The Crofter and the Laird

"This does feel like an over-done narrative. But it’s done brilliantly, and I think it’s a good lesson not to be scared to tread well-trodden turf. What I like about this book is the way he presents the complexity of the community, and their feelings towards the laird, who only lives on the island in the summer. This is the 1960s. It’s a time of great change—the end of an era. And there’s complexity in his personal narrative too; he goes to this place, where a lot of his ancestors hailed from. And at points he says, well, I don’t have any more connection to it than you would, whoever you are. I think that’s really interesting. There are beautiful moments but there isn’t a sense that he’s compelled to paint the landscape for us on every second page—in a way it’s not very of our time and it’s better for it I think. Less of his love of the land and more of his curiosity about the community. He mentions Scarba, an island where I spent ten days sleeping in a cave—I write about it in my book—there are no people there now at all. It’s interesting that when the people go, the place changes entirely. Completely. And I admire the bravery. To present a place properly you’ve got to tell secrets. He doesn’t shy away from doing that. But there’s a tremendous love for the island as a whole. When you start to write about place, you’re writing very deeply about who its inhabitants are. It can be very raw. People’s own sense of the place they live in is what makes them who they are. So you have to be honest, but you also have to handle it respectfully. I think he does. While I was writing my book, I met a man who told me that though his father trained as a butcher, he had become a fishmonger. This man he went away and learned how to fillet a fish properly, and after that, he said, he never saw his father the same way again. He couldn’t fillet fish. He was just a butcher. I thought, that’s so funny. But there’s so much in that as well. He kind of told me everything about himself in that little vignette. I think John McPhee does that; he captures how, in these places, people say an awful lot in very little."