Books: This is your destiny calling

DR: YOU COULD EASILY MAKE A case that Andrew Greig has the greatest range of any living Scottish writer. He's been acclaimed for his poetry, mountaineering books, literary novels, as well as his wonderful part-memoir, part golf book, Preferred Lies.

But the book of his we're here to talk about is Romanno Bridge, an action thriller that is itself a sequel of sorts to his 1996 novel The Return of John McNab. It shares some of the same characters – the journalist Kirsty Fowler and Neil Lindores (with whom Fowler's had a brief, passionate affair), mountaineering instructor Alasdair Sutherland and Murray Hamilton, a climber and green activist.

They're back together to search for the "real" Stone of Destiny. After the removal of the one from Westminster Abbey in 1950 (itself a medieval fake), various copies of it were made by a Scottish stonemason. Only three people know of the whereabouts of the "real stone" – the one that was hidden away from Edward I's invading army, the one that some people say was Jacob's Pillow or St Colomba's altar. These people are known as Moon Runners, as Kirsty discovers when one Moon Runner, approaching death, tells her his secret.

Each of the Moon Runners wears a ring, whose combined runic inscriptions reveal the whereabouts of the "real" Stone of Destiny. From that point on, the search is on to find it. Unfortunately the psychopath Adamson is also on the same mission, trying to retrieve the stone for an unnamed client who is prepared to pay £20 million for it. Hokum, I'd say, but high-class, enjoyable hokum.

LR: It's certainly very readable, and I'd recommend it to fans of action/adventure books, although I've got to admit, they're not my cup of tea. One thing he does noticeably well is to span the country quite effortlessly. Covering so much landscape on the page is actually quite hard to do, and I thought he did it very well. There's a real sense of place here.

Repeatedly, though, I did feel a lack at not having read its precursor. Because I hadn't, I didn't know why these people were such close friends and what had happened last time to link them together, Throughout, I had the uneasy sensation that I'd walked into the middle of a film, and while this did make me a more careful reader, trying hard to intimate what I'd missed earlier from actions and conversations, I never truly felt that I caught up.

AC: I agree it's an engaging romp and I loved the idea of the Moon Runner element and the three rings. I came to it cold too, not having read The Return of John McNab either. As I read this there were so many things that seemed at first to be sowing the seeds for a plot further on in the story, but gradually I began to understand that they were actually threads back to the previous book.

This began to irritate me, because there's enough story here for the book to work on its own. When you take out all the references to the previous book the story still stands independently and it might have been better that way. I enjoyed the first half of the book, but when all these characters from the previous adventure were wheeled in for the second part, I thought there were just too many of them and that they weren't drawn too well.

PC: I'm in the pro camp here. I really love the way Andrew Greig writes, have done ever since I read The Return of John McNab when I was at university. It was the first of Greig's books that I'd read and was such a joyous escape from 4th-year English Literature and all the stuff we had to read for that – a great yarn, incredibly well written, and peopled with such engaging characters. I don't think it's too much to claim that Greig is continuing the tradition of Scottish adventure romance – picking up from Stevenson and, more obviously, Buchan. I think he gets the spirit and energy for this kind of story absolutely right.

If you stop and critically engage with it for more than two seconds you'd have to admit that this book is just hokum, but I don't care, I enjoyed it. My only caveat is that the characters from the previous book aren't as well drawn as the new ones. I felt as though they were too sketchy, as though he was working on the presumption that people already knew them. That aside, I read it quite happily.

DR: I enjoyed it too, but there's clearly a problem with the linkage with his previous book. I think the answer is not to tease out the older book's back-story through the newer one but just to tell it straight. Perhaps many novelists might resist this because it implies that a book they might have spent a year or two on can be boiled down to two or three long paragraphs.

All the same, I think that's what works best. Look at how Sandy McCall Smith handles the back-story problem. He's on the ninth book in his Botswana series, so there's a lot of back-story to deal with, but he does so quite simply and straightforwardly, so you hardly notice it.

LR: In any case, as it's been ten years since The Return of John McNab, even if people have read the book, how much can they remember of the characterisation?

MR: My own feeling was that yes, although I enjoyed the book, I'd have preferred a lot more on the Stone of Destiny. But there's something else that is only told gradually: I was quite well into the book before I realised it was set in the 1990s.

DR: There are some clues – IRA plots, Wolsey cars, Amstrad computers, and so on – but again, I don't see what's gained by not just playing it straight. But what about the Stone of Destiny element? Mark, you're the expert. How well does Greig handle that?



MN: He's generally spot-on. And certainly during the time it was missing from Westminster Abbey in 1950, replica stones were carved and it's a relatively popular theory that it was one of these replicas that was returned to Westminster and used for the Queen's Coronation.

DR: But is the original Westminster Abbey one definitely a fake?

MN: No-one really knows. When Edward I took it in 1296, he seemingly leaves it for five years in Edinburgh Castle before moving it south; people were asking him what he wanted to do with it and it doesn't seem to have been a priority. And he certainly cancelled his plans to build a special bronze throne to house it, so it's almost as if he knew.

But the whole subject is a minefield. There are no Scottish references to it before it is taken to England, and it's only a short while after it has been taken south that all these legends start to appear. So it seems like there was a propaganda exercise to convince the English that what they had stolen was the correct thing.

The truth is so confused that the stone is whatever we want it to be. All the stories are the conflation of two, three or four legends. It has even been believed that it might not be a stone at all, but rather a bell.

So we pose the question: just what is the stone? If you want it to be a piece of meteorite we can find you evidence that says it's just that. Is it black, white, sandstone, is it a chair, has it got hieroglyphs on it, is it a bell or completely made up? It can be all of these things and none.

And Greig also mentions the notion that it might also be Jacob's Pillow. If it was, it would be the oldest biblical relic, the stone on which Jacob is resting when he has a vision of God telling him that the land of Israel belongs to him and his descendants. There are some people out there who want it to be the foundation stone of a new temple in Jerusalem in order to help bring forth the Apocalypse as described in the Book of Revelation.

AC: This is wonderful stuff. I just wished there'd been more of that in the book, because you come to the story expecting something, not maybe like The Da Vinci Code, but similar in terms of labyrinthine trail through history. I didn't know about the Stone of Destiny having this mystical Grail-like dimension and that's such a marvellous ingredient for a novel and I wonder why he didn't have more of that.

DR: As it is, though, I think it is far better than your average thriller. Greig's got good narrative skills, but every now and again you get passages of writing of real quality. There's emotional complexity too, in the relationship between Kirsty and Leo Ngatara, a Maori Buddhist builder coming to terms with the death of his child. And even just mentioning that makes you realise how specific Greig's characterisation can be – we're certainly not talking cardboard cut-outs here, at least not with the new characters.

The ordinary thriller writer just wouldn't have characters like that, or Jim Stobo, the Free Presbyterian widower policeman not wanting to consummate his love, but to keep it holy. And the writing too: the average thriller would write about headlights piercing the darkness, but Greig will write about "headlights vibrating in the darkness like white tuning forks".

AC: Or describe a woman as having "scone-making arms", which I thought was great. One of his strengths is saying a lot in a few words.

LR: I also thought, full marks to him for putting women at centre of the story, not just as babes but as active participants. Though I do wish the good guys didn't always – until the end anyway – seem so much less savvy than the baddies!

AC: It's just that when the old gang comes back together it does feel very much like a sequel. That's when it feels generic.

PC: To me, the whole point of the story isn't about getting the old gang together for another adventure, it's to resolve the one thing that wasn't concluded in The Return of John McNab – the relationship between Kirsty and Neil. I think that what Andrew Greig is really good at is the relationships between his characters. It doesn't matter what kind of structure he puts that in, these are relationships you can always believe in. Here there are three separate relationships in various degrees of flowering and that, to me, is the heart of the book.

Perhaps he's limited by the structure of the first book, in which he has this group of friends who are going to poach on the royal estates, which itself is a political statement to do with issues of land ownership. And there was a lovely, laugh-out-loud scene with Prince Charles right at the end of the book. In this book there's a small repetition of that whole HRH stuff, and it doesn't quite belong in the same way.

At the start, I thought it really doesn't matter if you haven't read The Return of John McNab, but the more I think about it the more I realise that it's incredibly important.

AC: I think the key question about this book is: Why are they going after the Stone of Destiny? Is it really about the relationships within the group, or is it a mystical hunt? But whatever about this book, now I really do want to read The Return of John McNab!

Meet this month's panellists


Philippa Cochrane (PC) is the Learning Manager at Scottish Book Trust, responsible for working on the educational aspects of its projects.

Mark Naples (MN) is the co-author of The Stone of Destiny: In Search of the Truth (to be published in June by Mainstream). He has been researching Scottish history for many years and is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

Andrew Crumey (AC) has a PhD in theoretical physics and was literary editor of Scotland on Sunday for six years until 2006, when he won the UK's largest literary prize, the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writers Award. His novels combine history, science and humour, and have been praised and translated into 15 languages. His latest novel, Sputnik Caledonia, was published earlier this month by Picador.

Lee Randall (LR) is a columnist, interviewer, reviewer and assistant editor (magazines and arts) for The Scotsman. She is also former editor of Scotland on Sunday's Spectrum magazine.

David Robinson (DR) is books editor of The Scotsman.



WIN CHAMPAGNE AND A COPY OF ROMANNO BRIDGE BY GIVING US YOUR IDEA FOR A SCOTS THRILLER

WHAT Scottish subject do you think would make a great subject for a thriller – and why? We are offering a bottle of Champagne and a copy of Andrew Greig's Romanno Bridge to the reader who comes up with the best answer.

Our next Scotsman Book Club meeting will be discussing Salman Rushdie's magnificent new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, which will be published in a fortnight. It tells the story of a lost Mughal princess, a great beauty who becomes the lover of an Uzbek warlord, the Shah of Persia, and then of a Florentine mercenary – a fantastically imaginative tale linking Renaissance Italy and the Mughal Empire at the height of its power.

Please send your reply to the Scotsman Book Club Competition, Books Editor, The Scotsman, 108 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS. E-mail replies should be sent to [e-mail] The closing date is Thursday 3 April.