All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney

A little while ago I had the good fortune of reading a marvellous new novel in manuscript, and I see that it's now forthcoming from Faber in a paperback original this August. It's the debut of a young writer called Liam McIlvanney, and it's entitled All The Colours of the Town.
Its protagonist is a grafting Glasgow-based political journalist called Gerry Conway who covers the waterfront of the Scottish Parliament, and is always quids-in for a good tip-off from a fictional Holyrood Justice Minister by the name of Peter Lyons. The complications and the drama really get going when Conway realises there's a big story submerged in Lyons' own unsavoury past, the hunting down of which will require him to get on a plane across the Irish Sea to Belfast (an unlovely and yet highly evocative journey, with which I'm highly familiar.) And in Belfast, that city under a black mountain, all the dirty secrets are there for Conway to dislodge with the toe of his boot.
To my eye, McIlvanney holds all the aces of a really vital young novelist: he tells a story with a sure hand, his recording eye is vividly precise, and he has his boots planted firmly in the moral mire of real life. All The Colours... offers the reader not only all the pleasures of a page-turner with compelling crime elements; but also a brilliant study in the harsh, pawky affinity between those two majestic cities, Glasgow and Belfast. Leading us to and fro across the Irish Sea on the trail of political/paramilitary skulduggery, McIlvanney manages both to keep us in his grip and to capture exactly what he calls the ‘fearsome Prod foursquareness’ of Ulster-Scots manners and mindsets. In short, and on the strength of all the elements sketched above, this is a book I'd very much like to hear the great Tom Paulin talk about on the Newsnight review show, to which Tom now seems to have returned after a much-lamented hiatus...

John Martyn: Addendum

On the subject of John Martyn, the Life and the Work and the interrelation thereof, consider the snippet above from a Scottish-produced documentary about the emotional content of music, made in 2007 and presented by Phil Cunningham.
Consider also the rather furious debate that developed below the clip on the YouTube comments space, where a few pronouncements about Martyn's personal conduct (some related to his treatment of his second wife) drew a hail of ripostes from those who clearly think this domestic matter is neither here nor there when you speak of a genius.
Another aspect worth a thought is Martyn's heavy Glaswegian accent here. Glasgow was part of his early life and I understand he returned there for his last years, during which this doc was filmed. Yet in the BBC 2004 doc, and in every other clip I've heard of him speaking, Martyn's accent was indeed more or less RP, with the odd joke-foray into mockney geezerdom.
Now those of us who have spent time in assorted corners of the country, or even the globe, do tend to have an array of accents for special occasions, and that's especially true of performing types; and, I think, doubly true of Martyn, also a lot to do with an artistic temperament inclined to conceal even as it supposedly reveals. That's what I get anyway from Martyn talking here about the blues as 'greetin', whingin', givin' out' etc, because it's 'good for the heid'. Rather than the 'intrinsic sadness in any creature', let's say...