The class-conscious, early-20th-century life story of Fergus Lamont
- who, after being bought a boy's kilt by his ostracized (and soon
to be a suicide) mother, never wears anything but aristocratic
kilts on his lower half again: uppity behavior for a wee-un from
the Gantock slums of Scotland. But not really - because Fergus, it
so happens, was in fact fathered by a laird. And, throughout this
solid but uneventful tale, Scottish novelist Jenkins closely
follows the taking-up and puttingdown of Fergus' assumptions of
class. Fergus eventually will become a poet, weathered by a World
War I officership and soured by marriage to the unfaithful Betty -
a popular novelist whose bitchery leads Fergus to forswear society
in favor of self-exile to the Hebrides village of East Gerinish.
Life is ducky there, with plain-in-the-head, lovely Kirstie. But
when she dies, Fergus, growing old, returns one last time to
Gantock and his roots, set-straight finally as to who he really is.
Jenkins provides some well-aimed observations about Scottish
character, and his forays into dialect are never so overdone as to
be less than burr-edly appealing. But probably only Scots-ophiles
will find enough satisfaction from the local colors here to make
this dry, rather heavy fictional biography a consistent pleasure.
(Kirkus Reviews)
'Half Scotland sniggered and the other half scowled, when in
letters to the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, I put forward my
suggestion that prisoners in Scottish jails be allowed to wear
their kilts as their national birthright if such be their wish.'
From his origins as an illegitimate child in the slums of Glasgow,
Fergus Lamont sets out to reclaim his inheritance and to remake his
identity as soldier, poet and would-be aristocrat. Covering the
years from the turn of the century to the Second World War,
Fergus's unforgettable voice recounts a tale of vanity, success and
betrayal which shines its own sardonic light on Scotland and the
cultural and political issues of the day. At odds with his origins
and unsettled in his aristocratic pretensions, Fergus Lamont
reaches middle age before he is offered at least the hope of
redemption in a love affair with an island woman. How it turns out
and what he learns too late, adds a tragic dimension to the
scathing humour of this, Robin Jenkins's most searching exploration
of the modern Scottish psyche.
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