Book review: At The Loch Of The Green Corrie

It's a considered, quietly ecstatic act of tribute – for here is a disciple following literally in the footsteps of his master, Norman MacCaig. That astonishing poet, sarcastic, tender, holding court, is conjured in immediate and compelling human detail – the classical head, the poised heron stance.

MacCaig's mighty peers are there too, notably the great and immensely loveable Gaelic bard Sorley MacLean, his sentences, as Greig notes, as elliptical and unhurried as those roads unspooling around the contours of Highland hills.

The premise appears, at first, simple. Andrew Greig – poet, novelist, erstwhile mountaineer, essayist, fisherman of sorts, one of our most heartfelt and multi-talented authors – relates how he was teasingly tasked by MacCaig, not far from death, to go catch a fish in the Loch of the Green Corrie, not its real name, in Assynt, his most-loved place on earth. Which writer could resist this resonant mission?

So our man, ever the romantic, heads for the hills with two good pals and appropriate whisky. They walk (a lot), cook (actual meals), drink (it is part of the legacy) talk or are quiet as they fish.

What happens along the way is, above all, remembering; a light and giddying balance between the freight of memories, the absolution of the present and finally a mature and deeply affecting accommodation between the two.

Here in the "ruinous, transcendent heartland of the North-West Highlands" many epiphanies await.

The love song turns out to be multiple. It spins out from the pre-fossil, huge upheavals of the geology of Assynt, to Greig's own father, who taught him to observe the forces that shaped this land.

It evokes the meditative moments on the mountain itself, all intellect and questioning quietened by, say, the motion of the reeds in the wind by the little lochan's edge.

It might be called mindfulness. Greig gives us history, from Deep Time through the Clearances to the crofters' historic buy-out, but above all he gives us the textures of rock and grass, of water and wind in the high corrie.

There are those who, this reviewer included, sat awed in the presence of the great poets as gawky teenagers and had the course of their lives shifted as a result.

This book is infused with pure spirit of MacCaig – "Assynt looks extraordinary because it is." Many spirits, however, give it radiance, including MacLean of the twinkling eyes and the elongated diphthongs. Sorley's courteous, curious, opening question to those to whom he was drawn, was always "And who are your people?"

And though this is nature writing of the first order, in the end Greig is gathering in his people. He once nearly died from a brain trauma – he alludes to it without tragic emphasis here, where many writers would have wallowed in the dank fear.

Now he seems lightened and buoyed, open to the sudden small pleasures of earthly life. In the hills, among the fault lines and the fishing lines, real and metaphorical, he reflects on the transmission of values and vision which make us who we are. That, in the end, is where the quest and pilgrimage lead.

In this luminous hymn to life and love and our land, we find him, on his eventual wedding day, all heart, "embracing the whole damn precious thing". Norman would have smiled his faraway smile and would not have disapproved.

This article was first published in The Scotland on Sunday, May 2, 2010