Scots Inspiration by Will Self
On the 14th of August this year, I stood on top of Ben More, a 1,174 metre peak on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. It was a radiantly sunny morning, and having left my B&B at Luib early that morning, zipped up in Gore-Tex and cashmere, I was now stripped to my T-shirt and sweating. It was such a clear day that I could see all the way south, over Loch Katrine and the Trossachs, and down the length of Loch Lomond to Helensburgh at the mouth of the Clyde.
To say that this was an inspiring, peak experience would be something of an understatement. The previous evening I’d left Edinburgh, where I’d been attending the Book Festival, and driven north. I like to try and bag a Munro (Scottish peak over 3000 feet), or two, whenever I’m up in Scotland, and the juxtaposition between the heady, creative fervour of the nation’s capital during Festival time, and the tawny immensity of the mountains, their flanks dappled by shadow, their summits wreathed in cloud, never fails to lift my spirits.
The day before I’d been listening to Alasdair Gray, one of the pre-eminent bards of contemporary Scots writing, reading from his new novel at a fringe Book Festival event in a club off Edinburgh’s Grassmarket; now I was high enough up in the central belt, to have a sense of the whole topography of the country that his fiction limns and hymns. This is the exciting paradox of Scotland, for me: a country small enough for one to be able to apprehend its shape, while immense enough to lose one’s self in its solitude.
I’ve been coming to Scotland since childhood, but have really only got to know it at any deep level since the 1990s. A chance visit to a friend’s house on the northern Orkney isle of Rousay was the beginning of my immersion. Of course, strictly speaking Orkney isn’t Scotland, but as I went back to the Islands for year after year (and lived there over the winter of 1993-4), I invariably ended up traversing a great deal of the mainland. Heading up the A9 from Inverness, over the Moray and Dornoch Firths, I often had the same sense that I had in August of Ben More: of apprehending the entire shape of the country, but while a landscape may be grasped, a people remain impenetrable.
However, in 1997 I had the great good fortune to marry a Scot, so, I suppose, this strengthened my connection with Scots society. My wife comes from Motherwell, an ex-steel town to the south of Glasgow. To some, this is the unlovely ‘rust belt’ of Scotland, but to me it’s far more representative of the country than any tourist postcard view. We usually stay at New Lanark, the ideal mill community built by Robert Owen and David Dale, when we visit my parents-in-law. Here the Clyde flows over falls through a deep and picturesque gorge. The village itself has been preserved (and is a World Heritage site), and the orderly, if Spartan, purity of the old mill buildings and the workers’ tenements, displays the same communitarian, enterprising spirit that created the architectural triumphs of Glasgow’s municipal architecture, or the elegance of Edinburgh’s new town.
As a writer, I’m leery of setting my stories and novels anywhere that I don’t know intimately. It seems to me that a reader senses a writer’s understanding of place, even if he or she has never been there. For this reason I’ve only set one of my stories directly in Scotland; Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys, the title story of my 1998 collection of the same name. This story is a paean to my relationship with the country, and tells of a mammoth – if despairing – drive, undertaken by its protagonist from Orkney, down the northeast coast, through the Grampians, on to Glasgow and then down the M74 to England. En route, the driver picks up a hitchhiker, a lost young man, who is on his way to Glasgow for a night of serious drinking with a friend. The night will, he expects, climax in a bizarre race, during which he and his pal will mount large Tonka toys and scoot down Sauchiehall Street – hence the story’s title, which was the advertising slogan for Tonka toys in the 1970s.
Like all the most incredible fiction, this story was inspired by real events: a real drive from Orkney, a real hitchhiker, a real communion with the spirit of the country through the foibles, dreams and nightmares of its inhabitants. But there’s more: my last novel, The Book of Dave also owes a large part of its inspiration to Scotland, and specifically to Charles Maclean’s splendid book Island on the Edge of the World, about the remote Hebridean community of St Kilda. Indeed, as the years pass, and I return to Scotland more and more, so the vividness of the country begins to hybridise with my more concrete and workaday, London imaginings. Now, in 2007, I will have the opportunity to spend several weeks on the Island of Jura as writer in residence. Once again, to say that I find the prospect exciting, or that I believe the island will prove inspiring, would be the sort of gross, tight-lipped understatement that only an Englishman would dream of making.
The Isle Of Jura Writer Retreat.
The Isle of Jura whisky company and Scottish Book Trust, Scotland’s national agency for readers and writers, have come together to offer a unique opportunity for an established writer to travel to Scotland to spend a month writing and living on the island as part of The ISLE OF JURA WRITER RETREAT PROGRAM, based at the beautifully refurbished distillery lodge at Craighouse. Will Self is the recipient of the inaugural award.
The winners will be following in the footsteps George Orwell who first visited Jura in September 1945 and moved into Barnhill in April 1946. Orwell's novel 1984 was completed there in 1948 and the reversing of the final digits gave him the title.
Scottish Book Trust is delighted to be working with Isle of Jura to create this Scottish, UK-wide and international writer’s retreat programme on Jura, which underlines Scotland’s unique position internationally as a literary and creative nation, with great natural beauty, wonderful local products and some of the most unspoiled and inspiring landscapes on earth.
There will be three separate residencies per year, the first focusing on an established UK writer, the second focusing on an international name and the third focusing on Scottish talent.
Further Information
