Great reads for the big screen

The Pure Land

Alan Spence, Canongate, £9.99

PORING over comic books as a child in post-war Glasgow, Alan Spence had a sense that there was something more to his life.

The author of the prize-winning international best-seller The Pure Land – an epic spanning 147 years and set between Aberdeen and Japan – explains: “I’d be reading war stories about craggy-jawed Yanks kicking the stuffing out of the Japanese and yet, weirdly, there was something I recognised in the wee guys yelling, ‘Banzai!’

“Years later, I was at a photographic exhibition and saw an image of Mount Fuji and two Zen monks. The whole thing was strangely familiar to me, like a memory of a past life.”

Reincarnation has an ethereal presence in the novel, which weaves a vibrant fiction out of the biography of Scots industrialist and revolutionary, Thomas Glover, who was known as the Scottish Samurai.

From the fortunes he made and lost and made again as the founder of the Mitsubishi company, to his loves and his wars, culminating with the overthrow of the Shogun, the military powers in Japan, Spence created a gripping page-turner.

And with talks now afoot to turn the novel into a film, the emeritus professor in creative writing at the University of Aberdeen, is hoping the time is finally right.

Spence explains: “The book was originally written as a screenplay but at the time the film The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise, had just been released.”

Spence’s agent convinced him to turn the screenplay into a book instead. It was a wise move.

The Pure Land was an immediate success. The writer laughs: “For the first time in my life I was the subject of a publishers’ bidding war.”

The novel has now been translated into 19 languages.

If a movie deal does materialise, Spence says the ensuing film will be better than he had initially dreamed – thanks to the novel.

He explains: “The book brought out so much more than was in the original screenplay, surprise elements not even I had anticipated.”

Would-be viewers will have to wait and hope it reaches the screen. In the meantime there is always the novel and another to follow.

Alan – who wrote Night Boat in 2013, also set in Japan – reveals: “I’m working on another novel set in the earlier part of the 20th Century and features R.H Blyth, an Englishman who went to Japan in the 1930s.

“He was about to take up citizenship when the war broke out. He was a tutor to the Emperor’s children and died there in 1964.”