A Summer Like No Other by Martin MacIntyre review: ' a small but powerful time machine'

Michael MacIntyre’s novel offers a sense of total immersion in a mainly Gaelic-speaking island community, writes Joyce McMillan

Michael MacIntyre’s novel A Summer Like No Other appears in your hands - or in your world - like a small but powerful time machine, packed with characters, incidents and landscapes from another age. First published in Gaelic in 2018 under the title Samraidh 1978 (Summer of 1978), and now translated into English by MacIntyre himself, the book is one of eight works of fiction MacIntyre has written over the last 20 years, alongside three collections of poems; and it tells the 1970s tale of our first-person narrator Colin Quinn, a 20-year-old lad from Greenock studying at Glasgow University, where he has just failed his end of year exams, thanks to an excessively lively social life.

South Uist and Eriskay as seen from the north end of Barra | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

Colin’s mother comes from Barra, and has passed on to him a basic knowledge of Gaelic; and it’s decided that he might gain some clarity about his future by spending the summer with his uncle Ruairidh, a recently widowed doctor who, although based in the Scottish Borders, often acts as locum GP for the summer on the neighbouring island of South Uist.

Uncle Ruairidh is also a keen folklorist, who loves to record for posterity the myths, legends and language carried by the tradition-bearers of the islands. And as young Colin accompanies him on his rounds, and on his visits to mainly elderly singers and storytellers, he is plunged deep into the life of the community - an experience made even more intense by the fact that this is the summer of Scotland’s famous World Cup journey to Argentina, a tale of initial sky-high hopes, disappointment and disaster celebrated and mourned across the island, in a series of all-male gatherings at various houses, both tranquil and rowdy.

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The novel therefore offers an instant sense of total immersion in a mainly Gaelic-speaking island community that is both deeply connected to all the driving, optimistic forces of 1970s modernity, and also rooted in an ancient way of life and language that is threatened by those forces, to the extent that today - almost 50 years on - it no longer exists in exactly the form MacIntyre describes.

Yet it’s striking that Macintyre offers this deep, rich, and highly complex portrait in a way that is almost without comment or inflection, as if he simply wants to lay it before us, like a long-buried time capsule. It’s not, after all, precisely an autobiographical story. MacIntyre would only have been 12 during the summer of 78, the pale schoolboy in the corner of the room at one of the football-watching parties; and although he did grow up to train as a doctor, the fictional Colin takes another path.

So when a strong and eventually shocking storyline does begin to emerge - involving Colin’s encounter with Jane, the troubled and wretchedly married great-niece of an 88-year-old islander who records some wonderful tales and legends for Colin - it seems to come very late in the tale, and to sit at a tangent to the slightly detached tone of the rest of the novel; as if over-emphasising what MacIntyre has already made clear - that island life is no idyll, but involves a human society as full of good and evil, creation and destruction, as any other.

Yet despite that slight sense of dislocation, the mix of English prose and (often) Gaelic dialogue in which MacIntyre delivers the tale is unfailingly fascinating, offering a vital bridge into the rhythms of the language and culture for English-speaking readers. And in the end, A Summer Like No Other emerges as a novel that raises questions without answers - about national identity, faith, language, modernity, masculinity, vocation, violence, and the long-term impact of trauma - in a way that requires both huge descriptive devotion and insight, and a formidable creative discipline; a discipline strong enough to leave those questions burning in the mind, long after the time-capsule is closed, and the story ended.

A Summer Like No Other by Martin MacIntyre, Luath Press, £10.99

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