A Country of Eternal Light is a homecoming of sorts

Image copyright: Paul Dalgarno

By Paul Dalgarno

In 2020, I read and loved the novel Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan. It made me laugh and cry with its take on love and friendship, life and death, which is to say: its universal themes.

But it’s also, to my mind, a prime example of what I think of as distinctly Scottish literature – the type that could theoretically be written elsewhere but tends not to be. There’s a kind of class consciousness and cultural awareness that ensures the big messages are delivered in down-to-earth, often pulse-quickening, prose that could be described in many ways, but never as pretentious.

Because of that, I hurried to click on an interview with O’Hagan that ran on the Sunday Post website in February 2021, in which he praised the current generation of authors in Scotland, comparing them to the ‘great flowering’ of Glasgow writers in the 1980s.

‘Scottish literature is on fire at the moment,’ he said. ‘Look at the last two years alone – Kirstin Innes, Jenni Fagan, David Keenan, Graeme Armstrong – these are all fresh names writing at the top of their powers.’

It had an impact on me not just because I’ve read and admired all of those authors but because it made me realise, with a level of surprise, that I too am a Scottish writer. Why the shock? Well, some context.

I read that article in Melbourne during the city’s third (five-day) Covid lockdown, still feeling glum about the virtual sinking of my first novel, Poly, which came out during the city’s second (111-day) lockdown at the end of 2020. It was my second book, and the ballooning hopes I’d tied to it deflated slowly behind the locked doors of bookshops.

My publisher, like the one for my first book, faced financial strife and wanted nothing else from most of their authors, including me. I was – to put it mildly – unsure of the value of continuing to write – or, if not to write, then to publish, or try to, anything else. Writing in the early mornings with a full-time job and young children is mostly pain, which might have been worth it had there been some gain.

I wasn’t unaware that I was Scottish – that part was fairly obvious – but I’ve only published books in Australia and New Zealand, since following my wife to Melbourne 2010. Beyond a few loyal friends in the UK, then, the majority of my readers have been in those places – which of course, I’m grateful for.

Without a publisher, and with the unlikely prospect (I thought) of ever finding another, it struck me on reading O’Hagan’s article that I could, and probably should, just write something for myself, which – given my background – would most likely be Scottish in setting and sensibility.

Though different in subject matter, the novels I love by Scottish authors share O’Hagan’s anti-pretentiousness. When I think of some of my long-term favourites such as James Kelman and Janice Galloway (both of whom I interviewed for The Herald and Sunday Herald) and the ‘new crop’ identified in the O’Hagan interview, I think of beautifully drawn characters facing – and profoundly questioning – existence. I think of language that somehow (without being highfalutin) is intensely poetic, of everyday words like ‘strewn’ and ‘bampot’ coming at me with enough force to squeeze the air from my chest. And of course, I think of hard-won laughter – gallows humour or, more simply, a Scottish sense of the grim, which (whether you’ve lopped off a hand or recently lost a loved one) seems inconceivable without a few laughs along the way.

Some bits of A Country of Eternal Light date back to 2012, but the big charge, the anima of the book, happened in a short period at the end of 2021, just after my job in Melbourne became redundant thanks to the pandemic. I wasn’t complaining. The (not huge) payout meant I could gift myself three months to write full-time, a luxury I’ve never enjoyed and an opportunity I seized as if my life depended on it.

Melbourne at the time was in the grips of its sixth – and final of the era – lockdown (77 days), earning it the title of the Most Locked-down City on Earth. Of course, nobody suspected it was the last one while it was happening. For all I knew, I’d never be able to return to Scotland and would be grieving, as I’d already done due to travel restrictions, the lives and deaths of loved ones from afar.

The Scotland I remembered – Edinburgh and Glasgow, and particularly the Aberdeen of my childhood and teens – worked its way into, and over, concerns about being unemployed, a long-time-in-the-making marriage breakdown, and my worries about the mental and physical health of my children, of everyone’s children … actually, just of everyone. 

I distinctly remember thinking, if this was the last thing I was going to write, what would I say, what did I want to leave in the world as my take on things – what would that look like? 

Beyond the scantest of details, I didn’t talk to anyone about what I was writing, even the people I was locked in a house with for those months. I just went and wrote with my hands and head and, maybe more than anything, my heart … or, to put it less romantically, my gut. For eight or nine hours a day, six days a week, I was in a largely uninterrupted dream that I sensed (rightly, I think) would have been punctured if I’d spoken any of it out loud. Having already been dropped by two publishers, I can’t imagine telling anyone I was writing a story from the perspective of a dead 64-year-old Aberdonian woman and them saying it was a good idea. More likely their response would have been like the freeway signs in Melbourne that warn misdirected drivers WRONG WAY GO BACK.

That the manuscript was snapped up immediately by a big Australian publisher, and consequently an excellent Scottish publisher, was a genuinely unexpected turn of events that I’ll be happily scratching my head about for years.

It’s the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever written, at a time when our collective vulnerability was front and centre. It’s imbued with the sense that we can and should live and love not because of, but despite, the odds – because really, what else can we do?

In that same Andrew O’Hagan interview, he says the following:

‘There is a sense of hope, even in the dark times we’re living in now, and I can see the arts responding and flourishing, not shying away or missing the mark, and trying to give a sense of hope and destiny in their writing, and that’s not something every country can say.’

To take my place, however small, in that ongoing response to the world – even from ten thousand or so miles away – feels like a wonderful, and long overdue, homecoming.

A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno is published by Polygon.

This article was published in the Herald Magazine, Scotland, on 19 August 2023, and online on the same date as: Scots writer Paul Dalgarno on A Country of Eternal Light.