HAME

Annalena McAfee

(Vintage, £8.99)

Let’s not get into the debate here as to whether Scots is a language or a group of dialects, or we’ll all get far too worked up. But the question looms large in Annalena McAfee’s latest novel as part of an exploration of the concept of identity. To what extent is identity a synthetic construct,

she asks, and can one ever pass judgment on

its authenticity?

McAfee seeds these questions into the story of Mhairi McPhail, a Canadian-born New Yorker, who, after splitting up with her partner, has come to the fictional island of Fascaray with her nine-year-old daughter to write a biography of the island’s most famous resident, the late poet Grigor McWatt, and to help establish a McWatt museum there.

Mhairi’s account of her time on the island is interspersed with extracts from her book about McWatt and the poet’s own copious writings about Fascaray, as well as a few of his poems and letters.

Fascaray is introduced as a microcosm of Scotland, events in the island’s history paralleling real-life events, such as the attempt by the “Fascaray Five” to claim back land from the laird, the blowing up of a postbox and the arrival of an American billionaire intent on building a golf course.

And Grigor McWatt himself is a composite who embodies attributes of a number of the poets who famously haunted Rose Street in the 1950s and ‘60s. He owes his fame, though, to the song “Hame tae Fascaray”, covered by a vast range of artists from Jimmy Shand to Paulo Nutini.

In her extracts of his writings, McAfee captures the perfect tone. McWatt’s voice is exactly what we expect from a thrawn, curmudgeonly Scots poet of his generation: just a shade too grandiloquent, bloated with a haughty self-regard, shot through with a nationalism of the most insular, anti-English type and continually promoting a romanticised view of Scots rural life in which even the acquisition of a kitchen tap

is “a triumph of vacuous consumerism over common sense” on an island with so much running water.

In contrast with McWatt’s unshakable convictions,

Mhairi is uncertain of herself and insecure about her identity, never having fitted in anywhere other than cosmopolitan New York. “I’ve always been a fraud. I don’t belong anywhere,” she writes.

Her parents had broad Scots accents, but Mhairi was raised to speak the North American equivalent of RP, marking her out as posh wherever she goes. Although she has family roots on Fascaray, she feels less accepted on the island than the current generation of incomers, and her doubts about her life-choices increase when she realises she may have been neglecting her daughter for work.

Partly a gentle satire and partly a genuine celebration of Scotland written by the London-born daughter of Scottish parents, Hame is written with wit and intelligence, and the undoubted effort she put into capturing McWatt’s voice,

both in his poems and his Fascaray journals, has paid off handsomely. At more than 500 pages, it may look intimidating, but it’s over, if anything, too soon.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT