The Dear Green Place

This book is Scotland's answer to the incredible Stoner by John Williams. It's the story of Mat Craig and his struggle to balance his work and family life with his desire to be a writer, a dream at odds with his Calvinist upbringing in working-class Glasgow in the middle of the 20th century. I found Mat so incredibly relatable. His Sophie's Choice is surely one that every creative has had to face at some time in their lives - the curtailed comfort and security of the nine-to-five life, or the freedom and reward of the hand-to-mouth life of the artist?

“Sometimes ... he would feel again his own ridiculousness weakness and inadequacy, the meagreness of his spiritual possessions, his physical poverty, his feeble stumblings and gaucheries, the paucity of this world, the refractory city, the numbing tenements and streets, his crumbling damp rooms, the Scotch sneer on his neighbour's face, the load, the weight, the density, the insistent immediateness of what is called living. His writing would become to him a jeering, ugly travesty. He would feel this sneering disgust which was in itself disgusting, a double disgust. And he was never sure whether his revulsions came from the grim, twisted mockery of life at art, or the inflated, lying mockery of art at life.”

“It just seems like a week or two since the beginning of last spring. Every year gets shorter.” Mat stood for a moment sawing his hand in the air... opening his mouth to speak, changing his mind. Then he burst out, “I mean you have a kind of crazy idea that you are exempt. That you have some kind of purpose. Something which you've forgotten but will remember someday. Then you look out of the window and you see that the light mornings are drawing in again. And you think - another year gone - and faster every time.”