A Wild and Woolly Scottish Western
This essay was originally published on 8 June 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.
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MOON COUNTRY
by Peter Arnott
All deliveries free of charge in the UK
Pages: 340
ISBN: 978-1-908251-47-3
Dimensions: 210 x 140
Publication: 18 September 2015
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“… true literature can exist only where it is created not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics. But when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox, when he must make himself useful today, when he cannot lash out at everyone like Swift or smile at everything like Anatole France, there can be no bronze literature, there can only be a paper literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today and used for wrapping soap tomorrow.”
I was going to use this quote at the end, but then I decided that its proper place is at the beginning as it will set the tone for this month’s novel, as readers will understand if they read on (and observant readers will have recognised Zamyatin’s words from our website, which sum up something I’ve always believed, but the author of We expresses it so much better than I ever could).
The first important thing for the reader to know is that Moon Country is the most original of the four novels I’m examining – insanely original and original in its every element (not that the others are lacking in originality, I hasten to add). In fact so original that I doubt that I can touch on all its originalities. Montale wrote that the best originality is always based on something that has previously been written, a paradoxical comment that may well have been aimed at Marinetti’s shallow originality for originality’s sake. However this debut novel by the seasoned playwright, Peter Arnott, is an exception to Montale’s rule.
The second important thing is what I have just mentioned. An experienced playwright is going to approach novel-writing in a very different way, and it shows – sometimes in unexpected ways. Few books these days are as dominated by the narrative voice as this one, which is judgemental, partial and yet open at times to various interpretations of what has been going on (inevitably bordering on where the metatextual exposes all the mechanisms of the novel – but hopefully falling just short of that). Clearly Arnott, who has never previously had to write a narration, has leapt into this new role with relish. The narrator is an obsessive fan of the murderous protagonist called Tom Hunter, who in an age of celebrity has become a mythical figure. This is convenient because Hunter is the author’s vehicle for a complex examination of the fragmentation of the individual in modern society, which is not a new subject but, I believe, never previously approached in this manner. The narrator is a self-declared “Hunterian” who has a single, very brief cameo role. Though not that clearly defined as a character, he becomes the mainstay of this novel – a constant reminder that this is only interpretation. Having hyper-compensated for a role not found in theatre, the author also goes in the other direction and introduces decided theatrical and filmic writing forms from his long career, such as CUT-TOs that direct the readers’ performances of his words in their imaginations, and a scene in a hotel foyer where characters come in and leave as in a British farce. All this could go badly wrong, but it doesn’t. The consummate timing is that of his principal trade.
The third important thing is the prose itself. It is painted on with the thick strokes and bright colours of Van Gogh’s sunflowers and occasionally the same artist’s evening view of a church whose dark blue windows somehow express the madness behind the genius. Arnott isn’t a man who is afraid of adjectives and adverbs or, thank God, long sentences (and short ones too, because the long and short play off each other). The curse of Carver and his clever editor is nowhere to be found in this novel. I don’t know about anyone else, but this was what gave me the greatest joy! For instance the way he describes Hunter newly released from prison:
"I see Tommy Hunter haunting the streets somewhere, newly expelled from the inferno to gaze once more upon the stars, somewhere on this middle road of life, near destitution, paralysed though restlessly mobile, waiting for something, perhaps acclimatising to being on the outside, more likely not getting used to it at all, blindly wandering alien streets full of undifferentiated noise and movement, all these bloody people all around him suddenly, and him still wrapped in prison stink, a bubble of bad smell, uncaring and unheeding, face like stone and glass, hour after unstructured hour, buying a pie and chips, not enjoying it, absently stroking a dug, scaring folk away with that monster stare of his, standing at the park gates gazing into the lost world of the playground, mothers hustling their little ones away." [p. 9]
He can also do the opposite:
"If Tommy was still here, is what I’m saying, there would have been signs. The animals would have scattered, sensing something, like fire on the prairie. The skies would have darkened. Graves would have opened. Cattle stampeded. Comets would have crossed the sky and dinged off the face of the moon. But there’s been nothing." [p. 3]
Also worth mentioning – and I hesitate to do this – is the fact that the first and last line in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (to give it its full fancy name, but just Tractatus to its friends) are also the first and last lines in this very different work of literature, namely “The world is everything that is the case” and “Of what we cannot know, we had best be silent” (actually the last line has been translated a little differently and not so well in my edition, so clearly Arnott has a better one). I spoke of my hesitation, as this quirk could be misleading – intentionally on the author’s part, I’m sure – but many readers may be scared off by that connection, particularly if they’re exclusively in search of an entertaining read, which this most certainly also is. At this stage, you won’t be surprised to hear that Arnott went further and adopted Wittgenstein’s system for numbering the chapters, sections and sub-sections, giving it the look of a philosophical or scientific work, if not the content, though the author is capable of the odd philosophical musing. This fragments the text, which is also put to good effect. After a bit, you forget about the numbers, but you still read the book in a slightly different manner – with a different rhythm.
The book opens with parallel narratives to give an idea of Hunter’s legendary status, before providing the “true” version of events. And the book also ends with an intentional lack of clarity, particularly various myths about whether Hunter met his wife or not, and having decided that he probably did, the narrator then provides sundry speculative accounts of what that meeting would have been like. There is a playfulness in those opening pages, which to a lesser extent continues throughout the book – a sensible choice because too much of anything never quite works. I have a soft spot for the Angel of the Wedge, when it comes to the difficult matter of how Hunter got hold of his wedge or wad of money, and other versions are proffered, but not the true one which eventually comes out much later in all its unexpected mundanity:
"There were lots of stories about that, and they were all true. Or they might as well have been. There are those who say, for example, that Tommy struck it rich randomly, sitting like a statue of homelessness in London somewhere — Camberwell Green or somewhere. When a man he’s never seen before, and who has never seen him before, a long, black man in a long black coat and a black felt hat just walks up to him and drops a carpet bag full of money on the bench beside him. For no reason at all. Tommy doesn’t look up to see his face. Just listens to the clack clack clack of expensive footfalls die away. The messenger doesn’t break stride and is not to be identified. The messenger’s purpose is not to be interrogated. His purpose is only to be fulfilled. For it was written that heaven would deliver unto Tommy Hunter that which made Tommy Hunter a force for right and truth and justice in the land. Were he to have existed in order to have made this spontaneous donation, the Angel of the Wedge would have been strategically spot on. Even forces for right and truth and justice don’t get far in this most fallen of possible worlds without the financial wherewithal. Not if they’re Tommy Hunter they don’t. Not if you’re a guy who can’t walk into a post office to buy a stamp without the alarms going off. Similarly, it would have been no good sending Tommy a cheque or a BACS payment, because if you’re someone whose name on a computer will set off a worldwide electronic aneurysm then you can’t open a bank account or write off for a MasterCard or shit like that. You can’t be part of the world, not this world, not a world where everything is known about everybody, not a world where if you buy a kumquat in Tesco then some cunt in the CIA will know that you’re a target for exotic fruit marketing."
The gentleman at the CIA leads us to another aspect of this novel. The c-word is used in accordance with a certain usage in Glasgow by which it only means a person, any person without any derogatory associations – much as Australians use “bastard” or used to. Some readers may object, but I advise them to suspend not only their disbelief but also their refined sensitivities, because this really is a worthwhile and often witty read.
On the plot I will say no more than that Hunter sets off on a quixotic journey to reunite his broken family (ultimately broken, it has to be said, by his callous and unnecessary murder of “someone of no importance” during a robbery) and perhaps aware that there could be resistance, he travels with carpet bag of money and a gun – the carrot and the stick in other words. The humour is in his inability to understand reality and how to deal with people in the real world (quixotic in every sense). He is both successful in his quest and a failure because, as we all know, desires fulfilled usually lead to disappointment. The author wrote the blurb for his own book (this is generally the job of the publishing house, but when I read it, I realised that it couldn’t be bettered), so I will quote a part of it: “Moon Country is a wild and woolly Scottish Western, a family road movie, a slightly insane treatise on nationhood and belonging, and a definitely lunatic quest for personal redemption.”
Some may also object to the novel’s misanthropy, which is quite pronounced for most of the novel, though there is more understanding and redemption in the final part – that is to say the only redemption we can ever get in this world, which is far from the eternal and blissful one promised by religions (anyway misanthropy is back in fashion, I think, and could put Evelyn Waugh to shame, whereas Moon Country’s is nothing compared with that of an average episode of East Enders and is great deal more stylish). The novel’s description of the working class – now rebaptised with some ghastly names such as the precariat and the underclass, so distasteful that you can be sure that they were not invented by themselves – is not one that I recognise. I spent my late teens and twenties doing crap jobs – by which I mean either badly paid or soul-destroying – and I came across a very wide range of people in both Britain and Italy, but also Norway to a much lesser extent. I know that the best people are at the “bottom of society”; not of course that all working people are wonderful and all the middle classes and above are dreadful. Life is clearly more complex than that, but in the main the working class is more collegiate and less self-obsessed. They don’t necessarily get up in the morning with the intention of doing good, but they often do just that quite unconsciously and without looking for their virtue to be rewarded (it’s also true that many things, including support for left and right, are wholly or partially transversal to class, creating the complexities so skilfully explored in Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, which is also an opportunity to plug Allan Massie’s excellent novella Klaus, which concerns the last days of that author along with memories of his past). Apart from the fact that the world could have changed since my youth – and almost definitely has – this is irrelevant in literature, as Zamyatin’s quote suggests. Authors quite understandably want others to write in accordance with their own poetics, but publishers and editors should not. Whether a book is misanthropic or not is of no importance, as there are great misanthropic works (Waugh’s for instance), just as there are great works by those with a more benevolent view of the humanity (Dickens’s). And it has to be admitted that misanthropy can generate more humour. It’s true that humanity has proved extremely adept at inventing all sorts of things, but not a political system that can deal with the pushiness and invasiveness of our own inventiveness. Still, the great majority of humanity strikes me as fascinating and benign. And the planet may run on strictly scientific rules, nevertheless it remains a miracle: I wrote in Things Written Randomly in Doubt, “In one backyard behind a block of flats, a history of lives can be played out, and more happens in one small child’s brain than in several light-years of space.” To reach its current state of vitality and luxuriance, our planet had to leap over so many obstacles (size, distance from the sun, type of atmosphere, etc.) that it could easily have remained the rocky wasteland it once was. And then it had to wait for the slow process of turning itself into a garden, starting with fungi which had to break down the rocks and produce earth for plants and invertebrates to thrive on. It was a dish that took a lot of cooking. This too is the kind of reflection that Arnott eventually comes to at the end of his book, along with many interesting observations on human behaviour.
No, the misanthropy – and we can argue over how much this is required for the humour – does not stop me from enjoying and even loving Arnott’s exuberant tale. It would not be good if we all wrote in the same way, and I can assure you that this novel will not remind you of any other. And here I quote again from the author’s own blurb which is both self-confident and truthful: “It’s also pretty funny. It is quite unlike anything you’ve ever read before.” I cannot say that he’s like Shakespeare, Dickens or Philip Roth, but I can guarantee that he is as good as his word. And that should be more than enough!
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, May 2021