Louise Welsh, Naming the Bones

(Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010)

Drowsiness is mandatory when reading this book, preferably that resulting from life on a sunbed by a pool in the Canaries, but the kind induced by a long overnight bus ride would do. The  storyline is light, rather tired, and peopled by stereotypes, while the writing is simply mediocre.  Since the sole source of suspense is the back-cover blurb, it’s not exactly a page turner, and I’m afraid I failed to spot any of Welsh’s alleged trademarks: wit, insight and gothic charisma. 

The plot centres on Murray Watson, a lecturer in English literature at Glasgow University.  Watson is  researching the life of Archie Lunan, a young Scots poet who published only one slim collection of poems, Moontide, in the 1970s, before he died, aged 25, in a boating accident off the Lismore coast.  Watson takes a sabbatical with the intention of writing a  literary biography of Lunan, and the novel follows Watson as he tracks down Lunan’s associates, and unwittingly uncovers sordid truths about Lunan and his contemporaries.  

Watson is astonishingly bland and uninteresting.  He appears to have little or no intellectual curiosity –  for example, he is said to have in the past, spent more time than he was happy about exploring ancient monuments with his then girlfriend, but nonetheless archly displays ignorance of the meaning of broch (p. 209).  His preoccupation with sex is initially irritating and then boring.  He displays a remarkably weak imagination – his description of sheep running down a hill as looking like fat women running in high heels is grating.  I can only assume the chapter spent in the pub with his colleagues, chapter 6, is an attempt to round out the man.  If it isn’t, then it’s a very longwinded way of introducing a sliver of plot development (Rab Purvis’ one-night stand with Rachel Houghton).  The brother, Jack, lurches in and out of the story for  no obvious reason bar that a saviour is needed at the end.  Jack’s glamorous fellow artist, Cressida Reeves is part of this clunky sub plot as is Jack’s girlfriend Lyn,  whom, for reasons I fail to see, we accompany while she helps a paraplegic ex-drug addict do his shopping. 

There is much that is derivative: the opening chapter set in Edinburgh is weak Rankin; the art exhibition in chapter 2 appears to be a bad replica of Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved; once the action moves to the island of Lismore, it becomes The Wickerman, while AS Byatt has covered the general storyline so much better in Possession.  Taken with together with the countless threads, burgeoning with potential, which Walsh introduces only to allow to fade away, you are left with a lazy attempt at a thriller, and an author who appears to assume a readership undiscerning enough to be satisfied by reputation alone.