In portraying a late-90s Fleet Street balanced obliviously on the brink of the internet, Annalena McAfee’s debut, The Spoiler, sent up an industry in which she’d spent 30 years. Hame – chunkier, more complex – centres on the secret life of a fictive Hebridean poet and sometime SNP candidate who dies shortly before the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. The object of McAfee’s satire this time isn’t an institution whose future defies prediction, but a nation.
The vote is still two months away when Mhairi, a Canadian curator of Scottish descent, quits Brooklyn for the (invented) island of Fascaray to write a book on the recently deceased Grigor McWatt, whose Scots renderings of classic poems (“They fuck yer heid, yer maw and paw”) caught the eye of Ezra Pound. Wider fame came from his anglophobic newspaper columns but above all from “Hame to Fascaray”, adopted as a nationalist anthem (“This is oor ain land... Let’s stake oor claim”) and covered by everyone from Bob Dylan to Susan Boyle.
Mhairi finds gaps in McWatt’s life story, even though it’s been dramatised on the BBC (Bill Paterson and Alan Cumming sharing the role). She can’t find records of his family or anything about his military service, even though he’s meant to have enlisted when Fascaray was requisitioned for training during the second world war; another puzzle is the identity of McWatt’s sometime correspondent Jean, whom Mhairi instinctively blames for the fate of McWatt’s one-time sweetheart, Lilias, lost to drink.
McAfee toys with our assumptions as she toggles between Mhairi’s book, McWatt’s letters and Mhairi’s personal diary of life on an island where the rain is “like standing under the power shower in my Cobble Hill gym”. Added to her anxieties as a posh-seeming interloper (she’s scared to say “bath” in public) is the thought of her estranged Italian-American husband, Marco, sleeping with his yoga instructor.
This diary section works as light relief, reliant on the comedy of frequent mishearings from Mhairi’s nine-year-old daughter as well as Mhairi’s memories of trading national stereotypes with Marco. Some of the other interleaved material, such as McWatt’s curiously assiduous glossaries of Scots vocabulary, advances the story so subtly you might not notice; but much of it – even McWatt’s poetry – adds colour rather than drama. That said, only the stoniest readers could suppress a smile at some of his “owersettins”, and McAfee has had a lot of fun: a line in McWatt’s version of Invictus, WE Henley’s Victorian hymn to keeping your chin up, is recast from “It matters not how strait the gate” to “Ah dinnae care if bampots prate”.
If Hame often comes over like a more cheerful version of a Sarah Moss novel, it’s also sneakily political at a time when a hard Brexit dangles the prospect of a Great British break-up. Mhairi’s tome on McWatt doubles as a history of Scotland, portrayed as a tragicomedy studded with own goals from colonial ambitions in central America (ending in bankruptcy and the Act of Union) to the SNP helping to bring down Labour in 1979 only to end up with Thatcher. Be careful what you wish for – or at least how you wish for it – seems to be the message; but while Hame’s pivotal revelation first lands with the force of a raspberry blown in the face of nationalism, it’s typical of the novel’s generosity that it finally feels like more of a kiss.
• Hame by Annalena McAfee is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
