And the Land Lay Still

Product Information

Don has two sons, the sweet-mannered CND activist and teacher Billy, and Charlie, a wayward gangster-soldier from bad-boy central casting, who is probably the novel's least convincing character. Charlie's relationship with feisty journalist Ellen, her brutal rape, pregnancy, and most of all, her and rebound partner Robin's reaction to all of this, didn't quite ring true for me. Perhaps paradoxically, I completely believed in the drunken spy, called James Bond. An embittered servant of the British state, Bond takes his revenge on his patronising superiors by bringing down a disgraced Tory MP, David Eddlestane, one of the party's last representatives in Scotland. Eddlestane is so well observed as to become an integral part of the book, not just the plot-device he might have been in less capable hands. Rather than revel in the sleaze of his demise, Robertson brilliantly wrongfoots us by letting Eddlestane emerge as one of the novel's most sympathetic characters, with a marvellous, dignified telephone confrontation with the man who ruined him. Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still is the most fully realised attempt to make a cohesive national story of the period and forces of devolution. Having been politically active in the 1980s, notably through the pro-devolution magazine Radical Scotland (1983–91) – thinly disguised in the novel as Root & Branch – Robertson naturally began with events and debates he had experienced first-hand. But on beginning to revisit this period he encountered a historical problem:

it had much earlier declared cultural devolution, both in the radical voices of new Scottish writing – from James Kelman to Matthew Fitt, from Janice Galloway to Ali Smith – and in the rewriting of Scottish cultural history that produced, in the 1980s and 1990s, a new sense of the richness and the autonomy of Scotland’s past cultural achievements. ( Craig 2003, 39) Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The stories we follow are mainly of those that are not too well-off. Apart from Michael Pentreich, we follow the stories of a couple who have two sons who follow very different paths, one a gentle left-winger, another a violent thug, the friend of the man of the couple who, one day, walks out on his wife and daughter without explanation and whom we meet early on (without being aware of it). We follow the story of the posh Tory M.P. who spends much of his time fighting with his wife (often physically but she is an equal match for him) and squandering his money, and their three children, two of whom do well and make money and one of whom, the daughter, drops out. The journalist, daughter of a generally absent father, the woman who keeps a sort of literary/political salon and the reformed thug who may or may not have killed William McRae also feature. The most interesting, perhaps, is the tale of James Bond (it really is his name but he changes it to Peter Bond later on, for obvious reasons), who really is a spy. He is recruited at a low level and remains at a low level, working in London However, he is later sent to Scotland, where he spies on the Scottish nationalist movement, as the authorities are worried it might turn into another Ireland, though Bond does not believe that that is even vaguely likely. The sporadic violence is both amateur and ineffectual. The award-winning epic novel received near-unanimous critical acclaim in the mainstream British press. To achieve better balance, there should be more reference to the common characteristics of the British people… ( Royal Commission papers, National Archive, HO 221/360).

This being said, too fixed attention to the national story can obscure key aspects of devolution, which – as Robertson notes – has as much to do with Britishness as Scottishness. At our first workshop, Catriona Macdonald noted that: If contesting an integrated British historical narrative was key to these Whitehall debates of the 1970s, the question of Scotland’s ‘distinct values and way of life’ were being explored with great energy by writers and scholars. Here the problem was blank space, rather than competing stories. During our first workshop, Cairns Craig argued that the explosion of Scottish historical writing over the past few decades represents the ‘filling-in of what was a kind of emptiness in the Scottish past’. For Craig the energies which led to Holyrood originate in the recovery of national historical memory, with magazines such as Radical Scotland and Cencrastus playing a key role:

Comments ranged from how much readers enjoyed the fact that all the story strands wove together so satisfyingly at the end, to one lady who admitted that, being English, not only had she gained an interesting slant on recent history as an “outsider”, but she had also learned new Scots words she had never heard before. JAMES Robertson's fascinating and multi stranded novel is proving a huge hit with Scottish book groups - and Strathblane is no exception. Pat: This is a powerful story of Scotland and of the growth of Scottish Nationalism from the 1950s to the present day, evoking strong nostalgic memories of life during these times.Set in the present day, In Ascension is a modern Scottish novel that follows a Dutch biologist named Leigh, who grew up in Rotterdam and is captivated by sea life.

The novel was enjoyed by everyone in the group - which is no mean feat as there are usually lots of different opinions around the room and few books gain a unanimous accolade! The Polish scholar of language nationalism Tomasz Kamusella added that ‘most states and nations extant at present in the world do not have and do not aspire to spawn their own national literatures’. But in Sassi’s view, the fierce contestation of Scottish literature’s legitimacy and importance was itself strong evidence of its political significance: ‘The degree of denial and denigration suffered by Scottish literature in the twentieth-century is in fact directly proportional, I believe, to the perceived political power of an independent national literary canon’ (ibid.). Its findings, eventually published in the 1973 Kilbrandon Report, set the process of Scottish devolution into deliberately retarded motion. The Daily Telegraph was impressed by the book’s ability to meld “engrossing individual storylines” with “cultural shifts such as the birth of Scottish nationalism, the death of industry, the sexual revolution and the boom in North Sea oil”. [5] The New Statesman noted that four years’ worth of research had gone into the book and finished its review with the line: “It’s some achievement”. [6] You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

In a sense, Robertson says, "this novel is a riposte to that. What I'm trying to say is: 'Immerse yourself. A lot has gone on. The place has changed beyond recognition. We haven't had civil war or bloodbaths, thank God, but we have had change.'"

The winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award 2010, And the Land Lay Still is a masterful insight into Scotland's history in the twentieth century and a moving, beautifully written novel of intertwined stories. Our story today, then, is about our stories: their history and future, influences and influence. We cast the spotlight not only on Scotland’s tales but on their tellers – the folklorists and the fabulists, short story writers and the seanachaidhean – those who have delicately spun their colourful yarns from the threads that connect us all. Home> Fiction from Scotland> And the Land Lay Still And the Land Lay Still By (author) James Robertson I didn't set out deliberately to follow the Gothic tradition, but there's no question that some of that Hogg and Stevenson stuff does speak to me in a weird way. I am interested in how the past continues to influence the present and how the present changes the way we think about the past."

Devolution’s Backstory: Managing ‘National Feeling’

Other voices rather welcomed the bracing effect of the call-up papers, or devolution’s nearest equivalent. Writing in the wake of the failed 1979 referendum on a Scottish Assembly, Tom Nairn took heart from the harsh division exposed between the ‘windy, sleekit, after-dinner “Patriotism”’ of middle-class Scotland and the hard political choice imposed by the Scotland Act. Despite the general malaise which followed, wrote Nairn, ‘a great deal of spineless self-affirmation was blown away in the result’. The idea behind this was to give the appearance of doing something, which would avoid the need for real action for as long as the commission was deliberating. According to Wilson, the commission was designed to spend years taking minutes, but in public it gave the appearance that the government was taking the issue seriously. It was hoped that, by the time the commission reported, the SNP would have gone away. ( Finlay 2004, 322) 7