celticman's blog

I recently read Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project , which I also reviewed. He uses much the same framework in his debut novel The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau . Here he claims the book’s author is not himself but Raymond Brunet and he is simply translating it, much the same as he claimed the leading authorial voice in His Bloody Project was not Graeme Macrae but the triple murderer, his Scottish ancestor, Roderick Macrae. I’m usually...

His Bloody Project was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016. Fiction often dresses up as fact. In the preface Burnet cites Gaelic Ossian poetry as a fake widely lauded for being factual, but the best fiction always does seem factual, or else it’s not worth reading. As a murder there’s no mystery. In the small crofting community of Culuie, with around 55 residents, seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae took a croman and flaughter, a kind of pick...

I read The Power and the Glory years ago. But there’s no glory in forgetting the books I read faster than the faces I meet. If pushed I might have known it was set in Mexico and I would have remembered the main character was a whisky priest, but not that he was the narrator. What stuck was a scene in which the whisky priest comes to a small village and one of the peons that come to meet him goes back to his family and friends and urges them to...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08j8jj3/smile-the-nations-family-album Produced and directed by the aptly named Kath Pick this programme interested me for a lot of reasons. I’m of the not-another-fucking-baby picture generation that doesn’t feel the need to endlessly catalogue what I’ve eaten or drank or where I’m going or have been on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms. My mobile phone isn’t very mobile. Half the time I can’t...

Poco a poco I’m working my way through Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, starting with Book 1, My Brilliant Friend . When I put it like that it seems like a chore, and that is not the case. Ferrante helps me enormously, and I guess other readers, by providing an index of characters. The first-person narrator looking back to childhood and adolescence is Elena Greco, also called Lenuccai, but known by the more popular diminutive Lenu. Elena is...

A draw that feels like a defeat. That’s how far we’ve come. The demolition of Rangers when they last visited Parkhead by five goals was comprehensive. If you can remember back to that day the big worry was that in-form Leigh Griffith was out. And Rangers would be nipping on our heels for the league. Joey Barton would be the best player in Scottish football by a mile (or so he said, but don’t misquote him). Since then Celtic have beaten Rangers...

Roll up. Roll up. You too could become one of the super-rich. The kind of person that if they won a couple of million on the National Lottery would hand the winnings to their son or daughter and advise their child to buy lunch and keep the change, but don’t give any to some poor bastard, because they’ll probably spend it on drink and drugs. SECRET #1. DON’T BE THE BEST. BE THE ONLY. I’ve been reading the Sunday Mail ’s sly propaganda campaign...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/under-lock-and-key Under Lock and Key highlights many of the problems discussed in caring for vulnerable people with complex needs. This shows how 'total institutions' work. I tackled this theme directly in my unpublished novel Hut's and more indirectly (I like to think in a Hitchcock fashion) in my novel Lily Poole . https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lily-Poole-Jack-ODonnell/dp/1783522356

I was out watching the fitba yesterday, having a couple of pints and old Lawrie was trying to explain what pub he’d been in, years ago, not by telling us where it was, rather by telling us who’d once owned it and who’d given him the money to buy the pub, but he couldn’t remember that either. ‘It was a great Scottish author.’ That was the clue to unravelling the mystery. ‘William McIlvanney,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘A great...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08gd0gc/growing-up-in-scotland-a-century-of-childhood-series-1-1-education This is fantastic viewing. I wasn’t about in the 16 th Century when John Knox thought it a good idea that every village and every Kirk should have a schoolteacher, and every child should be able to read god’s word in the bible as a bastion against Popery. Until fairly recently that was the model of schooling for many children in...