The Angel in the Stone

RL McKinney

Sandstone Press, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

McKINNEY’S second novel, two years on from Blast Radius, is as accessible and life-affirming as any book can be which deals with a splintered family driven ever further apart by blame and resentment. The roots of their estrangement can perhaps be traced back to the death of their father from cancer when brothers Cameron and Finn were young boys. But the pivotal moment around which this story revolves came in 1993 when Finn, who was probably bipolar, definitely had drug issues and believed he was protected by guardian angels, carelessly plunged to his death while rock climbing.

Calum, who saw his brother die, recovered from his own injuries, later getting an Aberdeen woman pregnant. He didn’t, however, stick around to raise his daughter, Catriona, instead following the money and glamour to America, where he finally crashed and burned, returning to Scotland a shambling wreck of a man.

Five years later, he’s in much better shape than he was, living alone in a croft near Fort William, but he’s not much better at this family stuff than he was when he walked out on them. His mother, Mary, has developed dementia, which has exaggerated her “dominant traits”, making her paranoid and angrier than ever: “A wee plump fairy godmother with a bun, specs on a chain and a whole pumpkin-load of bitterness”. She has always blamed Calum for allowing Finn to go climbing on the day of his death, and in her worsening condition anger is always close to the surface. Calum knows that, before long, she won’t be able to look after herself and responsibility for her care will fall to him. Although he tries to conceal it, Mary picks up on his resentment and lashes out at him accordingly.

It’s at this point that Catriona returns to her mother’s home in Aberdeen after her first year at university, unable to tell anyone that she was raped by another student at a party. Traumatised, and increasingly conscious of the gulf between her and her mother, she seeks out Calum, whom she hasn’t seen since his drunken return to Scotland five years earlier, in the hope of overcoming her antipathy towards him and reconciling with her father at last. The summer she spends with him in the West Highlands provides the first glimmers of hope that, even as her grandmother is slipping deeper into a paranoid dementia, the wounds inflicted on her family might somehow be healed.

McKinney, born in Colorado and raised in California, shows she has an affinity with the Highlands and the kinds of non-traditional communities that are springing up there now – Calum’s neighbour and friend-with-benefits is a sculptor, and a London couple live close by – and she has set the story during the independence referendum to reinforce points about interdependence and responsibility. Hooking its readers early and not letting go until the very end, The Angel In The Stone, even at its darkest, is shot through with glimmers of optimism and humanity without raising unrealistic expectations for her characters’ future.