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Land Of The Leal
by James Barke
ISBN: 9780862411428
Imprint: Canongate Classics
Publication Date: Jun 2008
Format: Paperback
Price: £7.99
Stock Status: in stock
This huge novel, closer in scope to a Russian epic than to any English counterpart, opens at the turn of the century in the extreme poverty of the Rhinns of Galloway, an agricultural backwater of the southern-most part of Scotland. A thinly disguised autobiographical tale, The Land of the Leal narrates the journey of Jean Ramsay, an aggressively practical woman from a peasant background, and her weak-willed, poetic husband, David. It spans three-quarters of a century of Scottish life, tracing the couple's wanderings from the idyll of their childhood in Galloway, through work for the landed gentry in the Borders and Fife, to their fall from grace in the depression years in industrial Glasgow. Inevitably, as their children are born and grow up and as the years slip away, their rural background becomes another Eden, yet Barke keeps sentimentality in check with his reflective description of the changing face of Scottish society, in which Jean and David are pawns in the development of economic cause and political effect.
James Barke (1905-1958) was born at Torwoodlee, Galashiels, but spent most of his childhood in Tullieallan, Fife where his father worked on an estate. After leaving school he worked for a time as an engineer in the years after World War I, but turned to writing and editing for a living after the publication of his first novel The World his Pillow (1933). Barke edited the works of Robert Burns and was responsible, with Sydney Goodsir Smith, for the definitive edition of The Merry Muses of Caledonia.
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