Below is an excerpt from Another Not Scotland commissioned by the Edinburgh International Book Festival:
"The genre I preferred always began with someone who seemed, like me, in a world regarded as commonplace, and then found an exit into a place of magic adventures. The earliest classics of this kind were Lewis Carroll’s Alicebooks, with others I read or heard dramatised on the BBC’s Children’s Hour – The Magic Bed-Knob, The Wind in the Willows, The Box of Delights. A subdivision of this genre had children who discovered lost or hidden lands when on holiday. Enid Blyton wrote a shelf of books about children finding mysterious geographies – The Valley of Adventure, Seaof Adventure, Castleof Adventure, Island of Adventure, etcetera. Growing older I found similar books had been written for adults – Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Rider Haggard’s She, The Return of She and Allan Quatermain.There were films about them – King Kong and Lost Horizon. In a BBC radio dramatisation I heard H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and at once ordered through Glasgow Public Libraries all his early romances, which I still think are science fiction’s unsurpassable best. His The First Men in the Moon took me to an impossible moon, yet imagined with such inventive detail that humanity is shown in a new light. That novel, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds describe exotic worlds elsewhere, but are no more escapist fiction than Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s 1984.
Before leaving secondary school I decided to write a book about a world of my own invention that would also satirise the world I knew. When planning it I was inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, with Edwin and Willa Muir’s foreword saying that Kafka’s protagonist was seeking salvation like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, but in a world where neither Heaven nor Hell are signposted. In Kafka’s world the agents of an obscure but inescapable bureaucracy hound a man in his rented bedroom, in the attic of a slum tenement, in the cupboard of a bank where he works and in a cathedral outside service time – encounters that I felt could happen in Glasgow. Kafka’s bureaucrats were more humane and believable than Orwell’s Thought Police, and his hero was so ruthlessly selfish that I never doubted his guilt. I was also reading books about the growing pains of men in other cities nearer my own in time and space – David Copperfield, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers. I now saw that books which (Milton says) the world would not willingly let die, must contain real local experiences such as those Dickens, Joyce and D.H. Lawrence suffered, even if they combined with Heavens, Hells and Wonderlands elsewhere. Most books in the Bible did that, most folk tales and the Scottish Border Ballads. In a public library (Denistoun, not Riddrie) I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and Its Background which, after briefly surveying the great epic poems and histories of Greece, Rome, Italy and Portugal, concluded that since Milton’s time, great epics were likely to be written in prose. He said that Walter Scott’s best novels almost (though not quite) amounted to a Scottish national epic. So that was what I set out to write."
