The gospel according to Luke

Racism made him leave Glasgow for London, but Luke Sutherland - the Scottish novelist who mixes fairy stories with tales of lynchings - may yet live happily ever after Once upon a time in a land far, far away there lived a little boy. And the little boy lived happily at home with his mother and father and brothers and sisters until he was old enough to go to school, where he met even more boys and girls. And some boys and girls said "hello". And some boys and girls didn't. And some boys and girls looked him up and down and called him "nigger".

It's not exactly the childhood fairy story most of us are familiar with. But, grotesque as it is, it does have a happy ending. For the little boy grew up to write a book. And the book was nominated for the prestigious Whitbread First Novel award, and literary fame and success beckoned.

Not surprisingly, the power of fairy tales hasn't passed Luke Sutherland by. They offer "the possibility of redemption", he says, speaking about his latest novel, Sweetmeat. Even if they are full of the "moral absolutes and certainties" he makes it his business to rail against, they offer another place when the world becomes "too difficult to deal with".

He may be describing a character from his book when he says that, but Sutherland knows a thing or two about the lure of a more enchanted space. Born in 1971 in London to an American and a South- African, he was adopted at five months by a white Scottish couple who moved to Orkney when he was six. After a childhood on the islands and later years in Blairgowrie, he studied English and Philosophy at Glasgow University where he launched a band, Long Fin Killie and began that first award-nominated book, Jelly Roll.

But Scotland didn't hold on to Sutherland for long. Even before any Whitbread nomination came along and the bright lights of London beckoned, he'd decided he had had enough. Enough of avoiding the city centre late at night, of avoiding groups of youths loitering on corners, of the shouts and taunts and racial abuse that a young black man making his own way about Glasgow puts up with every day.

"I'd never walk past a group of guys and there'd be certain people I'd cross the road to avoid," Sutherland says. "One friend says that racial abuse in Scotland is at least upfront - in London, it's silent, under the surface. In Scotland, it's honesty that shouts the abuse. But even if that is the case, I've had so many years of people shouting at me in the street that it's novel not to have that happen."

We are sitting in the bar of Shaftesbury Avenue's Curzon Cinema, not far from where Sutherland lives in Covent Garden. The racism he encountered while growing up is an old story for him, one he endured for a long time and has recounted for the curious many times since. But his ease with himself is newer, more recent. When we meet I'm immediately struck by how boyish he looks - short hair, glasses, big broad smile - and the exuberant, enthusiastic way he leans forward in his chair to talk, gesticulating all the time. I remember a different Sutherland, I tell him - more than eight years ago, walking about the grounds of Glasgow University, cutting a noticeable figure with chin- length dreadlocks, a long dark coat and a perpetual frown on his face. He looked sophisticated, mature and most of all, angry. "Did we ever speak?" he asks, uncertain at first. No, I say (although not from lack of interest - highly photogenic, he isn't exactly repulsive in the flesh either), and I describe how he appeared to me. "Unapproachable," he nods. "So many people have told me that, it's terrible, I know. I looked so angry and cross all the time - and I was the fastest walker! I didn't hang around."

It was while Sutherland was recuperating from a tour-bus accident that he completed Jelly Roll, the graphic account of a Glasgow-based jazz band touring the Highlands. Its portrayal of racism, the violent treatment meted out to the black character, Liam, who has the word "nigger" carved across his abdomen by the psychopathic Malc, of masculinity at its most perverse and extreme, its use of the vernacular, all attracted plaudits and comparisons to Irvine Welsh and James Kelman.

"I would go out at certain times of the night," Sutherland begins to laugh when he realises how this sounds, "oh, not to places you'd necessarily think would be bad - like George Square, where I'd never usually go after 9 o'clock - and it would just make me angry, walking around with what people were saying to me. So at the end of Jelly Roll, I was so wound up that I thought I just have to do this. I'd shied away from writing the last scene (where Liam is attacked) for a long time. But regardless of what he thinks about himself, it's what people think about him that really matters. And in a very crude sense, that's what he is."

Like many writers, ask a personal question and Sutherland will refer you to the work. But in his case that's more revealing than most. Jelly Roll was highly autobiographical - most of the incidents that happened to Liam happened to Sutherland too. Sweetmeat, however, while still containing autobiographical traces, is quite a different creature. Much more surreal and magical, even with the brutality, strong language and portrayal of masculinity that also characterised Jelly Roll, it is composed of two parallel stories: of sympathetic, cultured, obese French chef Bohemond, working in a London restaurant and in love with his boss, Hermione; and American musician Faulkner, who tells tales of racism in the Deep South, his love of the beautiful Beatrice and his fear of a psychopathic cop, Legion.

"The thing about Bohemond," Sutherland explains, "is that because of the way he looks and the way people respond to him, he finds the real world very difficult to deal with. Neither male nor female, neither black nor white, he descends into the world of the fairy tale because it offers a happy ending, a moral code, where if you do bad, bad things will happen to you and if you do good, good things will happen to you. Faulkner's fairy tales are full of the kind of certainties that Bohemond wants - he wants more than anything to be a man's man. There may be misogynistic, homophobic elements to Faulkner's tales but all of these things make the world seem more finite."

Not all of Faulkner's tales are fantasy, however - dwelling on lynchings and mutilations of American blacks during the last century, their brutal depiction is more intense than anything Sutherland realised in Jelly Roll. But he rejects any charge of gratuitousness, citing a more political, and more personal, reason for their inclusion. "When I was growing up in Orkney, I was the only black kid for miles and miles around, so as well as making very good friends I made very bad enemies. The absolute worst that I could ever expect was to be beaten up, get my head kicked in, really battered. So the idea of a completely unforgiving, extremely prejudiced masculine force has always been like a real bogeyman for me - men like Malc and Legion." How does he feel, voyaging into the darker recesses of this kind of soul to write about the very thing that he fears most?

"It's like cannibalising your worst enemy's most frightening aspect to make yourself feel more empowered," he says. "Or cannibalising your greatest fear to make it seem less potent. There's probably a lot of that in my depictions of Malc and Legion. One of the reasons Faulkner goes into these horribly graphic accounts is because he sees through the mythology of masculinity, the prototype black hero who is debonair, goes all out for the woman he loves, but who is actually humiliated and denigrated. That's very important. And also because my own fear of being physically attacked was so paramount in my own mind when I was writing."

Research for Sweetmeat meant that Sutherland took over three years to complete the book. It was a difficult process he says, and I ask his opinion on recent controversy over the granting of Scottish Arts Council Awards to writers and artists. Does he believe state aid would make the lot of a writer, even a successful writer like him, any easier?

"This book took such a long time to write," he says, after short consideration. "I got a bursary which just filled a hole really, and between that and my music I managed to stay afloat. But that's changing and I'm finding it very difficult again. I've just come back from Denmark - there's a myriad bursaries you can apply for, there's a lot of support there. Having said that, their taxation rate is higher, so that might play a part. But I knew that the writer's lot was a difficult one anyway, so I guess I think, well, it's meant to be difficult, I'd better just get on with it."

Emotional support at least has always been in plentiful supply. "People sometimes ask me the strangest things - you know, do you and you parents get on, because they're white and you're black. Please! What are they talking about? People are so quick to over-simplify, it's really frustrating. I've always got on really well with my parents and they've always given me the utmost love and encouragement."

As a result, he's not much interested in finding out who his birth parents were, and has no plans to look for them. "There's a curiosity there maybe, but no burning urge. Had my parents and I not got on, maybe I'd have been more eager to find out who they were, but no, I haven't tried to find them."

Maybe Sutherland has had enough fairy tales without looking for more - and maybe he doesn't need the happy endings they offer either. Content in London after a "fantastic" first year, a less satisfactory second and now fairly settled, he doesn't rule out returning to Scotland one day and buying a place here: "If I can afford it. When I was growing up, the real abuse, the real nasty stuff, came from a minority and that seemed to outweigh the good things for a long time. So my attitude to Scotland isn't the most balanced - there's an extent to which I'm responsible for how I think people think about me." It may be inevitable that questions about race will always dominate an interview with Sutherland, and play a part in his writing. But it also leaves him in something of a double-bind. Being pegged as a "black writer" - both through his own subject matter and his willingness to reveal his own past experiences - is not necessarily something he wants.

"The whole question of what people think, or who people think I am, is one that is really difficult to address. I hate this idea of 'black' sections in bookshops - what does that mean? I hate the idea that it's assumed there's an aesthetic thread that links people who are the same colour, nationality or gender. I rebel against that to the utmost, against the idea of moral absolutes. That's why the books turn out the way they do."

And how do they turn out? Sutherland provides his own answer. "Sweetmeat is not about Hermione or Beatrice or even about love. It's about Bohemond wanting to transcend the confines of his body," he says.

It's not too much to suggest a correlation between Sutherland and his creation. Like Bohemond, you sense that Sutherland too would like to transcend the body, or at least the colour, gender and national absolutes that leave it open to attack. Yet while that desire exists, he does, maybe he must, make race a dominant motif of his work. How to escape that double bind? Perhaps his next book, already completed, has the answer. Set in a talk radio station, it is, Sutherland says simply, "about miracles". It would seem that for the writer Scotland chased from its borders, the lure of the fairy tale will linger a little longeru Sweetmeat is published by Doubleday, (pounds) 9.99

Copyright 2002
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