Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh (Canongate, £12.99)

Naming the Bones is the fourth novel from internationally acclaimed author, Louise Welsh. Split between the civilised settings of the Glasgow and Edinburgh academic worlds, and the remote wilderness of the island of Lismore, the novel promises a tale of “literature, obsession and buried secrets”. Welsh’s masterful prose submerges the reader into the geography of Scottish living in the first ten pages, and after that there is no turning back.

When Dr. Murray Watson, professor of English Literature at Glasgow University, proposes to write a book on the life and works of deceased poet Archie Lunan, his research takes him away from the safe, clearly-defined world of Scottish academia, and into the wild and desolate landscape of the island of Lismore. The island promises to provide the answers to his questions, but what begins simply as academic research rapidly changes into a quest for the truth concerning Lunan’s death – was it murder? Suicide? Or simply a tragic accident?

In a novel that is bound up in secrets and deception, it is the humanity of the characters that is most striking. Welsh creates a novel that is populated by flawed characters. She emphasises, rather than conceals, their imperfections and their susceptibility to their passions and obsessions. In Dr. Murray Watson, the reader finds a protagonist who is as flawed as the average human being, driven by a love of Lunan’s poetry that stems from his adolescence, and a desire for knowledge. But, as this novel shows, sometimes ignorance truly is bliss. The moral questions and implications that arise through the course of Watson’s research provide the psychological and emotional backdrop for Naming the Bones, but it is the long-dead character of Archie Lunan whose presence looms over the novel, epitomising the dual setting of the text, and, perhaps, the dual nature of the Scottish identity, caught between city life, and the remote, rural landscape.

Similarly, the novel is caught half way between the past and the present. As Watson’s research takes him further into the past, the ties that shape his personal life in the present are tested or broken down. As Lunan looms over his academic life, so the image of his father, and, in particular, the emotional aftermath of his father’s death, haunts his personal life. And nowhere in the novel is the past so keenly felt as on the island of Lismore. The island is caught up in the past, unchanging and claustrophobic, home to secrets that, perhaps, should remain buried in the past.

Welsh ties up all the strands of her novel, all the different times and places, with a conclusion that would not be out of place in a gothic horror. The revelations that are at the heart of the final chapters are filled with deaths and misdeeds; although the poetry takes a back seat, its presence never truly disappears from the writing. Welsh merges the crime thriller with a work of literary fiction that is both shocking and beautiful. Though I was new to the writings of Louise Welsh, the novel shows that her international reputation is well deserved. Naming the Bones is a well written, engaging novel, from a very talented Scottish writer.


Emily Smith

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