Alan Radcliffe (2023) The Old Haunts.

For any of you unfamiliar with Glasgow dialect, The Old Haunts are the place you used to hang about when you were younger. Alan Radcliffe has pretty much nailed it in his debut novel. Part of the Fairlight (his publisher’s) Moderns. I’m not sure what that mean but it sounds like a good marketing gimmick. The Old Haunts speaks for itself. I’m tempted to give Alan Radcliffe the Great Scottish Writers tag I give to authors such as William McIlvanney and Janice Galloway. This short book is great but sometimes quality isn’t enough and we need more quantity.

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s follow up novel To Kill a Mockingbird is an example the exception to the rule. Quantity not being good enough. Fictional was factional for Harper Lee. The blurring of place and time gives her characters authenticity.

Readers sometimes confuse the author with the narrator. The Jem of To Kill a Mockingbird being conflated with Harper Lee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird

Alan Radcliffe may or may not be Jamie. His quest is examining his past lives and what made him who he is. Away from himself, up North, Aumrie, near Loch Tay, retracing his roots with his boyfriend. Landlady, Kit Ross, a wee woman with her own jaggy past. Authors necessarily need to tap into their psyche, characters calving off like glaciers from the larger shelves. Listen to the sound of Jamie’s actor boyfriend.

‘With his rigid hair and ludicrously square jaw, Todd looked like a cartoon hero—Fred from Scooby Doo or a Disney Prince—only with glossy pubes, a sponge-like scrotum and a belly that seemed to go on forever.’

‘One Day All This Will Be Yours’, the second chapter (after the inciting incident) brings his parents into focus. His parents lived above the Purple Shop in a tenement row. The kind of shops that sold fag and milk and papers and most other things you might need. We’d the same kind of shop in the seventies over the road called Johnny Graham’s. Their work was their life. Jamie was theirs and that was enough to be going on with. Their hope was he’d make something of himself. Something they could casually throw into a conversation, like my Jamie’s a doctor now.

Jamie is not like other boys because he likes other boys. He tries to work out how and when this happened. We’re in Douglas Stuart territory here of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo.  We know Jamie will get there. The hero’s journey doesn’t have to be heroic it just needs to be authentic.  Read on.