Last Friday evening, in the beautiful Borders town of Melrose, two things came to a final end: my second stint as part of the judging team for the Scottish Book of The Year awards, and the Scottish Arts Council (soon to be replaced by Creative Scotland). It was by turns a serious, hilarious, mildly dangerous and richly convivial event, full of bibliophiles, capacious talents, proud families (of winners), and solidifying friendships. Three books out of the four winners tore into the corporatizing of language and sensibility, while sponsors the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (more than a little proud of their not-quite-casino capitalism) looked on with sanguinity.
Much of my attention-span in this blog is taken up with the playful dimensions of new media, and therefore new literacies. But where I am most at and in play (other than in music) is in prose and poetry after modernism, with an ambition for Scottish letters which has rarely let me down over the last quarter century of my life. I said on the night that judging this competition, particularly with the brilliant minds and sensibilities that I locked horns (and hands) with over the last two years, was the best adult fun I could have with my clothes on - and I meant it.
As a record of the event, I'm delighted to be able to reprint the encomium that our chair, Literature Director of the Scottish Arts Council Gavin Wallace, gave to the winning fiction novel, John Aberdein's Strip The Willow. My own tribute to the eventual winner, Donald Worster's biography of John Muir, is below that.
Gavin Wallace on John Aberdein's Strip the Willow
When a debut novelist is rapturously compared not only with Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, and Duncan McLean, but also with James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Flann O’Brien (those well-known Scots!) – as John Aberdein was for his award-winning debut Amande’s Bed – you have to take notice. You also await with interest, to put it mildly, the sequel, in what the authors intends to be a trilogy.
Strip the Willow is that sequel, and the exalted comparisons are amply justified: this novel is as breathtaking, energetic, ebullient, exhilarating and formally logical and coherent as the dance of its title – a controlled riot of language, of ideas, and of character and story. It’s also as darkly dystopian and uncannily prophetic as its predecessor was tenderly, lyrically nostalgic. We’re once again in the city of Aberdeen, but in a future where ‘Uberdeen’ is being nothing less than shafted by the global corporation ‘LeopCorp’, which has taken over the bankrupt city council, and transformed Union Street into the Uber Street of advertising spectacle, and the global multinational GrottoLotto - a kind of cross between a giant bowling-alley and the film Rollerball in which enormous lottery balls sponsored by blue-chip corporations are propelled by media celebrities down the beleaguered city’s famous thoroughfare. With interesting results.
What makes this novel truly remarkable, though, is the sheer originality of the author’s style and voice, blending the Doric and dialect with a postmodern panoply of discourses into a prose texture brimful with dazzling wordplay, hilarious puns, and wry allusions. Ultimately the novel’s hero is this very linguistic daringness, which gradually emerges as our only hope of dissent in the struggle against the detritus of the thought-preventing corporate Unspeak which promises us the illusions of personal and social freedoms, in the very act of stripping them away. Strip-the-Willow is a consummate and utterly necessary work of fiction for our times; a world novel with an indelible Scottish accent.
Pat Kane on Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature: a biography of John Muir
As the New Scotland grows in confidence and stature, and the waves of our cultural and political development pull ever stronger, we should always be on the lookout to refresh and renew our pantheon of national icons. We should particularly treasure those figures whose enterprise and innovation gives us the inspiration to meet the challenges of the present and future, rather than locking us into old stories of frustration and failure.
Donald Worster's biography of John Muir, A Passion For Nature, gives us exactly that kind of inspirational figure for a 21st century Scotland. In a world where the urgencies of environmental crisis press upon everyone's mind, from citizens and workers to political and business leaders, the great naturalist John Muir is an exemplar of how we can passionately but constructively develop our green agendas.
Professor Worster's beautifully written and perfectly researched biography shows how the great defender of American's national parks and wildernesses in the 19th century drew his passion and articulacy Scottish upbringing and identity, a familiar combination of resourcefulness and piety undimmed throughout all his years in the US. Muir comes across as a Scot who was, in his own words, "salt of the earth and salt of the machines"; a devotee of natural beauty but also a sophisticated urban intellectual; a dauntless, even reckless adventurer in the wild, but also a serious institution-builder and political operative.
Most powerfully, A Passion For Nature shows that Muir's instinctive (and Burns-informed) egalitarianism stretched beyond human-kind to animal-kind, and indeed every other organism. In his luminous quotations from, and descriptions of, Muir's embrace of the sheer multitude of nature, Professor Worster reminds us that our "sustainable societies" can't be achieved through new policies or different institutions alone. It must stem from what the biologist E.O. Wilson has called our "biophilia" - the joy and energy we derive from stopping to consider our deep connection with the environment. For without loving what we have to save, as Muir might say, how can we save it?
The Scottish Book of the Year prize has rarely gone to a work which so elegantly enriches our national debate, and every other nation's debate, about the proper balance between modernity and ecology, between human inventiveness and the vast equilibrium of nature. Donald Worster's John Muir: A Passion For Nature shows how radical sensibility and good governance can strike a healthy relationship to serve the progress of a nation.
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