Back Issues

With a writing career that included biography, criticism, drama and short fiction as well as novels, Muriel Spark was never one to do things by halves. Those unfamiliar with her work might think otherwise, considering the now-unfashionable slimness of her numerous books. The contemporary publishing industry favours the blockbuster, the trilogy, and the continuing series – or at the very least books with a spine-width broad enough to catch a punter’s jaded eye across a crowded marketplace. (Contemporary readers, though, may be rather more in tune: many people appreciate the merits of a fast and flashing story, executed stylishly, and well.) Spark’s novels in particular are brief, quick, and very final, with no loose ends left dangling; when she writes characters, they stay written.

Islands are finite spaces enclosed by boundaries of indeterminate extent. This is a result of the Coastline Paradox, and specifically the Richardson Effect, to wit: the sum of the segments is inversely proportional to the common length of the segments. In other words, the shorter the ruler you use to measure a coastline with, the longer the coastline you’re measuring becomes; as ruler length l approaches zero, the measured outline of any island approaches infinity — or, the more you look, the more you see.

Fairies — the Little People, the People of Peace; the Sigrave;th; the Tuatha dé Danaan — are an interstitial race. They lurk around the edges, on the borderlands and in the margins, and out the corner of your eye … Scotland is blessed with more peripheries (and peri-fairies) than most other nations, so it’s no surprise to find their tracks scattered across this country’s stories, and laced into its history.

How does one do justice to a writer who lived for over a hundred years? Who witnessed almost every single day of the entire twentieth century, with over eighty books and an uncounted number of articles and essays to her credit? Who, over and above her own literary achievements, helped shepherd into print titles as various — and influential — as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Ringsand James Watson’s The Double Helix? One could begin, perhaps, by remembering not to forget her.

This issue, The Bottle Imp gets political. We’ve got our ear to the ground, but you never know who’s listening …

Scotland is the land of the Scots. To what extent are the Scots the people of the land which bears them? Landscape settles into language, hills and lochs and stones are built up into stories. Moods shift like wind on water: clouds scud, sun gleams, snow falls, ice cracks. Environment informs us, infuses us: quite literally, from our bones on up, it is the making of us. In this issue, we go for a stravaig into Scotland — Caledonia stern and wild, that fairyland of poesy, deer on high hills, shipyard, kailyard, fernie brae and all — in search of its natural heart.

It has become fashionable, of late, to point out that the novels of Sir Walter Scott are scarcely read, now; to remark that few would willingly pick up Waverley, let alone give shelf-space to Peveril of the Peak (it killed Prince Albert and it can do the same for you). But — controversial, I know — might there be a tad more to Scott than everything we already know about him, having never read him? He did more-or-less invent the historical novel, after all. And his stuff was popular. I mean, wildly popular, from Siberia to Alaska and back round again the other way.

The Scots have a peculiar relationship with medicine. On the one hand, we have pioneered many of the most important developments in medical science: world-shaking highlights include, but are by no means limited to, the clinical trial; the general anaesthetic; the hypodermic syringe; penicillin; beta-blockers; ultrasound scanners; full-body MRI; the Glasgow coma scale; and apoptosis. On the other, we might consider the deep-fried Mars bar; alcoholism; and the phrase “just an ordinary sword”. It is remarkable that so much effort has been expended in the fight against sickness and untimely death by a nation whose people sometimes seem to pursue those ends with such wanton abandon. Scotland’s medical schools blossomed in the Enlightenment, and Scottish doctors and surgeons came to dominate the field. It’s not surprising, then, that there should be such an overlap in Scotland between leeches and letters.

Scotland’s Law and Scotland’s Literature cohabit within the larger realm of Scottish Letters, and there is an extensive overlap from the one to the other—Scott, Galt, Stevenson, Buchan, to name but a few, all at least took training in the law, before turning out their more literal fictions (there are perhaps fewer who make the trip the other way).

The Scots are oddities, there’s no denying it: the most reliably peculiar inhabitants of the British Isles, blessed with a plethora of shibboleths, a host of identity tags from kilts and cabers, haggises and havers, to Whisky Macs and heart attacks and MC1R on chromosome 16. The blood is strong, and it’s all over the place. This issue is a tale of viewpoints, privileged and otherwise: join us as we dash past the funfair mirrors of other peoples’ opinions, to seek out where Scotticism meets Exoticism.

Stevenson — widely celebrated in his lifetime, and in the years following his untimely, early death — suffered an artistic eclipse in the aftermath of the First World War. Perhaps, like Sir Walter Scott, he was too associated with that prelapsarian Victorian age, too much a favourite of the old men; perhaps as well he failed to fit within the modern structures of literary criticism being raised in clean concrete on the ruins of the nineteenth century. A minor writer, a purveyor of sea-stories, of boys’ adventures; not fit for adult consideration, among the bakelite and aspidistras of last century’s avant-garde But times have changed, and are changing still. The odd half-baked opinion aside, Stevenson is now receiving the recognition his life and work deserves. Strongly, proudly Scottish, and at the same time international, a world writer and writer of the world, Stevenson is an artist whom few can equal.

Are we Scots more naturally adventurous, then? Going a-roving and a-reiving have been Scottish specialities, celebrated in poetry, prose and song, since the days of Dál Riata. We have breenged, wambled and jouked across the globe, for god, king, and country, fun and profit, romance, revenge, science and spite. High roads and low roads, we’ve taken them all, and got in there early, too, most times. The first bootprints on the moon belonged to an Armstrong: no surprise to those who know the folk of Liddesdale. In this issue, The Bottle Imp sniffs out the trail of some of our nation’s greatest wanderers.