Strip the Willow

It has been four years since John Aberdein’s Saltire Prize winning novel Amande’s Bed was published to widespread critical acclaim – a long wait between books these days – but now Aberdein’s second novel Strip the Willow is finally in print, we can say one thing with certainty. If it takes another four years for this singular writer to continue his literary exploration of form, politics, memory and emotional connection in this unique Granite City context, it will be well worth the wait.

Strip the Willow might formally be thought of as a sequel, or at least a continuation of the first book, in that it reintroduces many of the key characters that populated the world of Amande’s Bed, but that may be to do it a disservice. John Aberdein’s second novel is a wholly different book in tone, subject matter and intent.

Like Amande’s Bed it is by turn funny, touching, rumbustious and tender, but whereas the first novel was underpinned by almost a social realist sense of time and place (Aberdeen in 1956), Strip the Willow is a thoroughly post-modern novel, leading us through a maze of memory and association in what often appears to be a dream-like, uncertain, even Kafkaesque world. This is Aberdeen, Jim, but not as we know it. Here is a narrative with multiple Ariadne’s and criss-crossing cultural, social and political threads, as befits a novel set against the backdrop of the tumultuous world events of 1968. This backdrop though is at an aesthetic distance – like the 1956 Hungarian Rising backdrop of its predecessor.

The minotaur at the centre of this psychedelic labyrinth of a novel is corporate capital and its power, embodied in the shape of the carnivorous Rookie Marr and his LeopCorp organisation, who holds the city of Aberdeen – re-named Uberdeen, and now to be renamed Leopardeen – in the vice like grip of a ‘public-private private private partnership’. It is here the novel reaches its laugh out loud heights, delivering a savage, Swiftian kick in the goolies to rampant commercialism, municipal sell-outs, the dangerous banality of corporate and managerial speak, and the shallowness of our post-ideological, me-first society.

While LeopCorp’s plans for world domination and the revolutionary response of the diverse citizenry of Uberdeen form the architectural span of the novel, simpler human threads – both tragic and redemptive – gleam at its heart.

As always John Aberdein’s prose is sparse and concentrated, sometimes hauntingly poetic, and without the slightest hint of cliché. Both a satire on overweening human ambition and limitation, and a celebration of human solidarity and potential, Strip the Willow is probably a more difficult book than Amande’s Bed – but those who make the effort to navigate its depths will be amply rewarded.

As for his next book, I’ve no doubt it will be as different and as rich and as challenging as his first two. Like the very best of writers he continues to pose the difficult questions rather than give pat or easy answers. After all, as he has one of the minor characters in Strip the Willow observe, in couthy Doric, ‘fit hiv we ivver deen tae deserve a cuntin poet!’