KILBRYDE: Raymond Burke’s new novel reviewed by Federica Giardino

Raymond Burke’s new Bildungsroman about growing up in the new town of East Kilbride outdoes Scott and Gray at the same time: having the scope of both a historical novel and an existential modernist confession – Federica Giardino reviews…

Kilbryde: Tales from the Old, New, Functional Town

Raymond Burke’s Kilbryde is a tragic and killingly funny novel set in the “decaying, old, new town” of East Kilbride. Against its backdrop intersect the stories of ordinary modern-day individuals, historical heroes and villains, some drawn from archival records, others embellished – as the author reveals. A few of these actors, including Christopher Strang of Kylbride, courageously defended their beliefs and freedom and died at the gallows; others, like Kevin McLuskie, struggle to keep their footing under the weight of grief and responsibility; still others, like Frankie McLuskie, lead a sour life, decline into loneliness and dementia, and leave this world unceremoniously, losing control of themselves and their bodily autonomy. A fitting epitaph for such existences: “It could have been worse.”

Kevin McLuskie, the story’s protagonist, is a sharp-witted history teacher whose increasing preoccupation with the declining health of his abusive and alcoholic father drives him to excavate the folklore and heritage of his hometown. In reconnecting with the hostile parental figure, he strives to reconcile resentment and duty, animosity and piety, all while attempting to preserve the existing parameters of his personal life. Father and son communicate through acerbic, cynical exchanges – the verbal sparring of archetypal Scottish literary anti-heroes – through a linguistic divide: Frankie’s vexations are conveyed exclusively in Scots, and Kevin’s comebacks are restrained to standard English save for moments of anger or drunkenness, a performance of linguistic self-suppression learned at university.

Their everyday trials and tribulations in the declining industrial town resonate effortlessly with readers with ties to Scottish working-class communities. Despite its title and geographic focus, Kilbryde transcends parochialism. It follows one man’s search for meaning and grounding by assembling fragments of local mythology and his own genealogy, but Kevin’s jumbled life is embroiled in a collectivity and civic dimension progressively surrendering their identity. His personal unravelling is bound to the town’s systemic institutional and cultural deterioration, and Burke makes it clear that the story does not merely concern the McLuskie family and their immediate loci.

The selection of ‘forgotten’ folk tales interspersed throughout the narrative, mostly written by Kevin’s grandfather William McLuskie and gradually uncovered across various locations, propels readers through a whiplashing succession of historical periods, where they witness the mischiefs of witches and resurrectionists in the Georgian era, the Presbyterian Covenant army engaged at Drumclog and Bothwell Brigg during the Restoration, the wicked murder of a vassal in the Jacobean period, Rudolf Hess’s 1941 flight over Glasgow, and George Orwell labouring over Nineteen Eighty-Four in his hospital bed. When Kevin initiates a new cohort of students with the question “What can we learn from history?,” he contends that “human actions and events are rarely isolated. […] Their causation becomes clearer when we weave them together in a narrative.” Indeed, the novel expertly plays with historical chronicles and the time dimension, alluding to a Heraclitean, cyclical conception of time which obfuscates the distinction between the youth and the elderly, past and present, the living and the dead – cardinal preoccupations of Kilbryde’s thematic apparatus.

As Kevin investigates the whereabouts of his grandfather’s misplaced stories, he realises that the comical anecdotes frequently narrated by his father – rooted in Frankie’s own lifetime and sustained by his standing in the community – are similarly valuable and under threat of disappearance due to the man’s advancing memory loss. Frankie’s anecdote surrounding E.K.’s Sir Walter Scott monument, for one, sees his old friend Tam decapitate the statue and defend his actions by claiming “he started it!”; by the second half of the book, the punch-line has degraded into an improvised, mangled “That’ll teach ye!.” Time and senescence have also corroded Frankie’s ‘microwave’ anecdote, which is restored and relayed by Kevin in the very last lines of the book while sporting his recently deceased father’s bunnet. It becomes difficult not to feel disarmed by the increasingly incapacitated old man, whose caustic remarks and abrasive colloquialisms often elicit sincere laughter: his arsenal of responses to Kevin’s “It’s me!,” uttered upon each visit to Frankie’s flat, range from “Who the fuck’s ‘Smee’?” to “It’s too late, I’m deid” and profile a repellent yet conflictingly endearing character. Kevin’s narration complicates sympathetic feelings by interspersing brutal recollections of his father’s violence, including ruthless beatings inflicted on his two sons and wife, thereby fully denuding his flawed and dangerous character. The protagonist also grants us entry into his romantic relationship and its collapse, the logistics of elder care, the mundane chatter of the workplace, and the occasional pub brawl. Kevin is thus the third in a lineage of storytellers, and seemingly the most committed to historical preservation.

Just as the mythical figure of Kronos-Saturn devoured his offspring, per Roman lore, Frankie’s violence consumed his family; and ultimately, heedless of intention, time has eroded his memories and bodily autonomy. So too has it relentlessly decayed Kilbryde into historical amnesia, with the ‘new toon’ now resembling “a fuckin’ cartoon.” In the contemporary narrative, Frankie insists that the James Hamilton Heritage Loch (rehabilitated in the 1990s) is “no’ a real loch” – his father William had familiarised him with the “auld wan” through his stories, while Frankie himself had known it only as drained land in his youth. The site’s 15^th-century Mains Castle, formerly owned by the noble Lindsay family, is the setting of the historical murder recovered by Kevin and presented under the title “Crawford’s Hole”: the cruel measures of scion Alexander Lindsay of Dunrod, who drowned a vassal in the lake, epitomise a feudal hierarchy of domination. The tale can be upheld as a lens through which Frankie views the District Council’s urban governance, itself another form of oppressive imposition. Frankie’s judgement of his hometown is mercurial, claiming that “E.K.’s no’ got any history […] apart fae gang fights, dodgy politicians and dangerous wummin,” yet begrudging every change undergone by the “auld toon,” now confined to the village north of the centre, whose inn he regularly frequents. Even something as modest as the memorial plaques in the James Hamilton Heritage Park – inaugurated concurrently with the loch’s reinstatement – gives it the appearance of “a circle of death.”

It remains unclear whether Frankie’s resentments derive from an inherent fear of his powerlessness against time’s passage or simply from a poorly managed temper amplified by colloquial bluntness. His deep-seated resistance to change and rejection of the New Town’s utopian trajectory surfaces in his denouncement of the pageantry surrounding East Kilbride’s establishment as Scotland’s first New Town. Per one anecdote, the Queen was invited for a state visit, and Frankie’s friend Tam, recently housed in one of the development’s new flats, was to receive her in a media event. The Development Corporation supplied new furniture “tae save any kind of civic embarrassment”; however, it was swiftly taken away following the Royal visit. The modernist dream is merely a fleeting performance, a flashy “cartoon.”

Kevin’s critiques of E.K.’s changing physiognomy are equally acute, although softened by a less indignant exposition. Throughout the book, he documents a series of ‘town-planning compromises’: the library inside the shopping mall less-than-ideally positioned adjacent to a noisy ice rink; the railway station inconveniently distant from the town centre. Moreover, since the New Town’s golden years, its status and countenance have precipitated: the “decent shops” which positioned E.K. as a paramount retail destination have relocated, burdening the town with vacant storefronts, inflated rents, and parking charges that breed community resentment. The council-managed arts venues have become “creatively indolent” and either unable or unwilling to invest in substantive programming or novel material. Things in E.K. are functional enough to avert crisis, but inconvenient enough to fuel popular frustration: The pool of the Dollan Aqua Centre “had been built either just too short or just too long for Olympic standard”; The town itself is large enough to rank among Scotland’s biggest towns, yet too small to achieve city status or support a professional football team (at least for much of its history).

Among Kevin’s peers emerge light-hearted allegations of planning and government corruption surrounding speculative greenfield acquisition and opportunistic rezoning; in the school’s staffroom, colleagues bemoan the Labour Party’s private finance initiative whose incentives had allowed the school to be built, subject to high long-term repayment plans and strict operational constraints where one “could hardly open a window without having to fill online forms.” The comedic relief punctuating these discourses signals a widespread resignation to the status quo.

Kevin recalls visiting the Civic Centre with his grandfather at a young age. Here, he observed first-hand the district’s civic demotion and loss of administrative autonomy, as Kilbryde’s ancient coat of arms was removed on the spot and replaced with South Lanarkshire Council’s insignia following its acquisition of administrative control in the late 1990s. He offers further insight into the town’s industrial decline through the defunct Rolls-Royce factory “that made East Kilbride,” whose former grounds have been repurposed for the sprawl of new housing. For Kevin, the volume-built “flimsy new-build matchboxes” in the outskirts contrast with the “solid” masonry housing stock built by the local authorities in the 1950s, typified by the McLuskies’ ex-council family home in the Westwood area. The narrator reflects on the practice of mono-blocking, which is symptomatic of a typology shift. It became a standard UK-wide planning measure from the 1990s onwards due to increasing car ownership, prompting front gardens to be paved over for parking and reconfiguring the allocation of outdoor space. Despite mono-blocking ostensibly being applied retroactively to Frankie’s house, sacrificing its front garden, visitors attending the wake of his wife must still park on pavements, with “prams and wheelchairs being relegated to the road,” in a comically busy visual scene testifying to the add-on solution’s inadequacy – once again, a functional enough measure creating just enough inconvenience to perpetuate the town’s communal grievance.

In contrast to his father, Kevin experiences bursts of authentic civic pride. In admiring the Old Parish Church with its clock tower, he recognises the origin of his architectural appreciation: “It must have been inspired by having read my old grandpa’s stories.” He navigates considerable hardship – a failed relationship, the deaths of his mother and brother, and his father’s escalating care demands – with resolve and levity, but his fragility emerges through embedded folk narratives. The ballad “A Man and a Dog and a Horse,” which recounts a trio becoming lost and frozen to death in snow, is poignantly inserted immediately after Kevin’s discovery that fatherhood cannot happen for the time being, and the frosty paralysis echoes his struggle to accept his partner’s decision. In the account “The Auld Clachan Bell,” of historical significance, the good news of the death of James Graham of Claverhouse and the defeat of the Stuarts is delivered to the villagers of Kilbryde (1689). This frames Kevin’s discovery of his father’s death, which elicits a confusion of sadness and relief. Over time, Kevin came to take pride in caregiving, no longer recognising his father as “monster,” but rather “just a weak old man.” By the end, Kevin deflects others’ jokes about paternal resemblance and yet, sitting in the village pub in the final scene, he is wearing his father’s bunnet and repeating one of his stories, enacting circular continuity. Just before this, the reader has learned, not without surprise, about a violent outburst which had contributed to his romantic relationship disintegrating: unlike his father, however, he is overwhelmed with guilt.

Kilbryde is a story of human and urban trauma. It focuses on three generations of men, each embodying a response to time’s passage and urban transformation. Kevin ultimately redeems the person he has observed crossing death’s door, defenceless and pathetic, not by acquitting his cruelty, but by recognising that elements of the old man’s life – his stories, his wit, and even his resistance – are a form of testimony worth preserving. Thus, he grants Frankie’s anecdotes a place alongside his grandfather’s within the annals of collective memory. If the New Town project was conceived according to principles of efficiency, rationality, and standardisation, Kevin looks back at the past to dignify the variety and contingency that modernist urban planners sought to systematise. Human suffering, as he now understands it, is neither singular nor insignificant: through tales of Covenanters, witches, and commoners, he recognises that loss and decay are inscribed upon the fabric of his community. “It struck me as weird that civic nostalgia was reserved for the ill,” comments Kevin while describing the interior décor of E.K.’s health facilities, namely the Hairmyres Hospital and the health centre, where he studies local landmarks etched across curtains and glass surfaces. The hospital, liminal between life and death and nexus of individual and collective grief, functions as the novel’s anchor point: it is where he and his father reconnect after his mother’s death, where Kevin is treated during critical moments of his youth and adulthood, and where his grandfather documents George Orwell composing Nineteen Eighty-Four. The McLuskie lineage proves that memory and continuity can persist within the incessant, all-devouring flux of time. Thus, through preservation of legends, myths, and popular accounts of the old and new towns, the ‘compromises’ and shortcomings of East Kilbride, too, can be redeemed.

Get a copy of ‘Kilbryde’ here: Publications | writing