…he had also given Mike a little stone, a pebble. It had been both less than a meeting, and more: Mike’s father wanted a photograph of the family, and the tramp had obliged. But a detail in the epilogue lets us know that the consciousness is that of a kind of tramp – kind of, because he keeps himself scrupulously clean and is quietly courteous towards anyone he encounters – whom Mike had met at the age of nine. These are printed in italics, written in the second person, and seem to have nothing at all to do with Mike beyond a similar interest in the physical presence of Scotland. There’s another framing device, and we don’t understand it until we reach a kind of epilogue that matches the prologue.
But James Robertson is also interested in stories, and this gives him a licence to send things off on tangents that are often far more engaging than the lost and drifting Mike.
So the background is late 1960s and, in much more detail, the events in Scotland and the rest of Britain during the 1970s. In Part 1, almost the first quarter of the novel, he looks back over the first quarter of his life beyond the age of about nine. There’s a framing device, to do with the difficulty he is having writing an introduction to the catalogue for a posthumous exhibition of the work of his father, a much better-known (because much better) photographer than Mike himself. Mainly, it’s a fairly conventional narrative, set in Scotland, that takes in a retrospective of the vaguely unsatisfying life of 50-something Mike.
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