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  • The Space of Fiction: Voices from Scotland in a Post-Devolution Age by Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon
  • Matt McGuire
The Space of Fiction: Voices from Scotland in a Post-Devolution Age. By Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2015. ISBN 9781908980090. 206pp. pbk. £12.50.

This book is an attempt to survey the key developments within Scottish fiction of the post-devolution era, focusing on the work of twelve writers. The initial premise is sound: the notion that the advent of a devolved Scottish parliament in 1999 saw the country enter a new political, social and historical moment and, as such, that the fiction of the period deserves particular attention.

The Space of Fiction is a short book – approximately 60,000 words – arranged into six thematic chapters. Under the heading of ‘Millennium Babes’, Chapter One examines the treatment of the urban female voice in the work of Laura Hird, Anne Donovan, Zoë Strachan and Alison Miller, with particular attention paid to their aesthetic inheritance from James Kelman and Irvine Welsh in the preceding decades. Chapter Two focuses on the rise of the female crime novel and the ways in which Denise Mina, Louise Welsh and Val McDermid have turned to popular fiction to craft a ‘space of transgression’ in which the androcentric nature of both genre and the modern Scottish polity might be theorised and thought through. There then follows three chapters focusing on single authors – on James Robertson and history, Suhayl Saadi and multiculturalism, and Ewan Morrison and globalisation – followed by a final chapter addressing the ‘Confines of the Human’ in short fiction with a focus on the work of Michel Faber and Des Dillon. The Space of Fiction is to be applauded for its attempt to bring this next generation of writers to our critical attention. Their work represents a series of important departures from that of their much lauded literary forbearers – Kelman, Gray, McIlvanney, Welsh, Kennedy, Galloway, and so on.

The most salutary aspect of the book is the generous scope it affords to the discussion of writing by women. Seven of Pittin-Hedon’s twelve writers are female, a reflection of both the critic’s sensibility and the radical transformations within the Scottish literary landscape in recent years. One might well argue that the majority of interesting books coming out of Scotland in the twenty-first century are being written by women, a marked change from the 1990s in which Kennedy and Galloway cast significant, yet nonetheless rather isolated, shadows. With that in mind, there is perhaps a sense of a [End Page 169] missed opportunity with The Space of Fiction. One wonders, for example, why the author did not make more use of some of the outstanding scholarship on the gender politics of Scottish writing that has emerged in recent years. Whilst they are briefly mentioned, the likes of Carole Jones, Berthold Schoene and Stefanie Lehner may have provided a more productive and focused frame of reference than the more traditional, nationalist criticism of Cairns Craig, Robert Crawford and Angus Calder. Similarly Aaron Kelly’s work on class, alongside that of Scott Hames, may well have proved a fruitful lens for analysing the legacy of Kelman, Welsh et al, and their reconfigurations within this dynamic and diverse group of female writers.

The Space of Fiction is a brave book, particularly in its attempt to articulate a coherent and unifying argument to connect this radically diverse group of writers. Various concepts abound, including ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘multiculturalism’, the blurring of generic boundaries, the need to ‘demythify and re-mythify Scotland’s past’, and the erasure of national sensibilities due to the advances of cybercommunication and the advent of globalisation. Each of these ideas is highly relevant to the rich and complex reality of modern Scotland and its literature. The attempt to trace their treatment across the work of so many writers, however, ran the risk of leaving the argument a little stretched. The Space of Fiction might also have benefitted from looking outwith Scotland for sources of literary/cultural influence. One of the abiding weaknesses of much Scottish criticism is the notion that Scottish literature exists in some form of hermetically sealed chamber, isolated...

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