On the Enormity of Folk Stories

An Interview with Angus Peter Campbell

Join us as Angus Peter Campbell, author of Eighth Moon Bridge, takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!

What is a quick-fire Q&A?

We have our interviewee pick a number at random and we ask them the general question listed next to it.

Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions, to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.

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Do you have a favourite author?

I've got so many favourite authors. I think my most favourite author, who I come back to again and again, is F Scott Fitzgerald. I then try and find everything I’ve ever written and burn it because it's so inferior. I think what he has is this courage, he's got wonderful courage. Just to state what he feels and what he wants to say.

Of course, his classic is The Great Gatsby. Towards the end of the novel he slips in the fact that there was a gap between their aspirations and their achievements and their real selves, and Fitzgerald sneaks in that the problem is that they weren’t an eastern people; they were from the West. And of course, as a Gael in Scotland with all the history and the kind of cultural things that attach to it, it really struck me in reading it recently that none of us fit into the age that is imposed upon us, no matter how hard we try. I think Fitzgerald had that contest all the time between his real self and the people from the West trying to be smart and chic and progressive in the Jazz Age and it all just crumbled and fell apart.

What have you been reading recently?

I read recently the Collected Stories of Jack Schaefer. When was in Oban High School, being taught by Ian Crichton Smith, he would always recommend to us for our O-Level or Higher to read Shane, the Western. When I read The Collected Stories I was just absolutely bowled over. The language for the setting was so appropriate. It was Wild West stuff, it was frontier towns, it was men and women going out there on their own and trying to forge this new life right on the edge of existence. He never uses any philosophical phrases or any abstract notions. He just uses this kind of concrete language to describe their lives. If you're fencing, he takes a big hammer and hammers a post right into the ground and it fails to go in and so there is this sense of striving to beat the elements without saying any of that intellectually, I thought it was just beautifully and concretely written.

Is there anything about Scotland that inspires you?

Like with F Scott Fitzgerald, in the world we inhabit, which is such a global environment with media, there’s a contest between inhabiting fully that world and engaging fully in that world. First of all is a world that I remember which had nothing to do with that, which it was pre-electric and was very small in a sense, but also huge in another, because there were returning sailors who would come back with stories of in Buenos Aires and Addis Ababa in East Africa, etc. But the community was one I knew and when I look at the window it's a beautiful environment, the coolness of Skye and the sea and the landscape, daily it's being … I suppose the word is invaded by campervans and tourism. I’m convinced that one day Skye would actually sink into the Minch under the weight of tourism. There's a kind of contest between that whole global thing you want to engage with and the purity of landscape and of life and of communication and of who you are. That's the sort of things I try and engage with in my literature.

How do you explore that contest in Eighth Moon Bridge?

I think the way we articulate the world has been tremendously closed down by the mass media. We articulate it politically in a very narrow channel. For example, you are persuaded or almost forced sometimes to vote Labour or Conservative or Nationalist, as if they’re really narrow channels. I think our means of just telling our story has become diminished and very small. And my recollection of growing up was that, although we were physically in a small environment, the stories that we were being told were enormous. They were not just natural, they were supernatural. So that our neighbour across the road, for instance, would be taken away by the Slúagh – the host of the dead – on occasions and transported to a different place and then come back, to a sort of fairyland.

In terms of Eighth Moon Bridge, I didn't want to restrict our knowledge on the perception of the world. There is a mystery hidden in the bridge. On the one hand, you could take a television crew, and they could dismantle the bridge and then they would find the scroll written in, let's say, ogham. And then they scan it through a computer, and it would be a sort of scientific explanation of the mystery. And it's not the only explanation of the mystery. There are a thousand explanations for the mystery of who left it there and why it was there in the first place. And the women begin to explain what the scroll means, they have a folk consciousness which goes back into imagination and storytelling.

I remember being in Lewis and asking Professor Donald MacAulay, the great poet, who I was traveling with, when I saw a big stone on a hill, ‘What was that for?’ He’d say, ‘Well, likely it was because a shepherd boy was up there and the wind was blowing from the Atlantic, and he just stood the stone up to keep himself standing. Otherwise he would fall with the force of the wind.’ It was a practical a stone, not aesthetic or religious or spiritual or cultural. But we add these things to them.

We went up in the archives in Portree the other day, and there's a 2000-year-old wooden pot carved out of alder, and it's polished on the outside and inside it's quite rough. And the archaeologist who had analysed it had written ‘This is an unfinished pot’.

Now, my wife is a sculptor. She looked at it and said ‘This is not unfinished. This is the best that the sculptor, woman or man, who carved it 2,000 years ago could do with the implements they had’. I mean, you could get round the outside and ‘finish’ it and polish it, but for the inside you just had to kind of do your best. So it's not an unfinished pot from 2,000 years ago, it's a finished pot from 2,000 years ago. Definitions are given and definitions have commonly been given from the outside, from some kind of expert from London or New York or wherever.

What inspired your main character?

I've been reading the essays of Italo Calvino. And he said something quite interesting in passing. We were advised, of course, to write about what you know. He argues quite strongly you should actually write about what you don't know. And I don't think he meant that you just kind of think, ‘Okay, I don't know anything about what it's like to stand on Mars wearing a swimsuit’. What he meant was that there are experiences in our lives when we think ‘It's just a mystery to me..’.

For me, it's an exploration of something that's that is significant and important and I want to find out, does it mean anything at all?

When I was 12, we moved from Uist to near Oban, and because I was a Gaelic speaker, and although Oban wasn't Los Angeles, it was still a cultural step, you know, to a kind of a largely English-speaking environment, a bigger school, trains and busses and a lot of the rest of it. And so there was a sense I felt a bit like an outsider.

And I just began exploring, what it is to feel like a slight outsider and to come to an island. An island, of course. You know, it's defined as an area of land surrounded by water. But if there’s a bridge to the mainland, is that still an island? And of course, you can take that as a physical geographic thing or as an existential thing. it was an exploration of what it is to be in that kind of situation. This boy comes to the island and his father is the headmaster, and I think at heart Eighth Moon Bridge is the boy's search for his father, to find out who his father was.

Is the book what you imagined when you began it?

It's what I imagined but never planned. It was discovered on the way and it became what I imagined it to be, which is like scoring a wonderful goal. I think plans just destroy you. I mean, if you follow a plan you’re constrained by the paths on the signpost ahead, left here, right there and ahead there. If you walk with the characters and listen to them, hear them, they will take you swimming across swamps or climbing up mountains or laughing as you sit by the roadside. It’s having an ear to listen to them and love them and be astonished by them.