Glenfarron

Glenfarron is the tale of a rugged Scottish Highland landscape and the impact of three contrasted generations of outsiders: Polish aircrew at a British military hospital in the 1940s; young Glaswegians who inherit country property in the 1970s; African diplomats in 2006. There is a tragedy of illicit love, a psychological haunting, and a comedy of post-colonial hangovers.

These three histories overlap in a fine texture of place and memory, family passions and guilt. Nobody is left untouched, and by the end all have gone through startling changes. The wounded Polish servicemen arrive as heroes, and are then stunned by rejection. The Glaswegian couple are not what they seem, and their story – which begins with tenderness and creativity – implodes into horror. A collector of African artefacts draws his remote community into a farcical battle to defend their ‘heritage’ against foreigners. Jonathan Falla’s third novel is a triumph of storytelling, saturated with atmosphere and personality.

Praise for Glenfarron:

'...An intelligent, well-written, ambitious and often moving book. [Falla] writes well and vividly, and is no longer to be described as a promising novelist, but as an accomplished one. Glenfarron is a real achievement.'
Allan Massie, The Scotsman
(For full review, see http://living.scotsman.com/books/Novella-idea--Glenfarron-by.4345412.jp)

Praise for Jonathan Falla's previous novels:

‘It’s often quite easy to spot a first novel … Jonathan Falla’s Blue Poppies utterly confounds the stereotype. It is assured, self-confident, without a trace of self-indulgence.’ The Scotsman

‘A book saturated with loving detail, unpredictable and opulent.’ Roger Clarke, Sunday Times

‘Poor Mercy is a vivid, engrossing work of fiction.’ Michel Faber, The Guardian

‘Strongly plotted and electric with personality, Poor Mercy, which takes its title from The Pilgrim’s Progress, shows Jonathan Falla to be a mature storyteller in full command of his craft. Provocative and moving, it is an altogether memorable piece of writing.’ Scottish Review of Books

About Jonathan Falla

Jonathan Falla lived in a part of Scotland oddly like Glenfarron, where he inhabited a freezing hayloft while writing a book about tropical Burma. Such incongruities are the stuff of his writing. He is the holder of a Creative Scotland award, and in 2007 was short-listed for the National Story Prize. His previous novels are Poor Mercy and Blue Poppies.

For more about the author see www.jonathanfalla.wordpress.com

An Interview with Jonathan Falla

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I come from a medical-academic-post colonial family. In the 1950s my father taught Early English at the University of the West Indies – Beowulf in the Caribbean. He was struck by how readily they appreciated it; Derek Walcott was one of his students (and later re-wrote Homer). My father wondered if perhaps the hard realities of Anglo-Saxon life were more immediate to people whose own lives were often precarious, than for well-cushioned British students.

I began writing professionally in 1981 after a spell as a junior famine-relief hitman for Oxfam in Karamoja, Uganda. I had kept a diary there; re-reading it in the UK I realised that it was almost unrelieved farce. I turned it into a play which was produced at the Bush Theatre in London in 1982 and has had several productions in the UK and USA since. It is the only successful comedy about famine relief I’ve heard of.

I then trained as a tropical diseases nurse. Other spells of work abroad – in Java, Burma, Nepal and Sudan – have provided a store of material, and much of what I write has concerned cultural clashes and cross-fertilisation. I’ve written a script for a Nicaraguan theatre company visiting Edinburgh, a novel about a Scottish radio operator in Tibet, another about aid-workers in Darfur, and a film about childhood and politics in 1940s Trinidad, made by the BBC.

My own degree was firstly in English literature, and then Art History. I can thank my father for a love of Chaucer and Langland; I use Chaucer as a model when teaching creative writing, while the female lead in my Tibetan novel is based on his Criseyde. Other major influences have been Conrad and Hardy, and the Australian novelist Patrick White – rather out-of-fashion just now, but to my mind one of the great masters.

Finally – and especially having spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow at a Los Angeles film school – I must say that film has been a major influence. I made myself quite unpopular when running my school film society by bringing in endless lugubrious b/w Japanese and East European dramas of the 1950s. I adored them.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?

Glenfarron is in three parts, and the sources are very varied. I lived for a while near Aberfeldy (Perthshire) where my wife trained as a GP. There is, at the head of Loch Tay, a hideous Victorian castle which during World War 2 served as a Polish military hospital. On the trees nearby, Polish names are carved. We heard stories of the relations between Poles and locals, which are the basis of Part One of the book.

The plot of Part Two concerns leprosy and a ‘camera obscura’. As a tropical health worker, I often met with leprosy, even in London. When I later walked the Southern Upland Way across the south of Scotland, I passed through a district where, many centuries ago, lepers had been sent into internal exile out on the moors. This became combined with a childhood memory: the camera obscura at Portmerion (North Wales).

Part Three draws on an African source, an elderly Scot I knew in Uganda who, while working in agricultural development, also collected a remarkable array of local artefacts, with the intention of setting up a museum back in the Scottish Highlands.

Each of these stories concerns cultural incongruities and mis-matches which are, however, fertile – like Beowulf in Jamaica.

My idea in Glenfarron was to show three generations of alien influence in a Highland community, set in a landscape not unlike upland Aberdeenshire (where I once lived in a freezing bothy writing a book about the rebel tribes of tropical Burma). Each succeeding influx adds another layer of personal drama and of cultural diversity, and the results can be tragic, grotesque and also times comic. In Glenfarron, the cast and the locations recur throughout, memories are passed on, but each recipient makes of these something strikingly new. Memory is seen as a haunting, and sometimes we are haunted by memories that are not, strictly, our own.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

By listening carefully to what I write. I am convinced that the best way to revise is to read back aloud, and I do this repeatedly. I think one can tell the writers who do something like this, because they write good dialogue: Elizabeth Bowen, for example. You can also tell the writers who don’t revise carefully, because the prose is dull and the dialogue crass.

How and when do you write?

I have a hut in the garden in Fife – a luxurious hut, well insulated and stuffed with books. I shut myself away three days a week.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

A lot of travel and history, and a certain amount of poetry and plays: Chaucer and Shakespeare, Ibsen and Sam Shepherd. Recent highlights have been Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France (a study of 18th & 19th century provincial life), and Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D.Nuttall. I’ve been reading a lot about the French Renaissance, in part towards another novel and in part towards a new CD of 16th century music that I’ve been involved with. My fiction reading is rather quirky – I’ve not read a word of Martin Amis, little Ian McEwan, no Zadie Smith. But I greatly enjoy J.M.Coetzee, Ohran Pamuk, Murray Ball (another Australian), W.G.Sebald, and certain crime writers; I know the old Van der Valk novels of Nicholas Freeling almost by heart. Of modern Scottish work, I much admired Janice Galloway’s Clara. Few contemporary novelists have got as far under the skin of their subject, while at the same time writing such fine and inventive prose.

An extract from Glenfarron

Vladislaw, in later years, would tell anyone how fine Sara looked in uniform, slim and neatly made. He would recall her cycling in to the hospital, sometimes a little warm with the exercise, and with small dark patches under her arms.

Coasting downhill into the hospital grounds, she always seemed light-hearted, and she threw smiles to anyone she passed. She’d tweak the cycle bell for simple pleasure. The day after that outing, she was humming to herself:

Ring, ring, ring the bell,
My little skylark of the Ukraine.

Over the Chinese Bridge she rolled; the slats rattled but she kept her eyes up lest the sight of rushing water make her sick. She pinged her bell again – then felt self-conscious and put out a finger to still it.

An hour later she stood absently smoothing her pinafore, waiting at the clinic hut window. On the ink-stained wooden table lay a manila folder of medical notes. On the floor nearby were weights and bars. The hut was quiet and still. A bluebottle thrashed in a cobweb. Sara looked toward the door: no one coming.

She walked quickly through the castle corridors, passing with neutral smiles the damaged men. In a silent upper passageway she came to an open door, a dormitory with four plain steel beds and lockers, and one man sitting with his back to the door.

‘Jacky?’

She moved round to face him.

‘No exercise today?’

He had in his hand a small pouch of red cloth that he weighed and contemplated. She saw that all the life had gone from his face. She sat on the bedside chair.

‘What’s wrong, Jacky?’

He said, ‘Give me your hands.’

Surprised, she held them out. He took and positioned them on his own knee, palms upwards in a cup. Then he eased open the drawstring of the pouch and trickled out a little of the contents: rich dark soil.

‘That is all I have of Poland.’

He studied it for a moment.

‘The only tangible thing.’

Sara gazed down at the dry soil in her hands. She couldn’t bear to look at Jacky; she felt as if she was someone wandering on a misty hill where there might be a precipice. She closed her hands over the soil as though it were a fledgling she’d saved but didn’t know how to heal.

She said: ‘Come and see us again. Please?’

‘Your husband doesn’t like me,’ Jacky remarked.

She was about to deny it, but he put his hand over hers, which stilled her. So she only murmured: ‘Charlie likes you very much.’

He absorbed this, and pressed her hand.

*****

Charlie Dulce liked Jacky Whisky, but warily. Jacky’s voice was strange. And a strange voice suggested a world that the little boy had no experience of, and could not gauge at all. Just as there were things about his Aunt Sara that he could not understand: a bitter-sweetness, a sense that she both clung to him and was reserved; adoring but also cool.

In later life, Charlie Dulce did his best to remember them both and understand them. He sometimes told himself that the effort was useless, that he never would bridge the gap of experience. But then he became a doctor and, as such, attempted to imagine a woman’s experience of childbirth. He could not know how that felt. On the other hand, he could imagine it sympathetically, and since none of us can know the contents of another mind, he decided that no one could say categorically that his imagination got it wrong. Nor, indeed, could any woman be entirely sure that she knows ‘just what it was like’ for any other woman, since everyone’s experience is different and, again, we cannot know the content of another mind.

Similarly, Charlie had never suffered a stillbirth, although as a doctor he perhaps knew more about the mechanics of that horror than many women who had only ever given birth normally. So, when he thought back twenty or thirty years to his Aunt Sara, it was with a sense that he could not know what she lived through at this time, but also with a stubborn conviction that he had the right to trust his imagination.

Also with Jacky Whisky. As a child, there came a time when Charlie sensed something new in Jacky, an excitement that stemmed from that other world from which the strange voices came, and which perplexed him. Looking back later, having learned the history, he decided that there were many experiences that he would never meet first hand, but might still share in. He had never been in exile or ‘liberated’ either, but events in Poland had a deep effect on his life, and so as an adult he tried – with a ‘working imagination’ – to relive the effect that the news must have had in Farron Castle. He imagined the patients’ mess heavy with cigarette smoke, men listening with heads cocked, staring with fixed, unblinking eyes at the brown radio:

The Soviet Army this morning launched an invasion of Poland in the vicinity of Lublin. German resistance is reported to be fierce…

The listeners scarcely breathing, the smoke curling up their nostrils.

We are grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant towards the publication of Glenfarron.