MODERN SCOTTISH POETRY
[ISBN 0-7486-1600-4]

     Despite the crucial role played by Scottish poetry in the move towards self-definition and autonomy during the latter part of the twentieth century, there has been no specific study dedicated to its evaluation. Modern Scottish Poetry is a ground-breaking survey of the field, notionally framed by the outbreak of the Second World War and the (re)-opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Careful attention is given to this poetry's roots in the preceding period, as well as to the broader European context and to the influence of English and North American writers.
     Adopting a decade by decade approach, Christopher Whyte takes a collection by each of twenty significant poets writing in English, Scots and Gaelic as the starting point for an examination of their whole career and of the connections linking them. Poets featured include Sorley MacLean, Edwin Muir, George Campbell Hay, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, W. S. Graham, Iain Crichton Smith, Liz Lochhead, Kenneth White, Robert Crawford, Carol Ann Duffy and Aonghas MacNeacail.
     Innovative, challenging and frequently controversial, the readings are underpinned by a consistent theoretical sophistication. Topics covered include language, politics, the nation, gender and sexuality. Highlighting the richness and variety of work produced across six decades, Modern Scottish Poetry offers a refreshing and stimulating reassessment of Scottish cultural history at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

top of the page

THE CLOUD MACHINERY
[ISBN 0-575-07084-6]

     The theatre at St Hyginus, Venice's smallest parish, is about to reopen. It is Carnival time and Ansaldo Limentani, the charismatic impresario, plans a season of opera more splendid than anyone has seen before. But the events of the terrible night seven years ago on which the theatre closed down, when a Neapolitan princess disappeared in a column of fire and Alvise, last surviving member of the Contarini family, was brutally murdered, cannot be forgotten.
     Two sinister visitors from northern lands, Andreas Hofmeister and the Baroness Hedwiga, hover on the edge of the theatre company, determined to track the missing princess down. Domenico, the young musician hired as a conductor, discovers that the building has some unsuspected inhabitants. Because of them, an evil is unleashed on the opening night which can only be put to rest thanks to the intervention of a retired castrato singer and an entire commedia dell'arte troupe.
     Admirably suited to the alchemical talents of Christopher Whyte, The Cloud Machinery reads like a tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann set to music by Mozart. Its brilliant and elegant surface cannot conceal disturbing psychological undertones which makes this a thoroughly contemporary novel.

top of the page

THE GAY DECAMERON
[ISBN 0-575-06505-2]

     One June night, in an Edinburgh flat, ten gay men gather for a dinner party. Quirky, superficial, the conversation touches on one-night stands, the exploits of a friend who died, a brothel in Danube Street that might just have been a figment of the collective imagination.
     Into and around the talk Christopher Whyte weaves the untold stories that the guests bring with them: Gavin's trip to Ireland to find the place where Colin died; how Nicol's ad in the classifieds led him to the hairiest body in Edinburgh; the man who promised always to lie to Rory; the ghost that haunts Barry and what it wants from him; Kieran's relationship with identical gay twins. There is a visitor from Barcelona, and the stories range from Spain to Tuscany and Vienna, while in the seclusion of the study Brian dreams of a half-legendary Persia.
     No-one has so far attempted such a generous and detailed fresco of gay lives: unremarkable, uncompromising, erotic, sexy, funny and elegiac. Mothers, wives, lovers and children all play their part. The focus shifts from one guest to another until at last the dancing ends, the summer night has passed and they disperse; but not without a last look at the dawning landscape, and drunken speculations as to their place within it.
     Classic in scope and intricate in structure, playful and passionate by turns, The Gay Decameron invites comparison with the work of White and Baldwin, Navarre, Genet and maupin. If the lives it chronicles surprise us, this is because they have never been so naturally treated. That frankness makes the book, as well as a gay epic, a testament of shared humanity.

THE WARLOCK OF STRATHEARN
[ISBN 0-575-06506-0]

     A coded manuscript, obscure in origin and procured in unusual circumstances, provides an engaging project for retired schoolmaster Archibald MacCaspin. Cranky in person and pedantic in his own prose, Archibald's translation of the first person narrative reveals a very different voice...
     In the 1640s, in a Perthshire valley, a servant girl is delivered of a child with astonishing powers. He can talk to animals, inflict sores, heal illnesses and see the dead. Following a childhood and adolescence filled with the sights, smells and sounds of one of the loveliest stretches of Scotland's countryside, his story moves to Edinburgh, and as far afield as the forests of Southern Bohemia, before bringing him home to the rowan wood at Culteuchar. He describes a relentless struggle with his grandmother and her malevolent spirit, a conflict only resolved in a final confrontation as vivid and violent as any horror movie. But the warlock's greatest feat is reserved for the woman he loves and loses, who meets her death with dignity on the scaffold.
     The more disquieting elements in the magical realism of Christopher Whyte's first novel Euphemia MacFarrigle and the Laughing Virgin here move to centre stage, in a fantastic narrative which frames a psychodrama of prejudice and misunderstanding, of love and loss, of family hatred, revenge and, finally, salvation.

"Though it's usually described as fantasy, this is the most autobiographical of all my novels. But covered up, concealed, made to look like something else. On a chill but clear winter's day, in the village of Falkland in Fife, I got the idea of a warlock who puts the finishing touches to the manuscript of his life story then sets himself alight on a bonfire of sweet-smelling wood. But first you meet Archibald McCaspin, a half-comic, half-tragic figure more interested in placename derivations than in magic. He writes the novel's introduction but doesn't survive to write the epilogue, which is left to his gay nephew. My friend egregious lexicographer Iseabail MacLeod helped me with the Scots dialogue, for which I am hugely grateful. The book plays enjoyably with Hogg, Stevenson and a wide range of Scottish kitsch. It's the one novel in that tradition where, rather than the local minister telling you how they put a stop to the witches, a warlock persuades the congregation to string their minister up. And it contains some of the scariest writing I have ever done.

EUPHEMIA MacFARRIGLE AND THE LAUGHING VIRGIN
[ISBN 0-575-06065-4]