The Madness of July
James Naughtie
Head of Zeus, 352pp, £12.99
The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle
Kirsty Wark
Two Roads, 437pp, £14.99
One of the less-discussed consequences of Scottish independence would be if the newly liberated country were kicked out of the EU and Scots no longer had the right to work in the rump of the UK. Just think of all the plum media jobs that would be up for grabs. Adios, Andrew Marr! Adieu, Andrew Neil! Zài jiàn, Nicky Campbell!
What led me to measure up the curtains of the BBC’s current affairs programming in my head? Oh yes, reading the debut novels of two more Tartan Beebists, Jim Naughtie and Kirsty Wark. Both of these journalists have come late to fiction – Wark is 59, Naughtie 62 – and clearly their hearts belong to Scotland despite many years of working in Westminster.
Naughtie’s novel, The Madness of July, is mostly set in an airless 1970s London summer following the discovery of a body in a cupboard in the House of Commons. Yet it only comes alive when the protagonist, an anxious halibut of a man called Will Flemyng, returns to his childhood home in the Highlands. There are misty peaks, herds of deer and even a huge gillie called Tiny. Dark secrets are found in a strongbox. Meaningful looks are exchanged between granite-like men. It’s great.
Naughtie has kept his thriller taut by condensing the action over a single long weekend and layering several disparate plotlines. In England, there is Flemyng, a junior minister at the Foreign Office with a background in the intelligence services. In Scotland, there is his brother Mungo, piecing together the family history (their mother was apparently a bit of a goer in her day), along with their faithful manservant Babble.
In America, there is Abel, who – spoiler alert – turns out also to be Flemyng’s brother. Something untoward happened on a mission behind the Iron Curtain, it is intimated, and he decided to reinvent himself in America, working for the intelligence services there. Abel has a female boss who is revealed to be a lesbian. The book is studiously casual about both of these facts, but you get the sense Naughtie is quite pleased with his own progressive panache in having included a female character who sleeps with other women.
Not that she does so on the page, as it were. This is a novel that ruthlessly eschews all the frippery normally associated with thrillers: femmes fatales, helicopter gunships, people being sent body parts in the post, creepy sex basements, villains with monocles, silver thumbs or other improbable distinguishing features, pitched battles on the roof of iconic buildings, et cetera. It proceeds mainly by middle-aged men having repressed, tense conversations in anonymous Whitehall rooms. (It’s hard to convey drama when all you’ve got is men in an anonymous enclosed space, which leads to such sentences as: “Paul stood up to join in Flemyng’s stately progress round the table. They speeded up gently as they went, getting energy from each other.” I’m sorry, people are talking about state secrets and sleeper agents while chasing each other round a desk? Come back, implausible weaponry, all is forgiven.)
The sections set in Scotland are by far the best: Naughtie evidently feels a deep affinity with the country’s exhilarating scenery, where the mist curdles over the loch “like the guilty secrets of a multitude of hidden smokers”. Perhaps the same sense of nostalgia for his birthplace drove the writing of this book and his decision to leave the Today studios to cover the independence referendum for the BBC?
Kirsty Wark, who recently wrote in this magazine about the many hours she has spent on the Caledonian sleeper train, is also animated by Scotland’s landscape. Her setting is the Isle of Arran and, most particularly, a little house overlooking the sea across to Holy Isle. It is owned at the start of the novel by the elderly Elizabeth Pringle, who decides to leave the property to a young woman she saw pushing a buggy many years ago, and who left her a note asking to buy the place if it ever came on the market. By the time Elizabeth is ready to vacate her house – for a nursing home and, shortly after that, a grave – the young woman has grown up and has an adult daughter of her own, called Martha.
The book interweaves Elizabeth’s story of thwarted love, and loss, and loneliness, with Martha’s attempt to reunite her family even as her mother, Anna, succumbs to dementia. It is happy to dwell on domestic life, and better for it – I found it easier to care about Elizabeth’s lost lover than the imminent downfall of western civilisation against which Will Flemyng is fighting. Sometimes a smaller canvas allows for finer brushwork.
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