and the land lay still by james robertson

The demon drink, even if kept in check, answers back more than it should. He’s an alcoholic that has long and detailed conversations with himself in the same manner as some of Robertson’s other narrators had conversation with Saints or in Gideon Mack’s case the Devil. Bond is good at snooping, lying low in the background, but Jean Barbour susses him out. Oil in vast quantities, off the shores of Scotland, to a largely bankrupt Britain makes that a pressing question. The London establishment can’t quite decide if Scotland is full of windbags or real revolutionaries. Jimmy Bond is testing the waters for MI5. Jimmy Bond, who changed his name to Peter Bond, after another spy, Ian Fleming, brought a book about with its eponymous hero, James Bond. Everybody that is anybody goes to Jean Barbour’s, including Dufflecoat Dick. His da’s lost love (one of the many) Jean Barbour, keeps a room for Mike in her Edinburgh home. The conceit is Mike is arranging an exhibition of his father’s best memorial photographs. His dad seemed to have married his mum for spite.

It takes a lifetime to admit it, but Mike’s got there in the end. He’s gay and a photographer, but not half the man his father, Angus, was. Here we have an ensemble cast that takes us from Scotland in the 1950s to the kind of Scottish Devolution nobody much wanted, but we settled for. He can mix it up a bit with Saints, God and the Devil, but you know where you are with him. My pet theory is that authors write the same book again and again, until they get it right (write).

And the land lay still by james robertson