The Lucky Charm of Major Bessop

Poor auld Burtie ...It wasnae a nice way to go, the way he went.

"Followed one of the trails, just beyond the 'lodge', to an old quarry and, on the moors just beyond, a cluster of weird outcrops formin a nat'ral citadel - remindin me o the Cullowhee Knobs, where a Cherokee Chief gave himself up to the Great Spirit. Cathy says ya can see a giant face on the quarry, but I couldn't - tho maybe I'm expectin the profile o that there Chief and he ain't there ... Anyways, on the further side of the rock, halfway down, you can scramble into a cave. It looks kinda small when you first see it through a tumble of that coconut-smellin gorse and nettles: you wouldn't think it would go far, just an alcove tryin too hard to be sinister, like some corny act at a Halloween party. That pamphlet I told ya about, it said you could only pass through it if you was a virgin ... where would ya be without the power of legends?

In that summer of '63, it was great to be young and abroad, at first. The beach was dirty, the seals was lazy, but it seemed the panorama of ole Europe was there before me. Now, I guess I fear for the kids, the kids everywhere. Back then, though, it was radiant days, radiant days.

A vulnerable and bullied boy vanishes from a boarding-school in an austerely beautiful part of the Scottish county of Fife. A young nurse from the American South encounters love - and culture-clash - at the school. Her beau, a teacher and former army officer, is a tense and troubled man. A precocious young aesthete stumbles towards maturity. A lecherous, alcoholic headmaster quotes Shakespeare at inopportune moments. Tragedy? Farce? Both? Offset by praise-poetry to Fife landscape and folk culture, Tom Hubbard's complex, sardonic tale scurries through unexpected corridors and caverns, up and down dubious stairs, its secret architecture reflecting the "Big Hoose" in which much of the action takes place ...
About the Author: Tom Hubbard is a Scottish novelist, poet and itinerant scholar who has worked in many countries. His permanent home is in his native Fife. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Budapest (ELTE), Connecticut (where he was Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professor of Scottish Literature in 2011) and Grenoble (as Professeur invité), and a Writer in Residence at the Château de Lavigny in Switzerland. His short book The Integrative Vision: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Baudelaire, Rilke and MacDiarmid (1997) was based on lectures to students of design at Glasgow School of Art. He was the first Librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library, from 1984 to 1992. His first novel Marie B. (Ravenscraig Press, 2008), based on the life of the Ukrainian-born painter Marie Bashkirtseff, was longlisted for a Saltire Society book award. His recent book-length poetry collections are The Chagall Winnocks (2011) and Parapets and Labyrinths (2013), both from Grace Note Publications, as well as a pamphlet collection, The Nyaff (2012), from Windfall Books of Kelty, Fife. An essay on the Scottish poet Harvey Holton (1949-2010) was published as a pamphlet by Fras Publications as Harvey Holton: Bard, Makar, Shaman (2013).

He has edited a volume of essays, The Poetry of Baudelaire, which will appear from the New York publisher Grey House in 2014. He has also recently made English and Scots versions of poems by the nineteenth-century Russian poet Lermontov for an anthology After Lermontov, edited by Peter France and Robyn Marsack (Carcanet 2014). He is on the editorial board of the journal Scottish Affairs, and an honorary visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh Institute of Governance, where he is working on a "Scotland and Europe" project with Dr Eberhard Bort.

Between 2000 and 2010 he was research fellow and editor of major bibliographical projects: BOSLIT (the Bibliography of Scottish Literature, University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland, at http: //boslit.nls.uk [2000-2005]), and BILC (the Bibliography of Irish Literary Criticism, National University of Ireland Maynooth, at http: //bilc.nuim.ie [2006-2010]).

The Lucky Charm of Major Bessop is Tom Hubbard's second novel.