He has been described as Scotland's finest contemporary author by Alexander McCall Smith.NowRonald Frame is
bringinghistalesofCarnbeg,afictitioustowninPerthshire,andsixcharacterswhoworkforitslocalnewspaperto
the pages of The Scotsman every Monday, starting today. Here he sets the scene with Books Editor David Robinson
RONALD FRAME was one of the first writers I interviewed after I was made books editor of The Scotsman. It was 2000, and he'd just won the Saltire Book of the Year for his novel The Lantern Bearers.
Even before then, though, he'd started working on
a project of enormous ambition – a series of short stories all centred around Carnbeg, a fictitious spa town in the heart of Perthshire.
Carnbeg was where he imagined The Hydro, the huge Highland hotel about which he wrote three series of radio plays for the BBC. The rest of the town provided material for his short story collection Time in Carnbeg. "To visit this place," wrote Alexander McCall Smith, "is to savour a treat from Scotland's finest contemporary author."
Since then, Frame has carried on writing stories that are weaving into a wonderfully rich tapestry of place, looking at Carnbeg's past and interlocking present from multitudinous points of view. For his latest Carnbeg project, though, we'll see the town through the eyes of just six of his characters. And as these characters all work on a newspaper, Carnbeg Days, we're delighted that their stories will be told in this one.
So every Monday morning for the next six months, we'll be bringing you a taste of life in Highland Perthshire as seen in Frame's capacious imagination. To give more background, I asked him to explain more about what draws him to write about Carnbeg.
RF: Originally I wanted somewhere to set my short stories about the sort of people I recognise having grown up with. Carnbeg was staring me in the face all the time, only I had somehow failed to see that. Not seeing the wood for the trees, I suppose.
DR: Is Carnbeg a parochial sort of place?
RF: Not at all. Visitors pass through all the time: holidaymakers, conference delegates. Folk from Glasgow and Edinburgh have been coming here for decades. But in any case, I never wanted Carnbeg to be parochial. It occurred to me, this town of 10,000 souls plus all these transients can hold the whole world!
Thirty-five Carnbeg stories have already appeared in the US, for instance – I think their eccentricity appealed to editors, but also the fact that they're outward-looking: they touch on matters people can understand living far from Scotland. I've written a few "Indian-fusion" stories too. Carnbeg is twinned with several other fictional towns, including Mahbapur in Southern India and Wongahoolie Creek in Victoria, Australia (I've published several stories about 'Wonga' in Sydney).
DR: What's different about this project?
RF: We're going to have Carnbeg presented to us through the words of correspondents working on a publication called the Carnbeg Days. It's a weekly newspaper which has expanded into a hybrid of news digest/social register/lifestyle magazine. Its owner and editor is an American called Cornelia Hohenlohe: she's well advanced in years but young in spirit, and acquired the run-down Days for a song in the late 1960s.
Cornelia, with several marriages and liaisons behind her, surfaced in Edinburgh's New Town in 1967. She married a laird from Carnbeg, and now widowed has become Carnbeg's very own chatelaine – 5' 2" of feistiness, in trim Chanel suit and pirate's eyepatch, and referred to behind her back as 'Mrs High'n'Low'. Her idiosyncratic, slightly wacky publication now also runs on the internet, in digest form.
DR: And the other main characters. Can you introduce us to them, please?
RF: There's a keen young archivist with a preppy look called Ruari McKinnon; he's only in his twenties, but already he probably knows more about the Days and Carnbeg than anyone else.
Sandy Loam (chintz sundress, straw hat) is the nom-de-plume of the gardening correspondent (her brief also includes 'green' issues – and poker); she's another enthusiast nurtured by Cornelia.
Bruce Clunie (Nehru-collared wild-silk suit run up for him in Hong Kong) is the dapper 'bon viveur', who also reviews arts events (Carnbeg has a theatre, The Jubilee, and a small opera house, the Ca'd'Oro).
Trix Grahame reports, a little breathlessly sometimes, on sport and lifestyle and women's interests; sartorially speaking, she is always into the latest retro look.
Iain Iain Bain, with the ferocious eyebrows and trademark plaid shirt, is the business correspondent (also technology); not one to suffer fools gladly, and while taking absurd risks on his motorbike for a 70-year-old, he considers himself the Last of the Professionals.
This isn't the entire roll-call of Days staff. Others walk in and out of my imagination, delivering their copy (or not), but for the next however-long-it-is we'll have those six reporting from the Carnbeg frontline.
DR: But their blogs aren't going to take the form of a serial?
RF: No. Every week will be a stand-alone piece. So you don't need to know what has gone on in any other week. But if you would like to read more, there's a website address at the end. Please pay a visit! And there's a contact page for asking questions and/or offering comments, should you feel so inclined.
DR: Which writers would you single out as influences on your own writing?
RF: I like the spry wit and sharp eye and easy, natural tone of Garrison Keillor – the Lake Wobegon books, A Prairie Home Companion (radio shows and film). The Indian author RK Narayan set his fiction in the imagined town of Malgudi. People, he seemed to think, are much the same anywhere; he felt that he even if he was walking along a street in downtown New York, where he lived for a while, the strangers he encountered were very reminiscent of characters he knew from the streets of his own home town – they had the same hopes and the same problems, only they were dressed a little differently and had paler complexions. Narayan was a great humanist – no, that's what Narayan is, because Malgudi lives on after him. Are they 'influences'? I don't know.
Nabokov didn't do small towns, but he showed me that you create your own world: the world he created was entirely in his own image. Muriel Spark wasn't into small towns either, but was wonderfully nimble – knowing everything, irony abounding – from first word to last. One-offs, each of them. You have to learn all that, on the trot – just as you have to find your own voice, which no one else can give you. The voice should simply come, quite naturally – don't go straining after it.
What appears on the page comes out of your experience, and no-one is going to see it in quite the same way – so, that being so, you're already doing something in a thoroughly individual and idiosyncratic way anyway. Writers like (Georges] Simenon can remind you to chuck out what is unnecessary, but who would want to sound like a clone of anyone else?
DR: Accepting that, though, how would you describe your own writing style?
RF: Hmmm. You do what comes naturally as I say, and I don't really think about it.
Let's say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that's simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just like this – so I don't want fancy descriptions getting in the way. Even the word 'style' makes me uneasy – the style-over-substance business, all that.
I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all – the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.
DR: How does Carnbeg get written?
RF: Anyhow, anywhere, any time. Ideas get scribbled down into a notebook I carry in my pocket. Sometimes I might have two ideas that don't quite work on their own, and then for some reason – eureka! – it occurs to me how they could be fused together. I swim most days of the week, a diligent 40 lengths, and sometimes a moment of crystalline clarity occurs to me afterwards: between getting out of the pool and reaching the changing room. Presumably, a rush of blood to the head.
I've become a night owl, up till 2am and beyond. That's when I do the rounds of Carnbeg.
It's just in the last year or so that I've taken to writing directly on to a screen.
Before that everything was with a pen in longhand (by which I mean messy shorthand), and I felt I had to transcribe my pages of scrawl in the course of the next few days – otherwise it became indecipherable even to me. 'Cut and paste' allows you to move sentences and whole paragraphs about and experiment.
I find the 'delete' button very useful, although my fellow practitioners tell me they're keener on the 'insert'. It just feels more reassuring to me to have the thing worked up in type, even if it's 'virtual' in the meantime.
You know, it was a radio review in The Scotsman – modesty, of course, ought to forbid me repeating it – which made me think Carnbeg was worth persevering with: as sociological study or entertainment or however I try to justify it. It would be fiction if it weren't so true. For the whole of that weekend I was mentally turning cartwheels. Someone, one person at least, had "got it"!
Carnbeg DaysRONALD FRAME REPORTS ON LIFE ON PERTHSHIRE'S FINEST IMAGINARY NEWSPAPER
IAIN IAIN BAIN, BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT, is, er, moved by a recollection
THIRTY years ago we had a cub reporter on the staff, one Ramanujam V Raman, who left us and went on to greater things – namely owning and editing his own newspaper in Mahbapur.
While he was here, he made the acquaintance of a mechanic at the Clock Garage, called Shuggy by one and all. Shuggy agreed to undertake repairs on his bike gratis – in return for RV's giving him particulars of the favourite form of transport in Mahbapur.
RV's bike was running sweetly again, and he forgot about the conversation until, one day, he was brought to a halt in Mercat Street.
Pedalling towards him was Shuggy, in summer shorts and T-shirt, straggling the saddle of a cycle-rickshaw.
RV's jaw dropped.
The passenger seat had a tartan cover. An orange hood, with green tassels. As vividly coloured as any Indian jimricksha. "Here's the dream machine!" Shuggy laughed. "Your transport of delight. Jump in!"
Shuggy explained over his shoulder as he pedalled. He had found some photographs of rickshaws in the library. A mate of his worked at a foundry in Perth, and they had worked out the design between them, and got the work on it done at the weekends, with some help on the fancywork from his mate's girlfriend.
"All the soldering underneath is good," Shuggy said. "I know I'm not going to leave my passengers standing anywhere."
Now, he added, he had given up his job at the Clock Garage. This was to be his job.
RV settled back in the seat. For the sake of authenticity he called out the coolies' warning to pedestrians ahead, just as the drivers did in Mahbapur.
"Bajke Bajao, khabadar!"
Shuggy did well. In 1978 such vehicles were a rarity. Most folk had never seen one. His passengers weren't just visitors but also locals who cottoned on that the rickshaw could get to places where motor taxis weren't allowed, through the narrow wynds and vennels – back-lanes – of the Old Town.
Americans staying at the hotels thought the rickshaw was the wackiest thing (or the cutest). The white settlers of Carnbeg enjoyed being taken about just as they used to be overseas – with their airs and graces intact. Shuggy realised he could probably operate two or three rickshaws in the high season, a proper telephone-to-order service, and not need to go touting for business.
Meanwhile, on his single rickshaw, they were long days. Shuggy had been building up his muscles and his stamina with the hard work; he might have benefited from more rest periods, but because his journeys tended to be short he opted to keep in motion – and to fill his money belt with his modest takings.
"You could raise your charges," RV suggested.
"I should have made them higher at the beginning in that case. But Carnbeg people have good memories, and they'll say I'm profiteering. What difference does it make? I would still have more business than I can manage."
"Don't you need another rickshaw?"
"And a driver for it. And then that'll turn me into a company, won't it?"
When RV asked him, Shuggy confessed that he didn't have a licence. "There's no point."
He said that he realised the three competing taxi outfits would do everything in their power to ensure he didn't get a permit. Already, did his friend know, his tyres had been let down – not once, or twice, but three times.
Then the authorities acted.
– He couldn't operate a taxi service without a licence, and several objections had been lodged with the Council.
– Places at the ranks were fully accounted for.
– Even if he wasn't using those, he regularly picked up at selected spots – which meant he was flouting the regulations.
Shuggy put up a fight. His argument was that he didn't park the vehicle, he was simply taking a breather as other cyclists did, and anyhow it wasn't for long. (True enough in this respect: he seldom had to wait more than a few minutes before the next customer found him.) He tried to suggest that he was helping not to further pollute the Highlands air on which Carnbeg sold itself as a tourist destination, and so he was contributing to the general economy.
As he guessed, it was no use. Kicked out of court.
Shuggy disappeared from the streets. He got work, thanks to his mate, at the foundry in Perth.
But lo and behold, three months after the débâcle with the Council, the transport of delight was reinstated: the vehicle in question was back on the streets, tasselled hood now turquoise and the seat garden-chintz, awaiting the public's bidding. Resplendent across the yellow back panel, to face oncoming traffic, was the word RICKSHAW, writ very large in scrolled black print.
"Well," RV ventured as he drew alongside the parked vehicle, "no-one will have an excuse to forget what this is."
"Excuse me – ?"
"A rickshaw!" RV pointed to the word.
He thought it a foolhardy move on Shuggy's part – but extremely courageous of him at the same time.
"No, that's my name."
"Your name? What d'you mean?"
"I've changed it. By deed poll. I'm not Shuggy any more."
"What are you, then?"
"Richard Shaw. Contracted, naturally, to Rick."
RV found himself looking into a gap-toothed smile.
"Smart move, huh?"
"And now you've got a licence?" RV asked.
"What for?"
(Wasn't that self-evident?)
"To drive about with," RV said.
"Anyone who gets into my rickshaw is at liberty to make a donation to charity."
"To charity?"
"In the tin box thingy. I'll treat whoever I meet as my potential friend. Be nice to people, and most of them will be nice back to you."
Shuggy, or Rick Shaw as he now was, winked at RV. He rang his bell –"Bajke bajao, khabadar!" he called out like a born native – and off he sped.
© Ronald Frame. Illustration by Alice Wyllie
• Read more at
www.carnbeg.com.
• Next Monday: Meet Bruce Clunie, Restaurant Critic
BACKGROUND
Ronald Frame was born in Glasgow in 1953. He gained degrees from Glasgow and Oxford universities in the 1970s, and won the Betty Trask Prize for his first novel, Winter Journey, in 1984. In 2000 the Saltire Prize, for excellence in Scottish writing, was awarded to The Lantern Bearers.
In it, a boy, sent to stay with his aunt in a Galloway seaside, works as a singer for a composer. Both are drawn to each other, but still deeper secrets are played out in a masterful novel that uses music as an extended metaphor for loss.
His work has been adapted extensively for radio and he has adapted other authors in turn, including RK Narayan's Malgudi stories.
His 2004 book Time In Carnbeg, a nod to the gentle, understated style of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon stories, is set in a Perthshire spa town, and has a distinctly Scottish character.
His other books, critically acclaimed but no longer in print, include Permanent Violet, Sandmouth People and Penelope's Hat.
