The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price, reviewed by Bill Kirton

The story is built around the old traditions of crofting and droving in Scotland. Drovers and their dogs keep the cattle moving on long treks from the Highlands and Islands to the markets on the other side of the country. As they then stay to oversee the selling of their stock, their dogs make their own way home. This book reverses the process in that we first experience the dogs’ return, which, serendipitously for Sandy, a young boy running away from the ill treatment he’s been getting from the farmer to whom his mother sold him, coincides with his escape. It also reverses beautifully the assumptions we have about the relationship between humans and dogs because, as the author makes clear, it’s the two dogs who are in charge on this journey as they herd Sandy along the route they’ve chosen. They’re going home and taking Sandy with them.

To avoid spoilers, I’ll say nothing about how the story develops once they reach their destination. It does, though, involve yet another reversal as the dogs leave home again and Sandy goes with them; a new outward journey for them, a return for him. Add to all this the fact that I read the whole book on my own 2½ hour train journey from the East of Scotland to the West and there’s a satisfying symmetry about the whole thing.

It was a joy to read. There were hardships aplenty for Sandy, and the author spares us little of the deprivations the poor had to suffer. The precarious and often cruel nature of rural life in 19^th century Scotland is carefully sketched. The characters, including those of the dogs, are conveyed in light but telling touches, and the overall style has a warmth and a tenderness that, for all the indignities that Sandy has to suffer and the unfairness of the laws governing child labour, hints at where true nobility and humanity lie. This is the Scotland of myth and romance, but this author knows better than to trade in stereotypes. She tells the whole story, the good and the bad; hinting at the social and economic changes that affect the whole way of life of these people and will affect them even more powerfully as new ways of travelling and doing business are developed. But at the story’s core, it’s always the people who matter: Sandy, the drovers, the crofters, the families, and of course the dogs. It’s a realistic, unsentimental yet happy tale, made all the more touching by the fact that the narrator is Sandy himself, but as a grown man who can convey the immediacy of his sufferings and joys as a boy but put it all in the wider context of his own maturity and the changes he has seen in life in Scotland.

Forget about Brigadoon. This is really what it was like. And it’s a terrific story, beautifully told.

The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price reviewed by Karen Bush

The Drover's Dogs

Whether you’re a dog lover, a fan of historical fiction - or none of those – The Drover’s Dogs is a thoroughly good read from start to finish. Ten year old Sandy’s life is pretty tough, but it gets worse when his mother is forced to sell him in order to make ends meet. When he runs away from his abusive master, she makes him go back, and the outlook is pretty bleak. He decides to run away again, but there won’t be any welcome for him at his old home, so there is no point in going there … He sets off with no real purpose other than to put some distance between him and the cruel farmer, and ends up joining two dogs on their way home after helping to take cattle to market. Who is looking after who? And what will Sandy find at journey’s end?

I wasn’t sure whether this book was really going to be my cup of tea, but I really shouldn’t have doubted that Susan Price would once again produce a terrific story. If a long walk across Scotland doesn’t sound very exciting, read this book and be prepared to revise your opinion: as always, Price brilliantly brings her characters to life, has a keen eye for detail which adeptly conveys the harsh realities of the period – and there is real excitement and moments of high drama too. It gripped me from the very first page and was very difficult to put down: so difficult in fact that I sat up very late at night so I could finish it in one glorious helping.      



The Blue Horse by Philip Miller, reviewed by Ali Bacon

For me the city of Edinburgh and the intrigues of the art world always make fascinating reading and I wasn’t disappointed in this novel which happens to combine the two. But The Blue Horse isn’t just a book about art. The excellent opening sets the tone. George Newhouse loved his wife and his wife was dead, because it is George’s journey through bereavement which is the real story and his shifting mindscape as much as the cityscape of Edinburgh which dominates the book.

At the beginning, George has a new job as curator of Flemish art in the fictional ‘public gallery’ which I immediately recognized as The Dean Gallery but he is distracted from work by grief, intertwined with his personal quest to trace a painting by a minor artist mentioned by Rembrandt which contrary to expert opinion he believes exists (this is The Blue Horse).
George is already living on the edge and so it doesn’t take much to tip him over when his work situation disintegrates (the gallery is to lose most of its collection) and his mentor dies unexpectedly. He also fails to form new relationships with the women who excite his interest and his old friend, the boisterous Dutchman Rudi, is focussed on his own projects.

George has the added pressure of being in charge of the gallery’s installation by a renegade contemporary artist at the Venice Biennale. And after more evidence about the Blue Horse and George’s continuing failure to address his own grief, Venice is where everything comes together – or falls apart – in a bravura climax.

I admit I wasn’t always sure what was going on in this book but then neither was George. What mattered was that all of the art background rang absolutely true (the author is an art correspondent) and there was always a question that needed answering. Although they are miles apart in many ways it’s hard not to think of Donna Tart’s Goldfinch in the way that the painting exerts its influence all the way through the book.

This is a literary novel which I think deserves a wide audience. The Kindle edition (a very reasonable £2.99) has one or two glaring typos and has been criticised by reviewers for this, but they weren't enough to distract me.
Also in paperback from Amazon or via Freight Books.

As a footnote, here's the Dean Gallery now part of the National Galleries of Scotland (and renamed 'Modern 2'). It does have a very particular character which seems to attract fiction writers. I used it in my novel A Kettle of Fish and in The Lewis Man by Peter May, it appears in its original incarnation as an orphanage.

(Photo courtesy of The Edinburgh Blog on Flickr: creative commons license)


Ali Bacon was born in Fife and lives near Bristol. She writes novels and short stories and blogs for Authors Electric on the 22nd of each month.

Raiderland by SR Crockett reviewed by Julia Jones

S.R. Crockett describes  Raiderland as “a garrulous literary companion for Galloway lovers and Galloway travellers.” It was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1904 by which time Crockett had been a best seller for ten years. He'd already produced eleven of the novels that will soon be re-published in Ayton Publishing's Galloway Collection  and there would be a further fourteen before his death in France in April 1914. "Bear in mind," says series editor Cally Phillips, "that he was writing professionally in magazines for some ten years before he became published in book form and you will see that [Raiderland] is indeed no more than a snapshot of his work . But a beautiful and valuable snapshot it is."

The bare bones of Crockett's biography are fascinating. He was born in Balmaghie 1859, the illegitimate son of a dairy maid. For the first eight years of his life he was brought up by his maternal grandparents at their farm in Duchrae and was then educated in the small town of Castle Douglas. In 1876 he gained a Galloway Bursary to Edinburgh University where he began writing as a way of supporting himself as he studied. This seems to be an impressive educational trajectory and I rather wonder whether it could have been replicated in England at the same period? It's certainly a tribute to the moral and serious approach to life fostered by rural Scottish Presbyterianism. Crockett's grandparents were Cameronians - a section of the Scottish Covenanters who became a separate church after the religions settlement of 1690, refusing to take oaths of allegiance and continuing to object to the union between England and Scotland.  Scottish religious dissent and factionalism forms a major part of Crockett's fiction – especially where it's aligned with political resistance to the age-old enemy, England. It may be that there is a current political message in the republication of Crockett's oeuvre at a time when the Union is again under scrutiny. Whether or not this is so, Raiderland offers a wonderful opportunity to glimpse dissent from the inside. After his time at Edinburgh Crockett spent the best part of ten years as a Free Church minister himself, resigning in 1895 to concentrate on his writing.

Much of the early part of Raiderland is autobiography through landscape. Crockett recreates his childhood self (“the Boy-who-Was”) in a somewhat Wordsworthian way, mentally revisiting the landscape of his childhood and using it to rekindle memories of “those bright days when the sun had not long risen and the feeling of morning was in the blood.” 

Here's his introduction to his grandparents' Duchrae farmhouse: "The farm I know best is also the loveliest for situation. It lies nestled in green holm crofts. The purple moors ring it half round, north and south. To the eastward pine woods once stood ranked and ready like battalions clad in indigo and Lincoln green against the rising sun – that is until one fell year when the woodmen swarmed all over the slopes and the ring of axes was heard everywhere. The earliest scent I can remember is that of fresh pine chips, among which my mother laid me as she and her brothers gathered kindling among the yet unfallen giants.”

His first indoor memory is of lying in his cradle in the farmhouse kitchen aware of his grandmother “padding softly about in her list slippers (or houshens), baking farles of cake on the girdle, the round plate of iron described by Foissart. The doors and windows were open and without there spread that silence in comparison with which the hush of kirkyard is almost company – the silence of a Scottish farmyard in the first burst of harvest.” 

There is no sense that Crockett suffered any stigma for his illegitimacy or that he was anything other than a loved and cherished (though lonely) child experiencing a particular rural mixture of freedom and discipline. Raiderland proves that his senses remained wide open to natural beauty throughout his life and his imagination ranged freely backwards and forwards in historical time. That small detail of the girdle being “as described by Foissart” is indicative of Crockett's awareness of the living history that surrounded him.

The Galloway novels are set variously from the 15^th century onwards and Crockett finds many of his characters within his native landscape. Sometimes he is explicit, linking the solitariness of his childhood to his development of imaginary people – who were often  not imaginary at all but based on the adults around him, as in the following passage: “Chiefly I love the Crae Hill because from there you get the best view of the Duchrae, where for years a certain lonely child played and about which, in after years, so many poor imaginings have worked themselves out. Here lived and loved on Winsome Charteris – also a certain Maisie Lennox, with many and many another. By the fireside night after night sat the original of Silver Sand, relating stories with that shrewd and becoming twinkle in his eye which told of humour and experience as deep as a draw-well and wide as the brown-backed moors over which he had come.” 

At other places in the book Crockett simply segues into a relevant passage from one or other of his novels, usually with the briefest of historical notes. (I am assuming that the helpful titles in brackets have been added by the editor, Cally Phillips.) He tramps the hills and gazes down into the lochs of both East and West Galloway and takes the reader with him, delightfully. All of this is accessible to the English reader with no prior knowledge of the area or of Crockett's fiction. There are occasional moments when one reaches for a glossary or when he delves a little too deep for the ignorant southerner. I admit that my eyes glazed over the c18th century diary of landowner William Cunninghame but I apologise for this as a sign of my own English weakness.  Raiderland must be supremely rich for those with the relevant knowledge and I look forward to being able to access the original illustrations by Joseph Pennell on the Galloway Raiders website. I hope Raiderland will be carried in backpacks as an explorers' field guide as well as providing an oblique and fascinating glimpse into the hinterland of a prolific, confident and successful novelist. Ayton Publishing are clearly right to put Raiderland as the final volume, number 32, of their forthcoming collection yet it also serves as an introduction to whet the appetite for the fiction that has made Crockett's name.        

For more information about S.R.Crockett and his books click HERE or to join 'The Galloway Raiders' click HERE 

Review of Bird Of Passage by Catherine Czerkawska

Bird of Passage by Catherine Czerkawska

Reviewer: Susan Price

Category: Adult fiction

          I was three-quarters of the way through this book – or even more – before it dawned on me that it was Wuthering Heights in modern dress.  I was tipped off by a couple of sly and amusing references to twigs tapping on windows and ghosts, and by the hero disappearing for twenty years and then returning a rich man.

          It’s not a re-telling, though – it’s a re-imagining.  A dialogue with the older book, if you like.  It asks, would the same story, the same deathless love, be possible in the modern age, and if so, how?

Catherine Czerkawska

          Even so, if I’d known before I began it, I probably would never have read it, and that would have been a shame.  It would have been my loss – but I’ve read enough self-conscious and unconvincing rewrites of classics to ensure that they’re never something I’m eager to pick up.  However, I’m glad I did download this to my e-reader and click it open, because it’s excellent – as are the other books I’ve read by Catherine Czerkawska:  A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture and The Curiosity Cabinet. (Also reviewed on this site.)

          Bird of Passage begins on an isolated farm on the Isle of Skye, in the 1960s.  Every year, bands of Irish ‘tattie-howkers’ arrive for the potato harvest, and one year Finn O’Malley comes with them.  He is too young for the back-breaking work, and an elderly farmer is concerned for him, and takes him under his wing, inviting him back to his house to feed him up, and taking him fishing to give him a rest.

          The farmer has a granddaughter, Kirsty, on whom he dotes.  She’s an only child, lonely at the farm, and strikes up a friendship with Finn which persists through the years, as he returns again and again to the harvest.  By the time sex enters the scene, they have forged a close emotional bond that even years of separation cannot loosen; and, as an adult, Kirsty retains an understanding of Finn which others, kept at a distance by his silence, never reach.

          I’ll confess here that I’ve never actually finished Wuthering Heights.  While admiring the down-to-earth reality of its earlier chapters, I’ve always lost interest once it moved on to the next generation.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the classics we love and avoid today.  But I finished Bird of Passage.

Tattie-howkers

          Couldn't have put it down.
          For one, I found both Finn and Kirsty far more engaging characters than Heathcliffe and Cathy.  Kirsty is a bright and loveable child when we first meet her: the sheltered, adored darling of her mother and grandfather.  She can’t understand Finn’s withdrawn and touchy nature and merrily, touchingly, tries to draw him out.  She’s read the ‘Chalet School’ books and, hearing that Finn attends ‘a boarding school’ in Ireland, questions him about dorm feasts.  In reality Finn is a near-prisoner in an ‘industrial school’ for the children of ‘unfit mothers’, staffed by monks.  Things go on in dormitories at night, but not midnight feasts.

The Curiosity Cabinet

          Because we know more of Finn’s background than we do of Heathcliffe’s, we understand him more.  We can see why he is withdrawn, wary and silent.  Nor does he simply vanish before returning a rich man – we know exactly where he’s been, what he’s been doing and how he got that money.  We also understand why he hasn’t changed.  Though I know many Heathcliffe fans won’t agree with me, I’ve often felt that Heathcliffe should be clipped round the ear with a rolled newspaper and told to lose the Byronic pose – whereas with Finn, I knew exactly what he was struggling with and how hard it was.

          I was convinced, moved and impressed by Bird of Passage. It says that, yes, undying love for another, unrelenting absorption in another, is possible in these days of computers and motorbikes.  (Guess who rides the motorbike in leathers: go on, guess.)  But, although it’s possible, you may not want to pay the price.

          Whether you love Wuthering Heights or not, if you enjoy an involving, beautifully written book, you’ll enjoy Bird of Passage.

 Bird of Passage by Catherine Czerkawska can be found here.

Susan Price is an award winning author, and has recently published several ebooks.
She blogs here: http://susanpricesblog.blogspot.co.uk/

Susan Price also contributes to Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?