Book review: Headshook: Contemporary Novelists and Poets writing on Scotland's Future

Published on Friday 11 September 2009 18:11

HEADSHOOK: Contemporary Novelists and Poets writing on Scotland's Future Edited by Stuart Kelly Hachette, 276pp, £12.99

THERE'S a wonderful story by Janice Galloway at the heart of this anthology. In it, a mother and her four-year-old son, spending a day at the seaside, come across line of dead and dying jellyfish.

The son's reaction is one of primeval fear linked to a first contact with death. His mother – who will be taking him to his first day at school the following week – is crowded in by worries to which he is oblivious: the porn on the newsagent's top shelf, a near-miss accident she has just witnessed, a father angrily hitting his son and swearing at him. Tampon cases, cigarette packets and empty beer cans litter the very beach they are walking along.

Subtly, Galloway stirs these anxieties into the story so carefully that they don't overbalance the boy's happiness. There's a grace about this last day before the regimentation of school begins, a purity about the boy's trust in childhood's rules – that nothing bad will happen while the green man blinks, that football can always be played with strangers, that there's really no harm in the world about him.

Yet what the story is really about is the imminent. What will happen at that school-gate separation? What fears will there be that his mother can't save him from, that she has to remind herself she must leave him to confront alone? In short, what is the shape of that future?

There are no blueprints of the future in this anthology, nor should one expect there to be. Instead, it's like the hunted object in John Burnside's poem "The Fair Chase", "one of those creatures you find in a children's album/a phantom thing, betrayed by smoke and rain/or glimpsed through the a gap in the fog, not quite discerned".

A gap in the fog: an anthology that includes new work by James Kelman, AL Kennedy, William McIlvanney, Liz Lochhead, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Alan Warner, and Andrew O'Hagan can at least promise that, but what else can it deliver? What does it say about the state of the nation's literary imagination?

First, that punditry about it is next to impossible. Even on the individual level, here are stories that defy common perceptions about their writers – that Alan Warner's sense of humour isn't always bleak and laconic but can be straightforwardly good-natured too; that James Kelman can write scenes from inside a marriage as well as inside a mind.

On a wider level, punditry's stock takes on contemporary Scottish writing seem similarly empty. In his elegantly argued introduction, Stuart Kelly admits that the received wisdom about the strength of the "Scottish Double" or of the Caledonian antisyzgy in modern fiction doesn't seem to apply to Headshook. "Perhaps," he suggests, "a new critical term should be made: polysyzgy – multiple alignments, plural connections, a web of interlinked ideas and words."

That seems about right to me. It allows room for Andrew Crumey's sardonic take on a globally warmed Scotland, where the last midge has died and the natives have grown unaccustomedly friendly, and for James Robertson's ultra-violent dystopia. It offers space for Ali Smith's sustained unpredictability and Jackie Kay's warm-hearted wit, and for the powerfully elegaic Scots of William McIlvanney's poem "Burdalane", in which an old woman looks back on her life.

Along with poetry in Scotland's three languages, here is a vivacious anthology which left the national cultural cringe behind in a now almost incomprehensible past. In an afterword to his poem, McIlvanney talks of "trying to locate a kind of DNA of Scottish experience". How apt, then, to find it in a book that does exactly that for modern Scottish writing too.