Purple patches of a superficial Highlands helps to put the heather in

White Male Heart By Ruaridh Nicoll (Doubleday, #9.99)

RUARIDH Nicoll's first novel is set in Huil, an imagined village in the Highlands where people's small rivalries and resentments are magnified by the vastness and wildness of the landscape that surrounds them. It is a rites-of-passage story. An intense friendship between two young men is threatened by the intrusion of a woman, who becomes the lover of one of them. The book explores what happens when the stresses in that triangle become too great.

The blurb describes White Male Heart as "visceral", and certainly there is enough gralloching, skinning and exposure of internal organs to keep a medium-sized butcher's premises awash with blood. Hugh and Aaron are the inseparable friends who have grown up together shooting and fishing their way across the land. Aaron in particular has come to know the woods, hills and lochs intimately, as substitutes for his remote, unloving parents. Hugh, who still - just - communicates with his farming father, is less isolated from the inhabitants of Huil and better-liked than sneering Aaron. Desperate to show their disdain for the place, the pair also love it because they are part of it.

What makes them different from other alienated youths in small communities is their infatuation with, and access to, guns. This might not raise an eyebrow in America but they have a small arsenal of rifles and shotguns and Aaron, especially, has an unhealthy attitude to blasting any flying or creeping thing out of the sky or undergrowth. They also associate with the mysterious Mac Seruant, a poacher who lives up in the hills and exerts a powerful, even satanic, influence on Aaron. Meanwhile, the most profound relationship Hugh has is with his horse Sandancer, which he rides everywhere.

Other characters include Gus Houston, local publican and nationalist, his Gaelic-spouting Danish barman, and Roderick MacLeod, the Free Church minister who condemns the godless ways of the two friends while also being attracted to Aaron's cold dismissals of the rest of the population. Into this potential nail bomb of a society comes Becky, a London girl driving her ex-boyfriend's Maserati. She has rented a house to sort out her broken heart and discover what she wants from life. What she gets, after a brief hesitation, is a love affair with Hugh.

Aaron resents Hugh's infatuation with this incomer and the fact that his pal, tutored by the older Becky, is soon leaps and bounds ahead of him in sexual experience. He turns to Mac, busy boiling venison down to soup in his mountain retreat, who - like a warlock - supplies him with a scheme to win his friend's loyalty back. What follows is a descent into at times farcical but ultimately deadly violence. It begins with schoolboy tricks and home-made Molotov cocktails but soon turns into something more sinister.

All this promising material falls disappointingly short of the publisher's claims for it. One reason is Nicoll's style: although a journalist, he is not concise. He cannot just say: "Hugh began to cook an omelette" - he must add "taking eggs and breaking them into a bowl." Likewise, he knows a good deal about deer-stalking and clearly loves the Highland landscape but doesn't know when to stop going on about either. His descriptions often plunge into purple patches that put the heather in the shade.

More seriously, his characters are not convincing. They speak in bland, stilted, mid-Atlantic voices. The apparently deep relationships between Aaron and Hugh or between Hugh and Becky remain superficial, the minor characters frustratingly sketchy. A clue as to why this is so may lie in the publicity interview that accompanies review copies of the book.

Nicoll is asked why he went to "one of the most isolated spots in Europe" to write it. This turns out to be Achnasheen, which has a railway station and is on the road from Inverness to Skye. Isolated? Nicoll, who grew up in Sutherland, should know better. He describes Achnasheen as "grim" and says that the visits of a well-read travelling butcher were "the only human contact I had during my weeks of writing", though the friends he invited "loved it, of course".

This sounds like an outsider's Highlands. Hugh and Aaron are not outsiders, but they are toffs who do little or no work and never mention such mundane issues as money. This would not in itself make the novel uninteresting or irrelevant to the Highlands. But it adds to the impression that this is not a book about, as Iain Crichton Smith once put it, "real people in a real place".

Copyright 2001
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