I spend years gathering loose threads and then, when I feel like the cloth will hold, I start to weave them into a narrative. I suppose I began internalising John of John back in 1994, the year I went to college and chose to become a weaver myself. But it was in 2019, in the anxious period waiting for Shuggie Bain to be published, that I really found the thread for John of John.
I decided I would go to the Western Isles. It was a place I had been longing to see all my life and I had a vague idea that I might set a novel there about an adult son who has been called home to a crofting community to care for his difficult father. I reasoned that even if a novel didn’t emerge from the trip, at least I would have seen more of my own country.
I was drawn to the Western Isles for many reasons. I was keen to see the Harris tweed weavers, but I’d also just finished writing Young Mungo, a novel about sectarian violence where young Glaswegians seemed intent on destroying beauty, and so without being able to articulate it, I had set out seeking a spirit of gentleness, to write about creativity within working-class lives – about beauty, and colour, and nature, and music. People have a romantic notion of the islands – and perhaps I had a little too.
Although they are stunning, they are very real, very practical places, where it can be difficult to earn a living and raise a family, where managing your relationship within a community is of the utmost importance. I started in Vatersay and, after slowly travelling up the archipelago, I finally arrived on the Isle of Harris. It was there, in the home of a local woman, that I saw what my third novel might become.
We were sitting at her kitchen table, talking about her involvement in the local church. I mentioned that I’d been struck by the number of spinsters and bachelors I’d met on my trip. It seemed unusual given that crofts seemed to benefit from larger families.
When I asked her why she thought some folk had never married, she replied that they had probably just “missed their moment”. I agreed that it must be tricky to find love in a settlement with so few people, and then I ventured that it would be harder still if some of these older people had been gay. The woman looked at me with such cool horror that I realised, in that moment, that the novel was going to be less about a son returning home, and more about the father he had left behind; a weaver who was tied to the land, a man who had never been able to find love, or any sense of himself, in the only place where he belonged.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
