Stornoway Library Cafe, Isle of Lewis, 18 February 2011

First, let me come clean. I was supposed to take a picture. The camera got left behind so here’s a pen-portrait – or a typesketch  – of each of the writers who performed at the literary salon in the town of SY – namely the library café. The event is a collaboration between the programme of HI-Arts writing development officer Peter Urpeth and the local library service.

Writer John Aberdein

Dave Martin (Daibhidh Martin) is lean, and if he isn’t wearing a faded Levi jacket, he should be.  He is not  that tall but he bends to the microphone the way a very tall man sometimes does. Even when there isn’t one there. His hair, about the length of an Italian football star, falls across his face. He alternates this seated position with a look up to engage with his audience, in a low-key way, of course.

Out of the cool comes a smile, effective as February Lewis bright light in a week of cloud.

John Aberdein is big, but you only realise that when he’s standing beside someone else.  He’s comfortable on his feet and when he’s sitting down. He has the air of a man used to standing up to speak or of sitting to drive or to study. His hair must have been a thatch once but there’s still an outburst at each side and that all joins a full beard. When he reads he becomes a dancer because his voice is very rhythmical.

Now, I don’t know why Mr Martin has a Gaelic first name and an English one to follow, but he did open this  well-attended reading with  work in both English and Gaelic.  He writes songs and lays down stories which are made into songs, and lyric is also at the heart of his prose writing.

He is an engaging performer. You lean forward to catch the words you could miss when the voice goes down. This is late night radio rather than  beat  or rap. But, on this occasion, I felt he was missing the microphone. It’s a great device for this performer because he can be natural in his one-to-one voice.

That said, he is a natural storyteller and one of his variations on his portrait of a  gatemaker came alive. It reminded me of Jonathan Campbell’s stage adaptation of Linklater’s Sealskin Trousers story. There is a contemporary twist on a timeless story.  It’s high risk.  And interesting for a writer, like me, of an age when you took it for granted that you had to paint in hard-edged realistic forms, as a balance to all the Lilian Beckwith and other twee glimpses of island life.

This is a natural return to a less naturalistic depiction of the Hebrides. And we in dreams behold them…. It’s not kitsch but the writing takes a chance. I don’t think it would come off if Martin were a less talented performer. But I found myself drawn into the dreamy world of the gatekeeper who applies his craft to timbers that have survived Atlantic testing. Then some of these are returned to drift.

The act of a man who has lost his wife to the sea.  Think of the film Breaking the Waves. If you try to pin the setting to any particular Scotish island it will anger you, but if you accept the surreal world you can glimpse genuine emotion in the vision.

Daibhidh Martin (Cargo Press)

Martin can also write and sound out dialogue with great success. But I’m going to suggest that he has to trust his own talent here. After laying down a fine scene of a dialogue with a minister in an elevator, the narration describes what you’ve just heard as  “a barrage of inane questions”.  You’ve just heard them and they convey what they do so you don’t need the author butting in again to tell you what he’s done.

I was looking for my seatbelt when John stood to read, but was met with a tide of subtlety. I’d just used the library service to read Strip the Willow, before the performance. It verges from scathing but sharp satire to very tender moments. But one of the book’s foremost qualities is energy. So at first Aberdein’s measured reading voice took me by surprise.

But this is a born teacher talking – in the best sense – in that there is space to catch the words. The east coast voice is also not as fast as most people from out the area think it is. So you have the space to catch the wit and wordplay that allow the rhythms to lay out a narrative.

John’s reading was carefully structured. He read first from Amande’s Bed. I have no fore-knowledge of this one so I’m describing simply what I heard on the night.

He told a story of a family home where deep shock left confident talkers weak.

Unlike Strip The Willow, which uses a complex structure – a dance of narratives in fact – to trace back to the original threads of a relationship which lapsed for 40 years – Amande’s Bed is set in one specific year. When the Hungarian uprising was ruthlessly stamped and burned out, the communists in other European countries, like Scotland for example, had to re-assess the whole issue of their faith.

As an audience we had to work – and there might have been one or even two excerpts too many – but  we could sip coffee and bask in the rhythms of two contrasting voices.  I would have liked just that bit more space for discussion because it seemed to me that the difference of intention as well as voice of these two writers was itself a subject that could have kept us going for a while.

But of course some of us did continue the discussion. Librarians and journalists and writers and readers did indeed consort and sip more liquids and the evening became another morning. I would say that the Salon  is an idea come alive. The exchange of Island writers is more than that.

It’s highly appropriate that the next guest Islander is Robert Alan Jamieson from Shetland. He will  read in Stornoway on the 18^th March,  along with a certain local writer who (I happen to know) has been  working on  the Hebridean historical novel for about 30 years. [no need to be so modest, Ian; I’ll tell them it’s you – Ed.]

Alan was one of the early advocates of an inter-island dialogue of artists. But I’ve also seen him  communicate with clarity and no lack of wit in the university city of Olomouc in the Czech Republic.  The real thing crosses any borders.

© Ian Stephen, 2011

Links

• Daibhidh Martin
• Ian Stephen