Growing Up In The West

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John Muir. Growing Up In The West

Growing Up in the West

Contents

Introduction

NOTES

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TO RALPH SAUNDERS

Contents

Preface

Portrait of Isa Mulvenny

A Friend of Dosser Farr

Store Quarter

Perfect Pitch

Lord Sweatrag

About The Author

Copyright

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POOR TOM

Edwin Muir

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With Tom Gallacher’s Apprentice (1983), we move north from Ayrshire to the ‘precipitous streets of Greenock in the 1950s’. Apprentice is Gallacher’s first work of prose fiction and the opening instalment of the Bill Thompson trilogy, which continues with Journeyman (1984) and Survivor (1985). When his sequence of Clydeside stories made its appearance, Gallacher was already in mid-career as a playwright, his prolific output throughout the seventies and early eighties including radio plays, adaptations of Ibsen and Strindberg and original stage plays like Revival! and Mr Joyce is Leaving Paris. This theatrical ‘apprenticeship’ leaves its mark on Gallacher’s fiction. His faults as well as his virtues are those of a dramatist: his mise-en-scène is effective, his dialogue has polish and point, but his characters can sometimes seem overblown and ‘stagey’, and they are rather too ready to state their case in loudly impressive soliloquies.

The form adopted by Gallacher in Apprentice – the short-story sequence – is one with a distinguished pedigree in Glasgow fiction, having been used with some élan by writers like Gaitens, Friel and Spence. Gallacher’s sequence is tightly constructed: there are five stories, one for each year of the narrator’s apprenticeship, and each centres on a different character, one of the ‘spirited, funny, maddening people’ whom Bill encounters as he serves out his time. We are thus confronted with the paradox that, while Apprentice is the only text in the present volume to feature a first-person narrator, its narrative focus is the most diffuse and decentred of all. Bill Thompson is less concerned with his own ideas and fancies than with observing – and where possible learning from – those around him. He is not simply an apprentice engineer but an ‘apprentice human being’. He is also being inducted into an unfamiliar culture, undergoing an ‘initiation – into adoptive Scottishness’.

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