And the Land Lay Still

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Hiding from his memories and generally showing little interest in progressing his career, Rebus can’t ignore the ghoulish strings of crimes now tormenting the city. He isn’t just a cop trying to catch a bad guy, but he’s also a man who knows more about this story than he lets on. Scotland’s stories tell us about who we are and where we come from, reveal our relationship to this here land and memorialise the melting-pot of our cultural ecology. In these tales we catch sudden glimpses of ourselves within wild, weird and wonderful worlds, bearing witness to hushed conversations between our past and present. There is no strong ideological pulse beating through devolution, no political theology hovering above the pragmatic fudging of institutional reform. This makes the meaning of devolution both conveniently flexible and somewhat unstable, both as a policy and as an object of knowledge. Perhaps appropriately for an enterprise involving the deliberate erosion of central authority, devolution is always susceptible to being commandeered and re-defined, bent to stronger narrative impulses than those of its tinkering architects. What Leigh discovers in the vent takes her to the Mojave Desert, to a job working with a NASA-like space agency that is using a newly-discovered form of fuel to send people to the furthest reaches of our solar system and beyond.

Whether circular or not, we should notice that the culturalist narrative includes ample room for historical contingency and the unexpected twist. In a 2014 essay Craig observes that ‘in 1990 no political party in Scotland was in favour of the Parliament that actually came into existence in 1999’ ( Craig 2014, 1). 3 This classic gothic book tells the story of a respected London solicitor, Gabriel John Utterson, who is investigating the strange occurrences between his friend Dr. Henry Jekyll and the evil Edward Hyde. This one will keep you on the edge of your seat, as it’s been doing to readers for generations!Writing in The Guardian, the writer Irvine Welsh said of the "highly ambitious" book that it “represents nothing less than a landmark for the novel in Scotland, and underlines the author's position as one of Britain's best contemporary novelists”. [7] Scotland First Minister Alex Salmond selected the novel as his book of the year for 2010, telling the Scotland on Sunday that it was “outstanding”, “important”, and the author’s finest work. [8] What futures can we project for devolution today? In one sense, the political strategy became redundant in 2011, when it failed to prevent the open challenge to the legitimacy of the United Kingdom represented by the 2014 referendum. In another, the result of that referendum – 2 million votes against Scottish independence – was a ringing endorsement of devolution and proof both of its popularity and its durability as a ‘settled’ constitutional position. (This point was strongly made at our 2015 workshop by legal scholar – and Unionist/Conservative campaigner – Adam Tomkins.) Having spectacularly failed to ‘kill nationalism stone-dead’, in the famous 1990s prophecy of George Robertson, ever-further devolution is the maximalist middling way most popular with the Scottish public (see Curtice 2014), and serves as the basis for not one but two imminent strengthenings of the Scottish Parliament (the implementation of the Scotland Act 2012 and further new powers recommended by the Smith Commission in 2014). Simultaneously beefed-up and obsolete, devolution is being asked to mean most things to most people as never before.

The Royal Lyceum Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Scotland will present an online discussion inspired by James Robertson’s acclaimed novel And The Land Lay Still streaming online from Wednesday 5 May at 7.30pm until Friday 7 May 2021. The evening will feature extracts from a reading of playwright Peter Arnott’s stage adaptation of the novel, which is currently in development, presented by the National Theatre of Scotland. The novel first introduces us to the thoughtful Michael, a photographer of leftish nationalist sympathies, who's been as slow in coming out as Scottish law was to sanction the idea of gay sex. Michael is ambivalent about being entrusted with the task of curating an exhibition of work by his late father, Angus, a more successful and celebrated photographer. Michael's largely been in his paternal shadow, not just professionally but sexually and socially, the whole of his life. Basically, he's a nicer guy than his womanising old man, without the ruthlessness that often distinguishes artist from artisan, and thus perennially destined to come second. And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson". The Observer. UK. 15 August 2010 . Retrieved 1 July 2011.Iris’ goal is to met with Geillis Duncan, a woman who has one night left to live before she is hanged for the crime of witchcraft.

The quotation is from And the Land Lay Still, James Robertson’s panoramic novel of post-war Scotland, and probably the most ambitious historical fiction to emerge from Britain this century. Robertson’s task is to spread the paltry saga of Scottish devolution onto a vivid social canvas, stretching the narrow ‘common ground’ of constitutional debate to the full dimensions of the modern nation. The resulting tome attempts to weave every corner, faction and identity of the country into an intelligible Story of Scotland, one that makes political and emotional sense of quietly transformative times. This is a highly diffuse and murky tale, and Robertson’s task is made all the more difficult because he cannot count on his readership – even his Scottish readership – recognising the basic timeline and dramatis personae. The book employs several complex framing devices, but even the factual grist of the main narrative will seem obscure to readers unschooled in recent Scottish history. This makes a high degree of political exposition necessary, such that And the Land Lay Still often feels less like a novel ‘about’ history than one ‘doing’ history: producing as it goes the story it seems to be recounting. For the majority of the book Robertson is not dramatising or re-telling events already familiar to the reader, but introducing and explaining them for the first time. In this respect, the novel carries within itself the problem of national historical recovery it sets out to represent. It is a hugely informative and justly popular book, bringing the unloved and largely untold story of devolution to a much larger audience. But Robertson’s historical ambition has its novelistic trade-off, and the book’s on-the-fly explication requires that characters and happenings arrive oversaturated with representative significance. In one early scene, the central character could almost be speaking for a reader under-convinced by this approach, glancing at his surroundings and observing that he ‘had never come across such enthusiasm for political debate, especially when it revolved around questions of national identity and self-determination’ ( Robertson 2010, 64). Managing such worries took up a good deal of the Commission’s time. The minutes of a November 1972 meeting show the degree to which devising a coherent plan to recognise (and neuter) ‘national feeling’ involved extensive debate over how to accommodate cultural difference within the British national story: Ali Smith is a literary genius who once again gives her readers an unforgettable, mind-bending story. Centred around a Renaissance painter in the 1460s and the child of a child in the 1960’s, the story weaves between the two tales of love and injustice and twists into a single thread.

Hex can be read in a single sitting, and in that time it will take you on a journey through time; teach you about the plight and pain of womankind over centuries. Powerful and moving. A brilliant and multifaceted saga of Scottish life in the second half of the twentieth century ( Sunday Times) And the Land Lay Still - covers major transformations that have taken place in Scottish society over the past 60 years