{"id":20002,"date":"2025-07-24T09:48:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T09:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/20002\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T09:48:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T09:48:13","slug":"book-of-the-week-how-to-kill-everyone-in-scotland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/20002\/","title":{"rendered":"Book of the Week: How to kill everyone in Scotland"},"content":{"rendered":"

It just so happens that the two best New Zealand novels of the year so far are both set in Britain, with Cambridge writer Catherine Chidgey imagining sinister goings-on in a village in England in her novel The Book of Guilt, and now Dunedin writer Liam McIlvanney happily killing off characters in a pretty seaside town in Scotland in his very, very good crime thriller, The Good Father. I suppose the accumulated bodycount in Chidgey\u2019s book is greater than in McIlvanney\u2019s novel but she sets her novel over 40 years, giving her a long time to send her characters to their deaths, and The Good Father is restricted to seven years. Even so, he gives it a good lash. You want murders, you\u2019ve come to the right place.<\/p>\n

McIlvanney is chair of Scottish studies at the University of Otago. Right now he is on a book tour of Scotland, celebrating the very welcome news last week that The Good Father will be made into a TV drama series in Britain. Aye, I\u2019ll be wanting to watch that. I may already know how the story develops and what happens in the bloody end but I\u2019ll want to see the ways actors take on their roles\u2014particularly Rory, a little boy who goes missing\u2014and I\u2019ll really want to see what the town looks like. The book is set in Fairlie. Not our Fairlie, in the Mackenzie Basin of the South Island, which I am guessing is named after Fairlie in Scotland. It\u2019s got a beach. It\u2019s got peculiar houses lining the shore. McIlvanney describes it with a kind of atmospheric dread in The Good Father.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a book of two halves. Almost nothing happens in the first half which is to say a family is left with nothing after their son, Rory, goes missing. There are very few clues. There are even fewer suspects. The story is narrated by Rory\u2019s dad, Gordon, an English professor. He and his wife Sarah are shattered and helpless and inert. \u201cPeople talk of grief as a numbness. With me it was more like vertigo. I felt permanently dizzy\u2026Who took him? Where has he gone? Is he safe? Is he still alive? The questions wheeled like vultures in the sun.\u201d Grief is like a sickness, and McIlvanney leans close towards the suffering. He writes of Rory\u2019s disappearance without sentiment, and it\u2019s heartbreaking.<\/p>\n

I suppose it makes sense that Gordon, because of his academic profession, would connect with great literature as he tries to make sense of Rory being there one minute and spirited away the next. \u201cOf all things, I thought about \u2018The Purloined Letter\u2019, Poe\u2019s short story where the massed ranks of the gendarme dismantle the minister\u2019s Paris apartment, searching for the stolen letter\u2026Maybe, I thought, the police haven\u2019t exhausted every angle, chased down every lead.\u201d That was fair, and I also accepted Gordon telling his university class, \u201cThe challenge, then, for crime writers is to represent the gravity \u2013 in both senses of the word \u2013 of murder. The seriousness. The weight. What it really means to kill someone.\u201d But McIlvanney doesn\u2019t leave it at that, and things get kind of meta as he expands on the tricks and methods of crime fiction. The Good Father is about the story of a missing boy. You want the tension and awfulness of the situation as it unfolds in Fairlie; you don\u2019t want the author intruding, and getting in the way.<\/p>\n

You want to read about Fairlie. \u201cWhite triangles of sail on the darkening firth.\u201d McIlvanney is so good at place; the setting is visible, you can feel it and smell it. His dialogue is sharp and well-formed, and he\u2019s alert to patterns of speech. \u201cHell mend him,\u201d says one character; another describes a hard drinker, \u201cHe was putting it away like a man with three arms.\u201d There\u2019s a\u00a0 visit to Aberdeen and a visit to a town in Cork. But the plot doesn\u2019t actually thicken; \u00a0McIlvanney keeps a tight rein on things, never overplays his hand. There is no body, and a strong possibility that Rory was abducted, but his continued absence means the plot keeps thinning out, leaves Gordon and Sarah empty-handed, chasing shadows and phantoms. All of Part 1 of The Good Father is expertly told.<\/p>\n

Part 2 is where the violence finally erupts. Something amazing happens, and things get even worse. The book takes on a darker tone and Gordon faces a stern moral test. He fails that test. There are four deaths. The first two are a misfortune but the others are more like a carelessness. Crime fiction depends on a final hurdle, and I\u2019m not sure whether The Good Father takes it in its stride or crashes into it. McIlvanney seems to share the same credo as Eleanor Catton, when she approached the final hurdle of her novel Birnam Wood: kill everyone in sight.<\/p>\n

Still, the deaths are efficient, and skilful, especially the last murder: \u201cThe knife slithered crisply through the meat of him. The hilt clipped a rib\u2026His mouth yawed open; blood poured brilliantly out.\u201d The victim died \u201clike a dog\u201d. I\u2019d feel sorry for a dog. I didn\u2019t feel much for this guy but neither did I obtain any kind of satisfaction from his death. Things had gone too far. McIlvanney is adept at killing the most precious thing in our lives\u2014hope\u2014but perhaps got a bit too enthusiastic at the prospect of an all-out slaughter. It gave improbability to The Good Father. It\u2019s one thing to build the tension but it\u2019s another challenge to release it.<\/p>\n

But the heart of the novel beats strong and clear. \u201cYou think that families are held together by love,\u201d Gordon tells us. \u201cThat\u2019s not true. They\u2019re held together by secrets.\u201d There is actually a fifth death in The Good Father. It\u2019s not a violent death. It takes place almost at the edges of this very good read, with its captivating scenery of Fairlie and its little note to the author\u2019s adopted country (New Zealand is pointed out on a globe as a \u201clong, slim country, italic-shaped\u201d). It sends a message: good riddance to bad fathers.<\/p>\n

The Good Father by Liam McIlvanney (Zaffre, $36.99) is available in bookstores nationwide<\/p>\n

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