Playwrights as Novelists
This essay was originally published on 16 July 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.
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BLESSED ASSURANCE
by Stewart Ennis
All deliveries free of charge in the UK
Pages: 340 pp (approx)
ISBN: 978-1-908251-92-3
Dimensions: 210 x 140 mm
Publication: 18 November 2019
The fourth and last of the novels originally written in English is Stewart Ennis’s Blessed Assurance, and this debut novelist is also a playwright of many years’ standing (and an actor). In this he is like Peter Arnott, the author of last month’s book, Moon Country. In fact there are other similarities: they’re male, middle-aged residents of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, and given to writing in the vernacular. They’re witty, inevitably masters of dialogue given their theatrical connections, and capable of plotting their novels very cleverly. But obviously there are going to be differences, which I will come to later.
At the launch of this book, I commented on the fact that I have three novelists who are also playwrights (though Chris Dolan was the other way round, a novelist before he was a playwright). I said that playwrights must be well-placed to take up the challenge of the novel, precisely because of the skills I’ve mentioned.
Blessed Assurance is the story of eleven-year-old Joseph Kirkland who is being brought up by his grandparents in a small, industrial town in Ayrshire in the late sixties. They belong to a small protestant sect, hence the surname suggesting a small place packed with religion, but this novel is not dismissive of that world; it is a great deal more complex than that. The author grew up in similar circumstances and obviously draws on that experience, though he is adamant that this is not an autobiographical novel. As an atheist or possibly agnostic, he finds their belief system difficult to comprehend, but also perceives that this community has benefits that are difficult to put aside – to break with in his case. It provides its members with a unity of purpose and a sense of belonging which is quite possibly essential for human contentment (particularly if you consider that so much of European literature since the end of the First World War has been about how there is no comfortable place for an individual human being in the modern, industrial-bureaucratic society, and to some extent even before that war). The grandmother is a hard-line believer who attempts with mixed results to impose her rules on the rest of the family, while the grandfather, whose religious beliefs are unclear, but definitely alloyed with a degree of mischievous subversion which brings both pleasure and bewilderment to the boy. Paradoxically, underneath the veneer of fanaticism there is genuine tolerance and adaptability, which contrasts with the current play people make of being tolerant when they are anything but.
Ennis’s approach to the vernacular is different from Arnott’s, partly because it is set in the past. There is a mix of English, Ayrshire dialect and Scots (the latter only spoken by the itinerant preacher Benjamin Mutch, which is one of the many powerful characters portrayed). I hasten to add that this language is always accessible to a reader of Standard English.
Readers of this newsletter may well be on their guard against nostalgia, but this is not the right word here, I think. Yes, these were simpler and more collective times, but it is provincial conformism rather than religious cant that provides the claustrophobic atmosphere that constitutes a carefully understated backdrop to the novel and which Joseph is only beginning to become aware of. The reader can intuit this and also that the six days in which the story unfolds have only produced the first slight fissure in the protagonist’s devout acceptance of his grandparents’ credo and the values of the society he lives in. This is not a damascene revelation, but rather a slow and slightly painful process of intellectual discovery.
The tone and narrative voice are very different from Moon Country’s, not only because the two books belong to different eras and one is narrated by a child and the other by a somewhat nebulous cynical man of the world who has a very typical modern niche obsession – the bizarre life of a particular feckless local criminal. If I had to choose between these two excellent novels, I would go for Blessed Assurance. This is not because it is necessarily the better novel from a strictly objective literary viewpoint (if such a thing exists), but because of what I freely admit is a personal prejudice. We all have them! I cling to a belief in humanity even though it is becoming increasingly difficult to do this in the current era. So much narrative – in cinema, on TV, in books and on the radio – describes a world in which all individuals are in a continuous struggle for their own selfish interests. Thomas Hobbes called it the war of everyone against everyone else, which in my opinion is too much of a generalisation, but I agree with his conclusion that the state is the least harmful option at least for the foreseeable future. This is not to say that Moon Country isn’t aware of this reality, and in some ways satirises it, but Blessed Assurance provides a complete break from it and in times like these, it is refreshing to occasionally come across such views and remind ourselves that they once existed. It is not a work of unalloyed optimism and escapism – far from it – but it does allow us to glimpse something of our past, and perhaps also of our future, because I don’t believe that society moves in a linear fashion, and it is more likely to be cyclical (or perhaps a hybrid of linear and cyclical movements).
But what a great thing that these four novels exist in their undoubted heterogeneity, and it has been a pleasure to revisit them. We will revisit others, but in a month or two I will start to revisit our translated novels along with other things such as one or two translated articles from Italian newspapers (see Lampedusa) to provide a little variety as well as important truths beyond the less significant economic and occasionally existential self-interest of Vagabond Voices (the “existential” refers to the inevitable blows of the covid pandemic which of course have affected almost all small business very badly).
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, July 2021
I would like to add some of the endorsements for Stewart Ennis’s Blessed Assurance:
“Stewart Ennis’s debut novel hovers constantly between comedy and tragedy. Small-town Scotland is seen in perceptive detail through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. Characters, like his fundamentalist Gran, like the unforgettable itinerant preacher, Benjamin Mutch, leap into our heads and take us over. Steeped in matters of faith and rejection the book offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into a past world which makes you turn the pages in a quest for answers.” – Bernard MacLaverty
“This is the writer I always dreamed of finding – a born stylist with a story as intimate and vast as all creation. Ennis is the Scottish James Joyce.” – Meg Rosoff
“Stewart Ennis has drawn on his own faith-fixated upbringing to recreate a sixties childhood like no other. This, in a nuanced and theological sense, is a sectarian novel that manages to make life within a scripture-centred household appealing rather than appalling as stereotype would so often have it. We meet characters Mark Twain or Flannery O’Connor would have been proud to have begotten. Obsession with the afterlife does not preclude a fictional village universe rendered with the verve and vitality another writer might find in Glasgow or New York. Its Scottish antecedents include The House with The Green Shutters, Gillespie and Docherty. More recent sources for comparison would be the works of Jeanette Winterston, James Robertson and the poet Iain Bamforth. The earnest, scab-scouring schoolboy dreamer and precocious would-be missionary, Joseph Kirkland, takes his well-earned place amongst the many youthful savants and seers populating the coming-of-age stories that predominate in Caledonian letters. Kilhaugh may be a geographical figment but its cartography, spatial and psychosocial maps, mores and identities we can lose and find ourselves in. Ennis’ episodic structure – tablaux vibrantly vivants – have the stand-alone presence to compel even as excerpts. But cumulatively these vignettes take on a mass and momentum that propel this deep, deft and richly rewarding debut novel towards precincts of the psyche as yet unprowled in contemporary Scottish fiction.” – Donny O’Rourke