The Herald - The Herald Magazine
One misstep and a life unravels
“lut”.) But imperial reductionism can become somewhat ridiculous. He suggests, for example, that British “prudery” – not liking topless bathing – is part of the “bewildering complexity of empire”. Or maybe it is just prudery. There is certainly a degree of “Empire nostalgia” as Sanghera calls it. But are we seriously to regard the Gourmet Burger Kitchen’s “Old Colonial Burger” as racist? His critique of the “imperial aesthetics” of films like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel trivialises racism.
He says that the late Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s call for “an ethical foreign policy” was a product of an imperial mentality. I think that is puzzlingly harsh. I knew Robin Cook and he was as far from an imperialist as it is possible to imagine. Sanghera argues against “culture war” over-simplification but doesn’t always apply it to himself.
Most of the Empireland thesis rests, perhaps inevitably, on Brexit, which according to Sanghera is “British imperial exceptionalism” writ large: an attempt to recreate the great days of empire under the banner of “Global Britain”. There may indeed be imperial echoes in the ambitions of Tory nostalgics like Jacob Rees-Mogg. But Brexit was mostly a revolt against globalisation and mass immigration by the “left behind” communities of the north of England. They aren’t imperialists.
Even among the upper classes, support for Brexit was more about nationalism than any desire to restore the British Empire. I think Empireland confuses nationalism, which is present in all societies, with a unique form of it:
British Imperialism. Nationalists love their country and tend to think it is exceptional and better than everyone else’s. But this applies to Scottish nationalists as much as English imperialists.
Empireland makes salutary reading for anyone who believes racism is a thing of the past. Magnanimously, Sanghera concludes with an appeal for unity – for understanding the past rather than seeking divisions. He is against tearing down statues and says it would be better if campaigners “talked about widening the [university and school] curriculums instead of de-colonising them”. He also expresses his “gratitude” to Britain for the NHS and his Cambridge education. Though, pointedly, this only appears in a footnote.
CAT STEP Alison Irvine
Dead Ink, £9.99
REVIEW BY SUSAN FLOCKHART
THE “pas de chat” is a ballet step involving a sideways spring into the air. When well-executed, it looks extremely graceful. Unfortunately for out-of-work dancer Liz, the leap she makes shortly after moving from London to East Dunbartonshire, is anything but.
Alison Irvine’s taut new novel turns on one of those split-second risks we all take and then promptly forget because everything turns out fine. Liz is not so fortunate. A single mother who is clearly struggling to keep her head above water, she wakes up one morning to an empty fridge and drives to the supermarket with her sick but hungry daughter. When four-year-old Emily falls fretfully asleep in the car, Liz decides to leave her dozing while she nips out for the shopping.
On her return, Liz’s mistake becomes shatteringly apparent. The car is surrounded by strangers, police arrive, social workers intervene and the full force of a small town’s judgement is heaped upon her head, threatening her most precious relationship and her thin grasp on sanity.
Irvine is one of the growing list of distinguished alumni of Glasgow University’s creative writing masters programme and this is her second novel. Her first, the Saltireshortlisted This Road is Red, was set in an iconic Glasgow tower block and inspired by the testimony of real Red Road residents, including refugees who were housed there towards the end of the estate’s 50-year history.
While that novel was told from multiple viewpoints, Cat Step’s perspective is ostensibly narrower: all the action takes place inside one character’s head. Aside from feeling exiled within an unfamiliar and apparently hostile environment, one thing Liz has in common with Red Road’s erstwhile residents is a view of the Campsie Fells from her apartment windows.
In fact, the proximity of those hills is the only thing Liz likes about Lennoxtown – a place where Emily’s late father grew up but where Liz feels like an outsider, isolated and on-edge in a small town whose every resident seems scandalised by rumours of her slipshod parenting.
Eventually, Liz finds succour in a part-time job teaching dance at a sheltered housing complex.
The elderly residents are cleverly drawn and Irvine avoids the “dear old souls” trope, instead depicting a heartening but believable crossgenerational support network that benefits all parties.
At least, it does for a time, until it becomes clear that Liz’s closest ally in Lennoxtown has links with Robbie’s family. Indeed, almost everyone she meets seems to know things about her dead boyfriend that she doesn’t and as troubling aspects of his past emerge, she begins to question the basis on which their short-lived happiness had been founded.
Had she really known her daughter’s father at all? That question becomes all the more pertinent when her most recent romantic relationship turns out to have been built on sand.
The claustrophobic sense of a small town closing in is powerfully evoked, although we’re never completely sure whether Liz’s feelings of being judged are real or imagined. Nor is she entirely likeable.
As events unfold, we become uncertain whether her actions were a simple, momentary lapse of judgement or a sign of something darker in her character. And when the climax comes and she is hovering on the brink of catastrophe, her actions invoke a mixture of sympathy and horror.
Robbie’s story invites similar ambivalence. And if, towards the end, the characters’ pasts begin to enmesh a little too neatly for credibility, I like the fact that Irvine refrains from offering tidy solutions to the complex questions her story raises about responsibility, forgiveness as well as the limits of intimacy and self-knowledge. Cat Step is an impressive novel: compelling, thought-provoking and darkly enjoyable.