James Robertson’s latest is a surreal romp that plays joyfully with the conventions of the Highland journey. Set four weeks after the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, this warm-hearted novel takes us from Edinburgh to the Highlands of Scotland.
Readers of Robertson’s previous novels, such as the Man Booker-longlisted The Testament of Gideon Mack, will not be surprised by how funny it is. Anyone approaching this book with a hand on their chin and a copy of Devine’s The Scottish Nation’ at their side is in for an unexpected delight.
The hero of the tale, Douglas Findhorn Elder, is turning 50. Elder is an ex-newspaper man, an ex-partner, ex-carer to his ageing father who has been taken into a nursing home after a series of falls. Out of work and at a loss, he starts to write a novel. He doesn’t know what he is writing about or even if he really wants to write it. Then, on the night of his 50th birthday, he gets drunk alone and sits out on the back porch, or “sitootery”. There he meets a talking toad who dubs himself Mungo Forth Mungo. Elder invites Mungo to join him in a drink and they have a companionable drunken chat. Mungo is Elder’s inner voice, but remains a toad to his core. He maps time by the seasons and judges the warmth of each hostelry by the volume of insect life there. Duality and Jekyll and Hyde-like alternative personalities recur through out the story, sometimes conscious and sometimes not.
Looking for freelance work, Elder arranges a meeting with his ex-editor at the Spear newspaper, where he has worked for 20 years. This very thinly disguised version of the Scotsman has just moved from a glorious city centre building to a dull industrial estate, where it changes editors constantly and is haemorrhaging readers and staff. But the referendum has been good to newspapers. A rival paper’s sales soared when it took a pro-independence position and the Spear wants to capitalise on that: in order to woo “pro-indy people” the editor commissions a series of long articles about The Idea of Scotland, “seen through a tartan lens”. They will cover art, philosophy, science and “Literature. The stuff you don’t read for fun.”
So Elder is asked to interview a woman called Rosalind Munlochy, on the occasion of her 100th birthday. She is a former MP and radical, a novelist, an adventurer and all-round witness to the Scottish century. The editor wants Elder to find out how she voted in the referendum.
Elder sets off with Mungo Forth Mungo in his pocket, heading in the general direction of Oban. Robertson is a writer with a profound awareness of Scottish literary tradition and this is both a celebration and critique of the conventional “othering” of the Highlands. Narrative representations of the Highlands are rare, but tend to centre on a troubled hero from outside who discovers a wonderland of whisky, romance and rustic wisdom. Robertson references Buchan’s The 39 Steps, as well as The Vital Spark and Whisky Galore. Even elements of Brigadoon and I Know Where I’m Going! get a look-in.
As well as a book-within-a-book, Robertson includes research notes, interviews, lists and monologues by Mungo, who claims to be the only reliable narrator. There are more unlikely coincidences than you could shake PG Wodehouse at. But buried within are serious points about the stories we tell about ourselves, how history shapes our identity, scarred landscapes with absent populations and the often bizarre nature of self-selecting communities. In heartsore times we need more books like this.
• Denise Mina’s latest book is Blood, Salt, Water (Orion). To order To Be Continued … for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) 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.
