisky with Irn Bru, Billy Connolly, the Enlightenment, countless inventions and scientific advances, heroin, hooliganism, sectarianism, Highland gingers, bitter miners, poetry, Buckfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, the hills up north, literature, gorgeous cities and downtrodden schemes, Calvinism, industry, kilts and bagpipes and other invented traditions, predestination, John Knox, David Hume, JK Rowling, heresy, gay freedom, gangs, bigotry, solidarity? All of these, none of these, other things? God knows, that list could go on.
For me, being Scottish means literature, science, the Enlightenment, radicalism, ingenuity, friends, family, diversity, a rich history, beautiful landscapes, and self-reflectiveness. So I have given some of my own views on the question, but ultimately, dear reader, whether you are Scottish or not, whether you have even visited Scotland or not, the answer is up to you. Reflecting on being Scottish means reflecting on what it means to be a small nation with a young parliament within a bigger union, it means dealing with historically fluid allegiances and affinities, it means trying to pin down some essential (to the reflecter) features of a nation constantly in flux: in short, it is an acute national manifestation of the search we all take as individuals to know our ever-shifting selves. Perhaps the search will yield no final answers, and perhaps that is the point. Being human is a quest. All I can really offer is a recommendation of the work of James Robertson1 to aid you as you seek to answer the great and abiding question of Scotland—and, perhaps, of yourself.
I notice he has a new novel just out, which I really think I ought to read: News of the Dead.