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Andrew GreigAndrew Greig
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
BiographyAndrew Greig was born on 23 September 1951 in Bannockburn, Scotland and grew up in Anstruther, Fife. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and is a former Glasgow University Writing Fellow and Scottish Arts Council Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Travel
BibliographyWhite Boats (with Catherine Lucy Czwerkawska) Garret Arts, 1973 Men On Ice Canongate, 1977 Surviving Passages Canongate, 1982 Summit Fever: The story of an Armchair Climber on the 1984 Mustagh Tower Expedition Hutchinson, 1985 A Flame in Your Heart (with Kathleen Jamie) Bloodaxe, 1986 Kingdoms of Experience: Everest, the Unclimbed Ridge Hutchinson, 1986 The Order of the Day Bloodaxe, 1990 Electric Brae: A Modern Romance Canongate, 1992 Western Swing: Adventures with the Heretical Buddha Bloodaxe, 1994 The Return of John McNab Headline, 1996 When They Lay Bare Faber and Faber, 1999 That Summer Faber and Faber, 2000 Into You Bloodaxe, 2001 Word Jig: New Fiction from Scotland (with Michel Faber and Ali Smith) Hanging Loose Press (USA), 2003 In Another Light Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004 Preferred Lies Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006 This Life, This Life: Selected Poems 1970-2006 Bloodaxe, 2006 Romanno Bridge Quercus, 2008
Prizes and awards1972 Eric Gregory Award 1985 Boardman Tasker Memorial Prize (shortlist) Summit Fever: the Story of an Armchair Climber on the 1984 Mustagh Tower Expedition 1992 McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year (shortlist) Electric Brae: A Modern Romance 1996 Romantic Novelists' Association Award (shortlist) The Return of John McNab 2004 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award In Another Light
Critical PerspectiveAndrew Greig has had an unusually varied writing career - as a poet, novelist and travel writer, specifically writing about mountaineering. Not surprisingly, common threads appear in all three genres. Greig is in some ways an old-fashioned writer. His novel, The Return of John McNab, (1996) takes its poaching theme from John Buchan, and a nineteenth-century love of adventure and romance permeates his writing.
The quest for the heights, whether on the mountains or in flying, recurs in his work. The second poem in his first major poetry collection, Surviving Passages (1982), is 'Confessions of an Airman', and in 1986 he co-wrote with Kathleen Jamie, A Flame in your Heart, a poem sequence about the Battle of Britain. He returned to the theme in novel form in That Summer (2000).
In 'The Dawn Shift' from Surviving Passages, he offers a key to both his poetic and novelistic practice:
'Poems if anything are transcripts of smoke,
His descriptive prose is always alert to the 'precise equipment' of the world, and to moods as they settle out of the hail of occurrences. And his love of the uncoiling moment makes him a writer of action and of the romance of action. The poem, 'A Man is Driving', has:
'I am not afraid
With this philosophy it is not, in retrospect, surprising that he should have written about mountaineering but it came about in a surprising way. Although, as he admits, he was entirely an armchair climber until then, he was invited in 1983 by the mountaineer Mal Duff to take part in an expedition to the Karakoram mountains. He was in effect writer-in-residence on the expedition to Mustagh Tower, a once 'unclimbable' mountain. The result, Summit Fever:The Story of an Armchair Climber on the 1984 Mustagh Tower Expedition (1985), is a mountaineering classic. The climber Joe Simpson says in his introduction to the book: 'Yet the very fact that he saw this alien world ... through wholly innocent eyes gives Summit Fever a refreshingly honest ambience. It is an account by a "climber" with nothing to prove'. Greig updates mountain writing: all the usual technical detail and human interaction are there but this is a modern man climbing:
'No modern mountaineer wants to use oxygen, which is regarded as a backward step and definitely uncool.'
Kingdoms of Experience: Everest, the Unclimbed Ridge (1986), is the record of an attempt on the unclimbed north-east ridge of Mount Everest. Greig is in the tradition of the tough writer, the sensitive man who needs action. He has vast energy and there is a strong note of a latter-day Beat or existentialist in his work. He doesn't just climb mountains but relishes the sleazy nightclub frequented by the climbers and hangers-on:
'The beers went down like rivers of cold
His 1994 collection, Western Swing: Adventures with the Heretical Buddha, is his manifesto, an attempt to answer the question: 'what is the true voice of an educated East Coast Scot of your generation?', posed by the critic Philip Hobsbaum. The answer is that it is a melange of influences, from Dylan to Dougal Haston (the climber) and from MacDiarmid to Lou Reed:
'that night and every night
That Summer (2000) is a very successful book. It returns to territory first treated in A Flame in Your Heart. The summer in question is 1940 and it is the story of the Battle of Britain told through four protagonists - two pilots, a working- class Sergeant Len and a dashing Pole, Tadeusz, and their girlfriends, Stella and Maddie. The story is almost too well-known and Greig doesn't spring any surprises but That Summer does do justice to one of the greatest tales ever told. Greig writes as one of an older generation (he was born in 1948) haunted by a battle he never saw. His mother's diaries were an important source.
The events of June to September 1940 were so intense that the reverberations have never quite faded. Greig puts it eloquently in a fantasy early in the book:
'There are some radio signals from that summer - pilots taking directions from women who controlled them on the ground, or screaming at each other to get in formation - that have become trapped between the ground and the Heaviside layer. They bounce back and forwards like tennis balls in some endless rally, for they don't decay. Once in a while a radio ham, idly skimming the airwaves late at night, will suddenly be listening to men and women controlling, flying, singing, cursing, dying.'
That Summer is a tribute by one of those born to the generation who, at the age of twenty or so, instead of living a life of study, travel, rock music and sex, as Greig's own generation did, found themselves in the front line of a last-ditch defence of the nation. Greig writes their elegy:
'And she has now finally gone into the silence to join the rest of her vanished generation, whose code was sacrifice and whose quest was a decent normality, though it was one that had never quite existed.'
Peter Forbes, 2003
Author statementI write to feel more truly alive, and hope that my readers might feel themselves the same. My belief is that loss is inevitable and renewal is possible.
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