An impressive book

James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still deservedly won the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year Award. It is a magisterial novel following linked people and events through the decades of Scottish life leading to the present day, and it leaves the reader enlightened, impressed and astonished. Robertson made his mark in 2006 with an extraordinary novel called The Testament of Gideon Mack, in which a secretly wayward minister of the church finds himself in close conversation with the Devil, but his new book keeps in touch with reality, not matter how fantastic it may be. The intricate story is packed with unforgettable characters, centrally including a man who one day walks out of his house in despair at human ravaging of the earth, and never returns. At the same time, Robertson has a mordant and accurate eye for the double dealings that lie behind government and for the fallibility of the powerful. Above all, it looks with compassion and understanding at the lives of people who are unwittingly trapped in the machinations of politics. Historically, it presents a detailed, meticulously researched historical account of what has happened in Scotland in the years from the Red Clyde to the rise of the SNP and the likelihood of independence.

Linking these factors are passages of sheer poetry, watching the man who walked away as he slowly discards all the things thought essential for modern life. A couple will be left to remember him as the half-frozen wanderer who slept for a night in the barn and was gone by dawn. A child keeps forever the small white stone that a quiet man put in his hand. This book is revealing, wise and beautiful. It should be on every civilised bookshelf.

Alison Prince

And the Land Lay Still, by James Robertson. Penguin paperback, £9.99. ISBN 978-0-141-02854-5