Book review: Rabbits, by Hugo Rifkind

Sometimes sad, often funny, this coming-of-age story shows that, while the past may be a foreign country, it is never altogether lost. Review by Allan Massie

Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind is an accomplished journalist whose columns and reviews I always read, usually with pleasure. Now, in his forties, he has written his first novel, a coming-of-age story set in, mostly, Edinburgh, Perthshire and Cambridge in the mid-1990s. It is hard not to identify the narrator, Tommo, with Rifkind himself, but important to remember that while fiction draws on life, it also transforms it. Here a subtitle might be “illusions and losing them”.

Tommo is at a boarding school in East Lothian, gone there from a recognizable day-school because his mother is ill and frequently in hospital and his father has had success with crime novels (to Tommo’s embarrassment), featuring a butler as detective, and is often in London on account of films and TV. The boarding school is rough and wild, much smoking, drinking and drug-taking. It belongs in the Victorian age, Victorian fiction anyway, except that there are girls, lots of them. I got confused throughout the novel about which girl was which. Perhaps Tommo did likewise. His best friends, however, are male: Alan, who is cool and intellectual, and Johnnie who is different. Reflecting now, Tommo calls him “charismatic” and wonders if he may have had a crush on him.

Johnnie is actually at the heart of the novel. He is a tragic figure. His elder brother was killed when a shotgun went off in the Land Rover he was driving – Johnnie may have been in it too. Disturbed, he gets himself expelled from school. Tommo spends a summer holiday with him on the farm he inherited and from which the landlord, McPhail, some sort of cousin, is trying to evict him. The summer gives the novel its title. They go round lamping rabbits at night, lots of rabbits. If this novel was ever taught in universities (good idea), sensitivity warnings would be required for tender-minded students.

Tommo is drawn into the world of landed gentry and crumbling castles. He fancies McPhail’s daughter Flora, the most memorable of the countless girls in the novel, though it’s doubtful if he will be her type even if, to my mind but not quite to Tommo’s, McPhail is never quite the real thing, what an old lady I knew would have called a “counter-jumper”. Tommo even finds himself promoted from grouse-beating to be a gun at a pheasant shoot – very funny passage. Still, seen through Tommo’s callow eyes, it rings true.

After these incursions into a different world and after so many parties, each party merging into the next, plus too much drink, too many drugs and all these seemingly interchangeable girls, youth slips away and Tommo now lives in London “a Burns-Night Scot” – grown-up, in other words and responsible. That journey is, I suppose, the way of life. Tommo has come through, is now sensible and, I guess successful, although also sad in a way.

Yet, though the past is, as we know, a foreign country where they do things differently, it is never altogether lost. Everyone has a part of themselves they can’t or don’t wish to leave altogether behind. “Ah, no; the years O! / And the rotten rose is ript from the wall” as Thomas Hardy wrote.

This is a fine novel, sometimes sad, often funny, a bit long perhaps – we might, with advantage, have skipped some of the parties or left them earlier. It is moving, as novels of time lost and time recovered always are. I hear faint echoes of James Kennaway, even of my own two long-ago Perthshire novels, though I don’t imagine Rifkind has ever read them.

Rabbits, by Hugo Rifkind, Polygon, £14.99