Given its ubiquity in the headlines of the 60s and 70s, the subject of North Sea oil has inspired relatively few novels. While coal and steel went into terminal decline, the exploitation of the UK’s offshore oil fields was – and still is – going strong; fertile ground, you would think, for fiction, with rich themes of greed, corruption, ecological threat and human daring. Into this void jumps Richard T Kelly with his panoptic, compassionate fourth novel, The Black Eden, which follows the fortunes of five young men from Scotland whose lives are shaped by the search for “black gold” under the ocean.
We begin in 1956, with motherless teenagers Aaron Strang and Robbie Vallance diving “down in the blue limbo” off the coast of the Dornoch Firth, and follow their friendship as their career paths diverge. While Aaron becomes a geologist under the mentorship of Prof Hugh Munro, Robbie is a casual “roustabout” hand on one of the first oil platforms. When, in 1963, Aaron is persuaded by Munro to suspend his doctorate and take a job with the sharkish American firm Paxton Oil and Gas, he finds himself advising the government on the prospect of becoming an oil-producing nation, dispensing with the need to spend “five hundred million a year getting the bloody stuff off the Arabs”. The secretary of state observes that a chart of the North Sea continental shelf recalls “old maps illustrating the carve-up of Africa”.
It’s here the book’s political engine is engaged, as Aaron and Robbie’s tale is interwoven with that of Mark and Ally, public schoolboys who enter journalism and law respectively, and Joe, heir to a lucrative Aberdeen trawler firm. Their stories intersect when the 70s arrive and Ally switches from law to investment banking and decides to take over a stake in Paxton Oil, just as Joe is put under pressure from the oil contractors to use one of his boats to launch a diving bell. As the new decade progresses, the prospect of oil acts like a Midas touch in their lives, showering golden promise on every business and institution connected with it, from research academies to fishing communities, while souring friendships and love affairs.
Kelly expertly probes these knotty conflicts of interest while never losing track of the human stories. If The Black Eden has a protagonist, it is Aaron, whose tentative courtship and marriage to Hugh Munro’s musician daughter, Heather, is sensitively chronicled. The marriage’s slow collapse, as Aaron pursues his career as Paxton’s senior wellsite adviser while Heather begins an affair, is compellingly raw. At the same time, Robbie takes a job as a diver after his first marriage implodes, allowing him to begin a touching romance with Evie, a welder on his rig, a union which eventually leads to the book’s tragic yet ultimately uplifting conclusion.
While these interconnected lives are deeply involving, the book is not without its flaws and distractions. Like many multiple-point-of-view novels, the focus can become diffuse. For much of the time, the competing strands don’t really combine into a cohesive narrative. There’s also a fair amount of impeding, dry-as-dust geology to digest, with underwater terrain described as “base Zechstein anhydrite, a dependable Upper Permian salt cap”. And in the book’s first third, we encounter some curiously distracting archaic language, such as “abashedly”, “thence”, “becalmed”, “in a trice” and “but an instant”. Perhaps most egregiously, for such a meticulously researched novel, there’s a fairly major (for this James Bond fan) chronological error. In a chapter headed March 1967, Robbie and his wife leave the cinema after seeing You Only Live Twice, prompting much earnest discussion of Sean Connery’s sexiness. This would all be fine except for the fact that the film wasn’t released until June of that year.
These niggles aside, there are descriptions that stop you in your tracks, from the “overpowering stink of diesel, the monstrous roar and vibration” of the drilling platform, to “the gingery heel of malt” in a tumbler. Moreover, The Black Eden is the kind of capacious political novel that’s becoming a rarity, grappling as it does with unfashionable themes such as corporate accountability. Trollopian in its scope, Kelly’s book is an engrossing account of this country’s own oil boom and the brave men and women who worked to make it possible; a chapter of history that fiction has hitherto neglected.
Jacob’s Advice by Jude Cook (Unbound, £9.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The Black Eden by Richard T. Kelly (Faber & Faber, £20). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
