Edinburgh as literary metaphor

One answer may lie in its very design. The original city (stretching in a steep and narrow line from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse) was, in the 18th century, at danger from overcrowding. Sanitation was a problem, as were the precarious tenements which housed the majority of the population and which had a tendency to fall down. The answer was to build the “New Town” to the north of the Nor Loch (itself now drained and forming Princes Street Gardens). This geographical dividing of the city—into the rational and planned (the New Town, where the wealthy made their homes) and the mazy, dark, and nefarious Old Town—gave rise to literary metaphors for the human condition and provided Stevenson with his major inspiration for Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In turn, Stevenson’s story continues to be an inspiration to contemporary authors. My own first crime novel, Knots and Crosses, was (in part) an attempt to update the themes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a project which continued with my second Inspector Rebus outing, Hide and Seek. Likewise, another classic Edinburgh story of the 19th century, James Hogg’s sinister and mesmerizing The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, provided the impetus for my novel The Black Book.

I arrived in Edinburgh in 1978, aged 18, from a small coal-mining town to the north. Within a few weeks, I knew which howffs (bars) the poets and thinkers frequented—much the same ones Hugh MacDiarmid and his circle had been comfortable in a generation before. I remember buying a couple of drinks for Norman MacCaig at Bennet’s Bar on Leven Street while picking his brains on how to get my own callow poetry published. Yet, while bumping into (and supping with) poets and playwrights was fun, still there seemed something stifling about this weight of tradition. No one, it was assumed, was going to write a contemporary equivalent of MacDiarmid’s masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, while Muriel Spark was reckoned to have produced the perfect Edinburgh novel in her internationally acclaimed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Ironically, it took two Glasgow writers to shake things up. Alasdair Gray’s astonishing Lanark (1981) was followed three years later by James Kelman’s first novel, The Busconductor Hines. Both were published in Edinburgh, and both showed that the contemporary Scottish novel could be challenging, inventive, vibrant, visceral, and relevant. Alongside this rise in activity, the punk ethos had infiltrated publishing: small (often short-lived) magazines sprang up, public readings were organized, and writing groups prospered. My own first publisher—Kelman’s, too—was a student-run cooperative venture called Polygon (these days known for its work with Alexander McCall Smith). At around the same time, a University of Edinburgh student called Jamie Byng took over the running of the Canongate publishing house and began to revolutionize its list. (The result would be a Booker Prize winner and a still-growing reputation for risk taking and innovation.) Edinburgh no longer seemed in thrall to its literary past. Suddenly, it was possible to write about the contemporary scene in a contemporary idiom, with publishers and a ready audience waiting.

What followed was Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, published in 1993. It took as its subject matter the drug-taking scene of that time and was written in a street demotic which gave the novel added grit and a sense that these were real, contemporary lives. “Douce” Edinburgh, the city of Miss Jean Brodie and her “girls,” would never be the same. However, something about the city balked at easy compartmentalization. Instead of Trainspotting clones, Edinburgh threw up a bewildering variety of writers working in very different styles and with different intentions. The “Edinburgh novel” proved an elusive beast. Alexander McCall Smith lives in the city, but he has been made famous by his gentle detective stories set in Botswana. Similarly, the Harry Potter books are written in Edinburgh without this fact being discernible to any great degree in their pages, while Kate Atkinson doesn’t feel the need to set all her books in the city she’s made her home.

All of which seems quite proper. Sherlock Holmes…Peter Pan…Treasure Island…The Wind in the Willows. These were Edinburgh creations only tangentially. Stevenson may have had the notorious Edinburgh scoundrel Deacon Brodie (gentleman by day, hoodlum by night) in mind when he wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, yet he chose to set that book in London. One theory for the shift in geography is that the first draft of the story said too much about its author’s own darker proclivities. (That draft, now lost, is thought to have been tossed onto the fire after Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, objected to it.) By not setting the story in his native city, the author could hide more comfortably behind it.

My own first novel was set in my hometown and got me into trouble with one-time neighbours who didn’t agree with my interpretation of the place. So in 1985 I sat down in my student apartment to begin a novel which would be playful and gothic, harking back to Hogg and Stevenson, updating the divided-self theme of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and bringing that tale back to Edinburgh. When I scribbled my first notes on the project, I recorded that “the hero may be a cop.” He turned out to be called John Rebus (a rebus being a pictorial puzzle). And when no one realized, post-publication, that Knots and Crosses owed a larger debt to Stevenson than to Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler (neither of whom I’d read), I decided to try again with another Rebus adventure, this time titled Hide and Seek and featuring a club called Hyde’s where rich businessmen could fulfill their baser fantasies.

Twenty years on, I’m still writing books set in Edinburgh, principally because I am still curious about the place and still finding out its secrets, wishing to share the knowledge with readers. My book The Falls came out of a conversation with a museum curator who told me the story of one of his exhibits—a series of well-made, carved wooden coffins only a few inches in height and containing little wooden dolls. Seventeen of these had been found in a cave by some Edinburgh schoolchildren in 1836, and their meaning and provenance remained a mystery. I decided I had to give this open-ended story some closure, even if only in fictional form. The biggest thrill after publication was being informed that visitors to the museum were now asking to be shown the tiny coffins featured in my story. Likewise, when I discovered that an act of cannibalism had once taken place on the site of today’s Scottish Parliament building, I could feel a story begging to be told. The result was a novel called Set in Darkness, in which excavations at that site uncover a corpse.