The Ossians, by Doug Johnstone (A Review by Martin Macaulay)

Currently available on Kindle £1.71.

304 pages

Doug Johnstone’s The Ossians is his second novel recently reissued as an e-Book by Faber and Faber. The Ossians of the title are a twenty-something indie guitar band on the verge of securing a major record deal. All they need to do is see through a two week mini-tour of Scotland, culminating in what should be a deal-clinching successful final gig in Glasgow’s King Tut’s. It would be easy to slip into cliché whilst tackling a novel about rock’n’roll, but while Johnstone places the band on the narrative’s main stage, it’s what lies in the periphery that lends the novel its real depth and swagger. This is ultimately a tour of the country’s landscape, culture and mythology.

The Ossians are fronted by the self-assured and gloriously arrogant Connor. Other band members include Kate, his slightly older twin sister on bass, Danny on drums and Hannah on guitar and keyboard. Connor, the archetypal front man, loves to spout off during interviews, passing comment on music, literature and being Scottish:

‘Ossian was a third-century Scots Gaelic poet,’ said Connor rubbing his hands as if about to give a lecture…’A bunch of his work was discovered by a guy called James Macpherson in the eighteenth century, and published to great acclaim’…’Most folk thought Macpherson made it all up, and he was discredited as a fake. It’s typical of Scotland that our oldest history and literature might not even exist.’

The cultural landscape of this novel is littered with landmarks, mostly real, some imagined. Genuine pubs and places co-exist alongside fictional counterparts, moulding the myth and blurring the sightlines of reality. Enough bands to stock a small record store are name-checked throughout, though not always favourably. ‘Do we fuck sound like Big Country!’ Lyrics from The Ossians;’ fictional back-catalogue preface each chapter: ‘If I had a boat, I’d scuttle it for you. If I had your love, I’d try to sink that too.’ An Ossians CD was released in 2008, distorting the perception of what is fictional and real. Art imitates life imitates art.

The novel is structured around the band’s tour of Scotland; each chapter the next town or city on the Ossians’ tour. It kicks off in the capital with an impressive opening gig in the Liquid Rooms. Connor is wasted enough to exude the fuck-it-all attitude but not too far gone as to be an incoherent shambles. The stage is set for a tale of rock excess and self-destruction. Or so you would think. Johnstone turns the story on its head and twists the narrative in a couple of alternative directions. First, there is the mystical figure who appears to Connor during the middle of the gig:

‘…his attention kept being drawn back to one particular face, a young guy at the far edge of the crowd, half-shrouded in darkness. Connor thought he recognised him to begin with, then smiled as he realised that in the half-light the kid actually looked a bit like himself. A younger, taller, thinner version of him…He looked again later in the set, but the face was gone.’

The tour then takes a darker turn when Connor becomes an unwilling drugs mule to a local pusher with loftier ambitions. He’s forced into making a number of successful drops without his bandmates finding out. Connor now has even more of a reason to get trashed before and during gigs.

Doug Johnstone does a fine job at scraping at the veneer of Scottish society. He lays bare the class-ridden divisions that exist in places such as the exclusive St Andrews and sets out the hypocrisy of the “McGlashan” Scot with an irrational hatred of the English, whilst all too content to celebrate the existence of an inauthentic culture.

‘You either had Edinburgh Castle and Brigadoon or you had Trainspotting. But then Trainspotting had become another version of the same thing, hadn’t it? They ran Trainspotting tours of Leith, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t that just misrepresent the country as much as Highlander?’

Johnstone’s critique of the contemporary myth (or brand) doesn’t unnecessarily dismiss popular culture. The tired tartan metaphors may be ripped from Scotland’s shoulders, but the novel unashamedly celebrates the popular, from less familiar Scottish characters (such as McGlashan), to the more recognisable Scooby Doo and the Famous Five. When Connor comes across Ossian’s Hotel in Fort William, the atmosphere owes as much to any of the aforementioned as it does the book of Scottish Ghost Stories that he shoplifted from the Loch Affin Bookshop.

The infrequent appearance of the ghostly figure that appears to be following Connor is truly unsettling, if not disturbing, and the reader is never quite sure if this is a real person, a doppelgänger or an apparition. These scenes are cinematic in their execution, like something from a David Lynch film. They give the novel a feeling of other-worldliness and if the intention was to evoke the spirit of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde then it’s a decent attempt. The thread concerning Connor as a drugs mule however, owes more to Elmore Leonard or James Ellroy, but Doug Johnstone makes this novel his own by blending different literary styles and harvesting a host of allusions to hold modern Scotland responsible for the culture and ambiguities it creates.

If any criticism can be levelled in the author’s attempt to document modern Scottish culture, it is that, in his desire to encompass all, he sometimes over-reaches. At times it appears he does no more than list bands, books or historic events. However, the narrative that lies behind does more than enough to pull the reader along, prompting us to dig a bit deeper and discover for ourselves what is myth and what is truth.

Martin Macaulay lives and works in Edinburgh. He appeared in this year’s Story Shop line-up at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.