Land Of The Leal. James Barke

for instance, he is not afraid to contradict Sir Charles’s patronizing remarks about ‘the labourer in his humble cottage’. Later, completely caught up in circumstances much bigger than himself, he stands up for his daughter’s good name against the self-righteousness of the aristocracy even though it could jeopardize his chances of a new job and a new life for his family elsewhere. For all his reserve, David Ramsay is a remarkable man, although many of those with whom he comes into contact only realize this when it is too late.

      Jean Gibson is a lively, sharp-tongued, quick-witted character whose literary antecedents include the Wyf of Auchtermuchty and Kynd Kittock as well as Chris Guthrie. And like some of the women of ballad and folk-tale she is also possessed of the awesome ability to lay on an effective curse. She is no fool, and does not suffer fools gladly. Scrupulously honest herself, she is quick to attack dishonesty in others, as a Glasgow butcher finds out to his cost when he tries to sell her a less than perfect chicken:

      ‘“That’s a lovely young pullet, madame,” says he. It was a pullet the same time as you were a cockerel…’

      In all things she is practical and down-to-earth, and ‘lives for the present and the immediate future’. Where David is perhaps over-imaginative, Jean is almost incapable of introspection and has an unwavering faith in her own judgement; a strength which Barke points out might well be seen as her greatest weakness.

      In many ways the marriage of these two very different characters seems an obvious recipe for disaster, and much of the book’s interest must lie in how their relationship develops as, over the years and in ever-changing circumstances, they come to see each other more clearly.

      This is one of Barke’s strengths: the way he conveys to the reader the sense of time moving on, of characters slowly growing older and slowly changing. The reader is very much aware of the passing of youth from David and Jean Ramsay as the brightness of their courtship, the music and dancing of their wedding, begin to fade into the struggle to find a decent job and to bring up a family. It fades finally into the sadness of loss, and Jean is left with only memories to lighten her last days. Although The Land of the Leal is about many other things, it is perhaps the story of David and Jean Ramsay which gives it coherence, simply because it follows so surely the natural curve of life.

      The characters themselves, though, are too close to the action to be able to make out the meaning of their own story. At the end of the Ramsays ‘long journey David is troubled that he can find no shape or pattern to his life. Yet surely this is as it should be, for a life that is fully and completely alive is always changing and developing; it can never be fixed into a static, ‘safe’ pattern. David Ramsay himself should know that better than anyone:

      For David life was mystery. Sometimes the mystery was joyous and drenched in golden sunlight as when the wind caressed a field of barley or life laughed in the eyes of his child: sometimes it was sad and wrapped in impenetrable darkness.

      It is this mystery – the marvellous way that life cannot be pinned down to any one ‘meaning’ or shape – which David values most.

      For David the world was vast, multitudinous, an inexhaustible wonder and speculative delight.

      An openness to experience, the refusal glibly to accept established philosophies of life, is part of the ‘radical’ nature that sets David apart. It sets him apart from his own father, and from Tom Gibson, Jean’s father, who is a most striking example of the uncompromising Old Testament faith of Galloway which David had known and so distrusted in his youth. Unlike Jean, David is unable to accept what Barke calls the ‘spiritual determinism of the Scottish peasant’. In his wariness of spiritual certainties he is very much a modern character. Indeed part of the feeling of futility which assails him towards the end of his life comes from his inability to recognize this, an inability to grasp the way in which his own identity embodies the tensions and uncertainties of his time.

      Like many thousands of his day and generation he had been uprooted from the countryside, plunged from a life of semi-agricultural labour, semi-peasantry, into one of industrial wage-slavery. Only he had been plunged later in life than most of his fellow-countrymen. Too late for him to adapt himself to the life, even though necessity compelled readjustment.

      Although David does achieve a rather uneasy peace with city life he remains always a countryman at heart, a displaced person. Neither he nor Jean can really become reconciled to life in Glasgow and what it represents: the modern world. For their children, and especially for their sons, it is different.

      Like David and Jean, their sons Tom and Andy seem to be complete opposites. Tom is quiet, sensitive and studious, destined for the ministry. Andy is a shipyard worker and a more robust, active character. Ironically the studies which Tom is encouraged by his parents to pursue gradually set him more and more apart from the rest of the family, and especially from his brother. This growing sense of alienation is brought to a head when Andy attacks Tom for not helping the family more by getting a job, when David, like so many other paid-off shipyard workers, has worn himself out in a desperate search for work.

      It is not until David’s death that the two brothers achieve a measure of reconciliation, and it is in their lives that David’s own life begins to reveal the pattern or meaning that he was unable to discern. It is in the lives of the sons that his own vision is carried forward: the need to rid the world of ‘mutual distrust and open hatred’; the struggle for harmony and unity which David saw as the true end of life.

      Each of the sons in his own way shares that vision. Andy sees his decision to fight for the Socialist cause in Spain as giving significance to his life and to the lives of his parents who had been ‘the victims of greed and brutality, the passionless indifference of British Capitalism’.

      For Andy the answer lies in a Socialism which his father, for all his radical tendencies, could never accept because, in spite of its harshness, work on the land can still afford ‘a deep elemental satisfaction’ denied to the modern industrial worker. Always David had been torn between his hatred of the tyranny of the farmers and an almost overwhelming love of the land. And like Chris Guthrie in A Scots Quair he realizes that it is the land itself, uncompromising but always true to itself, that sustains him. Andy, who is unaware of this feeling, is troubled by no such ambivalence and cannot understand his father’s distrust of Socialism. In the same way David had carried his father’s sceptical cast of mind a step further with regard to religion, so at many points in the novel the reader is made aware of echoes and correspondences in the relationships between different characters over a long stretch of time.

      Tom’s answer lies not in Socialism, but in Christianity. Yet under Andy’s influence his Christianity begins to take a radical note of concern for the workings of this world that rather alarms his middle-class congregation. After his brother’s death in Spain, Tom preaches a strong sermon which, for all its ‘naive idealism’ in attempting to link Socialism and Christianity, is a genuine attempt to reawaken in his listeners the essential spirit of Christianity: the spirit of compassion.

      In Tom’s compassion, in Andy’s tenacity and determination, the spirit of David Ramsay lives on. The sons who seem so completely different unite in themselves their father’s best qualities, qualities such as the vision and independence which so many others had recognized in him, and that he himself had inherited from his father and from the ordinary folk of Galloway, the Land of the Leal.

      Yet there can be no going back, no retreat to some imagined pastoral paradise. The sharp unsentimentality of Barke’s picture of life on the land makes that quite clear. By the end of the novel the old ways have gone; the world is irrevocably changed. At the heart of The Land of the Leal, as in many other modern Scottish novels, lies the tension between life on the land and life in the city: the tension between a traditional and a modern way of life. At the end of the novel this tension remains unresolved: a strong elegiac concern for the passing of the old ways seemingly at odds with the fervent hopes of Socialism for a better future.

      Whether one reads it as an account of changing social conditions in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Scotland or as a spiritual Odyssey, The Land of the Leal is a powerful novel which deserves to be better known. With its many striking characters, its