Likely best known for The Dark Room, a debut which was both Man Booker listed and adapted for film, Rachel Seiffert may be a young writer, but already her achievements are remarkable. The Walk Home, her fourth novel, is set in Glasgow, a city the writer knows well. Specifically, the narrative is sited largely in Drumchapel, a peripheral housing scheme beset by the pains of multiple deprivation, and as culturally far from douce Kelvinside as it is geographically near. Being Glasgow, one problem predominates. When young Lindsey arrives, hopeful of distancing herself from the Troubles of her native Tyrone, she finds
When I left home, it seemed like Glasgow was far away. Turns out it isn’t.
Too late, and quickly too far into a teenaged shotgun marriage with the hapless Graham, she recognises another city of Orange Walks, marching bands and rancid sectarianism. Those who opine that the West of Scotland has no time for racism, being too busy with bigotry, may be being naively generous in the first point, but the second still punches a nasty truth.
… guns and men and malice passed back and forth between Ulster and this side of Scotland.
Somewhat in the tradition of Just another Saturday and others, Seiffert dissects a family caught in these tensions and the traumatic crossfire. She has been bold in her research, acknowledging the “generosity and openness of The Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland” amongst others. In itself, that is a surprising statement. In a dexterously woven timeline, the characters’ decisions to variously conform, fight or take flight open out.
Commendably, the writer evokes great empathy in the reader for figures who initially hold scant appeal. Graham and Lindsey’s sleepwalk into their relationship produces the very psychologically-damaged and needy Stevie. As a young adult in the” Glasgow of Now, or thereabouts”, he continues to try to find acceptance with a group of Polish builders. In a fine parallel, their own tribal needs, ethics and fears in a new country come to the fore. When Lindsey’s distress is heard by her husband’s uncle, the saturnine Eric – “the one who’d got away”, Graham calls foul. That same Graham who is unable to move beyond the scheme’s confines for his wife’s sake, unable to leave the only starring role he has known, drumming for The Pride of Drumchapel. That Lindsey’s confidant committed the cardinal sin of having married a Roman Catholic is the leaden final straw. Meanwhile Eric, an artist, literally tries to draw his way to understanding his father’s rejection, now perpetrated by his nephew, in pages layering Biblical iconography with personal history in Glasgow’s cityscape – Nebuchadnezzar as a felled Orangeman, and the Burning Bush in a Possil allotment. His sister Brenda (surely an unlikely name in the circumstances), forms a warm, loving bridge. If her hurt for her brother and beloved late sister-in-law does not prevent her from allowing her son to wear the sash, Seiffert offers the reader a means of understanding a mother so worried about the “feral boys” locally, enmeshed in substance abuse, violence and other criminality. Her youngest joining a flute band “seemed like a blessing by comparison”. Neither Brenda nor Lindsey however could continue to turn that blind eye, when the then tiny Stevie reveals frighteningly sinister aspects of the insidious poison his father drip fed him with the foam from his pints.
In this beautifully-structured narrative, the characters find their history more binding than they expected. Escape is never simple. If one note jars, it is the direct speech: ‘I’m sorry love. I wasnae trying to hush it up.’ Readers familiar with the more robust patois of James Kelman and Tom Leonard will doubtless find this anaemic, halfway Glaswegian. But that’s a minor quibble in a book successfully grappling the city’s sectarian shame, without preaching, in both a wide and a domestic context. Wisely, Seiffert offers no pat solution, but she does hold out hope.