APRIL is MORE 'Dystopian Britain Novels' Month
Book Review: 'Scotch on the Rocks' by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond
'Scotch on the Rocks' first was published in the UK in 1968. This Warner Books UK paperback edition (224 pp.) was issued in 2001.
A five-episode BBC Scotland TV series based on the novel aired in the spring of 1973. A source of some controversy back then, the series never was re-run. According to a 2023 BBC article, apparently the reels for two episodes are lost, making a present-day re-airing difficult, if not impossible.
Author Hurd (b. 1930) is a UK politician, and former Foreign Secretary (1989 - 1995). He has published 8 fiction works (some of these with Osmond as a co-author) in the political thriller genre, as well as a number of nonfiction works on foreign policy, and biographies of prominent Britons.
'Scotch' is set in the 1970s, in an alternate UK where conditions for many Scots are grim, as the authors make clear in a vignette about an urban renewal project in Glasgow's Gorbals district that has gone awry:
...The sandstone tenements, blackened by a century of smog, still stood - though some barely, their facades slipping and crumbling into asymmetry, and others not at all, demolished before they collapsed, leaving an impression of a recent bombing raid: patches of exposed wallpaper, fireplaces hanging four floors up, jettisoned furniture and piles of rubble in the empty spaces....All but a few of the shops were boarded up, their clients evacuated to the suburbs.
But people still lived here, pensioners and Pakistanis, huddled together in the half-empty buildings. Here and there a touch of paint or a lace curtain was evidence of human survival. Some of these curtains twitched aside as the car drew up and shadowy faces watched the two men go into an abandoned laundry. It was assumed they came from Housing Department.
...They stood without speaking for another five minutes. Rennie was straining to catch the roar from Ibrox which would mean a goal for Rangers.Hart's eyes followed a girl across the clinker, unshaven legs lurching in ill-fitting shoes, face pop-eyed and knobby with deprivation. Oxfam would have thrown her clothes away.
Angry over Britain's enrichment from North Sea oil revenues while their own country gets little from said resource, Scots have embraced the Scottish National Party (SNP) and its platform of independence. Also in the mix is the clandestine Scottish Liberation Party (SLP) which is partial to Marxist doctrine. The head of the SNP, a profoundly uncharismatic but crafty politician named James Henderson, takes care to disavow the SLP, preferring to use politics (as opposed to a Liberation Struggle) to chart a path to independence.
Henderson's stance is not reassuring to the British, who have ordered an intelligence operative named Graham Hart to team up with Chief Inspector Rennie of the Glasgow police to insert a double agent into the ranks of the SLP. A 'hard man' and former Royal Army sapper named MacNair proves able to the task.
The novel's first 60 pages are occupied with introducing the large cast of characters and laying out the political machinations deployed by the Prime Minister, Patrick Harvey, and Henderson, prior to a spring general election.
However, when the SNP fails to capture a majority, this catalyzes plans by the SLP to reject further negotiations and stage an insurrection. The goal: force both Harvey and Henderson to accept independence as a consequence of a popular uprising, rather than backroom wheeling and dealing. And because their cause is just, naturally, the SLP leadership isn't averse to sponsoring martyrs whose deaths will be a source of inspiration to the Struggle......
'Scotch' is not an easy read. Perhaps as a consequence of being co-written, the narrative has an abrupt, choppy quality. I often was forced to re-read sentences and sometime entire paragraphs to figure out what was happening to who, because of the terse nature of the prose.
Readers hoping for depictions of bloody street battles between Royal Army forces and wild-eyed Scots, with RAF bombing runs on border towns, fields strewn with corpses, and Saracen armored cars set afire by Molotovs tossed by beret-wearing college students chanting in Gaelic, will be disappointed in 'Scotch.' The novel revolves around political dramas, with most action sequences (including sabotage of bridges) taking place off-screen. It's only in the novel's closing chapters that any sort of violence ensues, but this is subordinate to discussions and arguments between bureaucrats clustered in board rooms.
Summing up, 'Scotch on the Rocks' has the restrained quality common in literature about near-future British dystopias. Maybe it's the restrictions imposed by the UK on personal firearms ownership, or perhaps the erratic psychologies induced by intergenerational vitamin D deficiency*, but the manic energy of American dystopias is quite absent in British treatments of the theme. If gun battles and mayhem are your 'cuppa,' then 'Scotch' likely will disappoint.
*According to a 2022 journal paper, a survey of 351,320 UK ‘Biobank’ blood samples taken from individuals aged 40 to 70 indicated that 53.75% of these individuals had serum vitamin D levels in the ‘insufficient’ and ‘deficient’ categories (i.e., < 50 nM / L). Vitamin D deficiency is linked to delirium.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7902418/
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