Character Driven: Laura Marney on For Faughie's Sake

Born in Glasgow, and a long-term resident of the city's West End, Laura Marney's career as a novelist began in 2004 with No Wonder I Take A Drink, a funny and passionate novel about a small Highland community replete with scandals, secrets and emotional conflict. She has written three more since then, and with her focus on female protagonists, the mores of relationships and the effects of heartbreak and romance, she is sometimes labelled as a 'chick-lit' writer, although this is misleading – far more important than the relationships, the sex, and the betrayals in her novels are the banter, her acutely observed ear for Scots patter, and the black, gallows humour we value so highly in this country. “Men, when they see a book written by a woman, assume that it is going to be 'chick lit,'” she says. “Some of my writing is quite girly, but it's also vicious. It's about big issues. There's no reason it should only be read by women.”

The girl-meets-boy plots of most chick-lit fare are far less complex than her intricately constructed personal dramas. With her new novel, Marney has pushed the political, socially-conscious themes of her work to the fore, engaging with issues that are utterly vital in modern Scotland – the independence referendum, American imperialism, and sustainability – in a searing satirical fashion.

For Faughie's Sake is set in Inverfaughie, the same town of No Wonder I Take A Drink. “All the characters from the first book are coming back,” she reveals over a cappucino in a Byres Road cafe. “One of the main characters is Trixie – it's thinly-veiled autobiography." In the first book, Trixie "inherits a house in the Highlands (I never inherited a house in the Highlands!), goes there and tries to fit in, but she just can't. She ends up discovering a lot of stuff about her family." In the sequel, these secrets are still at play: "This is the thing that's awkward about writing sequels – people who have read the first book know her family secret. I didn't want to have to tell them again. But the people who haven't read the first book don't know it, so I can't assume a certain amount of knowledge.”

As ever, her writing is incredibly character-driven, but in the ten years since the first novel, she believes she has matured, and so have her characters. “I've grown up. For the characters, although in fictional terms only a couple of weeks have passed, they're much deeper this time around. The first novel was all about the jokes, the laughter. This time it is much more about developing the characters... Trixie is still shallow, still selfish. She's quite jaded and cynical. She's still a secret drinker,” says Marney. “But even she begins to realise that you need community. If you want people to be on your side, then you need to be on their side, and you need to work with them. She learns a lesson. There are bigger forces at play in this novel.”

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“My writing is quite girly, but it's also vicious. It's about big issues” - Laura Marney

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Those “forces” include a Donald Trump-like figure, Sol, who has designs on the local 'machair' – a Gaelic word meaning 'common grazing lands.' “He comes to town and buys up the machair because he wants to build a polo resort,” says Marney. “That begins a whole tussle over land reform, which is a really important issue in Scotland.” Each of the issues she examines connect to the question being asked in the referendum in September – do people want to govern themselves, or be governed by Westminster? Who should be making choices about the wealth, the welfare of Scotland and its people?

“The town of Inverfaughie is like a microcosm of Scotland,” Marney continues. “It's got all the issues that Scotland has got; it's got the salmon, the whisky, the water, all the resources, all the sustainables. The novel has a lot to do with sustainability – there is a kind of hippy community in the book (they're not really hippies, but that's what everyone calls them), and their philosophy is to do everything as sustainably as they can. They win the village round.” For Marney, this victory is deeply symbolic. “I've seen this in action,” she says. “I've seen it happen in other small Scottish towns. I've seen people handing out canvas bags, and then weeks later everyone in the town is using them. This kind of small-scale, local community action can really have an impact.”

As she researched the novel, she became aware of “just how rich Scotland is; how incredibly wealthy we are as a people, in terms of resources, and how most of us don't have access to that wealth. Most of us are totally blind to this fact, too. That's a lot to do with Crown Estates owning all the rights to everything.” She cites one piece of eco-technology, the Archimedes Turbine, which uses water from rivers to generate clean power, as an example of technology we could use, were it not for the way land is owned in Scotland.

Another issue she tackles head on is the notion of American cultural imperialism. “Ever since I was young, I have felt the encroachment of American culture on Scottish culture, and it worries me,” she says. “SoI wanted a Hollywood movie to come and take over the town. I've been on the fringes of this type of filming before – they behave as if they've a god-given right to be there; they change all the signs in the town; they just do what they like. They own the town, because they are paying everybody lots of money.”

The film crew temporarily take over the town's machair, galvanizing the community to take action. “The machair, for me, is the most socialist symbol you can get. It's for everybody, it's common grazing,” says Marney. “So everyone is supposed to get the benefit of it. But no, they have, very stupidly, temporarily sold the rights to this American film company. Westminster get involved, and they don't have the interests of the town at heart at all. They just care about tax dollars, and so they shaft people.” She stops herself mid-flow and laughs. “I'm telling you the whole plot, I shouldn't be doing this!”

Marney was keen to tackle the independence question, but not head on – not in Edinburgh or Glasgow, and not by examining the Yes / No binary of the political campaigns. Had she decided how she would vote before she began writing? “The formal line is that I was undecided,” she says. “I don't think I ever really was, but I didn't want to just let my heart make the decision. I wanted to think it through. You have to, I think it's only fair to yourself.” Marney believes “you have a responsibility to vote in the best interests of the country,” a statement which seems admirably non-partisan. “I really did want to look into it and research it, and it seemed like it would be quite tedious and boring wading my way through lots of textbooks,” she says mischievously. “I thought why not have fun, and explore this with my characters?”

Marney was also wary of tying the novel too directly to the referendum. “I want people to be able to pick up the book in 10 or 15 years' time and be engaged with the issues, rather than focusing on the bickering and pettiness that goes on,” she says. “The idea was to sneakily introduce this idea that yes, you do have power, and you can use that power. A lot of people will just sit there, believing they have no power, and that there is nothing they can do about anything.” For her, the sustainability movement is a key example of people power. “You start with the canvas bags, and by the time they have been adopted, you move on to the next thing.” She enthuses about cars run on used vegetable oil from chip shops, and the huge potential of tidal lift for generating clean energy. These, she feels, are things we could adopt more easily in an independent Scotland.

“I didn't want to browbeat people into voting Yes,” she says. “Where's that going to get you? I wanted to present people with a kind of 'Aye, right enough!' feeling. I think a lot of women, in particular, are reluctant to talk about the referendum – they don't want to be drawn into debates about it, they don't want to fall out with anybody. I think it's really important that we don't sleepwalk our way into a No vote without having thought about it, or talked about it. I don't care how people vote – they are entitled to vote how they like, as long as they have thought about it. And see all this shite about 'We haven't been given enough information...' How much more information do you want?”

For Marney, the most important thing is engaging older voters. “We've got to get the wee bingo ladies on board. They are crucial. I feel like going down to that Partick bingo hall and just engaging them in conversation. I've done it once, but I need to do it more regularly. These are the people who read my books, and they might be swayed. I understand peoples' concerns about their pensions, and other issues, or if they feel they don't like Alex Salmond. But we have to look beyond that. We have to think about the future. A lot of people aren't yet doing that.”

A member of National Collective, she refutes criticism of that movement, which some perceive as being too middle class, or have accused of preaching to the already-converted. “Perhaps they are preaching to the converted, but if I'm hearing that message four or five times a day, every time I open my email; if I'm seeing it all the time, it's keeping the issues in my mind, and making me speak to other people about it,” she says. “It would be nice to widen it out,” but “National Collective is young, it is middle class perhaps, but I have no criticisms – they're doing everything they can for their future.” She praises writers like Alasdair Gray, and the Sunday Herald, for publicly declaring their support for the Yes campaign. “I think that is a very brave thing to do. I know other writers who haven't done it. I was hesitant about coming out myself, at least publicly – in my personal life I will do everything I can to convince people to vote Yes, to win people round.”

The novel, however, required a different tactic. “The book is the sneaky, softly-softly catchy-monkey approach to those old bingo ladies,” she says, the mischievous grin returning. “Sneaking up and tapping them on the shoulder, rather than punching them in the face.”