Book review: Homecomings

Published on Friday 19 February 2010 19:14

Homecomings by Donald Paterson Two Ravens Press, 434pp, £9.99 Review by TOM ADAIR

DONALD Paterson is an adroit and adept writer, whose debut novel will keep you reading.

Its central story is its lure, and it stems from an unexpected find during a house renovation in Elgin of the memoir of Scottish emigrant Hugh Ross. He records life from his early childhood on the Moray Firth. In the opening section his voice is inward and unsure. But this is merely the precursor to a tale that takes us to Canada, Chicago and eventually through the Midwest to California, concluding in 1857.

The story is interspersed with comments by the woman, Rona Macpherson, in whose loft the dusty manuscript was found. She lives alone. Her husband and children stay elsewhere. She has an attachment to Hugh Ross's book – which is a hinted-at bone of contention between herself and Philip, her ex. She has read and sifted it for nuance, prepared her footnotes on its development as a text, and on Hugh's development as a man.

Throughout the story she interrupts, drawing the reader's eye from the text to copious footnotes, confessing that at times she has fought off the urge to edit his work or rearrange it. She assures us she has resisted.

There she is, a substantial presence, an accessory after the fact of Hugh Ross's life, preparing the work for publication, directing the reader to what she considers salient details, letting us into the sketchy facts of her own life's path, bridging slabs of Ross's memoir. "If sales of Hugh's book benefit me then that is a pleasant by-product of the months I have spent in his company … The time I have taken to read and understand this book, to step back from the tangle of my personal life, has clarified my vision," she writes.

I read the book twice. The first time including Macpherson's insertions, and then, as Macpherson did herself when the text was discovered, reading Hugh Ross's free-standing record of his life without interruption. It works whichever way you read it.

Of course I was primed by the earlier reading, but tackling Hugh without his interpreter allowed the gradual slipstream of his writing with its twists and occasional lurches to suck me in at its natural speed.

Ross's story, told at first falteringly, in naf prose with rudimentary punctuation, and later with limberness and assurance, is an adventure tale, a history, a confessional and a love story. It is the tale of Hugh's two loves – of the woman Rachael, born like Ross on the Moray coast, and of Ian, the Church of Scotland minister, a misfit and a catalyst, who along with Hugh and his friends departs for Quebec.

Hugh begins by stating that actions, not feelings, are what he's trying to record. But thoughts and feeling seep through the surface as the adventurers sail the Atlantic in cruel conditions. We witness near-mutiny. Robert and Callum, Hugh's companions, are far less reticent than he, and Ian the minister, cryptic and sage, is the calming force. Rachael, along with her friend Elizabeth has preceded the men to Canada. Finding Rachael is Hugh's chief quest – a recurring plot point that underpins a much-tested relationship to the novel's final pages.

This is but one of the strands that binds us to the narrative. Another is the father-son connection of Hugh with Ian, in which things they have left unspoken become a source of poignant suspense. Hugh has a secret he must impart, but his nature impedes him.

Natural drifters – in body and spirit – they keep on searching and every character they meet gains a well-earned presence on the page as Hugh Ross's narration becomes stylistically more complex and reflective. Callum and Robert find other destinies. Blood is spilt amid raised voices; Donald Paterson, the author, keeps his eye on all his flock, retrieving loose ends, yet leaving us tantalised and dangling at the conclusion.

As first novels go Homecomings triumphs. It is subtle, moving and smart in its shifts of tone and mood and pace. It paints a picture of modern America in its birth pangs, and of humanity's imperfections. Its own imperfection is the sometimes intrusive presence of Rona Macpherson, less a character than a cipher.