The Cone-Gatherers. Robin Jenkins

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       Introduction

       by Paul Giamatti

      Since I was a boy I have had a fascination with Scotland, particularly its literature. Stevenson, Scott and Buchan satisfied my yearning for lochs, castles and lonely outlaw warriors. As I grew up, the misty, Celtic-dream Scotland of my youth, land of mystery, adventure and legend, gave way to a more complex, more real Scotland.

      But I am still romantic – or naïve – enough to believe that the instinctive visions of childhood are connected to something essential and primal in us. They are pure in their inarticulate expression of prehistoric, truly existential mystery. The book you have before you, this agonised, funny and terribly sad book, is a mature expression of those childhood instincts. It is a profound exploration of the loneliness, fear and heroism hidden in the ancient heart of Man.

      I first read this book twenty-two years ago in Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, another somber landscape of mountains and drizzly lakes. Like many of the books that I have loved in my life, I vividly remember the experience: the queer little warren of a used bookstore that I bought it in, a labyrinth of overstuffed shelves; the squinting and silent old man who sold it to me (he grunted his approval of my purchase). And I remember the soft semi-collapsed armchair I read it in. I went clean through it in one long day’s sitting.

      I was trying to be a more mature reader, and I had been lucky: I had just read Lanark by Alasdair Gray, a challenging, astounding book, and I was looking for more of this darker, literary Scotland. I took up this book next. Good heavens, what a duo! I was deeply grieved by The Cone-Gatherers, moved by the simple story and the clean prose that reminded me at times of Joseph Conrad. I remember being struck by the line that ends chapter 13, ‘By being born therefore, or even conceived, one became involved’, a notion Conradian in its concision and sentiment. Re-reading the book now, many years later, it is even greater than I remembered. I am awed by it.

      The story is simple: two outsiders – Neil and his younger brother Calum, an angelic hunchbacked dwarf – are hired to gather cones on the soon-to-be deforested estate of Lady Runcie Campbell. Most of the men of the estate have left to fight in the Second World War, leaving only those too old to fight, including the pathological gamekeeper Mr Duror. The story follows the course of his irrational and increasingly violent envy of the cone-gatherers – Calum in particular. Mr Duror resists his own madness, and it makes him as tragic a figure as the cone-gatherers themselves.

      I used the word agonised before, and that calls to mind the ancient Greek concept of the agon and the dire, dramatic struggle at the heart of this book. There is a quality of Greek tragedy here, an elemental drama simply presented: an Arcadian setting, a few characters and a terrifying inevitability. We know from the beginning how this drama is going to end: Calum must die and Duror must kill him. But Robin Jenkins is an artist of such power that he maintains a sense of suspense even in the face of fate. He keeps moments of the tragedy truly obscene, in the original sense of the word, ‘offstage’: we never know what Duror does to his unfortunate wife in front of Lady Runcie Campbell, but it is literally unspeakable, and all the more disturbing for it.

      The Cone-Gatherers is Shakespearean in scope, in its tragedy and even in its comedy (the Forest of Arden is our novel’s forest, too). In a masterful stroke near the awful climax of the story, Jenkins stops the drama and sends in the wonderful, sardonic clown Graham, and we suddenly find ourselves in the company of a character not at all unlike the Porter in Macbeth. The horror is deferred and we are offered some small relief before the passion and violence and blood explode.

      The novel is also steeped in Christian imagery, and situated in a Judeo Christian world: we are in Eden, not only Arcadia. It is the tough, fibrous Christianity of Scottish history, of inescapable sin and damnation – Calvinist, I suppose. But I think this remarkable writer is peering more deeply into the history of the human soul, into the pagan and primitive past that is common to us all.

      The source of Duror’s rage and rot lies far back in the blackness of Time; we will never find it. His malice is provoked, in part, by the literal and emotional displacement of the horrifying modern war that provides the backdrop to this tale, but the evil that possesses Duror is unfathomable, ancient and enigmatic. It is the motiveless evil of Iago, the rage of Ajax, the suffering of Philoctetes (another man left out of a war he desperately wanted to fight). He reminds me of the demon-men who materialise in so many works of Scottish literature, in Stevenson and in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; the kind of demon-men that haunted even a gentler novelist like Sir Walter Scott. He becomes the devil of folktale, the smooth-faced fellow met in the woods. Like a twisted Green Man, he is both an integral part of nature and horribly apart from it. He leaves his hoof print on a rock; he is a presence that cannot be articulated, a pre-Christian devil. That .Devil. The real one.

      Yet perhaps Mr Duror is merely an actor in an extraordinary tragedy, cast in a role he hardly understands, a role he is surprised to find himself playing so comfortably. I don’t think evil wins at the end of this tale. Jenkins is too sophisticated an artist for that. The Christ, The King, Calum, must die, must be sacrificed, but the demon of the tale has the humanity to kill himself, to blow his own face off, to take off his mask. The stage is left to the conflicted, confused and very human Lady. The possible future is in her hands.

      Robin Jenkins was a great artist and a great man, and he has given us a kind of fable: a true fable. It is a dark tale, brutal and truthful, and yet it is also delicate and lovely. It glows darkly. And, after all, it ends mercifully, with these very necessary words: