Brave new words

PETER URPETH interviewed ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL following the publication of his new Gaelic novel, An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn.

AT THE OPENING of Angus Peter Campbell’s novel, An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn, a 13-year-old boy stands on the banks of Loch Bhornais ready to fling a ‘skiffler’.

But as he prepares to let loose the almighty throw, the best and longest that those waters have ever seen, he is distracted from his task by the sound and sight of a horse and gig travelling down the road, such as it was.

The boy peers through the dust and rushes and sees the priest making his way along that track. The boy holds on to the skiffler. He will hold on to that skiffler: he has made a choice he will go in for the priesthood.

Shortly before this episode we learn that his elder brothers have also made their choices: choices that will have a profound impact on their lives, too. The year is 1913 and the Great War is calling young men to a death in the mud of foreign fields, or to glory as honoured officers.

The world the boy knows is in sharp, almost hyper-reality before him and it is changing. We follow him as his life progresses and as the consequences of his and their choices play out in the lives of those he loves and loses, and those who come after him, even up to one hundred years later in a time after our own.

And then, as the end approaches, we are back at that lochside. Now it is a girl who has the stone and she is just about to fling it across those same waters. She too is then disturbed and looks up not to see the priest and his gig but the complacent figures of a film crew recording the story of the previous pages. She goes unnoticed. She is excluded from this her and their own story.

But she has flung her stone and their indifference drives her to fetch it from the loch floor along with all those that others have been thrown there. But she has a final, almost defiant and affirmative act to make. And thus the book ends in a kind of broken circle, close to but moved on from the start.

When I managed to catch-up with him during his busy schedule of dates around the launch of the book at the Oban Mod, and in the weeks just after, Angus Peter stated that the central organising image of the book – the skiffler, the thrower, the choice – came to him in a dream and the following morning work on the novel started.

Immense in its scope, and at 380 pages, this is an epic. The novel was researched through a complete immersion in the Gaelic works and history of the time and what is immediately noticeable is that the language itself grows and moves through and with the story.

Early on we are close to that era when it seems that life had changed little for many generations. Later, we are close to the current age, when all has changed and the characters in the book reflect on the fragments of the past that they hold onto, or are reminded of:

“South Uist at the turn of the century did have a kind of golden hue and I feel that, in a sense, I was in touch with that, the dying remnants of it were there in my childhood. When I was born there was no electricity, there was no radio, and there was no television and no running water. It came when I was about ten years of age, so I feel as though I touched these things.

“As research for this work I read Dwelly and then I read Carmina Gadelica and I was awe struck by the fact that these were works from just over a hundred years ago and the depth of language and lyricism then was just remarkable. As a further part of the research I went to the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh where Donald John Macdonald the bard had left 7000 pages of hand-written, first-hand accounts of what he called crofting life in South Uist at the beginning of the twentieth century.

“I think it is important and we need to carry a ‘Golden Age’ with us, and the greatest work of literature that I have read is Paradise Lost. I was awe-struck by that and I thought that the immensity of the work was just phenomenal and it felt so contemporary that I thought I could have been reading about the Hutton Enquiry, it was just so relevant, and I think there is a sense of the Paradise Lost and Regained thing about that time in our history, of having survived the war and the clearances beforehand, there was a whole sense of a new beginning at that point.

“There was a generation saying we have a life that is worth living and it is good and we have children and a future, and there was a tremendous self confidence, strangely enough, despite history, and I think these things are so fundamental. Now, when I read those works I am touched in my heart and soul and this all takes me there and I think of how much of that innocence we have lost, I have lost, yet we have become grand and educated and philosophical and smart, and post-modernist.

“I consciously went out of my way to work my language through the novel. I think that it is a language which in a sense was purer and older, and throughout the century becomes less multi-layered, sparer.”

But apart from the depth and beauty of the language, this books also yields a sense of lamentation, of loss and distance, from that lost Golden Age of community and language:

“There is a lament for companionship, for youth and for language and culture, and for the richness of language, and for the feeling that I experienced as a child,” states Angus, “Despite its poverty, despite the depression, despite the war, despite exile, despite emigration despite Culloden, despite this, that and the next thing there is a whole sense of identity, and certainly if you want to carry the stone symbol through, many of us have flung stones very easily and very cheaply in our lives and have let them sink in the water.

“But ultimately this work is about a sense of atonement and of forgiveness and renewal and that no matter what we may or may not have done with our lives they can be redeemed and renewed. And we do not need to be exiled in Glasgow or Canada or wherever, lamenting the past. It is clear that the past belongs to us and that it can be ours to recreate and to pass on to our children.

“I think narrative and epic storytelling belongs to us, in our tradition. The magic realism of South America was nothing new, it was long in the Gaelic tradition but we lost that in the twentieth century on the back of World War One with the loss of men in the trenches. We lost the storytelling tradition and we confined it then to the Ceilidh House.

“When it came to what was grandly called ‘literature’ we just took on the so-called English model, and that for those of us who then went to University, the second generation after the war, meant studying the likes of Harold Pinter and we came out of university producing slim volumes of intellectual poetry and we forget the huge great narrative epic story.

“And so the model that I had as a writer were obviously the great bards and in our time – Sorley Maclean, Iain Crichton Smith, Derick Thompson, and so on. But the notion of ever producing a great work of fiction just wasn’t there as a role model for me or us.”

Perhaps one of the bravest choices associated with this novel is the fact that it is a Gaelic novel. It remains a fact that many of the most fluent speakers of the language, those for whom Gaelic is their primary language, struggle to read the language, and so its prospects as a book that will be widely read even within the Gaelic community may be questionable:

“It was a brave decision!” says Angus, “but had I thrown the ‘skiffler’ of this book in English it would have been totally different. Like our children, they would be different children too. My children have been brought up as Gaelic speakers and genetically you can argue that in terms of their upbringing they are different from if I had brought them up as English speakers living in London. So, too, the creature that is this work would have been utterly different if I had written it in English.

“When I think about my own children, I am conscious that our entire world is intermediated through the medium of English and so little of our universe is articulated and imagined and created for them in their own primary language and I am kind of tired of that and I thought to myself that if even only one of them reads it is sufficient.

“Making that decision was like crossing a tightrope. On crossing that tightrope you engage in a huge narrative of so many characters and so many issues across so much time that it was like walking a tightrope across the Niagara Falls. All you need to do is to glance down once and you see there is an abyss and you risk losing the narrative drive, losing the life of the characters, losing the character’s entire sense of contemporaneous history.

“Ultimately you can’t say I can’t do it in Gaelic because only two men and dog will read it, because if you do do that, if you do look down in that way, you risk letting the whole thing fall into that abyss. It takes courage to do it, a great deal of courage.

“So therefore I hope that it will survive as an incentive and as a model for a younger generation who will feel that it is not only perfectly possible for them to read this work but also to write a work of fiction, an epic work, a great drama as much as they would think of working on radio or television or film.”

With all this talk of the Golden Age and of lamentation there may be a tendency in reading this epic story to feel that it is harking back, almost a high romantic, to a time irretrievable, and in a sense that is inevitably true. But, beyond that time, in creating an epic Gaelic work of poetics, history and culture, Angus may have started the process of reimagining what the oral, Bardic tradition can mean anew in terms of contemporary Gaelic culture. As such, there is at least the opening possibility of a renewal of language and culture through its purest poetic form.

His novel is bold and affirmative; rich in its language and intentions; human and universal: boundless in its possibilities.

An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn is published by Clàr, priced £8.99