Three figures from the palpable regeneration of Scottish writing in the 1980s

Massie’s fiction begins with Change And Decay In All Around I See (1978) and The Last Peacock (1980). With The Death Of Men (1981) it became evident that this was a novelist capable of deeply impressive work. Edwin Morgan noted this novel particularly in his “Twentieth-Century Scottish Classics”: more than a fictional account of the kidnapping and death of the Italian politician Aldo Moro in 1978, it is “an exploration, through fictional characters, of the complex issues of political change and political stability in modern society. The brutal fact of abduction, especially when as in this case the most probable end is assassination, is shown in a penetrating way in its impact on friends, on Americans, on an English journalist, and on members of the family, among whom is one involved in the kidnapping.”

Impressions Of Rome colour the background but the main focus is on the extremes to which compromised commitments and faltering faiths can take people. Later memorable novels include One Night In Winter (1984), Augustus (1986), A Question Of Loyalties (1989), Tiberius (1991), The Sins Of The Father (1991), Caesar (1993), King David (1995), Shadows of Empire (1997), Antony (1997), Nero’s Heirs (1999), The Evening Of The World (2001), Caligula (2003), Arthur The King (2004), Charlemagne And Roland (2007), Surviving (2009), Klaus And Other Stories (2010), and a series of crime novels set in occupied France, where divided loyalties once again are set against the sense of moral justice in a deeply compromised society, Death in Bordeaux (2010), Dark Summer In Bordeaux (2012), Cold Winter In Bordeaux (2014), End Games In Bordeaux (2014).

James Kelman (b 1946), from the very first novel, The Busconductor Hines (1984), with its descriptions of family life in a tenement flat, the main character’s attempt to organise protest at work, to hold his family together and teach his son as best he can, focuses on the experience of working people (not all of them “working class”). His writing carries a moral force insisting that we must not evade the central matter of social injustice, economic division and the need people have for better lives than most of us are likely ever to get. Edwin Morgan’s description of The Busconductor Hines is worth quoting: “Kelman’s troubled and distracted hero, living in a ‘no-bedroomed’ tenement flat with his wife and small son, feeling he is in danger of losing both wife and job and cracking up, but determined to hold the family unit together and to teach his son to understand and master the ways of the world, is a remarkable character-creation, not least because of his verbal inventiveness, bizarre humour, and extraordinary monologues.” The book has “style, truth, and affection” and Kelman’s second novel, A Chancer (“less rich, more taut”) is also “highly recommended”.

His work after these novels became even richer and more complex. His Booker Prize winner, How Late It Was, How Late (1994), is a compelling exploration of the world of a blind man, victimised and bullied, trying to find a way through experience he struggles to make sense of. It is a tour-de-force of the writer’s art, and his later work extends his range, most searchingly in his exploration of childhood, Kieron Smith, Boy (2008), which dwells within the boy’s point of view, with untiring verbal invention and tightly controlled qualities of humour and sympathy.

READ MORE: Two modern fiction writers whose work inhibits different areas of Scottish life

HIS short stories are collected in An Old Pub Near The Angel (1973); Three Glasgow Writers (1976, with Alex Hamilton and Tom Leonard); Short Tales From The Night Shift (1978); Not Not While The Giro (1983); Lean Tales (1985, with Alasdair Gray and Agnes Owens); Greyhound For Breakfast (1987); The Burn (1991); The Good Times (1998); If It Is Your Life (2010); A Lean Third (2014); That Was A Shiver (2017).

His third novel, A Disaffection (1989), takes as its central character a school teacher and explores his world with a tight time-frame and forensic understanding, thereby allowing sympathy to grow without any excessive linguistic indulgence. Later works such as Translated Accounts (2001), You Have To Be Careful In The Land Of The Free (2004), Mo Said She Was Quirky (2012) and Dirt Road (2016) deploy his experience of America and his imaginative projections into the minds and feelings of characters very different from himself.

It is this intensely professional writerly capability that takes him far beyond anything that might be described as exploitative of sensationalised working-class experience to a kind of fiction that is fundamentally contemplative, and deeply resistant to the pressures of conformity brought to bear by middle-class conventions.

READ MORE: The value of freeing the imagination

ALAN Spence (b 1947) similarly made an impressive impact with his first book, Its Colours They Are Fine (1977), a collection of 13 interwoven stories comprising a panorama of Glasgow life through the 1950s and 1960s. A child’s-eye view of Glasgow life opens with optimism and hope and comes to terms with disappointment in the resilient world of fallible but supportive family and friends. Childhood, adolescence and old age are treated equally with direct and careful attentiveness. Truths arise without dramatic gesture, poised and strong. A six-year-old boy in a Glasgow tenement awakens to the vulnerability and emotional sensitivity of his parents, dazzled and attracted by the tinsel of Christmas decorations. A teenager finds himself on the edge of becoming a Glasgow “hard man”, reaching into his pocket, “feeling the steel comb with the long pointed handle”. Religious bigotry and public festivity combine in an Orange march and a Catholic wedding. Two old codgers chew over the past in the warm sanctuary of the Botanic Gardens. There is no nostalgia but rather a balanced, poignant, sustained and gentle sense of the temporary and transient nature of even the most vivid experience.

This was followed by The Magic Flute (1990), a kind of sequel to Its Colours They Are Fine. Further novels and story collections include Stone Garden (1995); Way to Go (1998), which takes the profession of funeral directing and confronts the gloom and darkness of traditional Scottish enactments of burial and entombment with an international range of attitudes to death and the removal of the body. Like all Spence’s works, this takes great risks with the balance of seriousness and humour – it could be farcically flamboyant or meditative to the point of being almost humourless – but it manages, sometimes necessarily unsteadily, to bring these together. It leaves you with a feeling of hope in the sense of possibility, and that old things that have always “been done that way” might not be done in the same way, but better, somehow, differently, in the future. It shows you how to want better.

The next two novels take you into Spence’s favoured territory beyond Scotland: Japan, its challenges, wisdoms and histories. The Pure Land (2006) ambitiously tells the story of Thomas Glover, 19th-century trader, travelling from Aberdeen to Japan, developing his own businesses, including arms-dealing, leading to the overthrow of the Shogun. A global political canvas depicting industrial-scale capitalism and imperial power is focused on the pathos, limitations, aspirations and humanity of one man, his relations with native women, friends and family, addressing questions of loyalty, value and loss. Glover (a historical character) helped found Mitsubishi, and the industrial centre that Nagasaki thereafter became was one reason why it was the target for atomic holocaust at the end of the Second World War.

Spence’s next novel Night Boat (2013), set entirely in 18th-century Japan, another fictionalised biography, tells of Hakuin, the man became the world’s most famous teacher of Zen Buddhism. In light, pellucid prose, in short chapters paused by bright, sharp-edged poems, Hakuin’s human story unfolds from his childhood family, through meetings with teachers, confrontations and solitude, to temples and wanderings, writings and conversations, through history, into old age. The pathos of the novel is deeply personal but also takes place on an epic scale.

The essence of that pathos might be sensed in Spence’s poem “Un Bel Di (One Fine Day)”, which is a register of feeling, watching Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly: “This time I tell myself I will not cry / I will not let Puccini rip the heart / right out of me…” In the poem, Spence is sitting “in this gilded circle / right up in the gods”: “But then she sings.” And at that point, everything surrenders to the music and its meaning:

We all wait for the night to pass, the dawn
to break, we all stand watching on some shore,
looking for that ship on the horizon,
the plume of smoke that signals hope once more.
She sings, Un bel di… And it’s no use –
I weep for everything I love and lose.

Spence is a fine playwright, not least in Sailmaker (1982) and No Nothing (2015), in which the ghosts of the Clydeside working-class leader Jimmy Reid and the poet Edwin Morgan meet each other in the afterlife and discuss the lasting priorities of their lives. He’s also a fine poet. In his book, Morning Glory: haiku and tanka, with illustrations by Elizabeth Blackadder (2010), there is this little poem:

it was this big!
the child tells her mother
on the phone

Now, read that carefully. If after reading, you cannot see the invisible, hear the unspoken, understand what intuition is, feel that family connection reaching through writing beyond itself, or grasp afresh how language and imagination work and what sympathy actually is – well, honestly, I think you should get help.