The Bagpiping People

Douglas Dunn

Turnpike, £10

Alastair Mabbott

Douglas Dunn, a 74-year-old Renfrewshire native, is rightly revered as one of Scotland’s finest poets. But it wouldn’t do for his poetic achievements to completely overshadow his short story writing, which, as can be seen here, is of the highest standard.

Dunn’s poetic skills are apparent in the luminous clarity of his prose, rhythms that carry the reader through to the end with deceptive ease and his ability to pack so much into a very few pages.

Selected from several decades’ work, it begins, as short story collections should, with a story that’s both strong and memorable: South America, which concerns the independent and determined Thea Docherty.

By 1937, Thea’s husband has already been gone two years, having taken a mining job in Brazil, leaving her and their two children behind. Realising that he won’t be back for years, if ever, Thea decides to have more children, with or without her husband.

She shows no shame in her pregnancy, her defiance wrongfooting everyone who crosses her path.

Given the time and place, one would expect her to be shunned as a scarlet woman, but by refusing to be cowed Thea forces the village to treat her as an eccentric rather than a pariah, and the women of the parish even come to view her with a certain admiration.

South America is one of several stories which show small towns being more accommodating, subtle and self-aware than city-dwellers generally give them credit for.

The tinkers in The Bagpiping People may be routinely denigrated, but one lad finds that his father has also been smoothing the way for their boys to get jobs.

The narrator of The Canoes would, you think, be resentful of the wealthy holidaymakers who descend upon his Highland village, but he’s actually well-disposed towards them, admiring their youth and lifestyle accessories without rancour. In Something For Little Robert a lady with a double-barrelled surname sees it as her duty to buy her housekeeper’s son a gift. Dunn doesn’t deny that there is class tension and moral condemnation in small Scottish towns, but he shows that such places can find a balance for the greater good of the community.

The second half of the book takes on a more melancholy tone. Relations become frostier. The narrators are older, more introspective, unable to move beyond earlier phases of their lives or else returning to them to find that they’re no longer welcome.

The middle-aged oncologist in Seven Farms returns to the place of his birth only to be badly shaken by the hostility he encounters. And Boyfriends And Girlfriends is the flipside to South America, showing townspeople who take a widow’s life-choices too personally and blame their unforeseen consequences on her.

These later stories are sadder, more sobering pieces, but Dunn’s prose style and his storytelling skills remain a delight. In every one of these eleven stories, we’re hanging on to his every word to see how they’re going to resolve themselves. All devotees of Scottish fiction owe it to themselves to get their hands on this book.