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Thursday, 12 June 2008 |
Romanno Bridge
by Andrew Greig
Quercus 2008: 312 pp., paperback.
Village Voice €19. No discount price.
There’s a streak of Walter Scott in Andrew Greig – the
earthy Scott of the unexpurgated manuscripts. It’s not
just the love of Scottish landscapes or the mists of the past
erasing the sharp outlines of the present: it’s the romance
of high danger, bravery, camaraderie, even a kind of
chivalry, topped off with a ‘wee dram’ and a singing,
poet’s gift for language.
Not that Greig’s recently released novel ‘Romanno
Bridge’ could be described as a historical romance, though
it does have some of the trappings of the genre. The plot
revolves crazily around a venerable 0 stone, or rather a
rash of stones. There’s the so-called Stone of Scone, also
known as the Coronation Stone, hijacked by Edward I in
1296 and re-hijacked from Westminster Abbey on
Christmas Day 1950 (fact) and its (contested) number of
copies; and there’s the myth of the original (but fake?)
stone being substituted for an earlier chunk of rock called
the Stone of Destiny, or Jacob’s Pillow, which takes us back to the deepest fogs of Scottish
history. A dandy archaeological find, if it turned up – only the people who want to get their
hands on it are definitely not archaeologists. Enter a certain Adamson, a pathological killer who
could be the twin brother of the abattoir gun-toting hit-man in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘No Country
for Old Men’.
Enter a group of hard-living high-jinksters resurrected from Greig’s most entertaining
novel ‘The Return of John McNab’, who are determined to keep the stone – though no one is
ever quite sure if it’s the right stone – from falling into the wrong hands. Mix with the entourage
of HRH (no name, but it's easy to guess who He is), a dash of sex, a feisty redhead (female), a
Kiwi rugby player (definitely not female), a fetching lonely ex-busker from Oslo and present
maid in distress, a handful of Tibetan Buddhists, some very nasty knife play and plenty of good
blues music.
If this sounds somewhat on the daft side, it is. But that’s not the point. When you’re being
pursued at high speed you do not stop to consider the landscape. And Andrew Greig is a master
at keeping things moving fast. He is also very good at characterization: his characters are so
vivid and their emotions so plausible that the reader soon ceases fretting about how much sense
they or the plot are making. Their openness to the sheer intensity of living are what ‘Romanno
Bridge,’ like all of Greig’s writing, is about.
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