COMPLEMENTARY to Neil Gunn’s vision of the Highlands is that of Fionn MacColla (Tom MacDonald, 1906-75), whose novel The Albannach (1932), dealing with contemporary Gaelic Scotland, was followed by And the Cock Crew (1945), reading back into history and exploring the Highland Clearances from a position of passionate commitment to the modern regeneration of Highland life.

MacColla was born in Montrose, trained as a teacher in Aberdeen and taught in Wester Ross before going to the Scots College at Safed in Palestine. He returned to Scotland in 1929, although he had already joined the National Party of Scotland in 1928, the year it was formed. He and his wife lived in Montrose near Hugh MacDiarmid, or CM Grieve and his first family in the 1920s and they encouraged each other in their commitment to writing and art. MacColla was appointed to a teaching position in Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides in 1940 and lived in the Western Isles, mainly in Barra, till he retired in 1967. He died in Edinburgh in 1975.

His autobiography, Too Long in This Condition (1975) includes an angry story from his teaching days in Aberdeen, when he was called in to witness an interview between the headmaster of an approved school and a delinquent boy who had been referred there by the courts. The boy stammered and stumbled trying to read from an English reading book but when MacColla asked him to read “Tam o’ Shanter” his voice “became strong and resonant, his stammer disappeared, he read with fluency, expression and obvious pleasure and satisfaction”. The headmaster dismissed this with a snort, saying the boy had probably read it before. MacColla’s point was this: “He was not a legal or social problem, he was a linguistic warning ... He should have been allowed to speak his native tongue.”

MacColla’s essays, At the Sign of the Clenched Fist (1967), constitute a politico-religious condemnation of post-Reformation Scotland, presenting it as the development of a negative ethos which “snuffed out” what he said must otherwise have developed into the greatest culture in Christendom. Wayward and wild as such claims might seem, in the context of MacColla’s writing, much of it unpublished in his lifetime, the bitterness and rage they express are not easy to dismiss. The novels are intense and strong, dramatising the arguments in characters and confrontations, with scenes of great pathos and power. The Albannach bears comparison with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The novel is set mainly in the Highlands but takes in a nightmare sojourn in Glasgow as well. For Murdo Anderson, the spirit and economy of contemporary Scotland lead to constriction and negativity. The repression of Calvinist church teaching and the subversive, sly resilience of common people are fundamentally opposed. Murdo goes through disastrous experiences before coming to an acceptance of possibility that resides in humour, patience, sympathy and understanding. Towards the end of Joyce’s Portrait, Stephen Dedalus imagines an old man one of his friends has met in the west of Ireland: “Old man had red eyes and short pipe. Old man spoke Irish.” Stephen’s first response is repulsion but then he corrects himself: “I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till ... Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean him no harm.”

Stephen’s animosity gives way to a recognition of the value of native Irish identity which his own allegiance to a European world ultimately respects. Similarly, Murdo recognises a depth he needs in the Highlanders who play the pipes, tell stories and sing. One of them closes the novel with a last laugh: “In the depths of his beard, the old dotard chuckled.”

That patient, quizzical laughter is restorative in The Albannach. In And the Cock Crew there is no such redemption. The central confrontation is an extended dialogue between Fearcher, the old poet, and Maighster Zachairi, the minister who, effectively working for the Hanoverian establishment, is advising his parishioners to allow themselves to be cleared out of their own homes quietly and passively. It is a central conversation in the whole of modern Scottish literature, placing pagan and prehistoric values of art, poetry and song against the work of administration, political and economic exploitation and authoritative rule by violence. That conflict is as vital today as it ever was. MacColla understands the opposition but he shows the minister’s complicity sympathetically, as Zachairi is increasingly aware of the destruction his commitments are leading to, and Fearcher’s sympathies are not sentimentalised. He is shown to be increasingly aware of his own helplessness in the face of what bears down upon him and his people with the weight of an inevitable outcome. Yet MacColla’s skill as a writer is to show in this confrontation how permanent, perennially relevant the conflict is.

It rests on the myth of Ossian after the Fianna, returning after the world of heroes has disappeared, to tell his stories to the enquiring St Patrick in the new dispensation of Christianity. Ossian’s world is gone. But St Patrick’s questions prompt the telling of the stories and the songs that will continue to commemorate it, and make of it a living imagery for the future. The power of literature is always subversively at work like this. Even when the absolute commitment of writers like MacColla might grind into despair, the novels teach through the drama they enact.

This is evident in the novel-fragment, or extended short story, Scottish Noel (1958), a chilling midwinter tale of the 16th century, where, to quote Sydney Goodsir Smith, “A lance sticking in the snow becomes portentous, a stricken horse, screaming, bleeding, the moonlight, the cold, the impersonality of the action as if the gods of death were playing chess with living men.” It’s as if Wyndham Lewis were translating a Gaelic heroic ballad.

The novel, The Ministers (posthumously published in 1979) begins unforgettably, as if from a godlike distance: “The sidereal universe: existent, in energy: this moment of time. The planetary order: in motion: the earth tilting over. The northern hemisphere: Europe facing sunwards: the British islands. To their west, at the ocean’s edge, the north-west coast of Scotland, rockful, splashed and sun-splintered standing over the waters of the Minch.” And then we’re with the main character, “a consciousness at a window there ... looking at those fickle waters ... ” MacColla’s distinction, ultimately, was to predicate all his best writing from such a position of disinterested distance, but to engage the human story with a fearfully passionate commitment and seriousness.

Although Eric Linklater (1899-1974) was born in Wales, his family connections with Orkney drew his own inclinations to the northern archipelago and he was committed to the Orkney Islands as his favoured place. He studied medicine at Aberdeen University and something of the clinical detachment, compassionate yet distanced, sometimes ironic stance of the surgeon is a characteristic of his writing which connects him to the forensic anti-sentimentalism of Modernism. After service in the First World War as a sniper with the Black Watch, he completed a degree in English and became a newspaper reporter, working as assistant editor of The Times of India and travelling through America before returning to Scotland. He wrote 23 novels, each very different. The first, White-Maa’s Saga (1929), is a fictionalised autobiography with a dramatic resolution, while Juan in America (1931), his greatest popular success, breathlessly follows the adventures of a descendant of Byron’s Don Juan in the United States, with vivid, fresh encounters with new cities, independent women, radically un-British attitudes, prohibition, gangsters and rising new world optimism. Its follow-up, Juan in China (1937), includes its hero’s lovemaking with beautiful Siamese twins and a military attack with tanks made of cardboard. The shock and satire remain challenging, forceful and sometimes outrageous. In an utterly different tone, Linklater also wrote The Men of Ness (1932), an eerily self-conscious story based on the Icelandic sagas, A Spell for Old Bones (1949), set in the Cold War period, and numerous short stories, the most memorable in God Likes Them Plain (1935) and Sealskin Trousers (1947).

Magnus Merriman (1934) is a comic tour de force, again beginning in fictionalised autobiography with Magnus in the trenches of the First World War (Linklater himself was badly wounded when a bullet ploughed through his helmet and head, leaving a furrow in his skull in which, I have been told, at dinner parties, he would occasionally rest his pen). Magnus returns to Scotland for the rising tide of political and literary national reawakening of the 1920s. There is a hilarious portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid as the poet “Hugh Skene” (which MacDiarmid relished!) but at the heart of the book there is Magnus’s wavering commitment to the idealistic vision of a revitalised Scotland and his more hedonistic indulgences in the pleasures of flesh and high adventure. As the novel progresses, these oscillate convincingly. Rich comedy is sustained through touching pathos and sympathy. The ending is a perfectly judged balance: rhapsodic wish-fulfilment gives way to realism that presents its own consolations and forward-pointing (arguably, perhaps, feminist) strengths.

RODERICK Watson, in The Literature of Scotland, describes Magnus as “a sexual and political adventurer who moves from the ambitious social circles of London to end up as an inefficient crofter on his native Orkney, where he is trapped in marriage by the shy guile of a young, beautiful and pragmatically unimaginative farm girl. She may represent his punishment or the making of him, but it is difficult to tell, for he is a romantic chameleon who changes his stripes to suit his situation whatever it may be — city sophisticate or island poet.” As such, Watson speculates, Magnus Merriman may disclose Linklater’s personal feeling about his own position in Scotland, his careless brush with politics, his satirical depiction of nationalists and his deep love of Orkney, yet the ambiguities do not rest upon cynicism. Rather, they arise from the divided loyalties of someone exceptionally capable of imagining reality different — and maybe better — than it is. Compassion overrules scepticism, in the end. The future is as full of unknown possibilities as it is of inevitable certainties. Presenting these ambiguities and loyalties in a sharp, fast narrative which pauses long enough in episodes to allow you to enjoy speculation of what might yet be brought about is Linklater’s forte.

His post-war fiction includes Private Angelo (1946), in which the title character is a good Italian man caught up in war, whose life and suffering is described with a care both detached and sympathetic. It remains one of the finest novels to emerge from the Second World War. It reaches forward beyond its date of publication to imagine life in the years of peace, and the human potential for comedy and understanding that might dissolve the legacy of war’s brutalities. Linklater’s wartime “conversations” such as The Cornerstones (1941) and The Raft & Socrates Asks Why (1942) exercise his talent for dramatic dialogue and his autobiographies, including A Year of Space (1953) and Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970) are compelling. Linklater’s recommendation for a happy life was “a good appetite and a bad memory” but his own memory was packed and his writing is always lucid, balanced, dramatic, surprisingly unpredictable and consistently a pleasure to read. His grave and that of his wife Marjorie are in the kirkyard near Harray Loch in Orkney, not far from the house that was their home for many years.

LAXDALE Hall (1951) is a Highland comedy of manners with a social realist edge, sometimes almost farce-like and riotous, but good-hearted rather than cruel, celebrative as well as satiric, refreshingly relishing the absurdities, the puncturing of pomposities and the degradations of being human. The Merry Muse (1959) takes these qualities further, as a clandestine copy of Burns’s newly rediscovered erotica is circulated surreptitiously in an otherwise douce, polite, Muriel Spark-like Edinburgh, and the city’s denizens are inspired to unprecedented sexual abandon. It is a comic satire of pretentious Edinburgh subverted by 18th-century Scottish sexual liberation on the eve of the 1960s. Orcadian and Biblical sagas respectively inform A Spell for Old Bones (1949) and Husband of Delilah (1963).

His last and most mysterious novel, A Terrible Freedom (1966), is a tense, dialectical work counterpointing the forensic realism he had learned as a medical student with a deepening sense of the authority of the imagination, a proto-postmodern nouveau roman with the undecided, ambiguous nature of reality at its core and conclusion. The central character alternates accounts of his life, traumatised in the First World War, with descriptions of his dreams, sexually risky, wildly unpredictable, often absurdly comic, in a deepening understanding of tragedy, loss and despair, culminating in heartfelt praise of taking dreams – for which we might read, the arts – seriously.

There’s a great deal still to learn from – and enjoy – in both these writers.