November 2003 Interview: Angus Peter Campbell (1)

AT THE OPENING of Angus Peter Campbell's novel, An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn, a 13-year-old boy stands on the banks of Loch Bhornais ready to fling a 'skiffler'.

But as he prepares to let loose the almighty throw, the best and longest that those waters have ever seen, he is distracted from his task by the sound and sight of a horse and gig travelling down the road, such as it was.

The boy peers through the dust and rushes and sees the priest making his way along that track. The boy holds on to the skiffler. He will hold on to that skiffler: he has made a choice he will go in for the priesthood.

Shortly before this episode we learn that his elder brothers have also made their choices: choices that will have a profound impact on their lives, too. The year is 1913 and the Great War is calling young men to a death in the mud of foreign fields, or to glory as honoured officers.

The world the boy knows is in sharp, almost hyper-reality before him and it is changing. We follow him as his life progresses and as the consequences of his and their choices play out in the lives of those he loves and loses, and those who come after him, even up to one hundred years later in a time after our own.

And then, as the end approaches, we are back at that lochside. Now it is a girl who has the stone and she is just about to fling it across those same waters. She too is then disturbed and looks up not to see the priest and his gig but the complacent figures of a film crew recording the story of the previous pages. She goes unnoticed. She is excluded from this her and their own story.

But she has flung her stone and their indifference drives her to fetch it from the loch floor along with all those that others have been thrown there. But she has a final, almost defiant and affirmative act to make. And thus the book ends in a kind of broken circle, close to but moved on from the start.

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