PERTH-BORN author Allan Radcliffe is making his debut as a novelist this month, with the release of his first long-form prose fiction The Old Haunts (published by Fairlight Books). He is, however, a well-established short story writer whose work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in a range of anthologies including Out There, The Best Gay Short Stories and New Writing Scotland.
Moreover, he is an accomplished journalist, who has, for many years, specialised in theatre criticism and arts journalism. I caught up with him during the whirlwind of events surrounding the launch of his novel.
The Old Haunts is, as its title suggests, a fiction about place and memory. It is told from the perspective of its protagonist, Jamie, a Scottish schoolteacher who lives in London with his actor boyfriend, Alex.
The book begins with the couple arriving at the steading by Loch Tay where they have rented an apartment. Their rural retreat has been prompted by Jamie’s recent bereavement.
Radcliffe’s prose, as one might expect of an experienced short story writer, is spare, yet evocative. The author has expressed his admiration for the short prose works of such writers as Muriel Spark, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce.
In Radcliffe’s novel, despite (or perhaps because of) the economy of the writing, childhood memory is expressed so poignantly that it becomes cinematic. Indeed, so visual is this aspect of the book that one is reminded of the films by Terence Davies, particularly the wonderful Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992).
The novelist considers memory to be a rich reservoir for fiction. “Our whole lives are built of memories,” he comments.
It is inescapable, he believes, that artists are, “always going to be weaving together what is happening in the present moment with memories”. In the case of his novel, he observes, “it starts with a bereavement, with someone who is still in the first, acute stages of grief.
“One of the ways that we cope with painful things that happen to us in our lives, like loss, is by retreating into the past and trying to make sense of our lives through storytelling.” In fact, he continues, the process of retrieving and reconstructing memories is very much like the work of writing fiction.
Any student of literature will have discussed the famously “unreliable narrator”. For Radcliffe, memory itself is just such a narrator.
“Of course, memory is unreliable, and more so as you get older,” he comments. “How often,” he asks, “do you have a clear memory of something that happened in the past, then you meet somebody who was there, and they have a completely different memory of it?”
In terms of the particular power of childhood memories, the writer believes that our early memories are “more vivid”. This is, he says, “because childhood is such an intense experience. It’s the first time that we experience everything”.
Radcliffe’s sense of the fruitful interconnection between memory and fiction writing owes a considerable amount to his paternal grandmother, who was, he says, “a great storyteller, and also a great exaggerator”. One of her stories could, he remembers, “be repeated again and again and again, and it would grow arms and legs”.
In The Old Haunts Memories are intimately connected with a sense of place. The protagonist, Jamie, feels the need to get out of London and live through the grief of his recent bereavement in rural Perthshire (not very far from where Radcliffe was raised).
This hankering for a rural setting, “goes back to the original inspiration for the book”, the author explains. “The image I had in my head was of the forest, from fairytales.
“Most of the fairytales we know arose in northern Europe and they often involve children wandering in forests.”
Such stories become increasingly important to us, Radcliffe believes, as Scotland, despite the celebrated natural beauty of its landscapes, continues to urbanise as a society. “So many of us live in the central belt, people are being herded more and more into urban centres,” he comments.
“The countryside is like the last bastion of the exotic. The reason that people go there is so that they can reconnect with some sense of childhood, beauty and the otherworldly.”
For all that Radcliffe’s story is about grief, memory and the solace of the countryside, it is also a book rooted in his life experience as a gay man. Although he would not categorise himself as a political writer, first and foremost, he thinks that it was unavoidable that his novel would have a political aspect.
“If you have a novel… which is focused upon gay characters and has a gay protagonist, there will, inevitably, be a political dimension to it,” he suggests. The writer came to early adulthood in what was still a hostile environment for gay people.
Margaret Thatcher’s infamously homophobic Section 28 had come onto the statutes in 1988 and the HIV/AIDS crisis was still routinely described as a “gay plague”. He is, of course, pleased by the progress, both in terms of legislation and social attitudes, that has been achieved in terms of queer rights since then.
However, he is troubled by much of the debate over gender self-identification. The author is, he says, a “trans ally”, and “unapologetically” so.
He believes that “bad actors who frankly don’t give a stuff about queer rights or women’s rights”, are using the gender recognition debate, “to drive a wedge into the LGBTQI community and to set all of us at each other’s throats”.
Of gender-critical people, he comments, “I wonder, if they ever came into contact with a real, live trans person, if they might have a slightly different take on it.”
Many people will agree with his desire for less heat and more light in our society’s consideration of gender recognition. Indeed, Radcliffe’s belief in experiential empathy is something we find expressed in the beautifully balanced, humane prose of his novel.
The Old Haunts is published by Fairlight Books: fairlightbooks.co.uk
