In an extensive, frank, interview published this weekend in the Scottish Review of Books, McIlvanney, 73, says he now takes issue with one of his favourite characters, the detective Laidlaw, who, despite meeting some of the country’s worst criminals, said “There are no monsters”.
“I have to admit that there are cases which make me want Laidlaw to step out the page till I have a talk to him,” says McIlvanney. “When you’re living in a society where someone abducts a young man, sexually abuses him, murders him, dismembers the body, scatters the pieces in Loch Lomond and then has his lawyers campaigning for his civil rights in prison, you’re living in a place so morally bizarre that Jonathan Swift couldn’t satirise it.
“I find myself wondering if there are actions so horrific that the commission of them constitutes a unilateral cancellation of any viable connection you can have with the rest of humanity.”
In a recent reunion with three university friends, he tells the SRB, the subject of capital punishment came up. Previously, says McIlvanney, all four were against capital punishment. That day they voted on it: “Two absolutely for, two a hung jury. I was part of the hung jury but I don’t know for how long. And I don’t think that’s just hardening of the arteries.”
McIlvanney is also outspoken on the subject of the Scots language, which he believes is dying. “You don’t save a language by feeding it with belated middle-class patronage like steroids,” he says. “What people now call Scots is a poorhouse version of the language, a thin demotic gruel… It’s time to own up. Languages die. Scots isn’t dead. But it’s no very weel.” He is not entirely negative about its future, though: “What I think can survive of Scots in English is a democratic attitude of mind, what I have called ‘English in its underwear’.”
The Scottish Review of Books is published with The Herald on Saturday.
