Naming the Bones

Naming the Bones
By Louise Welsh
Canongate £12.99, 389 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

How valid is it to judge a writer’s work by looking at their life? The purist’s position – that the text alone matters and all else is a distraction – seems increasingly unfashionable in an era when literary biography is so popular. Excavating the sexual peccadilloes and mental frailties of dead writers has helped make stars of many academics who might otherwise have spent whole careers labouring anonymously in the library stacks.

The delicate relationship between a creator’s life and their creations is at the heart of Louise Welsh’s fourth novel Naming the Bones, a hugely enjoyable literary thriller. While it is a more mainstream novel than Welsh’s acclaimed debut The Cutting Room, it still plays to the reader’s intelligence. Despite a gothic plot that flirts with – and occasionally gets into bed with – melodrama, the book never loses sight of its broader themes.

Welsh’s protagonist is Murray Watson, a junior lecturer in Glasgow University’s English department. Since childhood, he has been obsessed by a Scottish poet called Archie Lunan, a dissolute regular in Edinburgh’s many bars who produced one slim volume in the 1960s before drowning off the Hebridean island of Lismore.

The novel opens with Watson unpacking a box of Lunan’s belongings left to the National Library of Scotland. He hopes that the contents will unravel the “knot of Archie’s life” and provide material for the book about the poet he plans to write. What he finds instead borders on junk. The archive includes childish doodles, tarot cards, a list of names and an unpublished science fiction novel: hardly a biographical treasure trove, and unlikely to explain why Lunan chose to sail a boat alone into a storm, at night, in a notoriously dangerous stretch of water. The dead poet’s lover, Christie, might be able to shed light on matters but she refuses to see Watson, threatening to prosecute him for stalking. The knot holds fast.

At the same time, Watson is tying himself in different kinds of knots. A series of rash sexual encounters with his head of department’s wife risks exposure; and he has also fallen out with his artist brother Jack, whose new exhibition uses film of their late father as he struggles with dementia.

The parallel between the artist and the biographer invading the privacy of their subjects quietly informs the book. The point is most forcefully made when Watson meets the widow of an academic who died while researching a book about artists who have killed themselves. She recounts how disturbed she was by her late husband’s glee whenever he found a new subject in the obituaries column. “That was what biography was,” Watson realises, “a paper facsimile of life hurtling towards death.”

Welsh brings matters to a suitably apocalyptic climax on Lismore, where Christie still lives. It gives away no more than the cover blurb does to reveal that Watson’s quest leaves him scrambling in the mud of an ancient burial ground – a pointed metaphor for the biographer’s art.

Ultimately, Naming the Bones is ambivalent about the duty of a biographer or artist to their real-life subject. It would be surprising if it weren’t: one imagines that Welsh’s satirical take on campus life has something to do with her stint teaching creative writing at Glasgow University. Certainly, as someone who has written a fictional account of the career of Christopher Marlowe (Tamburlaine Must Die), she knows well the fascination that a literary life can exert.

But if there is a moral to this novel, it is that all such acts of creation are at some level parasitic. Writers in Naming the Bones tend to be presented as exploiters and exploited – or both. They suck out the marrow of others’ experience to use in their work and, in turn, they are fed upon themselves.

Adrian Turpin is the director of the Wigtown Book Festival