There is an arguable cultural tipping‐point for recent years in Scotland and it has been political devolution, that transition, allegedly, from subalternity and mere‐postcolonial status to a greater and fuller awareness of individual and national identity in and for itself. Politicians might be good or bad at expressing and achieving this, but writers (novelists, poets, dramatists, critics, translators, English‐ and Scots‐ and Gaelic‐speakers alike) can do it better.
This is where the Companion enters the fray, after devolution (in 1999), perhaps with a fair or foul wind on the way towards full independence, and where Scottish writers fit into it all. The editor's introduction makes this clear: look back on the literature and on the commentary about the literature from the early 1990s and you catch that wistful introspective dystopian patriarchal macho working‐class culture associated with Scottish life and literature: look more recently and you see some of these still, like a dystopian critique and a spiritual duality (not by accident is the Jekyll and Hyde nightmare Scottish), but now there is a new confidence, a resurgence in drama and poetry, new uses of language, new perceptions of gender and cosmopolitanism.
So “contemporary” and “literature” mean that (in book titles they can mean anything at all), so at least you know what you are likely to get if you buy the book. Some facts first of all: 42 essays by practitioners and academics mainly in the UK but also elsewhere, edited by Schoene who is a professor of English at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. Contributors include Christopher Whyte and Gavin Wallace, Colin Nicholson and Robert Morace and Valentina Bold. There are four thematic sections – contexts, genres, authors, and topics. There is a rather indifferent index that connects things up in a way, but connections and underlying (or over‐arching) critical vectors need to be inferred and extrapolated, despite the in‐your‐face pointers in the introduction.
Deterritorialization emerges from a perceptive essay on James Kelman by Aaron Kelly; the bimetallic strip of Scottish culture, mythic or modern, peeps out when Katherine Ashley discusses the international reception of Scottish literature; denationalization and the extent to which poets can and should act as national spokespersons is a major element in Scott Hames's analysis of Don Paterson's poetry; and relating more to community than to nation is an important claim made by Schoene himself when describing Alan Warner's protean post‐feminist novels. These add to what Schoene's introduction says about cosmopolitanism and post‐coloniality and urban ecology and gender, making what is actually in the book a lot larger than a quick glance through the introduction and the blurb conveys.
The Companion operates on several levels and this will make it useful as a reference sourcebook in academic libraries. All the essays contain a lot of information about authors and their novels and poems and plays, and references are made that are brought together in a good bibliography at the very end. On that level, then, a one‐stop shop or portal to a wide range of topics. Specific topics – like essays on post‐feminist writing, gay writing, children's writing, realism and the supernatural, and poetry – can be followed up and through for their own sake. There is a wide critical hinterland for each one.
There are also hints of deeper and subtler, more pervasive and tacit and arguable, cultural cross currents, of the kind noted above, and the challenge for the reader is coherently to connect up Scottish literature now with the ever‐changing political scene. There is nothing explicit on politics except as it emerges in and through the literature, and that could be exteriorized more fully in any further edition. That said, politics is an ephemeral game (but then so is literature, as the revealingly volatile historiography of literature itself demonstrates in this very companion). The claim, too, that a lot is going on and that therefore there is resurgence is never fully examined or proven. After all, people always say that, don't they?
The paperback was reviewed and looks like value for money: I am not at all sure I would pay for the hardback even though it would last longer. For something gathered together from many sources, the book holds together well: the four thematic groups make sense, any overlaps are easy to sort out in your mind (such as essays on authors like Gray and Kelman and Banks, who can readily be assigned to and re‐contextualized in essays elsewhere on issues like urban writing, the Glasgow novel, representations of masculinity or dystopia). These cross‐connections could be substantially strengthened if the companion approach were converted into an encyclopaedia approach, something Edinburgh University Press did quite well with their recent work on continental philosophy, (Protevi, 2005), reviewed earlier in these columns (RR 2006/183).
A snapshot of what each section contains may help here: contexts covers Scottishness and new forms of cultural authenticity post‐devolution, looking back historically and sideways to publishing and media; genres include drama and Gaelic work, crime fiction (inevitably Rankin and McCall Smith) and children's fiction; authors examples like Morgan and Lochhead, Whyte and Galloway, Welsh (things were never the same after his novel Trainspotting of 1993) and A.L. Kennedy; and last of all topics, with essays on lesbian/gay writing, masculinity and being a “true Scot”, literary translation, story‐telling, and comparing Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Beyond that, several connections and themes appear that are worth highlighting in their own right – notably the links between language and national identity. A challenge for anyone writing about Scottish literature is that falls into at least three language silos (English, Scots, and Gaelic), each with its own constituencies and advocates, and beyond that there is the international dimension. In literature as in media, operating on a global stage and being more cosmopolitan (as opposed to being parochial) is now part of a kind of knowledge economy and gross national product mind‐set, and, although this is noted here, no systematic treatment is given to it except some material on arts funding. Some entries are there in the interests of completeness – like cinema and Scotland in American romance and children's fiction – widening the appeal of the book but leading you to wonder how representative each of them really is. You can in fact journey back over the Companion, searching out, say, themes like gender and patriarchy and Scottish identity, putting some of the pieces together for yourself.
Ultimately the post‐devolution political point is the mere chance of a thing, a label and a contingency, which evidently applies unevenly (and sometimes so obliquely as to be implausible) to some of the work here. What is really being said and used here is the concept of “Scotland Now”. Some current policy themes emerge like arts and cultural policy (but only in fragments), hints of whether commissions and sponsorship really shape the creative practice, references to Canongate and Birlinn (no evaluation), emergent gay experience, and ecological concerns, perhaps understandably when you reflect that it is, after all, writers rather than politicians and policy‐makers who are being discussed. Devolution and cosmopolitanism are both at work but should be separated out rather than being lumped together. One final thing about the Companion – a real strength – and that is the way it encourages the reader to go off and read the novel and the poem or see the play. As Waterstones bookshop found when they published guides to generic fiction, such things really work, even though they date quickly. This Companion will suffer the same fate: I give it no more than three years of active life.
