Book Review: Naming the Bones, by Louise Welsh

Mar 19 2010 by Gregor White, Stirling Observer Friday

Naming the Bones, by Louise Welsh

Published by Canongate, £12.99

MURRAY Watson is an academic researching the life of poet Archie Lunan, who published just one slim volume of verse before his mysterious death 30 years ago.

He is also a man on the edge, dumped by the woman he had been having an affair with, at odds with his artist brother over their differing approaches to their father’s recent death and wracked with guilt in the wake of that death itself.

Seeking solace in his work, his investigations soon become akin to an obsession, one only fuelled by the ever-increasing number of dead ends.

With her debut novel ‘The Cutting Room’ Louise Welsh was hailed as a great new voice in Scottish crime fiction, a talent with that rare ability to combine a true literary sensibility with edge-of-the-seat puzzles and thrills a-plenty.

Follow-up ‘Tamburlaine Must Die’ was an unexpected departure, leaving behind the mean streets of Glasgow and even the 21st century in favour of a very short and very fast tour through the back streets of Elizabethan London.

‘The Bullet Trick’ saw yet another shift, this time to the world of Berlin cabaret.

Of all these it is the second I like best but I may have found a new favourite in this latest work – and not just because it is a return to closer to home.

Chunkier than anything that has gone before, it also has a much slower build-up to the main action than Welsh has previously allowed.

Far from frustrating, though, this makes for an enjoyably expansive read as Murray goes about his business in libraries, galleries, cafes, pubs and university corridors that never feel less than utterly real.

The same goes for her people. A duff main character would obviously kill the story stone dead and thankfully the troubled, complex Murray is anything but second-rate.

Even at the end much about him remains opaque, such as his strange relationship with the opposite sex, where his dalliances come with the aforementioned married woman and a recently and still rawly widowed mother. The only other close female relationship he seems to have is with his brother’s girlfriend.

Does he deliberately choose women who are unattainable or is he just unlucky? Is he unable or unwilling to find fulfilment in his personal life or is it simply that academic pursuits are ultimately more important to him than personal ties?

Pleasingly, these are questions that are never fully answered.

The bit part players are every bit as compelling. Adding little that is obvious in terms of either plot or theme, there is still plenty to enjoy in Murray’s brief encounters with a homeless, wheelchair-bound man, the bouncer at a strip club he unwittingly wanders into and a coven of old-school, cynical, hard-drinking fellow academics.

Like the wonderfully resonant descriptions of place, each and every character also works to ground the action in the compellingly real.

This is certainly a help when things move from mainland Scotland to the island of Lismore, where more than a whiff of ‘The Wicker Man’ begins to permeate.

Including several distant and fleeting glimpses of Archie’s former girlfriend that have you unable to think anything but “there be witches”, this section gives a true sense of the pure horror that Welsh has said she would one day like to produce.

If her previous work suggested Welsh was an exciting voice for the here and now this latest novel stakes her claim to being one that will last for some considerable time to come.