Books: Hame by Annalena McAffee shows Scotland in microcosm

King Kenneth MacAlpine’s mother, we are told, was from there, and so too was a first mate on the Darien expedition, and its Big Hoose has been visited by Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Boswell and Johnson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh too. But the tourists who pour into Fascaray do so not because of them but because of a single world-famous song — Hame Tae Fascaray — written by Grigor McWatt, a cantankerous nationalist poet who lived there.

“Our Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?” asked an even more famous cantankerous nationalist, but here the answer has to be yes. If Fascaray is Scotland in miniature — and it is, right from being divided into Catholic and Protestant to oil being discovered not too far off its coasts — its bard, McWatt, could well be expected to have a lot to say about Scottishness. And he does, or rather did, because when the book opens in 2014, he has just died and Mhairi MacPhail, a Canadian appointed to set up a museum in his honour, edit his papers and write his biography, has arrived on the island with her nine-year-old daughter Agnes. The rest of the novel switches between McWatt’s notes on island life — there are 70 years’ worth of them — and his poetry and extracts from MacPhail’s biography and her own notes on writing it. It is, as you can imagine, more than a bit bitty.

Neither MacPhail nor McWatt are great stylists, although he is by far the worse: he can’t see a conifer without calling it a “heaven-aimed spear” and will write guff like “porpoises joyously arc and dip as if stitching the ocean’s silken canopy”. Hame Tae Fascaray, however — which has been recorded no fewer than 59 times, by artists including Dylan, Van Morrison and Paolo Nutini — has made him so famous that this doesn’t matter. More intriguing still is the fact that, even though he lived into his tenth decade, McWatt remained a curmudgeonly enigma throughout. Only one woman seems to have got past his crusty carapace: a free-spirited girl called Lilias, who was just 17 when she met the poet in a pub in Edinburgh’s Rose Street and fell headlong in love.

There’s a mystery about why their relationship ended, and wanting to find out more about such blanks in McWatt’s life is the main hook pulling the reader through the novel’s 580 pages. But Scotland’s backstory — and its recognisable miniaturisation into Fascaray — preoccupies McAfee just as much as McWatt. So the Fascaray Land Raid of 1946 (“later an agitprop hit for the 24:7 radical theatre company”) is a clear nod back to the Crofters’ Wars of the 1880s and forward to The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil. The New Age-style settlement at Balnasaig has echoes of Findhorn, the community buyout mirrors Eigg’s and so on. By the time an American billionaire’s plans for a leisure resort are stymied by an offshore windfarm, this has become somewhat tiresome. Mhairi’s own notebooks, with their extensive emotional parsing of why she and her partner split up after separate affairs in New York aren’t too much more involving either.

Hame bills itself as “a love letter to Scotland”, but it is even more effective as love letter to Scots. Like Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend until their inevitable fall-out and subsequent flyting, McWatt listed Anglophobia as a hobby, and wrote poetry in Scots as a point of principle. His hatred of England went a long way beyond sticking stamps on envelopes with the Queen’s head upside-down or blowing up the odd island pillarbox marked “EIIR”. It meant taking the linguistic fight to the enemy on their most sacred soil of all — their poetry. “I pick the pockets of the English tyrants who have robbed us of our birthright,” he wrote, “take the best of their verse, and by a process that is part linguistic, part alchemical, I reimagine it, offer it to my people and make it Scotland’s own.” This was, he claimed, “redistributive larceny” every bit as seditious as the Fascaray Land Raid on which he had participated and about which he had written “thon skitterie wee sang” that made him world-famous.

There are 99 of these seditiously Scots poems-in-translation poems in McAfee’s novel, and they lie right at its heart. Although Hame ends with a particularly intense coup de theatre — in fact, a whole series of them — for those of us who are not confident readers of Scots (I’m one) the poems effect a no less dramatic transformation. Even if, at the start, I was constantly riffling to the 10-page glossary at the back of the book, by the end, I hardly needed to. It helps that these “reimagined” poems are translated with precision and wit (Chesterton’s “The Pirlin Scottish Road”, for example, ends “Afore we gang to Paradise by way o Pittenweem”), and that they are subtly introduced and relevant, but they also make a superb case for the vigour and range of Scots.

With its Scots inventories of life on Fascaray, its telescoped history and geography, and the way it hops between narrative styles, this is a gallimaufry of a novel. Somewhere in there, you’ll find the kitchen sink, but you’ll find a few treasures too.

Hame By Annalena McAfee is published by Harvill Secker, priced £16.99