This essay was originally published on 19 May 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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I now examine Redlegs, the second novel in our group of four highly significant novels published by Vagabond Voices. If Surviving was an excellent novel eccentric to the author’s vast oeuvre which included such classics as The Sins of the Father (which we also published or rather republished, excluding it from this gang of four), Redlegs is a masterpiece, which in my opinion lifts it far above Chris Dolan’s other works, both the other four we’ve published and his other fictional works, which I’ve also read. Believe me, this is not a criticism of his other works, but an assertion of the importance of Redlegs. Looking forward as well as backwards, I should also say that what unites Redlegs, Surviving, Moon Country and Blessed Assurance, apart from their quality, is the fact that none of them would have been published had Vagabond Voices not existed (and therefore they’re important to me, particularly in those difficult times over the twelve years of our existence in which I have regretted going down this path).

Like most great novels, there are so many things happening in Redlegs that it is difficult to know where to start, but as the title of this piece suggest, I will choose the “hardness of ideas”, something of a bee in my own bonnet. Ideas – that is grand ideas – are dismissed as utopias, things that could never happen, impractical dreams that contrast with actions of men (yes, generally men in this commonsensical interpretation of the world) who make things happen through the force of their own charisma. Instead, ideas have constructed the entire material world that surrounds us. It’s true that they mutate during their implementation and, as in the case of Redlegs, they can end in failure. Dolan takes a single plantation on Barbados to say something about utopian projects. It is more complex than that because the ideas that drive the plantation’s innovators are the evil ones of white supremacy wrapped up in the pseudo-science generally associated with Arthur de Gobineau, who is not mentioned in name but is there in spirit. The factor, who is the intellectual force behind the project, is not a reactionary in the strict sense of the word, but one who embraces modernity and perceives mechanisation as the key to gaining economic advantage. And with a flourish that suggests just how good this novel is, he is also a religious fanatic convinced that he is doing God’s work. This is entirely in line with the intellectual developments of nineteenth century, in which industrialisation and Darwin’s discoveries played such an important part. The narration is not judgemental and in fact views the events in terms of the dominant ideology, and this was a bold move on the author’s part: it made things more difficult but lifts the book to a higher plane. Good literature never underestimates the reader’s intelligence.

The sequence of the plot is another strength in this novel. It starts around 1830 in Scotland with a band of itinerant players. They are pictured as endlessly trudging across moors to their next anarchic venue and the associated humiliations – and we are reminded of this narrative origin at various stages in the novel. The daughter of the leader of these unmerry minstrels is shaping up for the leading actress but is enticed away by the plantation owner. She is a young woman of strength and ambition, and sets off with great hopes. Scotland is abandoned fairly soon in the novel, as she leaves on a ship called Alba (the Gaelic for Scotland), but her native land is always the backdrop for this story, because it is the land of grim realities but perhaps also the land where ideas are kept in their proper place.

I won’t give away any more of the plot; suffice it to say that it always holds surprises for the reader, and for the female protagonist, Elspeth Baillie, but at the end when the cycle is closed, it feels that much has been said without the least hint of the didactic. It is also a humanistic work, because the reader can even have pity for the vicious factor because he is a poor deluded fool. The enormity of the crimes is not matched by appropriate indignation, but rather by the simple question: Why do people keep doing these things to each other? Why do they allow their humanity to be ruled over by received ideas?

People misunderstand the historical novel, and believe that it has to be historically accurate. Benedetto Croce comes to my aid on this, as he said, “All history is contemporary history.” This is almost certainly an exaggeration, but I think that we can say without fear of contradiction that all historical novels are contemporary novels. They also provide the author with a huge degree of freedom. A.L. Kennedy wrote an excellent novel set in the Second World War called Day, which is the protagonist’s surname. I thought that this was a very difficult thing to do because it takes place before her time but not that long before. It was the period in which my parents were in their twenties, and the way they spoke is the way the characters have to speak. And a high degree of authenticity is required. In other words, if you want to enjoy the full freedom of a historical novel, you have to set it at least two generations earlier. In Redlegs Dolan embraces this freedom with a passion, starting with the language – or rather languages, because this book contains Standard English, Scots and Bajan, the dialect of Barbados, though I can assure that it is always accessible. My Scots is limited and my Bajan non-existent, but I enjoyed their presence. Dolan uses such verbs as “tarry” and sentences as “Be not afeard”, but he never gets it wrong. Like me, readers are probably not experts in nineteenth-century English but they probably could pick out clearly anachronistic expressions. They won’t here, but they will pick up the love of language and experimenting with language that is driving the author. The fact that a theatre and an actress are at the centre of this novel give him extra licence, and the reader is the beneficiary.

Just occasionally there is a historical inaccuracy, as when Dolan writes about a ship “ferrying its foul cargo from Senegal to Liverpool to here”, but the slave trade always went in a clockwise direction. But as I say, those are criticisms of someone who does not understand the role of the historical novel, particularly one that has a literary purpose. Dolan also consciously defies historical fact: the idea for the import of female labour from Scotland was suggested when his research led him to an article on this practice not from Scotland to the West Indies but from Germany to what is now Namibia. Perhaps using the methodology of magical realism, this historical inaccuracy served a greater purpose in developing his arguments and fulfilling the requirements of his plot. As far as I’m concerned, this novel is about the tyranny of progress, which is always supposed to improve our lives and never does, or if it does, it is for a short time. Often utopia (no-place) becomes dystopia (bad place, which is not the opposite), but in reality the distinction was never clear; it is just that the modern utopia is more explicitly critical of the possibilities of a rationally organised society, starting with Zamyatin’s We, and so we call them dystopias. I’m not sure that either term helps us to explain this novel, which is saying something different: good ideas can often go wrong and end in tragedy, while bad ideas can also go wrong and end in farce.

Redlegs is now a very topical work, because it underscores the link between the slave trade and modern racism, which recent events in America have brought to the forefront of political discourse. It is also about the waste of human energies and lost ambitions, the weight of the past, the constant battle with nature, which then was always won by nature. This brings us to the frame: a visitor to the island travels to a remote part of the island and an abandoned plantation, and is shown a manuscript which of course becomes our novel. He returns at the end of the novel and discovers that cove and the hill are going to be destroyed in order to make them conform to the requirements of a golf course. Of course, man has always meddled with the environment, but the capacity to reach into every corner of the planet and change the landscape with relative ease is new. The follies of the past left only a few rotting buildings, but the “progress” of today will be irreversible. It is also an ecological novel, but never in a preachy way.
 

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, May 2021