Commentary: Readers of the future will learn from this book

If you had to imagine the kind of novel that the Saltire Prize was designed to honour, you might come up with something akin to James Robertson's And The Land Lay Still.

There is something both epic and domestic about it; as it encompasses over half a century of political and social change in Scotland, neatly paralleling the characters' quests for control over their own lives with the question of self-determination at a national level.

Although, on the surface, it seems like a conventional, social realist, state of the nation novel, it is marbled with more fantastical and surreal elements: an arch and bohemian Edinburgh hostess and her variations of traditional folk-tales and the central figure of a tramp, handing out pebbles as he criss-crosses the country.

Some critics took umbrage at the handling of unfolding events - a kind of running commentary like the scrolling headlines on-screen on 24-hour news; but that rather seems to miss the point.

The novel is a commemoration, and its true audience, perhaps, is not the generation th at has lived through the formation of the welfare state and the battle for a devolved parliament, but those generations yet to come who will want to know what life was like in our days.

And that's exactly what And The Land Lay Still delivers: a wonderful lifelikeness.

Overlooked by the Booker, I have my fingers crossed that someone in television drama production is reading it attentively.