The Weekenders by David F Ross review: 'starts well and then withers'

Interweaving three narrative strands, this novel doesn't quite measure up to its admirable ambition, writes Allan Massie

In the fashion of the day, David F Ross's new novel comes with a host of recommendations from other writers. This is now so common that the praise means less than it did in the days when a novel might have only a solitary puff on the cover, impressive if it came from an author such as Graham Greene or Muriel Spark. A proof had, you assumed, been sent to the distinghuished novelist, but you trusted that the puff was sincere. I daresay the couple of pages of enthusiastic approval from fellow-novelists today is just as sincere, but when there is so much of it, the chorus of praise is less impressive. You feel the author's admirers have been rounded up.

In this case, however, much of the praise is justified. The Weekenders is an ambitious novel with a shifting time-frame - not something easy to bring off. The narrative switches from Glasgow in 1965 in the first section to Italy in 1943 and then back to Glasgow's Raskine House built, of course, on the profits of slavery; and then forward to 1969 and more murders, while the murderer Bible John is casting his dark shadow on the city. There is violence throughout.

The first episode is conventional. A young girl has been murdered. Two reporters are sent to cover the case: Jock, a hard-drinking disillusioned veteran, and Stevie, a wet-behind-the-ears youngster whose brilliant football career was ended by a brutal and deliberate foul by the Rangers and Scotland centre-half. (This is not a novel that will please Rangers.) They work for a newspaper that is controlled by the fearsome Jamesie Campbell, a thug turned Labour politician. This is all promising, but the journalists have no future, though Stevie refuses to believe this.

The second episode takes us to the terrible Italian campaign in 1943. Campbell is a fearsome lance corporal, not a man whose company is to be relished. He is invalided back to the Scotland (but was the wound self-inflicted?) and finds himself in Raskine House, now a convalescent home. He runs a racket there, but attracts the attention of the laird's daughter and then of the laird himself, who recognizes him as the enforcer he needs. Campbell, a horrible man, is on the way to fortune and respectability.

The third section has a murder like the first, this one presented to us through the eyes of Doodle, a court sketch artist.

The novel has tremendous energy and a couple of the characters are likeable. But, though Ross gives it a Shakespearean epigraph from The Tempest -"Hell is empty and all the devils are here" - which, given the goings-on at Raskine House and more generally, seems a suitable judgement, there is little light in this novel, only darkness. Ross's picture of Glasgow is ugly, vicious, eventually tedious. There is no sign of the sharp wit and warm humour of the city.

That he is a gifted writer is clear. There are fine scenes, and there is sympathy for Stevie and the old soured journalist, Jock, in their unhappiness, but of the other characters only Doodle has life in him.

The Weekenders is a book that starts well and then withers: there is too much repetition, too little variety of tone. One feels it should be better. Ross writes as one angered by greed, cruelty, bullying, hardship and selfishness, but the book doesn't quite measure up to its admirable ambition. This is partly because of the poverty of the dialogue, partly because the action drags, partly because Raskine House and the goings-on there are cliches of the genre, and partly because the chief villain, Campbell, is not only a horrible man but also a crashing bore.

The Weekenders, by David F Ross, Orenda, £9.99