Undiscovered Scotland

 

Paul and Mikey are two brothers on the run. Mikey has been released from prison after a long spell inside for a child murder committed when the brothers were both little more then children themselves, aged fifteen and thirteen. He's been the subject of intense press interest since his release, and his older brother Paul has decided that they need to escape the media and the hostile public interest generated by its coverage. We encounter Paul and Mikey living in a tent in a field in an oddly out-of-focus corner of Scotland. Paul spends his days walking into the local town to buy provisions and to check whether Mikey's photo has ceased to appear in the newspapers.

But even in the remote place Paul has chosen, their presence begins to attract unwelcome attention and events take a much darker turn. Some of the locals in the town take an interest in Paul's daily routine, and the brothers' campsite is also noticed. We follow the story through Paul's eyes as he and Mikey try to resolve their growing problems in a shocking way, before abandoning their bolt-hole. We follow them to Arran, and then to a peace camp near the Royal Navy's nuclear submarine base on Gare Loch, where they become involved in an outlandish religious cult. It gradually becomes less and less clear whether Paul is recounting real or imaginary events, and as his personality spirals downwards towards what seems inevitable destruction, the balance of power and leadership shifts between him and the younger and apparently much less bright Mikey.

"Fallow" by Daniel Shand is a book that beautifully draws the reader into Paul's fractured and bizarre take on the world. It is also a book it is much easier to recommend than to categorise. You could call it a road novel, and there's certainly more than a hint of Jack Kerouac in the way the brothers move from place to place and from encounter to encounter. But perhaps more than that it's a novel that gives the reader a compelling insight into a deeply disturbed mind, the mind of a man losing touch with reality and with rationality. The reader is forced to ask how much of what Paul is experiencing is the product of the world around him, and how much is actually formed by his own deeply distorted inner view of that world and his memories of past events. As the brothers fall ever deeper into the hole they - mostly Paul - are digging for themselves, it seems increasingly clear to the reader that there cannot be anything other than a totally disastrous outcome to what we are witnessing. But this is a book in which nothing is ever quite what it seems...