Book review: Naming the Bones

Published on Friday 26 February 2010 18:50

Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh Canongate, 288pp, £12.99

TO judge a book by its cover is to invite ridicule, of course, but the stark contrast between the appearance of Louise Welsh's fourth novel, Naming the Bones, and the three celebrated titles that came before it (The Cutting Room, Tamburlaine Must Die, The Bullet Trick) seems so obvious, so unmistakable, that to ignore it would be almost rude.

Where once there was a stylistic illustration and design flourish that hinted at Welsh's fascination with the secrets of eras past, now there is only the writer's name, in huge type, floating above a foreboding wave. In the abstract imagery and the scale of the typeface there is, of course, recognition and respect; Welsh is an internationally acclaimed writer whose name alone is enough, deservedly so, to guarantee readers. But the shift in appearance signals something more.

The surprise of this novel, despite the obvious and undeniable pleasures of a ripping pace and a gripping plot, is that it's not the book one might have expected Welsh to write.

Touted as the novelist who might (at last) blur the boundaries between crime and literary fiction, Naming the Bones, for all its accomplishments, seems to be a step away from that experimentalism and towards the mainstream.

That's not a criticism but nor is it something to ignore. Here, rather than testing and challenging the elasticity of the crime genre, as she has so admirably done in the past, Welsh seems more to be revelling in her mastery of it.

What you get is as clear as the embossed lettering on the cover: an assured, pacy page-turner, filled with trademark black humour and fine descriptive language (sheep as "fat ladies running downhill in high heels", gathered empties in a pub as "ammunition for a seige").

And although the novel is in some ways a surprise, that's not to say that there is no continuity with what's come before. In The Cutting Room and The Bullet Trick it was photographs that triggered investigation, here it is text.

Dr Murray Watson, a lecturer in the English Department at Glasgow University, is set on reviving the reputation of a poet, Archie Lunan, and solving his mysterious death on the island of Lismore some 30 years ago. To guide him, Watson has a slim volume of poetry, a box of indecipherable notes and the inescapable feeling that Lunan could and should have achieved more in his short life.

A lover of poetry and a failure in love, a drinker with a problematic personal life, the parallels between Watson and his literary hero are clear. Welsh expertly weaves the academic's attempts to understand the life and death of Lunan around his own reluctant quest to understand how he's ended up where he has – in love with women he can't have (or who don't want him), stymied in his profession and out of kilter with his only remaining family, his artist brother Jack. If it sounds irredeemably bleak, it's far from that.

Watson is a fine creation: a flawed self-sabotager, but with enough self-awareness to be thoroughly likeable. The snatches of interior monologue – Watson imagining himself as a movie star, an image dissolved by the flashing outskirts of Edinburgh glimpsed from the train, or bemoaning his ever-present desire for sex – add to his bleak Romanticism.

The plot is, as you might expect, assuredly controlled and cleverly paced. Welsh's well established interest in the seedy side of life – pubs with regulars known as "Crippen", the underbelly of sexual desire – is present and correct.

The exploration of sexuality as something liminal and impermanent is also there but this time only in passing. The sexual relationships are, however, recognisably tangled, knotted with infidelities, dishonesty and loss.

There are literary references too, to Conan Doyle, Stoker and Stevenson which lend to the gothic themes Welsh develops, while her descriptions of Glasgow and Edinburgh, such well-trodden literary settings, are both confident and convincing.

What is most impressive though is the characterisation. The main cast is expertly drawn, but it's the bit part players that linger in the memory and give the novel its texture and depth: the morose and disappointed librarian, the buttoned-up B&B landlady serving carrots from a tin and worrying about mud on the carpet, the drunken teenagers on Sauchiehall Street and sozzled academics cluttering up the West End boozers.

Welsh has, to my knowledge, never stated her intention to be the writer who will pull off the literary coup of assuaging the chip on crime's shoulder, perhaps because it's an impossible task, or because it doesn't interest her. Maybe this novel is her way of stepping out of the fray? If it earns the success it deserves, and seems targeted to find, it will be a fleet-footed move by a writer confident enough to determine her own destiny.