Obiter Dicta

27^th September 2011

I’ve just put the finishing touches to the redraft of my novel, ‘Wyndford’. Now it’s been whizzed through the virtual ether to Stan, my agent. He can work a few magic passes over it with his wand and start a massive bidding war amongst the richest publishers in the land.

I’ve always wanted to write something about the shale mining industry. Historically, the first major oil-producing industry in the world, it rose and fell in West Lothian in the space of about a hundred years. It started in the 1860s and the last pit, Westwood, closed in 1962. I feel that not enough people in the world know about it. So I wrote a novel with a mining village in 1946 as its setting.

It lay dormant in my mind for eight years. I made a few tentative notes and jottings in the year 2003, including some historical research and a list of character names and street names. I knew at that time that I wanted it to be tragic; my central characters to be the women of the village, and my main character to be a young woman called Nan Cochrane. Then I put it aside. A conversation with Stan in February 2011 blew the grey embers alive again and I wrote it – 98,000 words - in a little less than two months. Nan is still the main character and her tragedy is a personal one, but played out against a larger, historical tragedy. I rather like it.

The story, ‘Grand Guignol’, that I submitted to the Manchester prize, has taken on a life of its own this week too, and I’ve almost doubled the length of it as I develop the themes already there. I am equally fond of this piece of writing. Something different, I like to think.

Glad to see, among all the bunting and frippery surrounding the impending bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, that people are returning to the novels. Or reading them for the first time. As a child, I knew of  his works, but I suspect I hadn’t read them. From this distant remove, it’s hard to remember accurately, but I think I may only have gleaned the narratives of some of them from Classic Comics. But, like many, my mind was stocked with his characters – Fagin, Pip, Micawber, Sairey Gamp – and his phrases. ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ ‘Barkis is Willin’.’ ‘I’m so very ‘umble.’

It was only when I got to uni in Edinburgh that I read the actual novels: ‘Bleak House’ in first year and several, including ‘Great Expectations’ in third. Thereafter, I bought them all in the orange Penguin English Library series of the time, and devoured them, one by one in chronological order. Now, I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t know these exceptional novels or revere Dickens as one of the finest writers of the age – and one of the finest humorists of any age.

Happy two-hundredth birthday, when it comes, Chuck.