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Jamie Bawn returns from life in Liverpudlian exile to his home "valleys of mirth" in Ayrshire. He's brought back by his grandfather Hugh, nearing the end of his life high in a 24-storey tower block that once reached for the sky, but now plumbs the depths. Faced with Hugh's decline, Jamie comes to terms with his own father, one of those Scottish fathers "made for grief", whose children ran from them and endemic, proud self-pity: "Our fathers were all poor, poorer than our fathers' fathers."
The elements of soap opera are all alarmingly present and correct--alcoholic father, masochistic mother--but O'Hagan never plays to the gallery: there's a warmth tempering his deliberate unsentimentality, reminiscent of the best cinematic work of Terence Davies. This is a book about lost dreams--not just of the Bawn family, but of the generations that put their trust in socialist solutions, in public housing, in ideas. A succinct, perfectly judged and ultimately moving debut. --Alan Stewart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Hugh Provan was a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a man of the people, he led Scotland's towerblock programme after the war. Now he lies on a bed on the eighteenth floor. The times have changed. His flats are coming down. The idealism he learned from his mother is gone. And even as his breath goes out he clings to the old ways. His wife sings her Scots ballads to soothe him, yet his final months are plagued by memory and loss, by a bitter sense of his family and his country, who could not live up to the houses he built for them. Meanwhile the corruption hearings bring their hammer down on the past.
Hugh's grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor. The old man's final months bring Jamie to see what is best and worst in the past that haunts them all, and he sees the fears of his own life unravel in the land that bred him. He tells the story of his own family - a tale of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old Left. It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses, of three men in search of Utopia. Andrew O'Hagan has written a story which is a poignant and powerful reclamation of the past and a clear sighted gaze at our relationship with history, personal and public.
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Concurrently it looks at the strains in Anglo-Scots relations, as Jamie Bawn (the youngest of the generations) returns to Scotland from England to be with his dying grandfather (who was more of a father figure to him than his blood-father). As Jamie straddles the line between Scotsman and Englishman (at least in the eyes of the Scots), so O'Hagan walks the line between Scots literature in the vein of Kelman, Welsh etc (ie, there are small smatters of Scots dialect along with snapshots of the grittier life lived within the walls of the public house) and the more `English' novel as we've come to know it, in the vein of Ishiguro, McEwan and others - that of ideas, memory and the more traditional narrative structure (even if it does seamlessly slip between eras in a less signposted, and much more illuminating, way than these two authors - in a way that in fact reminded me of Sartre's `The Reprive').
It's examination of the social impact of the new housing constructions in Scottish cities in the mid-twentieth century - from the compelling portrait of the climate at the time of their construction to the disappointed aftermath of the 1990s - is enlightening and perfectly pitched, while it's forays into the rise and fall of socialism puts the icing on the cake of what is one of the most perfectly structured and delivered novels of the 1990s. Highly recommended.
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