Ron Butlin

A Review by Ian Stephen

So Many Lives and All Of Them Are Yours
Ron Butlin,
Birlinn (2023) hbk £12.00

The Sound of My Voice’
Ron Butlin
Birlinn (new pbk edition 2023) £8.99

 There is a high level of responsibility needed in writing reviews. Over the years I’ve found this feeling of weight has increased because there are so few forums for in-depth discussion. So I would usually read a book in any genre twice when there is an opportunity for discussion in a forum like this. I’ve now re-read Ron Butlin’s So Many Lives And All Of Them Yours, published by Birlinn in 2023 as a compact hardback. That was no duty, as the precision of tone makes a music of language. But it seemed equally important to return to a novel first published by Butlin in 1987 (Canongate) but reissued in several editions and now, in a style to chime with the new novel, by Birlinn .

            In a way it is one work. Both books stand alone and both are compulsive reads but they amount to a detailed portrait of the inner life of the central character. The first used the second person to get inside the pretty complex machinations and justifications of the alcoholic executive. Magellan has lost his way. The new novel picks up the strands many years after the breakdown of a marriage.  The children have grown and  the tentative strands of a relationship  are just out of reach as the Covid pandemic reveals itself. The former businessman of biscuits comes to admit that he was sacked rather than making his own decision to follow his suppressed need to compose music, beyond jingles. The point of view differs but the uncanny probing and revelation of a mind at work is equally successful.

            The tension which takes complete hold of you comes from needing to know if he can hold it together to hear the music in his head and get it down on the page. I was reminded of the anxiety which came from being mesmerised by Douglas Stuart’s character of Agnes in Shuggy Bain.  There’s a bit of that in Trainspotting too and I was also reminded of James Kelman’s breakthrough novel How late it was, how late. The registers are very different, but it seems to me that Butlin has been as precise in his realisation of a mainly middle-class Scots character as these three authors of seminal works with a main focus on working class life in Scotland, of a period.

            In So many Lives….. Magellan gravitates back to the house he grew up in. There are rumours of a lockdown coming and he holes up in the near derelict shell, feeding floorboards to a fire in the house he has somehow rented from the estate agents who have it up for sale. There are blackouts but also periods where his nerve-ends and especially his hearing return him to the key moments of a childhood with a loving mother and an icy but domineering father. That might sound like the building tension in a Daphne de Maurier story ready to become a Hitchcock masterpiece but the writer who comes to mind is William Trevor. In fact the pitch-perfect tone achieved in both these novels (published with a 36 year gap) brought me back to the huge scope of the Penguin omnibus edition of all the published Trevor collections. It now seems to me that what Butlin and Trevor have in common is an uncanny ability to enter the heads of characters who are often struggling and for whom their past is inextricably linked with their present dilemmas. Occasionally Trevor can verge on satire (maybe a hint of a Somerset Maugham sting-in-the-tail story) and Butlin  uses his wit to potent effect when it comes to characters who are cruel, whether  they are blood relations or a vindictive laird.

            But the mind, trying to find its way forward by reliving what went before, also lodges on  the escape from that home to a free and easy squat in London. It seems inevitable that the breakout will give way to conformity. Many of the background tones left in shadow in the previous book are filled out as a man from the next generation again fails to show love to wife and bairns. Yet, in a word, I’d describe the tone you are left with as ‘humane’. Echoes of the significance of the haunting melody of ‘Neil Gow’s Lament To His Second Wife’ in Magellan’s life confirm this. There is something to build on from his character at last finding the courage to return to the key scenes (very Hitchcock-like). And that is maybe the main development from one book to the other, both sections of a flawed man’s life. But the whole experience of reading and re-reading these novels has been positive and rewarding and gripping. This is due to language which never seems ‘worked’ but amounts to the writer’s own sensitive composition. One of the first works of Butlin I read was his short poem on Mozart and that has stayed with me, marvelling at how an artist who produces such a mesmerising surface, seemingly without effort, has also made something  fathomless: you will never reach the bottom.

            Don’t be feared that such an intense subject and such tight focus will be difficult reading. The music will take a hold of you and I’d suggest you can read the new novel first but I’d be surprised if you weren’t then desperate to probe further into where this lost navigator came from.