Naming the Bones [Hardcover]

The night was dark and stormy . . . Dr Murray Watson is knee-deep in mud, shivering with terror and cold. "He grunted and pulled, feeling all the while that the struggle was two-sided and whatever lay below wanted to drag him down there with it."
Louise Welsh has written a purler about an English lit academic who takes a sabbatical to research the life of drink-addled Archie Lunan, a young Scottish poet dead these past 30 years in tragic circumstances. His body never recovered from the sea where he drowned.
Against a background of academic bitchery, sexual trysts and an unravelling family life, Dr Watson's love for the one slim volume of the poet's work is the only pure thing in his anaemic life. Consumed with self-doubt as he runs up against a series of dead ends, Dr Watson asks himself if his quest is pointless. A central theme to this whodunit is whether a writer's life is of any consequence or whether "the life is an unfortunate distraction from the art".
In a bitter moment Dr Watson wonders if they should delete authors' names from all books and let the works stand or fall on their merit.
Finding Louise Welsh reminds me of the excitement I felt on first reading Ruth Rendell or P.D. James for here is an assured storyteller shot through with daring and originality.
I will now seek out her three previous novels including the much-admired The Cutting Room.
Highly recommended.

Naming the Bones, by Louise Welsh, is set against a gray and depressing backdrop--a dim back room in a library, various bars in the seamier side of town, the long twilights of late summer in Glasgow, Scotland. The tone of the story mirrors the climate. A scholar, Murray Watson, is researching--or trying to research--the life of a poet who died thirty years earlier. The one "slim volume" published by the late poet, Archie Lunan, was the inspiration that sent Murray down the path to become a Doctor of English Literature. His research is bearing little fruit as the story opens, his relationship with his photographer brother is strained, and the affair he is having with a colleague--who happens to be the wife of his department head--ends rather badly.

Then he meets a member of the library staff who was personally acquainted with the poet when they were both students at the university, and he learns a few tantalizing and mysterious details. He receives a phone call in response to an ad he placed in the local papers, fishing for information. The caller is the widow of a social scientist who had been researching the lives of artists who committed suicide. Her husband died in a tragic accident on the same island, Lismore, where Archie had been born and where he also died. The man had gone there to interview Christie Graves, the girlfriend of the late poet, who had turned down Murray's request for an interview. The widow had been able to tell Murray very little, and her husband's notes about Archie had been in the car he was driving when he had his fatal accident. She had not got them back.

Much of the build-up of the story suggests there may have been foul play involved in Archie's death. Ultimately, Murray must go to Lismore himself, to see where it all happened, find out if he can learn something of Archie's childhood there at least, and possibly engineer a "chance" encounter with Christie in the hopes she will relent and grant him the interview she had previously refused. Everything on the island seems to be working against Murray, though, the weather, the last-minute timing of his visit, his own short-sightedness. He seems destined to fall way short of his goal right up until the last possible moment. The story's finish is at the same time inevitable and completely unexpected.

As a mystery, this is a first-rate story, with all the parts fitting together and all the characters acting true to the way Welsh has painted them. I will certainly look for other titles by Louise Welsh, and/or printed by the Felony & Mayhem Press.

by Judy King
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

In this atmospheric and leisurely Scottish mystery, youngish Murray Watson, Glasgow doctor of English literature, has taken a sabbatical to research his literary inspiration, the dead poet Archie Lunan. Drowned sailing in a storm off a remote island in the 1970s, Lunan, 25, left only one slim volume of poems.

There are those - including Watson's department head, Fergus Baine, who think one volume was quite enough. Baine was against the project from the beginning and after a discouraging slog through the minimal record, Watson is beginning to wonder if Baine wasn't right after all.

But then Watson is having an affair with Baine's wife, which might also explain his boss' general enmity. Interviewing every tenuous lead, from old drinking buddies in gritty pubs to Lunan's mentor, a secretive retired professor with a deep dislike of Fergus Baine, to an attractive young widow whose husband had an unhealthy interest in art and suicide, Watson decides to go to Lismore, where Lunan died and his lover, Christie, still lives.

Christie has refused to have anything to do with Watson's project. She has even promised to have him prosecuted as a stalker if she catches sight of him. So Watson, while determined, is circumspect, probing the clannish islanders for information about the pair's history while ducking out of sight every time he sees Christie.

Dr. Watson, like his namesake, is charmingly clueless. And for all that his personal life is a shambles, and his professional life is teetering, he still manages to be engaging rather than pathetic. The island - complete with a deserted limekiln village - is everything you could ask for: bleak, secretive, wet, rocky, muddy and romantic. And the central conundrum: why can't an artist's work stand on its own, without personal context muddying perceptions, is playful rather than pedantic.

Welsh (The Cutting Room) delivers a literate novel full of prickly, demanding characters (except for hapless Watson who is more battered than battering, though he does try) with a wonderfully over-the-top macabre ending. Highly recommended for those who like their mysteries edgy, literate and not too bloody.

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