The Flood

Introduction

The Flood was my first published novel. It’s not a crime novel, though it contains secrets and revelations. Nor is it a thriller. Fair warning: it’s a young man’s book, all about the perils and pitfalls of growing up.

I wrote it when I was a student at Edinburgh University. I have the feeling it started life as a short story, only the story started to grow. Before I knew it, I had written a full twenty pages — too long for Radio 4’s short story slot (for which two of my stories had already been accepted), or for most of the magazines and other outlets for “shorties” that I knew of at the time. I decided that instead of trying to edit what I already had, I should just call it “part one” and keep going. I’d already written one novel, entitled Summer Rites, a black comedy set in a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. The plot revolved around a one-legged schizophrenic librarian, a young boy with special powers, and the abduction of a famous American novelist by the “provisional wing” of the Scottish National Party. Curiously, no one had seemed to agree with my judgment that Summer Rites was a fully realised contender for the title of Great Scottish Novel. Undaunted, I set about turning my short story The Falling Time into a new novel called The Flood.

I was reading a lot of Scottish literature at the time, as part of my PhD study into the novels of Muriel Spark. Looking at The Flood now, I can see influences peering back at me: Neil Gunn, Iain Crichton Smith, and especially Robin Jenkins (author of the marvellous The Cone Gatherers). Although The Flood was written in the mid-1980s, at a time when a fresh urban Scottish fiction was arriving — thanks to writers such as James Kelman — I decided that my own story would be local and rural, based in and around a fictitious coal-mining community. The problem was, I named my village Carsden, which is why a lot of people back in my hometown of Cardenden thought I was writing about them. It hardly helped that the main character was called Sandy the name of one of my school-friends — or that when I took the finished novel home to show my father, he perused the opening sentence and told me a woman called Mary Miller lived just over the back fence from him.

Turned out, I hadn’t disguised the place of my birth well enough.

Up to this point, I’d been writing a lot of “shorties”, very few of them ever picked up for publication. However, I’d had some success with a story called Walking Naked, which had been based on an actual event from my family’s history. In similar fashion, the original idea behind The Flood had been to describe a single scene — the moment when an aunt of mine (my father’s sister; a mere girl at the time) had fallen into a stream composed of hot waste water from the washing-plant of the local coal-mine. She sported long hair, of which she was inordinately proud. A young man saved her by hauling her out of the stream by that same coil of hair. It was a tale my father had told me, probably embellishing it for effect.

I would embellish it further.

My first attempts at writing, back in my teenage years, had concerned my hometown. I’d written a long, rambling poem (a homage of sorts to T. S. Eliot) about the derelict Rex Cinema, some short stories based on incidents real and imaginary, and even a novella (written in niched school jotters), in which the plot of William Gelding’s Lord of the Flies was played out not on a desert island but in my high school. I was trying to mythologize the place, to give it a sense of importance at odds with the reality. With the coal-mines redundant, I’d watched some of the life (and livelihood) seep out of the place. As a student, I would spend weekdays in Edinburgh, and most weekends back home in Cardenden, taking my dad for a drink at the Bowhill Hotel, meeting friends from my schooldays at the Auld Hoose. I was trying to fit in, while becoming increasingly aware that I was moving further away from my roots all the time. In Edinburgh, I’d be reading Paradise Lost and Ulysses’, back home, I’d be playing games of pool and discussing the previous week’s John Peel playlists.

Maybe The Flood was part of the leaving process.

As well as reading a lot of Scottish literature, I’d also been reading about folklore and witchcraft, and catching up on literary effects such as symbolism. In fact, there was more in the final draft of the book than even I was aware of, as I discovered when, for a short time, The Flood became a set text for the university’s Scottish Literature department. I was invited to sit in on a tutorial, with my identity being kept secret for the first half of the session — as far as the students were concerned, I was just a newcomer, albeit one a few years older than them. One student (I think he was American) delivered a paper on the book’s wasteland imagery; another discussed Old and New Testament themes and borrowings, while a third had made a detailed study of the author’s use of elements and colours. I started taking notes at one point: it was all good stuff! Even if I had not consciously meant for these patterns to exist, I was happy to acknowledge them if readers could see them. (I was a fan of the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser — eventually using his name for a Professor in my first Rebus novel. Iser’s thesis was that it’s what readers see in books that is important, not what the writer intended them to see. The name for this is Reader Response Criticism).

I finished the final draft of The Flood on Monday 9 July 1984, having started it in January. During that first half of 1984 I was studying hard — everything from Proust to Derrida — and writing a lot, amassing a slew of rejection letters in the process. Some of these were from publishers, some from agents, and yet others from magazines, short story collections and competitions. Still I kept slogging, hungry for recognition as a writer. Iain Crichton Smith, having beaten me into second place in a short story contest run by the Scotsman newspaper, had written a letter of introduction to his publisher, Gollancz. But his editor, Livia Gollancz, had already turned down Summer Rites, and would reject The Flood, too. At the university, writer-in residence Allan Massie had helped me to meet a London based editor called Euan Cameron (who would eventually sign up Knots and Crosses to his publishing house, Bodley Head). But Euan wanted neither Summer Rites nor The Flood.

In the end, and unwittingly, it was James Kelman who helped me get published. The students at Edinburgh University ran their own publishing house. It was called Polygon and employed two or three full-time staff, complemented by any number of jobbing, unpaid students. Despite its lack of size and resources, however, Polygon had achieved fame and success with the publication of James Kelman’s first collection of short stories, Not Not While the Giro. On the lookout for new authors, I became one of the lucky ones. Launching an imprint called “Polygon New Writers”, I found myself signed up with two other first-time authors, Robert Alan Jamieson and Alex Cathcart. And even though only a few hundred copies of The Flood would be printed, I can still remember the thrill of walking into the Polygon office on Buccleuch Place to sign my first-ever book contract. By coincidence, that same day (Tuesday 19 March 1985) I got the idea for another book, to be called Knots and Crosses. It would feature a troubled detective who would, in time, even meet one of the main characters in The Flood. (Check out the opening pages of Hide & Seek if you don’t believe me).

The Flood was edited by a fellow literature student called Iain Cameron, and proof-read by one of my lecturers. The painting on the jacket was provided by a student at the nearby art college. (A few years back, when Polygon was moving premises, I tried tracking down the original artwork, but it seemed to have vanished without trace). The handsomely-produced book was eventually published in February 1986, in a joint run of hardcover (three hundred) and paperback (maybe eight hundred). One of my diary entries of the time states: ‘Saw “Flood” (and the other new Polygons) in Stockbridge Bookshop: it looked as though only one copy (of Alan Jamieson’s novel) had been bought. Felt a twinge of failure.’ However, the next day I was doing some tutoring at the university, and two of my students had brought copies of the book that they wanted me to sign. (I hope they’ve held on to them — The Flood has become highly collectable... and very expensive as a result, which explains this new edition I want it to be available to everyone who wants it, without them needing to remortgage their house or pawn the children).

Publication week climaxed with a launch party for all three authors held in one of the university buildings. I was photographed, had to read from the book in public for the first time, and even sold and signed a few copies. Afterwards, a bunch of friends took me to the Café Royal for a night of riotous assembly which ended with us being asked to leave.

I woke up next morning on a living-room floor, with my publication cheque (£300) safe in my pocket. It was a shaking, whey-faced author who posed that afternoon for a photographer from the Dundee Courier.

A trickle of reviews eventually arrived, as did a trickle of sales. By the end of May, I was recording in my diary that I’d sold five hundred copies in total. Meantime, an aunt of mine had finished reading the book and thought me depraved. According to my dad, she was “crying for my soul”. If only she’d been a reviewer, some extra interest might have been drummed up. Eventually, I visited her in the flesh, so she could chastise me properly for writing such sordid stuff — “all soiled knickers and fag-ends”, I believe she said. She also asked how I would feel if my niece were to read the book. Little did she realise that I was already at work on my next project, which, in the fag-end stakes, would make The Flood look like Little Women...