On St Andrew's Day 1996 a crowd of people outside the gates of
Holyrood House silently watched a gleaming military Land Rover
begin its journey up to Edinburgh Castle. Driven at walking pace,
the vehicle advanced between the fixed bayonets of soldiers and
sailors lining the street. As it passed they presented arms as if
saluting a state funeral. Yet nobody had died. On the back of Land
Rover, cushioned in velvet and shielded, like the Pope, by a sheet
of perspex, lay only a large and grubby white rock. The rock was
the Stone of Scone and it was coming home, exactly 700 years had
passed after it was stolen. When Edward I of England kidnapped the
Stone of Scone in 1296, he knew what he was doing. He had already
seized the Crown of Arthur from Wales, another kingdom severed of
its legitimacy. The lump of rock, the 'Stone of Destiny' to give it
its correct title, was in fact a throne kept at Scone Abbey near
Perth on which the Scottish kings of centuries had been seated for
their inauguration. Nobody could say with any degree of certainty
quite where the Stone came from. It might even have been used by
Jacob as a pillow in the desert when he dreamed about that ladder
to heaven. All that mattered, as Edward I appreciated, was that the
Stone's removal symbolized the end of national identity. Scotland
was now a colony. Never again would she stand on her own.
Ascherson's use of the history of the Stone of Scone for his
evaluation of modern-day Scotland is a brilliant device. Skilfully
weaving legend, recorded fact, political comment and personal
experience into a subjective yet finely tuned account, Ascherson
does for the country of his birth what no one has done since
William Wallace. And the English executed him. (Kirkus UK)
Neal Ascherson is one of Britain's finest writers in an undefinable
genre that fuses history, memoir, politics and meditations on
places. His books on Poland and his collected essays on the strange
Britain to which he returned from Europe in the mid-1980s were
deeply influential. In 1995, Black Sea won critical praise in many
languages and several literary prizes. Stone Voices is Ascherson's
return to his native Scotland. It is an exploration of Scottish
identity, but this is no journalistic rumination on the future of
that small nation. Ascherson instead weaves together a story of the
deep past - the time of geology and archaeology, of myth and legend
- with the story of modern Scotland and its rebirth. Few writers in
these islands have his ability to write so well about the natural
context of history.
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