WHISKY GALORE

Now that I have your attention, what do you think of when you hear the name Compton Mackenzie? Most of us, I guess, would think of Whisky Galore, the book on which the much-loved Ealing Comedy film was based.

Let me digress for a moment. When I lived in Wembley in the early 1980’s, I had a friend and neighbour called Ed Debreuque, one of nature’s gentlemen. Ed was a lorry driver, he could do honours maths questions as if he were shelling peas, and as I recall, he read Caesar in Latin for pleasure. He later got a first in maths and then an MSc in applied maths from the Open University but remained a driver for his living. Anyway, one day in 1983, he brought this book to the pub to lend me, an ancient Penguin edition of Mackenzie’s The Monarch of the Glen, saying that he had found it very funny and that I as a Scot would also find it so.

I had never read anything by Mackenzie, and knew nothing about him except that he had written Whisky Galore. I took Monarch home, read it over the next few days and loved every page of it. The story is a comedy about a larger-than-life Harrow-educated west highland laird, Donald MacDonald of Ben Nevis, and his battle with the National Union of Hikers, who insist on walking through his demesne during the hunting season, with a resulting disruption of grouse-shooting and stag-stalking activities. The farcical events of the narrative are amusing enough, but the real fun for the reader is in the characters, notably Ben Nevis and his antagonist, Mr Sydney Prew, Secretary of the National Union of Hikers.

Ben Nevis is a terrific invention, that highly amusing type, a man with unassailable self-belief. This manifests itself in threatening to throw Scottish Nationalists in the nearest loch, high-handedly locking hikers in his dungeon and blowing their portable radio set to bits with his shotgun. He remarks, ‘To be shut up in a dungeon for a bit without any jazz is just what they require.’  He continually struggles with the Gaelic language, declaring ‘Slanjervaw’ with each ‘jockandorris’ he downs.

There are no villains in this book. Reaching the end of it, one feels as Orwell said about War and Peace, that one could go on reading about these charming, unsophisticated people for ever. This is good-natured farce at its best.

And I’ll tell you something else. The book is nothing like the TV series and is a hundred times better.

What about the author? You might not like his politics, but Compton Mackenzie was an extraordinary man, a senior Royal Marines intelligence officer in the Mediterranean during the first world war, writer of more than 100 books, mostly fiction but also including history and autobiography (some of which led to his conviction under the Official Secrets Act). His novels covered some big and daring themes for the mid-twentieth century, challenging social conventions and including homosexual relationships.

But his major, ‘serious’ novels, like Sinister Street and Carnival, I find unreadable. The joy is in his gentle comedies and farces, like Whisky Galore, Monarch of the Glen and The Rival Monster, in which the characters of the first two books are brought together. Incidentally, despite living for many years on Barra, writing some of the finest Scottish comic novels of his century and being a founder of the Scottish National Party, Mackenzie was English, born in Hartlepool.

And despite the gentleness of his comic novels, some of them pack a social punch, like Rich Relatives, a story of a poor female dependent of a rich family. It rivals Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey in its treatment of the powerlessness of women in the British establishment, and in its needle-sharp depiction of dysfunctional families.

Another of the gentle comedies is Buttercups and Daisies, about Mr Waterall, who at last achieves his dream of moving out of London to rural Hampshire. He then attempts to impose his urbanite’s idealistic notion of rural life on his neighbours, stirring up several wars of attrition, putting up a lot of backs when he puts up his twelve-foot-high fence. In a chaotic public meeting in the last chapter, the narrator loses patience and rushes through the following twenty years in the final two pages of the book. Mr Waterall’s dream home has gone, although some of the trees he planted still remain. He and his wife have grown old, and his sons have grown up and gone away. The local battles for and against post offices, off-licenses, travellers’ sites, have been won and lost. And there is something very fine about this, reminding one of the last passages of the finest Italian novel of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest Italian novel ever: The Leopard, by Lampedusa, with its theme which I find myself returning to as I become more and more of an old git: Everything changes, and nothing changes.