celticman's blog

Alan Warner’s debut novel Morven Caller was adapted and made into a film. He’s one of Scotland’s most successful writers. Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is a step away from the usual write-what-you-know school. A short novella. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight through the Highlands. Most readers know about his escape to France. So we know the ending. We think we know the plot. Why bother? Warner addresses these issues in Afterward . This could and...

The Barra Boy is a whodunnit split into three parts. Beginning (Part One: Ewan Fraser). Middle, (Part Two: The Barra Boy of the title). End (Part Three: Laura Robertson). What happened in Barra is split into two time frames. Ewan Fraser, a successful London solicitor, thinks he saw Billy Matheson on the other side of the window on the crowded Tube station in 2022. But Ewan is in his fifties. Yet Billy seemed to be the same eleven or twelve-year-...

Everything has a past, even the future. Let Scotland be Scotland it the cry here, but what type of Scotland and who’s Scotland are we talking about? He takes a page out of Hugh MacDiarmid’s On a Raised Beach : ‘…We are so easily baffled by appearances And do not realise that those stones are at one with the stars. It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low, Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace or pigsty. There are plenty of...

George Mackay Brown writes about what he knows. An Orkney life. His characters are crofters, grounded in the shallow soil and windblown sea, their surnames a mark of where they bide. One bleeds into the other in a communal life in which Mackay Brown is poetically versed. The opening lines of The Golden Bird show this by documenting an island feud. ‘They had not spoken to each other, the crofts of Gorse and Feaquoy, for three generations. And...

The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. The premise is simple, but it got muddled up in my mind. Ma (Rachel Swart) has terminal cancer. She makes Pa (Herman Albertus Swart, known as Mannie) promise that he’ll leave the house and title deeds to the woman that has nursed her and helped bring up her children, Salome. But the hired help, or servant, is black. She lives with her son, Lukas, on what is termed The Lombard Place. A farm worker’s home...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_John Between 22 February 1968 – 31 October 1969, three Glasgow women that attended the dancing at the Barrowland Ballroom never made it home. Patricia Docker, Jemima MacDonald and Helen Puttock were raped and murdered. We’ve become attuned to the nuances of serial killers through thousands of stories, books programmes and podcasts. This is the shortened version, originally shown in September 2011. David Hayman...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Lives https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thirteen-Lives-Viggo-Mortensen/dp/B09ZSJ8QN4/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1L041PIUBBOXF&keywords=thirteen&qid=1684779761&s=instant-video&sprefix=thirteen%2Cinstant-video%2C93&sr=1-2 Like me, you may vaguely remember this, 23rd June 2018. 12 boys from Thailand (and their soccer coach) = 13, trapped in an underground cave (Tham Luang) and being rescued. We know there is a...

I hadn’t heard of the not too lauded Scottish novelist Agnes Ownes, from Balloch. She was born in 1926, and most of her longer, short stories—novellas—were published in the 1980s. Five of them have been brought together. Like Birds in the Wilderness, A Working Mother, For the Love of Willie, Bad Attitudes and Jen’s Party . What they have in common is stories mirror a working-class view of the world. Dialect isn’t dialect. Just the way people...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0B8M3WD4S/ref=atv_mv_hom_c_9U9jIg_brws_1_46?jic=8%7CEgRzdm9k Mariel (Karla Souza) is almost thirty. She’s been a fixture in Mexican diving team since she was fourteen, winning a bronze medal at the Olympics. But she’s never fulfilled her potential, never got that elusive gold. Never come close. She always seems to fuck up. Self-sabotage as her diving guru Brualio (Hernán Mendoza) puts it. ‘He saw me,’...

Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning study of the American housing market was personal. He lived the life. A cri de couer . Poverty by America is a step away from that immiserating experience. His gut was telling him it was wrong. He wasn’t a cultural tourist. This is a more cognitive and rational approach to explain why so many people in America are poor and likely to remain so. His solution seems pretty straightforward. Stop...