It is a hugely informative and justly popular book, bringing the unloved and largely untold story of devolution to a much larger audience. In this respect, the novel carries within itself the problem of national historical recovery it sets out to represent. For the majority of the book Robertson is not dramatising or re-telling events already familiar to the reader, but introducing and explaining them for the first time.
This makes a high degree of political exposition necessary, such that And the Land Lay Still often feels less like a novel ‘about’ history than one ‘doing’ history: producing as it goes the story it seems to be recounting. The book employs several complex framing devices, but even the factual grist of the main narrative will seem obscure to readers unschooled in recent Scottish history.
This is a highly diffuse and murky tale, and Robertson’s task is made all the more difficult because he cannot count on his readership – even his Scottish readership – recognising the basic timeline and dramatis personae. The resulting tome attempts to weave every corner, faction and identity of the country into an intelligible Story of Scotland, one that makes political and emotional sense of quietly transformative times. Robertson’s task is to spread the paltry saga of Scottish devolution onto a vivid social canvas, stretching the narrow ‘common ground’ of constitutional debate to the full dimensions of the modern nation.
The quotation is from And the Land Lay Still, James Robertson’s panoramic novel of post-war Scotland, and probably the most ambitious historical fiction to emerge from Britain this century. Nobody loved it, and nobody had much of a good word to say for it. The one policy that offered some prospect of common ground, devolution, was once again being squeezed from all sides. There was tension in the air: identity politics versus class consciousness. It is 1983, shortly after Thatcher’s landslide re-election, and the Scottish Left have gathered to squabble and lick their wounds.
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