Our Fathers By Andrew O'Hagan Faber & Faber 281 pp, £16.99 in UK
There is a moment in Irvine Welsh's Train spotting when the book's title is explained. Begby and Renton are taking a leak behind the derelict rail station when an old drunk veers up out of the darkness and says "what are you doing lads, trainspotting ?". The joke being that the station has been shut for years, closed by the "London Government". Only afterwards, from Begby's mute reaction, does Renton realise who the old drunk was - Begby's father.
Such moments, with their blend of personal and political, are also found in Andrew O'Hagan's powerful first novel. In one scene, almost unbearable in its abusive menace, O'Hagan's main character, Jamesie, walks out on his hospitalised father, only for his waiting grandfather to suggest they go and visit a nearby ruin, associated with Robert the Bruce - "the beginnings of the wars. Scotland's independence". The contrast could not be more crushing. As in Irish novels of the 1980s, personal confrontations, especially of a domestic sort, are used to illustrate larger, national frustrations. Jamesie, 35 and living in Liverpool, has returned to Scotland to visit his dying grandfather, Hugh Bawn, and the book is a celebration of the grandfather and his life as a Scottish nationalist, Socialist (Old Labour, not New) and builder of modern tower blocks. Having insisted on filling the land with these blocks - "proud as a Soviet gymnast" - Hugh has decided to spend his last days in one. Ironically, in trendy London, these tower blocks, with their brutalist modernism, have now become de rigueur for sophisticated yuppies.
But in windswept Scotland, they are vandalised and falling apart and, after a while, Hugh's extravagant claims for his own achievements seems more like a blocking out of present realities, particularly the unresolved relationships in his own family. All of the characters rage against things they cannot or will not change. As generations, they struggle to connect, especially the fathers and sons. The women, more sympathetically drawn, are stoic facilitators, trying to keep things together.
This is a novel strong on atmosphere and astonishingly immediate, almost tactile, in its ability to evoke sadness and regret. The sentences come ringing out as clean and strong as the tempered iron which the young Jamesie so extolls. Teenage girls walk in arm-inarm with "gold chains in their mouths". A feckless man was "good at life but not good at a living". Tellingly, Jamesie's father is described as one of those men who, though a mean tyrant at home, was generous and lively in the pub - because no one there could ask him for anything. Drink, like the rain, is ever present.
It is one of the paradoxes of literature, and art, that such brutality can be rendered in a language of great sensitivity, a salvatory aspect which is prophetically signposted in the opening section when the childhood Jamesie decides to plot his escape through books and science. The dynamic is very similar to the head-down atmosphere of This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, a US take on such domestic survival.
But at times there is too much atmosphere, too many ghosts out there in the "remembering hills of Arran". The note of protest also becomes wearisome, so that it seems equally unhappy with the "rotted" soil as with an unfeeling bus driver. But this may be O'Hagan's intent, the maudlin quality of Scottish nationalism which feels it has had a great past, but nothing tangible to show for it. It certainly packs a Glasgow punch and has a fearless, redemptive effect which resonates long after you've recovered.