![]() These are printed in italics, written in the second person, and seem to have nothing at all to do with Mike beyond a similar interest in the physical presence of Scotland. There’s another framing device, and we don’t understand it until we reach a kind of epilogue that matches the prologue. But James Robertson is also interested in stories, and this gives him a licence to send things off on tangents that are often far more engaging than the lost and drifting Mike. ![]() So the background is late 1960s and, in much more detail, the events in Scotland and the rest of Britain during the 1970s. ![]() In Part 1, almost the first quarter of the novel, he looks back over the first quarter of his life beyond the age of about nine. ![]() There’s a framing device, to do with the difficulty he is having writing an introduction to the catalogue for a posthumous exhibition of the work of his father, a much better-known (because much better) photographer than Mike himself. Mainly, it’s a fairly conventional narrative, set in Scotland, that takes in a retrospective of the vaguely unsatisfying life of 50-something Mike. ![]()
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