Highland Views

Military jets exercise over Loch Eye as a seer struggles to remember the content of his vision; the honeymoon is over for workers down at the Nigg yard, and an English incomer leads the fight for independence both for Scotland and for herself ... This debut collection of short stories from a gifted writer provides an original perspective on the Highlands, subtly addressing the unique combination of old and new influences that operate in the region today.

Praise for Highland Views:

'A fine organic collection – one that advances a viewpoint, culture and history quite other than the urban central belt that still lopsidedly dominates recent Scottish literature.' Andrew Greig

'A view of the Highlands with a strong element of political and social comment. David Ross explores these concerns in convincingly human terms through the lives of his characters.' Brian McCabe

'...an authentic and unsentimental aspect on Highland life. The characters are real, the prose is lyrical and the stories compelling.' The Scots Magazine

About David Ross

David Ross took a degree at Edinburgh University and then stayed on in the capital for another fifteen years, working at a variety of jobs ranging from lecturer to dish-washer. He wrote two draft novels and ran a Creative Writing workshop for Theatre Workshop as well as playing and song-writing in several bands, including Poetry Roadshow, a words/music fusion of performance poets and musicians. Returning to his home town of Tain, he began writing his short story collection Highland Views (published by Two Ravens Press) and now works as a guitar, composition and recording tutor.

An Interview with David Ross

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

Our English teacher in Tain Royal Academy had an enthusiasm for his subject that was infectious. He read a lot of contemporary books - fiction, plays and poetry - which he let us borrow. He’d encourage us to discuss and assess them, and also to write for the school magazine. If asked, he’d even give his own fascinating interpretation of Bob Dylan’s lyrics. He was a huge influence at a very impressionable age.

Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, with its progressive peeling of the layers of the truth onion, was certainly an inspiration when I first began work on a novel of my own. It was also a great help technically, in managing a movement from a first person to a third person narrative, as was Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park. That is to say, there were certain scenes which those authors needed to include, but which their narrators could not have had direct access to. They both solve the problem in different ways, and that gave me confidence that the problem could be solved in yet a third way of my own.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Highland Views ? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

In general, Highland Views was supposed to be a broadside against any tartan haggis-bashing caricature of life in this part of the world. The title appealed to me because I had no intention of offering an equally stereotypical picture of what contemporary highland life is ’really’ like. There are as many different views of it as there are characters in the stories.

I was also trying to put myself through an apprenticeship in a new writing medium - the story. I’d like to be able to say ‘the short story’, but I found it extremely difficult to compress a theme into a couple of thousand words, and the majority of the stories ended up considerably longer than that.

How and when do you write?

Always these days on the computer. Word processing is a great invention. If you didn’t secretly believe you’d get something right first draft, you’d probably never get started, but experience usually tells you that re-writing and editing will considerably improve things. The computer is ideal for that. The story of Jack Kerouac presenting the manuscript of On The Road to his publisher as a first and final draft on a single sheet of telegraph roll is apparently just that - a story. The ‘real’ story appears to be that he did a lot of painstaking re-writing to produce his famous ‘spontaneous prose’.

Personally, I can write pretty much any time I’m not occupied making a living, but there’s definitely something special about the night-time hours. A lot of the chatter and static on the psychic airwaves seem to close down when most people go off to sleep, and anyone else who’s still awake seems to be minding their own business too. So it’s a good time to let the imagination run riot.

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

Virtually the only poet I read these days is Ezra Pound - specifically the Cantos. He’s all too easily dismissed as ‘high-brow’ or ‘elitist’, but my own reaction to the parts that are difficult to understand is how much more I’d like to learn in order to appreciate them more fully. And they can always be read purely for the music - he’s a great lyrical poet. As for his dubious politics, I think he was arguably guilty of over-simplifying his own position under the black or white? pressure of World War Two, but he certainly hasn’t made a fascist out of me.

At the moment I’ve been catching up with Bernard MacLaverty’s short story collection, Walking The Dog. I heard him read the title story some years ago in Dingwall and it was chilling. The suspense is equally unrelenting on the written page and it’s astonishing to realise how short the whole story actually is. He’s a real master of the medium. Cal is obviously his best known novel, and it was the film of the book which first started me reading his work, but I’ve also been very impressed with Grace Notes. It’s particularly well titled because there are some timeless images in it, and it’s also a very brave book. He could no doubt have repeated the winning formula of previous novels, but instead he took an entirely different tack with an imaginative crossing of the gender divide which I find entirely convincing.

Perhaps we’re more surprised when a man achieves this crossing than when a woman does, since women are usually stereotyped as being more intuitive and empathetic than men. But it strikes me as an admirable feat in either direction, so I should finally mention Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist for its equally believable portrayal of its central male character.

An extract from Highland Views

She used to hear a distant pibroch sound on the breeze those autumn evenings, back in that year when the child was still newly formed inside her. And when her husband was away at sea, she’d often climb the low summit of the hill and sit awhile, listening to that sad and lonely music, even if it was no more than some trick of the wind.

After darkness had returned to the land, only Inverness, tinsel-lit, would remain in view to remind her that she lived in the lengthening shadow of the twentieth century. Strings of white and orange lights would glint like electric dewdrops on an unseen web suspended between the gentle inland slopes and the foreshore, where two last shimmering tentacles of light, separated by the invisible Ness, snaked into the blackness of the firth. Invisible also was the hospital which required her to make such frequent visits. But to the west she could clearly see the single beacon of light that marked entry to the Caledonian Canal, while, to the east, temporary floodlights played on the foundations of the bridge that would eventually link the highland capital to their side of the water.

The completion of the bridge would cut her husband’s travelling time back and forth to Aberdeen, the main base for his off-shore assignments, and he was all in favour of that. But for her own part, she would miss her solitary walks into North Kessock, timed to allow her an unhurried cup of tea before the arrival of the ferryboat from Inverness. And she would miss that brief sea journey across the narrow neck of firth, inhaling the salt breeze before she made her way through the traffic fumes of the town to the hospital.

Strange how her first recollections from that period were always of the times she’d spent alone. For in the deep quiet of her being her husband had been ever present, whether at his work of inspecting the platforms, or at home with her, forever finding new jobs that needed doing round the house before the baby arrived. Even those memorable trips across the water on her own had been very much the exception. Far more often they’d visited the hospital together, and it was together they’d driven the long road round by Beauly the day the consultant decided to break the news to them. They said yes, they would like to see the x-rays for themselves, and yes, they would let him know their decision by the end of the week. And yes, oh yes, there had only been one decision possible, for what kind of life could such a creature ever have had?

And so it was a sad Christmas that year, leaving her still weak as a kitten after the operation. There were complications, so they’d been told before she left the hospital, and they’d been strongly advised not to try again.

Though her husband seemed swift to embrace the sorrow as if it was some forgotten friend from long ago, it constantly stood across her own path that winter, like some malevolent stranger whose challenge she was not yet strong enough to meet. No longer could she summon up the energy to climb the hill, and only once did she hear the phantom music trudge slowly towards the house before it got lost in the silence of the drifting snow …