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Eric Linklater
Eric Linklater was one of Scotland's most popular 20th-century writers, known primarily for his fiction. This biography of the award-winning novelist and journalist seeks to reappraise the importance and significance of Linklater's life and work.
Ripeness is All
When the celibate Major Gander, C.B., T.D. sold out the family toffee business to American Candy Inc., he was able to retire in comfort. And when he dies from heart failure (it was after a strenuous shoot at the Brackens' Rife Meeting) his gathered relatives found that the thought of his will moderated their grief considerably. For they all felt well placed for at least a few thousand to help them cultivate their favourite virtues and vices! But it was not to be so simple. The Major, they soon discovered, had made his choice of legatee dependent on the most preposterous condition...
A Man Over Forty
Eric Linklater's command of language and situation, and his gifts for humour and storytelling have seldom been better displayed than in A Man Over Forty, first published in 1963. Edward Balintore is the archetypal television personality: big, loud, and assertive, given to reactionary sentiments and fits of explosive anger. In a 'depth' interview before the cameras he is driven to admitting a fear 'of being found out' and collapses with what the doctors call overstrain and nervous tension. Accompanied by his Watson or Sancho Panza, Guy Palladis, an elegant, detached and well-connected young man, he sets out on a long and varied quest for peace and an earthly paradise. Jamaica, Ireland, Greece, all are sampled in turn and nearly accepted; but in each some dissonant element from Balintore's past turns up and sends him on. The Furies (If it is indeed they who are pursuing him), finally catch up with him in the Aegean in sight of Mount Athos - appropriately enough, for a man with a soul to save or sell. This is a novel of great satirical and imaginative scope - a picture of red-blooded Dionysiac man bent on defying 'the solemn ones' who plague him.
A Terrible Freedom
First published in 1966, Eric Linklater's brilliant novel tells the story of a double existence. Evan Gaffikin, sixtyish, grumpy and bored with his dull commercial success, discovers and develops his power to dream: to dream in such depth and in such glowing reality that he is able to escape his extraordinary existence. We learn of his double life as scenes from Gaffikin's real life alternate with his surrealistic, vivid, and often hilariously bawdy forays into the world of unreality. As his dream-world and its remarkable characters, gradually get the upper hand, the tension of the novel rises and the climactic sequence - in a yacht off the Hebrides - is mysterious and exciting. A Terrible Freedom could, perhaps, be described as an idiosyncratic venture into the realm of science fiction; but it may be preferable to see it as a conventional novel built with classical composure of unconventional material. Either way it is a tour de force of imagination and narrative skills.
The Dark of Summer
In the early years of the Second World War an army officer is sent to the Faroe Islands to investigate rumours of a collaboration with the Nazi regime in Norway. What he finds changes lives, not least his own. No one who reads this book will forget the frozen corpse tied to a chair in an icehouse guarded by two drunken seamen, or the raging storm which batters their, ship as they carry the body to Shetland. That's just the beginning. As the tale takes grip, the reader becomes haunted, just as the characters are haunted by a sense of guilt and betrayal. One of the finest of Linklater's later, deeper, darker novels, The Dark of Summer combines national and family histories as it sets out to understand the past, redeem the corrosion of memory and find meaning in a world of divided loyalties.
A Spell For Old Bones
"When the giants fell, old bones revived" - there is the rubric for Eric Linklater's new story, first published in 1949. There may be no historical foundation for his tale of a fantastic war, in the First century A.D., between the giant Furbister and the abominable Od McGammon, his neighbour in the south-west of Scotland; but their quarrel - which provides a background to the engaging love-story of the willful poet Albyn and the delightful Princess Liss - has a real enough interest and no small significance in our equally strange world of today. Would love cure all our troubles? Love indeed has a power that is almost infinite. But man (especially if he is a willful poet) has the habit of dissatisfaction, an eye that looks critically at love itself. And here, in this tale of some very modern primitives, love makes the running but fails to win the race. A new departure for Linklater? Well, he often makes new departures, and here, though he is serious at bottom, his seriousness is nicely garnished with wit, and sometimes at the mercy of humour. The fascination of the story carries its outlandishness as lightly as a feather.
The Raft / Socrates Asks Why
Are the people of Britain capable of serving the new world, of writing with honour a new chapter of history? The answer, conclusively, is Yes.... But Socrates, in the third of the pieces, has still to be satisfied that the Allies are truly conscious of their purpose. A four-fold rule of law is not enough: the peace within that rule must not be an idle peace, but creative. If that is not explicitly our intention and desire, then why are we fighting? The Raft and Socrates Asks Why are imaginary conversations revolving around the political and military problems of WWII. The Raft is set in the mid-Atlantic, where six survivors from a torpedoed ship discuss the position of Britain and the difficulties and moral dilemmas of a soldier life. Socrates Asks Why is a conversation between Socrates, Voltaire, Johnson and Lincoln where the Allies' aim of peace and ending of the war is discussed and questioned. These conversations were first published in 1942.
The Goose Girl and Other Stories
Eric Linklater was one of the most respected and prolific Scottish writers of this century, yet more than twenty-five years have passed since his last collection of short stories was published. This selection covers Linklater's entire writing life. The settings are as various as the places where he lived - Orkney, India, California, Edinburgh and the Highlands - the events that take place, both fantastic and sensual in their depiction. A strong seam of Scottish history and culture runs through much of Linklater's work. The short stories include classics of the form, such as The Goose Girl and Kind Kitty, and wild variations on fairy stories, medieval myths, bawdy folktales, Viking sagas and 1920s crime reports. They derive from the magic of the world - love, beauty, ambition, drink and language. Their exuberant invention and comic verve provide glorious evidence for George Mackay Brown's assertion that 'Linklater is one of Scotland's best story-tellers ever'.
