The term ‘lost classic’ is a loaded one, often referring to a book which has been overlooked or forgotten for good reason. However, Gordon M. Williams’ 1968 novel From Scenes Like These can lay a genuine claim to such a description. Shortlisted for the first Booker Prize in 1969 (alongside the more celebrated Muriel Spark) it rarely features in discussions on great 20th-century Scottish novels, yet its literary credentials are impeccable in both content and vision. With a title taken from Robert Burns’ ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, it feels like a bridging novel between Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s agrarian Sunset Song and the urban Clydesideism of the 1970s and beyond. It shares themes, and some style, with William McIlvanney’s Docherty, and you could draw a lineage through James Kelman to Douglas Stuart, both of whom would go one better in terms of the Booker Prize.
Set in the 1950s in the village of Kilcaddie in west central Scotland (Sunset Song takes place in the near-namesake Kinraddie), it’s a rural setting, but close enough to Glasgow to see the ‘black smoke’ which hangs portentously over that city. Work on Craigie’s Farm is increasingly tough, and it’s where 15-year-old Dunky Logan gets his first job tending the horses. Dunky is in an indecent rush to become ‘a man’, already seduced by the hard-drinking, quick-fisted, football-obsessed stereotype which would shape the idea of Scottish masculinity for so many.
Meanwhile, Mary O’Donnell arrives from Sligo: penniless, physically impaired, and pregnant, but determined to prove her worth and improve her prospects against all the odds. What follows is a powerful depiction of life in post-war Scotland, a time which would shape the country’s social, political, and cultural identity, arguably to the present day.
Williams’ writing is hard-nosed yet artful, staying just the right side of sentimentality to depict a period and a place where the promise of better times often lay elsewhere and, for most, out of reach.
With an insightful introduction by James Robertson, From Scenes Like These seems set to reclaim its rightful place in the Scottish literary canon. With themes of language, identity, class and, particularly, masculinity all tightly intertwined, it’s as relevant today as it ever was.
From Scenes Like These is published by Picador
