Iain Beag

"Iain Beag would always be out when it was a question of piping. He was one of the best of pipers himself and would stand there leaning his weight on his artificial leg and tapping time with his one own foot while he went through all the changing parts of a piobaireachd, and he plainly in his glory...He had left a leg in France."

The Albannach, Fionn Mac Colla

I like the understated manner in which the artifical leg is explained - the lack of sentimentality, the slight humour.

This is an interesting novel. There are familiar themes: the oppressive religious upbringing, the bright boy who goes away to be educated, a brush with vice and debauchery, the failure to break free. There is a little piping, a little of domestic life in a croft, a fair amount of evocative description of the land.

There is a good chunk of Gaelic in it, some explained, some not. Murdo is a sent a poem, which has quite an impact on him, so it's a shame to have no hint at all of what it means. Google translate is no help at all, telling me firmly that 'Gile na gile do chonnarc' is Indonesian and that, translated into English, it reads 'na gile gile do chonnarc'.

But, the misogyny! Other than motherly Mrs O'Callaghan, who provides bed and board and asks no questions, every last women is fat, ugly, stupid to the point of being little better than an animal, gives herself airs, or moans and complains. They make sexual advances to him. One - a prostitute in Glasgow - passes on a STD. At least, that's how I read it. It's part of the novel that is written in almost a dream state, Murdo being drunk throughout (it's all rather Bloom in Dublin at this point), and I supose there will always be a certain amount of reticence in a novel of that time (1932) on such matters. There are apparently no women students at Glasgow. Women revolt and oppress him. To be fair he's not overly complimentary about the men, either, but at least they have faces and personalities; the women are all breasts, backsides and blather. They seem to have little in the way of opportunities - they bear 14 children, are shouted at and ignored by drunken, or adulterous and righteous, husbands, nurse each other in illness and their only relief seems to be sixpenny novelettes. I wonder to what extent that reflected the real lives of women in rural Scotland in the first part of the last century.