'The Big Music' by Kirsty Gunn

Highland piobaireachd bagpipe music gives its spacious looping structure to this novel of vast scope and breath-taking achievement. Octogenarian composer John Sutherland struggling across the landscape with a baby in his arms forms the opening 'ground' upon which the themes and variations of the rest of the book are developed: intergenerational torsion, the rigours of place, unbidden and unfulfillable hearts, the vast loneliness that arises from harmonics in relationships like the 'silences' created from the harmonics between the pipes' drones. Multivocal, fractalising, encyclopedic, Sutherland's 'Lament for Himself' induces its own way of reading, akin to musical listening. Conceived of as a box of documents, Gunn has produced a work of many skins, from the intimate to the documentary, and, if place impresses itself upon its inhabitants, has perhaps done for the cadences of Highland thought what James Kelman has done for those of demotic Glasgow. Repeatedly in her writing, Gunn performs what is known in piobaireachd as a ‘stag’s leap’: airborne, the reader covers the ground of the theme as the text plays hazardously against it.

(August 2013)