The Dear Green Place by Archie Hind

Archie Hind died not only just before he was to appear at the Aye Write festival, but before this re-release. It's a shame that The Dear Green Place wasn't reprinted earlier and oftener, because it's brilliant. The book is about Mat Craig, a Glaswegian clerk, and later slaughterhouse worker, whose ambition it is to write a novel. It's notable that readers are never in any doubt that Mat's novel will be well written, because Mat is clearly a version of Archie, so in a sense he's working on the novel that we're reading. And the novel that we're reading is of a very high quality indeed. This edition also includes, for the first time, a fragment of Fur Sadie, the unfinished follow-up novel, and it's supplemented by a sympathetic and informative introduction by Alasdair Gray, who also contributes an afterword explaining where the plot of Fur Sadie may have gone. All of this is fantastic. The Dear Green Place is in fact clearly the best novel ever written by man, woman, trained monkey, or anyone else who could conceivably bash a keyboard. And the fact that I'm the author's grandson has obviously had absolutely no influence whatsoever on this review... [Keir Hind]