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”.
