With Brian Toal
Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands
This was a Guardian book of the year, and rightly so. A book with shades of Shuggy Bain and This Is Memorial Device, it’s set on a bleak Fife housing estate in the nineties. Cora Mowat is bored, desperate for something to happen in her humdrum life. She could have inspired Morrisey, I’m sure. When her mum’s new boyfriend moves in, things become tense, and this turns out to be the catalyst for change her life was waiting for. She finally leaves and heads for the bright lights of Glasgow, but with no job, very little money and nowhere to stay, it’s anything but glamorous. Will she escape her life’s trajectory or simply succumb to the pull of the housing estate as so many of her peers have done?
The character of Cora is beautifully drawn.
Newlands states that the book is drawn from life but with riotous imagination. We all know someone like Cora. Some of us were Cora. The despair and misery of a teen trapped in a small town and desperate for life to begin is something many of us will relate to, unless you’ve lived your whole life in ‘the golden triangle’, of course.
“I was roasting in the tracksuit as I came down the stair. Breathless, like something was filling the bits where air should go. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen watching the Christmas tree blink, the slats of street lighting striping the rug, wondering how much more misery and guilt a lassie could fit inside her body.”
These sentiments continue throughout the first part of the book, with this desperate desire to escape a constant refrain in Cora’s head, like that Tracy Chapman song. “I gripped the cold handlegrips and felt the hair prickling on the backs of my fingers. It felt like I could drive out of my life on it. The speed and the windy dark would rinse every burning thing out of my heart and my head. Like the car to McDonald’s with Dennis. Like the rollerblades. Like the chairyplane when I was wee. I had no idea where I’d go, all I knew was that I was tired of here.”
Be careful what you wish for.
Glasgow doesn’t turn out to be what she had imagined. “In the end it was wet streets and wet bricks and wet slates and me in the middle trying with everything I had to look like I was enjoying it.” Without getting all Paulo Coelho about it, perhaps what she was looking for couldn’t be found anywhere. Perhaps she already had what she needed. There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.
‘Glasgow: A New History’ by Alistair Moffat
Alistair Moffat is a name well known to Westenders, having featured a couple of times in recent memory with his ‘Hidden Ways’ and ‘Scotland’s Forgotten Past’. In this new offering, just in time for the winter holidays and yuletide presents, he takes us from the earliest settlements on the banks of the Clyde, or Clutha as it was known then, right up to the present day.
How he does this in just under 200 pages is quite remarkable. Having reviewed Michael Fry’s ‘Glasgow: A History of the City’ just a few years ago and having just Googled Michael Fry to discover that he’s also recently written a history of Edinburgh as well, just like Moffat, it seems that the two authors are competing for customers. However, they’re aiming at very different markets, in my opinion. Moffat’s history of Glasgow takes us at a breakneck speed through bishops, traders, shipbuilders, politicians and merchants, each getting a slim four- or five-page chapter. Fry, on the other hand, provides a far more comprehensive treatment of the same areas.
Moffat covers immigration and all the wonderful food that comes with it, football (groan), entertainment and architecture. Each chapter really deserves a book to itself. But this is very much a buffet approach to Glasgow, including Chicken Tikka Masala, of course. If you’ve got any visitors from foreign lands this winter, this is a perfect gift for them to take home. Along with some Irn Bru.
‘Crow Children’ by James Dixon
James Dixon is not a writer I’d heard of before. He’s a London-born Glasgow-based writer who mostly writes YA books dealing with difficult subjects. And this, his latest, is no exception. Ava is a bit of a loner at her new school as she has been forced to leave her friends and follow her mother back to her hometown of Crawford following the death of her father. Loner – tick. Trauma – tick.
She falls in with the crowd who go to the woods to perform a ritual and is drawn to the mysterious Dustin, another troubled outsider. So far, so ‘Twilighty’. When Ava’s gran starts to lose her memories through dementia, Ava has a chance to make a deal with the crows to get the memories back. The crows are the messengers between this world and the next. Ava has to decide whether to sacrifice her own desires for the greater good and the good of her gran.
Yes, there’s a character called Robin. Yes, there’s a character called Jay. Yes, the town is called Crawford. Yes, Ava sounds a bit like avian. But let’s leave all that to one side and just enjoy the book. The youngsters will love the emotional angst and the tortured feelings between Ava and Dustin. Especially if ‘Twilight’ passed them by. With the winter upon us, it would be a good gift to while away a few dark hours beside a roaring fire. The cleansing ritual of the fire.
Books available from all good book stores, including Waterstones, Byres Road
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