News of the Dead

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Robertson is telling us many things as he weaves his tale round the various inhabitants of the glen over the last thousand or so years. He is telling us that the oral tradition is important. Of course, some details have been forgotten, some details embellished and some invented. The mythology of our past forms us as much as the actual events. We were not witnesses of the actual events. We have to rely on documents which may or may not be accurate. Oral accounts can be lost, unless they are recorded at which point, they become a document. In ancient Pictland, the Christian hermit Conach contemplates God and nature, performs miracles and prepares himself for sacrifice. Long after his death, legends about him are set down by an unknown hand in the Book of Conach.

News of the Dead - Kindle edition by Robertson, James News of the Dead - Kindle edition by Robertson, James

I liked that about the book: it's place, and it's description. And I like stories which, without being too prescriptive about it, interlink a few different things. I also like historical fiction. News of the Dead is certainly far from dull and the author manages to pull off several different styles, including passages in Scots dialect for the stories told by the irrepressible and accommodating Geordie Kemp, who never likes to disappoint a listener. I’ve been thinking about it for about five years, so it’s taken a while for it to come together. I wanted to write a novel that was set in one place, but that took place over a huge amount of time. So I invented this glen, Glen Conach, which is, in my head, not far from where I live. There are three stories going on: the story of Conach himself, an 8th-century Christian missionary to the Picts who becomes a hermit in the glen; then a story set in the early 1800s, where Charles Gibb comes to the big house in the glen to look at this manuscript about the life of Conach; and finally a modern story narrated by a woman called Maya, one of the oldest residents of the glen in the year 2020.The challenge for the reader is all the more invigorating when characters are uncertain as to what is real and what isn’t. As Maja says of her life-story: “It comes to this in the end – a mixture of memories and imaginings and I’m not sure which is which.” What is clear to us, though, is that her creator has written a wise and hugely satisfying novel about stories, sanctuary and, to quote the Baron, the “strange, heeliegoleerie world we bide in”.

BBC Radio 4 - News of the Dead by James Robertson

A good story… had to have some element of truth in it, even if he had made it up or stolen it. If it did not have that truth, even if it was the best tale of them all, it would fail.” Because News of the Dead moves frequently between three different storylines, there is a danger of it feeling like three books squeezed into one. However, the author manages to create sufficient connections between the three to make it a cohesive whole, although the storyline set in the present day feels the least connected. Having said that, Maja’s story, when it is finally revealed near the end of the book, I found the most compelling and I think in expanded form would have made a fine novel in itself. The first of these stories is of the Christian hermit Conach. In ancient Pictland, Conach contemplates God and nature. For a while he is accompanied by Talorg who serves him. Conach performs miracles and prepares himself for sacrifice. And after his death, legends about him are written by an anonymous person in the Book of Conach.James Robertson will be talking about News of the Dead live onstage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday, August 16 at 5.30pm Set in the fictional setting of “Glen Conach” in the North East of Scotland, Robertson in his classic style combines three narratives from characters across different centuries, tied together by their connection to the Glen, creating a tale which is steeped in myth, folklore and legend. In 2013, James Robertson wrote a story a day: 365 tales, each one 365 words long. They were published in one volume the following year. Some stories were nothing more than light sketches, pithy squibs and fleeting impressions. However, many made a little go a long way and showcased experiments in form and a diverse array of subject matter, whether ballads, monologues, fake obituaries, replayed dreams or restyled fairy tales. In one entry, a writer describes his more inventive fables: “They’re the stories I let out in the open, the ones I slip off the leash.”

News of the Dead by James Robertson | Goodreads News of the Dead by James Robertson | Goodreads

The three stories are quite different. In the early Middle Ages in Pictland, there’s the Christian hermit, Conach, whose signs and miracles performed in Glen are made legendary through ancient writings in a text known as “The Book of Conach.” Generations later in the 19th century, an antiquarian called Charles Kirkliston Gibb, is drawn to Glen Conach to transcribe and translate The Book of Conach, and in turn is taken into the grand home of the Baron of Glen Conach and his frenzied household. And then there’s the present-day reflections of Maja, an elderly woman who has lived in the Glen for most of her life and her relationship to a young boy, called Lachie, who claims to have seen a ghost. The book is written from three perspectives and over three timescales; Maja in the current day, William Gibb in the early 1800s and the story of Saint Conach from a monk from ancient Pictish times. As we weave in and out of each of these stories, we are sometimes told the same story a few times from each perspective, showing how much a tale changes each time it is relayed. In ancient Pictland, the Christian hermit Conach contemplates God and nature, performs miracles and prepares himself for sacrifice. Long after his death, legends about him are set down by an unknown hand in the Book of Conach .

Another is the importance of storytelling itself. It is ow we learn empathy. It is how we learn to distinguish between right and wrong. It is how we learn how to behave. History is essentially storytelling. All the great religions centre around the stories that they tell, whether it is Moses parting the Red Sea, the Good Samaritan, the flight from Mecca or the Mahabharata. It is how we teach the next generation the essentials of our beliefs. It is how we teach them what is safe and wat is not. It's like some beautifully ornate kist or jewel-box that for most of the encounter you admire for its own sake, only to find a key, near the end, that opens onto even more treasure Gavin Francis Jasami Publishing takes talented new writers on the journey to becoming published authors. By publishing a myriad of genres Jasami offers a stellar variety from contemporary writers; From Scotland these include a crime writer, poet, photographer, and c … It is another wonderful piece of storytelling from James Robertson, offering a penetrating exploration of the complexities of collective memory and the tenacity of tradition, all played out through a thousand years of life in a single glen. It has all the makings of a timeless classic in its own right. Professor Gary West