A Magical Masquerade:
The Fiction of Christopher Whyte
by Niall O'Gallagher
Christopher Whyte’s
four published novels mix magic and myth, Scotland and Europe.
They are both playful and polemical, fusing realism and fantasy
to create a fiction that revels in its own artistry, while raging
against the repressive nature of Scottish society for both men
and women, gay and straight. On the Scottish scene Whyte’s
fiction is an anomaly, its cosmopolitan comedy distinctly out
of step with the dominant mode of Scottish, and particularly Glaswegian,
fiction published in the last decade of the twentieth century.
While Scottish men’s writing of the period abounds in prolier-than-thou
machismo, Whyte’s work unashamedly explores the lives of
middle-class characters, holding Scottish bourgeois culture up
to a scrutiny that it frequently manages to avoid. And in a fictional
and critical environment where terse, demotic prose is in the
ascendancy, Whyte’s style is generous and expansive, recalling
the romances of Walter Scott rather than the realism of recent
Scottish writing.
Whyte’s arrival
as a novelist was heralded by the publication of Euphemia
MacFarrigle and the Laughing Virgin (1995), some four years
after the appearance of his award-winning collection of poetry
Uirsgeul / Myth: Poems in Gaelic with English Translations (1991). Whyte’s first novel explored his native city, its
pieties and perversities. At the centre of the novel is the miraculous
Madonna at St. Ignatius’ Church in Glasgow, a thinly disguised
version of the real St. Aloysius’, the Jesuit church at
whose adjoining school Whyte himself was educated. The novel abounds
in miracles both sacred and secular: the miraculous member of
an Episcopalian minister, the miraculous conception experienced
by three nuns who are promptly locked up for their trouble. Alongside
these there are the ordinary miracles experienced by people who
survive in a climate of religious intolerance and sexual repression.
Whyte followed this outrageous
Glaswegian gallimaufry with The Warlock of Strathearn (1997), a novel that makes use of the centrality of the black
arts in Scottish fiction from James Hogg to Alasdair Gray, and
from the traditional ballads to James MacMillan’s overture The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (1990). Whyte deploys
a device beloved of Scottish writers from Hogg’s Confessions
of a Justified Sinner to Gray's Poor Things, a found
manuscript, to weave together a marvellous tale of a seventeenth-century
child with uncanny powers. Whyte’s Warlock uses his otherworldly
abilities to escape the repression and rigidity imposed on him
by his grandmother, in a journey that takes him from Scotland
to Bohemia and back again, even adopting the form of a woman in
order to seduce his great love, Lisbet, on his return home. He
is someone with extraordinary talents, gifts that cause him to
be persecuted yet at the same time provide him with the means
to escape that persecution. Near the beginning of his narrative,
the Warlock admits that those very gifts constitute a barrier
between himself and his imagined audience:
How do you explain to a blind
man what it is like to see? How do you help a deaf man understand
the delights of hearing? How am I to describe what has always
been perfectly natural to me, as if it were an acquired skill,
something from which I could be separated? Could you, the reader
of these pages, convey to me what it is like for you to live
without the faculties which I possess? (The Warlock of Strathearn,
p. 30)
The Warlock of Strathearn
combines tight narrative patterning and a deft, understated prose
style with events that are truly fantastic. As in Euphemia
MacFarrigle, Whyte uses the situation of his principal character
to explore the nature of male identity, but in his second novel
the fluidity of the Warlock’s gender and catholicity of
his desires are presented as liberating, magical and deeply empowering.
While both Euphemia
McFarrigle and The Warlock of Strathearn evoke worlds
that range from the miraculous to the macabre, for his third novel,
The Gay Decameron (1998), Whyte opted for a more realistic
style. The art of continental Europe, and of Italy in particular,
has been an important influence upon Whyte’s work, and in The Gay Decameron he follows Boccaccio in using a group
of friends to generate a sequence of stories. But if in Boccaccio
the friends narrate stories featuring a wide range of characters
from different times and places, in Whyte’s novel the narrator
builds up, in episode after episode, a group portrait of the friends
themselves. Boccaccio’s villa becomes a top floor flat in
Edinburgh’s New Town, where Dougal and Keiran are hosting
a dinner party for a group of ten gay men. Whyte’s homage
to Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which the various
narrators have fled to Fiesole to escape a Florence in the grip
of the Bubonic Plague, can be read in the context of Edinburgh’s
status as ‘the HIV capital of Europe’, something rehearsed
by Whyte’s younger contemporary, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. The treatment of gay life is never coy, and
the descriptions of erotic love are explicit without being sentimental
or voyeuristic. In his longest published novel to date, Whyte
refuses the idea that gay experience is somehow peripheral, that
the lives of gay people can only de described in a coded language
inaccessible to those outside. Here is a novel set in the heart
of the Scottish capital, the Edinburgh of David Hume and Adam
Smith, one whose structure is borrowed from a canonical text of
European literature. Accordingly, Whyte’s novel, with disarming
honesty and openness, explores the experiences of a group of men
who cannot be defined by their sexuality, men who, despite the
pressures and prohibitions affecting gay men in Scotland at the
turn of the twenty-first century, continue to lead rich, occasionally
tragic, but always valuable lives.
In his most recent offering,
The Cloud Machinery (2000), Whyte revisits some of the
magical material that characterised The Warlock of Strathearn.
This time the setting is Venice in the year 1761, in the small
parish of St. Hyginus, where the only theatre has lain shut since
a disastrous evening seven years before when a Neapolitan princess
went missing and Alvise Contarini, the only surviving member of
a local wealthy family, was murdered. The legacy of these events
exerts a powerful influence in the run-up to the opening night,
as two mysterious travellers arrive in search of the missing princess.
As in The Warlock of Strathearn, The Cloud Machinery features a pair of men skilled in the magical arts, one younger
and one older: Angelo Colombani, the retired castrato whose incredible
stage machinery gives the novel its title, and his former teacher,
the sinister Goffredo Negri or Gottfried Schwartz. The theatrical
setting gives Whyte the freedom to tell a story full of human
comedy and political intrigue in the poised and yet playful style
with which readers of his other books will be familiar. He seems
to be perfectly at home in the world of eighteenth-century Italy,
with its art and aristocracy, its comedy and carnival. His interest
in carnival, which owes something to both Goethe and Bakhtin,
informs this novel’s concern with masks and masquerades,
costumes and corruption. The theatre of St. Hyginus offers Whyte
a stage upon which he can bring together a cast of characters
and themes that figured repeatedly in his previous fictions, as
well as allowing his audience to delight in sheer literary spectacle.
The words of Don Astolfo, the parish priest we meet at the start,
offer an apt account of the particular pleasures offered by the
novels of Christopher Whyte:
His thoughts turned to Alvise
Contarini, the last surviving member of the Contarini family,
who had been afflicted with a passion for all things theatrical.
He showed more loyalty to the stage than to the altar. His appearances
at mass had been sporadic. The priest had heard his confession
only twice in well over a decade. The theatre occupied all his
waking thoughts and consumed a sizeable portion of the family
fortune. Yet Don Astolfo could not find it in his heart to condemn
him. The keenest pleasure the priest had ever experienced (except
on one occasion, which is not germane to the present matter)
had been within that candlelit interior, as he watched, in disbelief,
gods and nymphs descending from the sky, borne on a marvellous
machine.
Niall O’Gallagher is a writer and critic based in Glasgow, Scotland. He specialises
in Irish and Scottish writing from Oscar Wilde to Alasdair Gray,
and has translated several of Christopher Whyte’s Gaelic
poems into English and Scots.
top of the page