Plots on the landscape

A FEW years back I visited the Spanish windmills that Don Quixote fought. Quixote, of course, is the chivalrous alter-ego of the dull country squire Quejana, who in turn is the invention of Cervantes. And he didn't fight windmills, he fought giants - though in reality they were in fact windmills. To hell with facts, though. It was brilliant standing there in exactly the place that Don Quixote could never have been.

Then, a few weeks ago, when I was recording The Edge Of The World, a radio series investigating encounters between foreign writers and Scotland, I went up to look out over the north tip of Jura to the Strait of Corryvreckan. George Orwell nearly killed himself and half his family in its whirlpool, coming close to depriving the world of his last book, 1984. But my favourite image was David Balfour, shipwrecked in Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. There is no such person as David Balfour and Stevenson never actually named Corryvreckan as the scene of the disaster, but that mattered not one jot. Places - real places - play a powerful part in bringing fiction to life.

It is not only the locations against which fantasies are played out that fascinate us, it is the places in which writers do their dreaming. Anyone interested in books becomes - illogically, perhaps - intrigued by Burns Cottage or the Edinburgh cafe where JK Rowling is supposed to have created Harry Potter. Or the bedroom on the northernmost tip of Jura where Orwell made up Airstrip One - as the futuristic Britain was renamed in 1984.

A good many writers have visited Scotland's shores to write, think or rest. Making The Edge Of The World, we were interested in what they took from their visits - and in what they left behind. There were a great many authors to choose from: JD Salinger, Beatrix Potter, David Mamet, Washington Irving and a host of others. We selected our final six for the very different stories they had to tell.

Mary Shelley, for example, loved Tayside. While she was there, aged 16, she watched whaling boats set out on the North Sea, and heard reports of one becoming stuck fast in the ice. Two years later she used the story in Frankenstein. More importantly, the already highly politicised Shelley became deeply immersed in a Dundee that was a hotbed of radical politics. The theme of injustice that lies at the heart of her classic book was at least partially powered by this.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, on the other hand, came a real cropper in her jaunt to the Highlands. Invited here by the Duchess of Sutherland, an important ally in her fight against slavery, she wrote a travel book, Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, applauding Scotland's just and progressive land management policies. The brutality of the Clearances seemed to have totally passed her by. It took a victim, Donald MacLeod, to expose the good lady's blind eye and deaf ear. She never recanted - too fearful of losing the Duchess's abolitionist support - but unwittingly played a pivotal role in giving the Highland Scot a voice by provoking MacLeod's coruscating riposte.

Louis MacNeice, the Northern Irish poet, made much better sense of Scotland. He took two trips round the Hebrides and wrote up what he found hilariously and with biting honesty - and, in Bagpipe Music, penned one of the great poems of the century.

But many others had less than lucky encounters here. It may be that nobody would have been murdered on the Rue Morgue, and the House of Usher would never have fallen, if Edgar Poe had not been fostered by a Scottish merchant and subsequently brought back to John Allan's homeland. Young Edgar despised the Ayrshire town of Irvine, but the oppressive Presbyterian church services and the bleak school at Kirkgate - which used the graveyard for its playground - must have contributed to the nightmare landscapes he was later to create. The ghost stories he learned, and his vengeful teacher, crop up decades later in stories and poems.

Daniel Defoe, meanwhile, would never have spied for England against Scotland had he not worked a deal to get himself out of prison. But his presence here has genuine national significance, creatively and politically. In his lifetime, this extraordinary, energetic man all but single-handedly invented modern journalism and travel-writing - and his espionage activities on the eve of the Act of Union played a real part in the history of our two countries. Defoe began his career as a novelist at a ripe 60 years of age. If he had not come across the story of Fife-born Alexander Selkirk and his voluntary island exile, we may never have had Robinson Crusoe. The borrowing of a true story to tell a lie which the author thinks will reveal more of the truth is the enigma at the heart of any literary creation.

On the other hand, 1984 could easily have been written in London or Burma. But the Isle of Jura gave George Orwell, suffering from tuberculosis, peace and space - and its remoteness is felt in every word. The idea of loss - in Jura's case of an ancient culture and language - is felt by the book's hero, Winston Smith, as a fear of losing political memory.

Perhaps Orwell even detected a tinge of Big Brotherliness in small island life. When series producer Carolyn Beckett and I called in at Jura's only shop, everyone knew all about us. Maybe the author smiled at such echoes of his Thought Police.

Orwell's adopted son, Richard Blair - who spent most of his infant life on the island and still stays for much of his year across the Sound of Jura - recounts tantalising anecdotes about his father. Out in the garden of his farm, Barnhill, you can imagine father and son playing. And upstairs in the bedroom-cum-office you can picture the austere Orwell, battling against illness, drafting one of the darkest manuscripts of the century. 1984 was nearly called The Last Man In Europe. The view from Barnhill over to Scarba and Luing gives you an idea why.

Ours is an outward-looking country, on the edge of the Atlantic and the North Sea, yolked to England, a stone's throw from Ireland. Writers have not felt like strangers here. Orwell was uncomplimentary about Scots before he came north, but by the time he left he understood the desire for independence. Shelley never returned but always wanted to, and freely endorsed Dundee as a central influence in her development as a writer and woman. MacNeice and Defoe, 200 years apart, unearthed vital roots and truths in a way that perhaps only incomers can. It is something of a truism, but the universal is in the local, and the local - that sense of a real place - sneaks into both the writer and the written. It is not hard to imagine the lapping of the tide and the north winds whispering secrets in the ears of those who came to Scotland to write and think.

Great fiction is a blend of dream and reality. No doubt the 15- year-old Jura malt helped blur what is real and what is not, but I do not think it too quixotic to glimpse Crusoe shipwrecked in Princes Street Gardens, Roderick Usher hidden in Kilmarnock's shadows or Frankenstein's creature wading, howling, out into the Tay.

The Edge Of the World, Radio Scotland, Wednesdays, 11.30am, repeated at 10.10pm. Chris Dolan's latest novel is Ascension Day, Headline, #6.99

Copyright 2001
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