AS SPUTNIK CALEDONIA OPENS, WE learn two things about its protagonist, Robbie Coyle: the nine-year-old still wets his bed, and he dreams of becoming an astronaut. By the satisfying end of a wickedly funny tale, we're in the company of a different young man known simply as "the kid".
Also focused on the skies, he contemplates a plane that may or may not contain a grown-up Robbie Coyle, who may or may not be carrying a bomb, which may or may not detonate in mid-air. These images of flight are apt, for with this, his sixth novel, A
ndrew Crumey has crafted a tale that sends the heart soaring.
Fans (disclosure time – I'm not just a fan, but a longtime friend) reading that description may be chuckling with delight, reassured that the book revisits themes woven through all Crumey's books: multiple worlds, alternative narratives and meta-texts, and the thorny questions posed by physics and philosophy. But there's an extra dimension in the new novel – on the strength of whose opening chapters he won the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation award – that should capture him a wealth of new readers.
On a recent visit to his old stomping grounds – Crumey is the former literary editor of our sister paper, Scotland on Sunday – we caught up for a blether, and I pressed him about a comment from an e-mail, when he called this his most emotional book to date. How so?
"People said that earlier books had lots of interesting ideas, but the characters were a bit like chess pieces being moved around. I wanted a book that was more character-based and linear, a simpler, more traditional novel. When I say emotional, I mean something that makes an emotional impact that people respond to, rather than just reacting to with their brains."
The first section occurs in a town not unlike Kirkintilloch in the 1970s, which is, not coincidentally, the site and era of Crumey's childhood. It centres on the enchanting Coyle family: father Joe, a rabidly socialist Clydebank factory worker, mum Anne, given to unconsciously hilarious turns of phrase, Robbie and his sister Janet. This is a family given to weekend yomps and probing conversations about everything from politics to Aristotelian theory. How much of that is drawn from life?
"He's a kid of my generation, from the town where I come from, but Robbie Coyle isn't me, and his family isn't my family," he assures me. "Of course there are bits and pieces of my life in there. Yes, I did want to be an astronaut when I was a kid, though I never went into training like Robbie, or dressed up in a spacesuit. I had a Batman outfit, but that was different. And I did have a sleepless night once after someone suggested to me that my parents were aliens in disguise." (See extracts, page 17.]
Sounding like the teacher he was, Crumey chides me that autobiographical titbits aren't absent from earlier novels, merely masked by their surroundings.
"I've written about people in different centuries, so you don't start out looking for the link between author and character. The classic quote is Flaubert, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' I'm not sure if he really said it, but it's the idea that all your characters are you in one sense or another. In other books I've used voices I know from real life. Here it's more explicit. It's not the data, but the rhythms."
Crumey has said his books form a sequence that can be read in any order, but he did set out to make this one distinctive. "When people say after a certain number of books, 'Oh, he writes this kind of stuff, there's a devilish urge to do something different. I've done things like this before, but not published them. Most of what I write never sees the light of day, but it's there and potential material to draw on.
"If this novel is different, it's to the extent that it starts very much from voices. If you can hear a character talking in your head, that's what makes them alive and that was central, initially, more than plot or structure."
He'll often start writing unrelated bits and pieces, then examine them with a puzzle-builder's eye. "Where this book is like my others is that it's a collage of things that, superficially, are really different, almost disconcertingly so, like they shouldn't fit together. But the whole game is to make them fit together."
The ideas are here, as ever, just relegated to the background. "The first part is simple and episodic and, I hope, funny and enjoyable, but it can only go so far, then there has to be another level. The middle section is where all the story is and, to an extent, the ideas. It's coming from authorial voice rather than character voice. But I wanted this sense of connection, that there's some sort of mirror."
In this section we reconnect with Robbie, now 19 and living in the People's Republic of Britain, which emerged after the Nazi invasion during the Second World War. It's the society dad Joe might have dreamed of – had his dream of a workers' revolution turned into a nightmare. Robbie is part of a team training for a suicidal manned space flight to explore black holes. Crumey has had this vision of communist Britain before, but now it feels especially grim, especially for women.
He nods. "Soviet communism made slaves of everyone. I wanted to portray that, and I was conscious of wanting to write a book that would appeal to a female audience, one that would say something specific to a female reader.
"In a sense, that section uses repression of women to represent repression of people in general. You have this Kafkaesque set-up where people have to have sufficient freedom that the plot can happen, but at the same time you have to portray the slavery, so you need something to contrast it with.
"The slavery of the women is that contrast. The thing that ultimately makes Robbie rebel in that society is the way it treats women. No-one should think this is a nice place to live. It's based around brutalising people and divorcing them from their emotional connections."
This idea of mirrors plays out in the middle and final sections, where characters, motifs and settings recur, subtly skewed. "Everything is there but potentials are realised. All the material is there in the first bit of the novel, but things grow out of it in the middle and final sections. It's this idea of growth. The kid in the last bit is a destabilising force. I always tend to go towards the rational, and I wanted to push in the direction of the irrational in this book. Who is this Robbie Coyle? Is he a ghost? A spaceman?"
I'll leave that for readers to decide. But what I will tell you, what I've been telling everyone as I recommend Sputnik Caledonia, is this: as the novel drew to its close I felt my heart swelling with emotion. I can't remember the last time I was so reluctant to put a book down.
• Sputnik Caledonia is published by Picador, priced £7.99.
'Robbie's parents weren't unnaturally sensitive to light …'
WHILE prospecting for frog spawn, Robbie and his mate Scott begin speculating why, exactly, Mrs Coyle is so nice. Scott suggests the Coyles must be aliens in disguise. Robbie mulls this over …
"Surely there must be some way to verify his unique predicament. In every account of alien life forms, he recalled, some trait distinguishes the creatures from humanity, and becomes the weakness which ultimately proves their undoing. But Robbie's parents weren't unnaturally sensitive to light, or to diseases such as the common cold (once the downfall of an entire race of invaders). They didn't retreat at night to a cupboard in their bedroom containing a sleek metallic pod (or did they?), nor devote mysterious evenings to the care and maintenance of an inscrutable electrical device. As far as he could tell, his parents were pretty much like anybody else's; though it was this false normality that was most damning of all.
"… Mrs Coyle came through from the kitchen. 'Are you going to tell me what's wrong?' she said, kneeling beside him, enfolding him in her arms. 'What've you and Scott been up to?'
"He came straight out and asked her. 'Are you an alien?'
"She laughed and kissed him … then said, 'I'll have words with that wee devil, so I will, for putting daft ideas in your head.' When she left him to carry on playing with the radiogram, Robbie knew his fears about his parents were groundless. Of course they weren't from another planet: they were sensible grown-ups who knew the right way to do everything. But what about Robbie himself? He was a bewildered traveller in a strange world who couldn't even stop peeing his bed. He was the alien: a space foundling dropped one night into the back garden by a smouldering comet, unable to relocate his cosmic home except by a process of random tuning which one day, if he was very lucky, might bring him to the comforting frequency he sought."
