We first glimpse the two Roberts lying in post-coital embrace on an Ayrshire hillside. The summer of 1934, and a great vista of central Scotland, in space and time, is laid out for their inspection: distant industrial Glasgow, the glittering sea and the lines of great ships entering the Clyde, and “their childhoods spread before them in fields of blue-reaching barley”. These young men are art students in Glasgow, and illuminated in a golden glow of love and as-yet barely tapped talent.
So begins Damian Barr’s absorbing and eloquent imagining of the lives of the artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde: “very real people, and very real talents”, Barr notes in an afterword, “even if they’re not as celebrated now as they deserve to be”. Upon the bare facts of their lives – their Ayrshire origins, the upward trajectory of their professional reputations, and the early eclipse of their careers – he builds a narrative by turns realist and impressionistic, founded now on descriptions of the Glasgow of their student days, now on scenes set in pre-war Europe, wartime London, and post-war rural England, now on passages of correspondence.
The effect of such varied narrative texture is by turns beguiling and frustrating: while their youthful experiences in Glasgow are brought to life with vividness and brio – indeed, these early sections of the novel read as a deeply felt love letter to the city, and in particular to the Glasgow School of Art’s spectacular Mackintosh building, since consumed by fire – many later glimpses of the wider world remain as mere snippets, leaving the reader wanting more. The point is, perhaps, to underscore a sense that the two Roberts live a later life of considerable velocity, always rootless, always forming rapid impressions before the next move, and the next – and always, after an early zenith, on a downward slope towards, one senses, ruin.
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Though not inevitable ruin: this is no Hardyesque tale of destiny inescapable, but rather one of pity for needless waste and loss – and admiration for lives filled with appetite. But the great gift of Barr’s novel lies in its reminder that living an authentic life – here, the queer and conjoined lives of these two Roberts – calls for more raw courage than is often visible, or acknowledged.
