Guest review by Paul May: PREFERRED LIES by Andrew Greig

 

"I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to replace it. I give it to people because it is life-enhancing, funny, entertaining, honest, sometimes sad and always very Scottish."

Paul May is a children’s author, musician and former Primary School teacher. These days he writes mainly for his own pleasure. He was about to embark on a bicycling research trip to Northern Italy when the pandemic struck. While waiting for normal life to resume he has been cultivating his allotment. See more on his website. 

Let me just say that I am not a golfer. The closest I’ve come is a few rounds of putting with the children at the seaside. But I promise you, this book is about a great deal more than hitting a ball around a golf course (though it is very much about that, too). Its author calls it “an odd book about being alive, Scotland, transience, fathers and sons, mediated through the practice of golf.”

Andrew Greig is a Scottish poet and novelist who has also written two books about Himalayan mountaineering expeditions and another book, At the Loch of the Green Corrie, which is about his relationship with the poet, Norman MacCaig, about fishing, about friendship . . . it could be described as a companion piece to this book about golf, and is just as hard to pin down.

What Andrew Greig doesn’t tell you about Preferred Lies is that it is beautifully written and often very moving. After a near-death experience which leaves him lying in a hospital bed ‘drifting in some kind of ante-chamber that I thought of as blue shadowlands’, he slowly emerges from the terrifying uncertainty that follows a brain injury, and it’s golf that offers him a way forward. “But through those long ward nights on the edge of panic, when I could no longer hold Lesley’s face in my mind’s eye, it was to picturing Anstruther golf course that I turned.” Lesley is Greig’s wife.

Preferred Lies, it should be noted, is a book about Scottish golf; not about the kind of golf Donald Trump plays, and assuredly not about the kind of golf courses Trump owns. You can read about them in another great read — Commander-in-Cheat by Rick Reilly – hundred-foot-high waterfalls, anyone? Three of them on one course?

This book opens on the tiny island of North Ronaldsay, outermost of the Orkney islands:

“Pop. C62, plus 3,500 rare-breed North Ronaldsay sheep . . . The ‘clubhouse’ is a battered shed perched on breeze blocks. It is slightly skewed, and faded and tattered as everything is here by wind, salt and light. There is no starter, no tee-off booking, no queue at the first tee. In fact, there is no identifiable tee. There are also no golfers.”

As Greig plays a series of golf courses, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of old friends, sometimes with people he meets along the way, he is also constantly in the company of ghosts. They are with him from the moment he finds himself close to death, floating in those ‘blue shadowlands’ where his father talks to him about playing golf and his friends share stories and laughter. “It didn’t strike me as odd they were all dead.”

And so the book becomes a kind of memoir, too, and Greig’s father is perhaps the most vivid character in it. Not that you won’t meet plenty of other great characters here, some alive, some dead. Greig reflects on his life and on his future, as befits a man who is himself a kind of revenant. He also manages to slip in a considerable amount of information about the history of golf in Scotland.

He is often funny. He speculates at one point that Yeats may have been a golfer: “For surely only a man who has watched a smartly struck long put run across the green, swerve then clatter into the hole, could write: ‘So great a sweetness flows/ I shake from head to foot.’”

I’ve given copies of Preferred Lies to friends several times, partly in order to see the looks on their faces when I recommend them a book about golf. It’s the kind of book you might pick up in a holiday cottage or second-hand bookshop, wonder what it’s about, and find yourself still sitting there, reading, a couple of hours later. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to replace it. I give it to people because it is life-enhancing, funny, entertaining, honest, sometimes sad and always very Scottish.

Walking back across North Ronaldsay after his round of golf Andrew Greig has the idea for his new project: “It may not be a good career move – I really should write another novel – but from the outset it’s not a career but a life I’ve been after . . . Golf isn’t life. It’s just a small, radiant corner of it, like a chip of mirror glass, the kind where if you bring it close enough and examine carefully from a number of angles, you can see the whole of your eye, and a surprising amount of the world around you.”

Preferred Lies is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.  

Guest review by Graeme Fife: BESIDE THE OCEAN OF TIME by George Mackay Brown

'Mackay Brown is a writer of haunting spell, a compelling weaver of yarns...' 

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, has just been published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

The great skua is known in the Scottish islands as a bonxie, a Shetland name of Norse origin. He flies low over the sea but think of him cruising into a higher slipstream and circling the string of rocky outcrops that make these other islands, ‘the green hills and the blue waters of Orkney’, the treeless open ground where the men and women of the small population tend the planticrus (walled vegetable patches) and haul up their boats from the chafing sea onto the noust (a scooped-out trench atop a beach, protected by a shallow wall of stones), ready for the next foray into the waters for fish. The low walls are everywhere, sign of the need to win shelter from the wind that sweeps over the low ground, the wind that tosses the bonxie as he espies the pattern of existence that has been the same and changed endlessly over the centuries here.

For these islands have played unwilling host to succeeding waves of ‘land-hungerers’ as George Mackay Brown terms them in this novel, one of a series exploring the vicissitudes and intrigue of Orcadian life. In it he traces the dwindling lines of a story which slips in an out of the strands of history of these people – particularly the abiding menace of ‘war-hunger’: the advent of the Norsemen…the days when the Oracadian men marched south to join Robert the Bruce on the field of Bannockburn against the English come, in vain, to subdue all Scotland…the final chapter of the incursions, a great onslaught of concrete and tarmac at the outset of the war against Germany, laying flat the farms and holdings of the Orkneys as a base for fighter planes to combat the waves of bombers, slashing through the skies at speeds inconceivable to the bonxie and seeing beneath them, on the raw stone, scraped clear of ploughed farmland to make way for landing strips, men and women at war but not displacing the centuries-old hard toil of harbouring the fish, culling the oats for the staple cakes, churning the goat milk to butter and cheese, cutting the peat for the fires that must never be left to die out, for when a fire goes out ‘the croft dies’.

Mackay Brown is a writer of haunting spell, a compelling weaver of yarns – how apt that the image of the woollen garments the Oracadian women knit should chime with the tales that beguiled their long winter evenings by lamplight. He is an outstanding embodiment of what he calls ‘the music of  (the) island speech’, a language that laces together Norse, English and Scots, exploring the pull of ‘the ocean of eternity, the many voiced sea’. One young woman, though, has a voice that is quite different. ‘Her speech had something of the music of breakers in a cave-mouth, or far-off horizon notes, or dolphins in the flood tide.’ She is a selkie. If you don’t know what a selkie is, what enchantment awaits you in finding out. For the selkie is part of the continuum of these island stories and Mackay Brown is a shrewd and kindly companion in the roaming through them.

At the conclusion of the novel, a woman returns there to live, to be with the man she met when she came first and they were young - he written off as an idler, a good-for-nothing and the central narrator of the stories that fill the book to bursting, like the stomachs of Burns’s haggis-feasters, ‘bent like drums’. She contemplates her future: 'I'll dig my three acres and milk my goat,' said Sophie. 'I'll settle for that. We never find what we set our hearts on. We ought to be glad of that.'

For there is no quarrelling with the wind or the winnowing storm. The choice is resignation or accommodation. The peoples of the island, prey to all manner of invasion and incursion, natural and human, are stuck, to a degree, but persist, somehow. Their wandering – their continued defiance - is expressed in the stories they tell, the plunderings of the outer reaches of the imagination where they travel in ‘dream time’ which they bring back to the fires in the crofts, the work on the creels outside the stone-built dwellings, the quiet of the times on the calm seas as they wait for fish...

‘The body laments, the body dances; from somewhere deep within, in the heart’s heart, or from beyond the furthest star, the good angel, the guardian,is playing on his pipe’.        

                 

Beside the Ocean of Time is published by Polygon.

Guest review by Paula Knight: THE OUTRUN by Amy Liptrot

"The tug of love between urban and rural life is what stitched me into the core of this book." 

Paula Knight is an author, illustrator and comics creator. She has illustrated over 60 children’s books and written three picture books.

Her latest book, The Facts of Life, is a graphic novel memoir for adults, published in 2017 by Myriad Editions after six years in the making. An extract of it reached Myriad’s inaugural First Graphic Novel competition in 2012, chosen by judges including Ian Rankin, Corinne Pearlman and Steve Bell. She was awarded an Arts Council England grant for the work.

Paula is currently exploring new ways of working within her limits of being semi-disabled due to chronic illness. She is also an enthusiastic amateur photographer interested in nature, wildlife and abstraction. The former and latter are likely on a creative collision course - albeit tethered in sketchbooks waiting to be set free.

IG (Illustration): @paulajkstudio
IG (Photography): @paulajknight
Twitter: @Paula_JKnight
www.paulaknight.co.uk

As a city dweller who nurses romantic notions of living somewhere less peopled, I’d been meaning to read this for a while. I’ve long been interested in ‘overcoming adversity’ memoirs since reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography in my twenties. I’m also a wildlife lover and bird-fan (albeit not a fully fledged twitcher), so there was much to absorb me in this book.

Liptrot’s memoir is set in Orkney and London, and springs from a backdrop of extremes: her father’s mental illness; her parents’ separation; her mother’s subsequent religious fervour; and the author’s struggles with addiction. The opening pages take place on Mainland’s airstrip: Her father is waiting to be taken to a mental institution in Aberdeen as her mother arrives to introduce his newborn daughter (Liptrot). This sets the tone and premise for her story - one of leaving and returning, excess and retreat.

The book continues with Liptrot’s return to the island after a young adulthood spent partying in London. A mingling of childhood memories with exposition of the island’s landscape and wildlife is not only a backdrop to her story but the very fabric of it. The prose is pure without being flowery or too sentimental, and her close knowledge and respect for the wild Orcadian landscape is evident. She recalls memories of rural life and how, as a teenager, she yearned to spread her wings. Migrate she did - and the book tells of her chaotic life in London descending into alcohol addiction, difficult relationships, lack of direction and a distressing adverse event that is the catalyst for her return to Orkney in search of healing.

The narrative structure moves between how she spent her time on the islands and how life unfolded then imploded in London, including time attending AA meetings.

What I found most gratifying about this book was how Liptrot makes sense of her life in the seamless connections between nature and the human condition, and the enlightenment that can be gained from recognising these introjections of states. She likens the destructive action of ‘shoaling’ waves eroding the cliffs to the physiological effects of alcoholism on her body, which exacerbated seizures; and how geological tremors felt by islanders were tied up with the myth of the destructive Stoor Worm. Facts about Orkney are intertwined with folklore, mythology and stories of shipwrecksm suggesting that Liptrot is similarly washed up in this landscape from her own personal storm. Although some metaphors are explicitly explained, there is plenty of room for readers to make their own connections. For example, Liptrot engages in conservation work counting the elusive corncrake by listening for their calls at night. I interpreted this as a metaphor for personal desolation - a casting around in the dark for reassurance from at least one solitary voice confirming that life is still thriving in the gloom. The corncrake doesn’t want to be found, but it is a human need to know that the world is in order with everything in its rightful place. This is the crux of how Liptrot sets anchor - by engaging in nature; in what is real.

The tug of love between urban and rural life is what stitched me into the core of this book. The damage wreaked by alcoholism in the wilds of a heaving city versus retreating back to the expansive skies of her Orkney homeland in search of recovery is perhaps a cliche. However, Liptrot explores this in a way that throws out assumptions of rural romanticism as healer and city life as destructor. I appreciated how nature was not offered on a plate as a magical cure-all and that she makes clear that recovery is an ongoing process.

Liptrot writes about being drawn to ‘the edge’, and throughout the course of the book she at once moves geographically closer to it and metaphorically further from it: By eventually choosing to inhabit one of Orkney’s most northerly islands, Papa Westray, her deep immersion in the natural world facilitates her turning away from a life lived on the edge of self-destruction. It’s truly a human/ nature story - one that defines how the two are in no way separable.

Despite being left with no illusions as to the potential challenges of life in a remote and wild location, I still found myself searching Orkney house prices on the internet for a few weeks after reading The Outrun. The book confirmed a distinct notion that it’s as plausible to suffer loneliness living in close proximity to millions of human beings as it is on a far-flung island with mainly wildlife for company. The latter seems more palatable to me.

The Outrun is published by Canongate. 

Read our review of Paula Knight's The Facts of Life here.