A few weeks ago, a shivering intimation of imminent mortality was felt all across literary Scotland. Willie McIlvanney was not well. Very far from well. The kind of unwell that requires a lung transplant. If the news was hardly revelatory – McIlvanney had, for more than sixty years, given his body a pretty thorough work-out – it was still gloomily depressing. We might not have Willie McIlvanney for very much longer.
And so it came to pass and we no longer do.
It does McIlvanney a great disservice to say that, until today, he was Scotland’s greatest living novelist. He was much more than that. His writing was ineradicably rooted in Ayrshire, Glasgow and the West of Scotland but there was nothing limited about its power or ambition.
It could, in other circumstances, have been transplanted to Flanders or the Ruhr or Pittsburgh or Detroit. Anywhere, in fact, where men chiselled coal from beneath their villages or where their lives resounded to the din of hammer on metal.
Even that, however, while accurate, sells McIlvanney short.
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