Nicola Sturgeon used to be a ‘historical fiction geek’. But not any more
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Version 0 of 1. To borrow a turn of phrase from this newspaper’s Saturday quiz, what links the following? Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott; The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity by Anthea Callen; Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence; The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth; The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. The answer is that all have been named by British prime ministers as their favourite books – by Blair, Edward Heath, Churchill, Thatcher and Gordon Brown respectively. The variety is astonishing and we should rejoice that our leaders aren’t slaves to literary fashion. But can these really be their favourite books? Thatcher’s choosing Freddy Forsyth has the ring of reality. All too easily we can imagine her enthralled by the plot to assassinate a French president and returning to the novel again and again in the hope of a different ending. But was Ted Heath really so taken by an illuminating study of impressionism, or Blair by Scott’s medieval romp, or his rival and successor by a sweet story for the under-fives? This information is never established under oath. Usually, it has come from a magazine Q&A, a charity wheeze or the last minute or two of Desert Island Discs (“apart from the Bible and Shakespeare”). And, of course, it’s a dubious idea in the first place – to imagine that out of the hundreds or thousands of books you might have read there will be one so superb, so singular in its effect, that it stands tall and alone like Blackpool Tower above the hoi polloi beneath. It also invites a slight dishonesty. You might choose a title to oblige a friendship or to suggest sympathy with a cause. You might also choose it to enhance the public view of your personality, so that rather than you endorsing the book, the book is endorsing you. A trivial thing, it has to be said, and yet how interesting it is to know that David Cameron’s favourite is Robert Graves’s memoir of the trenches, Goodbye to All That, and that Ed Miliband chose Ian McEwan’s 2007 novella about connubial disaster, On Chesil Beach. Or this at least is what they’d have us believe; unofficial reports say Cameron can never have enough of Jeremy Clarkson’s oeuvre, while Miliband’s real top choice – the one he hides behind the covers of the Beano – is thought to be The Great Transformation by the Hungarian-American theorist Karl Polanyi, which examines the creation of the market economy. No such deception was on my mind when in an interview with Nicola Sturgeon two years ago I asked her about the writers she enjoyed. I suppose I expected a partly Scottish answer. Her boss at that time, Alex Salmond, chose the complete works of Robert Burns for his desert island – no doubt for genuinely literary reasons, but also because the poet gave Scotland what Salmond has referred to a an “assumed identity”, meaning a favourite way of seeing itself. What I didn’t know then was that Sturgeon isn’t a big fan of cultural nationalism – or what you might call spare time. She said simply that she was a “historical fiction geek” who as teenager had enjoyed Nigel Tranter’s romances set in the Scotland of long ago. She was too busy to enjoy much else. In October the following year, after she replaced Salmond as first minister, a reporter from the Scotsman emailed Sturgeon a similar question and this time she replied: “I have lots of favourite authors, historical and current … Jane Austen, Val McDermid, Chris Brookmyre, Louise Welsh to name just a few.” Her “fave book of all time”, however, was Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, published in 1932 and widely agreed to be the finest Scottish novel of the last century. Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie may have a larger resonance worldwide, but Grassic Gibbon’s Chris Guthrie remains the most memorable and sympathetic woman ever created by a Scottish writer. Sturgeon said she read the book in her teens. “It seemed to speak to me at a time when other things were taking shape in my head,” she said, implying she saw something of herself in the heroine’s feelings towards the land and its history. People recall different things at different times, and I don’t want to suggest she was making it up. All that can be said is that her broader literary interests suit her forthcoming role as – arguably – the most famous non-fictional woman in Scottish history, always excepting Mary, Queen of Scots. With that future ahead, who’d want to be known as a geek? ❦ Grassic Gibbon, real name James Leslie Mitchell, wrote two other novels telling Chris Guthrie’s story, to form the trilogy titled A Scots Quair. My family were keen readers of it, though in the 1950s it led a half-secret existence as a too-frank and too-political account of rural living – sex and socialism – that needed to be kept from the eyes of children and other respectable persons. Then one night, thanks to some bold decision by the BBC in Glasgow, we heard a radio adaptation on what must have been the Home Service. I’ll always remember my shock at the point when Chris waits to welcome her husband Ewan home on his leave from the western front. He comes late from the railway station as an unsteady drunk. “He had gone away Ewan Tavendale,” Gibbon wrote, “he came back a man so coarse and cruel that in place of love, hate came singing in the heart of Chris – hate that never found speech, that but slowly found lodgement secure and unshaken.” I’d never heard drunkenness seriously depicted on the radio before – comedy shows (“I am sho shorry, Mishish Higginbotham, I thought you were the ’atshtand”) were a different matter. It may have been my introduction to social realism: odd to think of it like that, because the reality being depicted was one I already knew, not as intimately as Chris Guthrie did, but as a little observer of Saturday-night buses and streets. I suppose the shock came from having it in the house. ❦ Like Sturgeon, Grassic Gibbon wasn’t a cultural nationalist, or perhaps any kind of nationalist at all. “What a curse to the Earth are small nations!” he wrote in 1935. “There is an appalling number of disgusting little stretches of the globe claimed, occupied and infected by groupings … babbling militant on the subjects (unendingly) of their exclusive cultures, their exclusive languages, their national souls, their national genius, their unique achievements in throat-cutting in this and that abominable little squabble in the past.” He came south to live in Welwyn Garden City and died there of overwork and a perforated ulcer a few days short of his 34th birthday in 1935. I think of him whenever I pass through on the train: the writer that many would think of as Scotland’s greatest 20th-century novelist dying here, not far from the Shredded Wheat factory and well down the railway line from the national soul. |