Review
Capable of giving voice to the place and its people…does so by combining the past with an all-too-realistic present. -- Carl MacDougall
Inspired madness - a mind scrambling mix of Borges and Welsh. -- The Sunday Herald
Inspired madness - a mind scrambling mix of Borges and Welsh. -- The Sunday Herald
Book Description
By the banks of a mighty river the interconnecting lives of estuary dwellers flood and ebb, as a new property development threatens to turn their local idyll into a massive riverfront development. Dodgy deals by local sharks, council corruption and incompetence, and the putrid swamps of tabloid journalism build layer upon layer, towards an utterly deft resolution. And among all this, a man who cannot face his hometown after ten years in London sleeps rough in the woods at the mouth of the estuary, silent like the river, watching events unfold.
From the Publisher
Pacy humour and sharp wit flow smoothly, with an expert eye catching every detail. Starkly realistic yet blackly comic, Andrew Murray Scott's second novel 'Estuary Blue' is a satiric portrait of a city in flux, and follows the success of his first novel, 'Tumulus', published by Polygon in 2000.
About the Author
ANDREW MURRAY SCOTT is a journalist, writer and lecturer in creative writing. His first novel, 'Tumulus', won the inaugural Dundee Book Prize. Two of his non-fiction books have been published by Polygon: a biography of Alexander Trocchi, 'The Making of the Monster', and 'Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader' which he edited. He is presently working on a collection of short stories.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It's deeply ambiguous. All these empty hours, an absence of water, warm sands stretching to infinity, drying under the sun. Lulled into complacency. Seals, sluggish dots on a hazy invisible waterline. But the waters are coming back. When you least expect it, the pent-up ocean is yards away, swirling over the submerged reef a mile a minute, a high white line of surf coming in on me.
The shore and the forest is a mile away. During the quiet hours the water has been sidling innocently between sandlebars, swelling 'the pool' between me and the shore. I run heavily across the darkening silt. The water glides perfectly, colourlessly, into my footsteps and catches me around the ankles …leaving no footprints… An oystercatcher kervee-kervees in alarm. There's sea on all sides.
Each time I think I'm not going to make it. Water, rough, salty, surges at my legs and thighs. Water swells, buoys me, water up to my armpits. But I keep my feet, aiming for the trees, finally skipping out of the playful shallows, collapsing into the low dunes, and sticking to me, sand all over, breathing hard but breathing. I half-close my eyes and listen. My heartbeat. Bursts in the silence of war planes from RAF Leuchars. Like needles stitching ribbons together across a silk sky. Machine-gun fire stuttering from the military range at Barry Buddon. And nothing else but the sheer percussion of being alive. Being at a low ebb can never be a permanent condition. Life is change, always ambiguous, going both ways at once, having two faces.
Four weeks I've been here, illegally, in this beautiful place. Despite bylaw 13 - no tents, sheds, caravans or other structures for the purposes of camping - living in a bender in the woods. It's a National Nature Reserve; the green tiger beetle, the grass of parnassus, the coralroot orchid, the greyling butterfly - and me.
Alive. Walking in the shelter of the dunes round by the Point I see a white object reflecting the sun. Smooth away the sand around it, delve it out. It's not a stone, it's a warm seashell, light and hollow, full of echoing air. As large as my palm, its five whorls revolve anti-clockwise, unwiding into bloatedness. Silky yet chalky dry to the touch. The inner spirals glisten with an oily iridescence, a ghostly reminder of the soft-bodied mollusc. I hold the wide aperture of the empty vessel to my ear.
At first I can't hear anything at all, then faint echoes. Of many stories, many voices, of ceaseless poundings in mountainous seas bulging and sucked upwards by the moon. I try to visualise the immensity of the weightless, soundless depths which it has scuttled or floated or been carried across … plucked lightly from a warm beach in the shade of palms … the Gulf Stream to the Azores, the North Atlantic. Passing through all the blue waters of the world and all the beaches. Yet here it is, intact, a perfect fossil. It blocks the sunlight and a warm glow spreads through the chitin. I place it reverently on the sand-scuffed log, and walk on, as if it was just something washed up and discarded at low tide in an estuary.
The shore and the forest is a mile away. During the quiet hours the water has been sidling innocently between sandlebars, swelling 'the pool' between me and the shore. I run heavily across the darkening silt. The water glides perfectly, colourlessly, into my footsteps and catches me around the ankles …leaving no footprints… An oystercatcher kervee-kervees in alarm. There's sea on all sides.
Each time I think I'm not going to make it. Water, rough, salty, surges at my legs and thighs. Water swells, buoys me, water up to my armpits. But I keep my feet, aiming for the trees, finally skipping out of the playful shallows, collapsing into the low dunes, and sticking to me, sand all over, breathing hard but breathing. I half-close my eyes and listen. My heartbeat. Bursts in the silence of war planes from RAF Leuchars. Like needles stitching ribbons together across a silk sky. Machine-gun fire stuttering from the military range at Barry Buddon. And nothing else but the sheer percussion of being alive. Being at a low ebb can never be a permanent condition. Life is change, always ambiguous, going both ways at once, having two faces.
Four weeks I've been here, illegally, in this beautiful place. Despite bylaw 13 - no tents, sheds, caravans or other structures for the purposes of camping - living in a bender in the woods. It's a National Nature Reserve; the green tiger beetle, the grass of parnassus, the coralroot orchid, the greyling butterfly - and me.
Alive. Walking in the shelter of the dunes round by the Point I see a white object reflecting the sun. Smooth away the sand around it, delve it out. It's not a stone, it's a warm seashell, light and hollow, full of echoing air. As large as my palm, its five whorls revolve anti-clockwise, unwiding into bloatedness. Silky yet chalky dry to the touch. The inner spirals glisten with an oily iridescence, a ghostly reminder of the soft-bodied mollusc. I hold the wide aperture of the empty vessel to my ear.
At first I can't hear anything at all, then faint echoes. Of many stories, many voices, of ceaseless poundings in mountainous seas bulging and sucked upwards by the moon. I try to visualise the immensity of the weightless, soundless depths which it has scuttled or floated or been carried across … plucked lightly from a warm beach in the shade of palms … the Gulf Stream to the Azores, the North Atlantic. Passing through all the blue waters of the world and all the beaches. Yet here it is, intact, a perfect fossil. It blocks the sunlight and a warm glow spreads through the chitin. I place it reverently on the sand-scuffed log, and walk on, as if it was just something washed up and discarded at low tide in an estuary.
