News of the Dead

James Robertson

Hamish Hamilton, £18.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

In 2013, James Robertson wrote a story a day: 365 tales, each one 365 words long. They were published in one volume the following year. Some stories were nothing more than light sketches, pithy squibs and fleeting impressions. However, many made a little go a long way and showcased experiments in form and a diverse array of subject matter, whether ballads, monologues, fake obituaries, replayed dreams or restyled fairy tales. In one entry, a writer describes his more inventive fables: “They’re the stories I let out in the open, the ones I slip off the leash.”

Yet for all its range and sparkle, 365 left the reader wanting more. Ultimately, size mattered. Robertson can write short, quick-fix fiction, but his real talent is for expansive and immersive novels which grapple with Scottish identity, heritage and culture, and the way in which history, personal and national, leaves its mark on the present. And unlike those off-the-leash stories, his novels’ flights of fancy – supping with the Devil in The Testament of Gideon Mack, conversing with a toad in To Be Continued – amount to more than quirky conceits, they are keys to unlocking a character’s idiosyncratic mindset or decoding their wayward antics.

Robertson’s latest novel, News of the Dead, sees him playing to his considerable strengths by mapping the lie of the land of a north-eastern corner of Scotland, crafting a series of histories about a place and its people in three different eras, and treading the fine and often blurred line between fact and fiction. Fantastical elements appear as the stuff of legend, but for the most part Robertson keeps things grounded, and the book is all the better for it. Indeed, as his characters’ lives take shape and their impulses become clear, we admire the fertile imagination on display and the captivating storytelling at work.

The fictional setting is Glen Conach, a place so off the beaten track and so buried within the Grampian Mountains that many people living within an hour’s drive have never heard of it. In 1809, an outsider learns of its existence and that of a local cultural treasure. Charles Kirkliston Gibb is an antiquarian – “an interpreter of this country’s past” – who is keen to inspect the Book of Conach, one of the most important, though neglected, of Scotland’s relics. The medieval manuscript has ended up in the library of Glen Conach House. Gibb writes to the Baron of Glen Conach, secures an invitation to visit, and travels up from Edinburgh to begin what turns out to be an eventful four-month stay.

Details of that stay are filtered to us through Gibb’s warts-and-all journal. Two other main narrative threads are woven around it. One is Gibb’s translation of the Book of Conach. Originally written in Latin about 800 years ago, the book chronicles the life of the “blessed and venerable” Conach, who performed miracles for his fellow Picts in “the north country” before devoting himself completely to God by becoming a hermit.

The other strand takes us into the present day. Maja, the oldest inhabitant of the glen, is also something of a recluse. She spends her days reading Gibb’s journal, which was recently unearthed at the “Big House”; she listens to young Lachie, who swears he has seen the ghost of a girl in the library there; and she looks back on her long life to weigh up how much she has lost and how far she has come.

The Maja and Conach sections prove absorbing, and the stark contrasts in voice, content and time period add colour and variety to the proceedings. But these parts can also feel episodic and digressive when set against Gibb’s journal extracts which, collectively, constitute the bulk of the novel. Gibb emerges as the chief protagonist and it is in his account that we encounter rounded characters, carefully constructed set-pieces and expertly controlled drama.

Gibb, it transpires, is an “intellectual vagabond”. Over the course of his career he has travelled around sponging free bed and board from wealthy patrons and pocketing any possessions which won’t be missed. His latest host, the Baron, is bemused by his presence and sceptical of his profession: “What’s an antiquarian if not a man filling his idle hours with an amusement?”

Gibb keeps his head down translating the Book of Conach and shows his face at mealtimes. After a while he becomes fond of the Baron and his family – his wife Margaret, his daughter Jessie – and deceives them to extend his stay. But when Jessie rumbles him, he finds himself under her sway and faced with an offer he is unable to refuse.

News of the Dead is a rich patchwork of a novel. Along with the three narratives there are a number of documents, from written testimonies to transcribed oral histories. Some allow Robertson to render folklore in local dialects (“an he dee’d three daiths on the same day, by stane, by widd an by water”). Tacked on at the end is the 50-page “Story of the Dumb Lass”, a bravura tale that is at once haunting and thrilling, and whose neat twist puts everything we have read before in a new light.

Several of Robertson’s novels have explored the difficulty in establishing a definitive version of events. “That’s a slippery substance, truth,” says a character in The Professor of Truth. “Memory: a tricky substance,” muses Gideon Mack. News of the Dead examines this further through the myths surrounding Conach, the gaps in Maja’s recollections and Gibb’s artistic licence in his translation. Robertson scatters contradictions and discrepancies which force us to sift the evidence before us and question what we are told.

The challenge for the reader is all the more invigorating when characters are uncertain as to what is real and what isn’t. As Maja says of her life-story: “It comes to this in the end – a mixture of memories and imaginings and I’m not sure which is which.” What is clear to us, though, is that her creator has written a wise and hugely satisfying novel about stories, sanctuary and, to quote the Baron, the “strange, heeliegoleerie world we bide in”.

The Herald:

James Robertson will be talking about News of the Dead live onstage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday, August 16 at 5.30pm 

Details at: edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/reading-scotland-james-robertson-ghosts-of-the-glen