Rating: 4/5
Review:
Good but slightly hard going sometimes
Strange Loyalties is very good, but somewhat different in tone and
style from the first two Laidlaw books and for me it wasn’t quite
as effective.
Laidlaw is taking a
week off to privately investigate the death of his brother, who was
killed in a road accident. He doesn’t so much want to prove that
it wasn’t an accident as to understand who his brother was and why
he behaved so strangely in the months leading up to his death. His
enquiries become entangled with a police investigation into gangland
crime and rather an involved story gradually unfurls.
McIlvanney was a
brilliant writer, which is well in evidence here. However, rather
than a crime novel with a moral and philosophical bent as the first
two are, this is more of a moral and philosophical novel with some
crime as a driver. This means that we get a great deal of Laidlaw’s
(i.e. McIlvanney’s) philosophical musings which, without the
dilution of a crime plot, can get a bit much at times. Here’s a
typical paragraph:
“To pretend that
subjective conviction is objective truth, without testing it against
the constant daily witness of experience, is to abdicate from living
seriously. The mind becomes self-governing and the world is left to
chaos. That way, you don’t discover truth, you invent it. The
invention of truth, no matter how desperately you wish it to be or
how sincerely you believe in the benefits it will bring, is the
denial of our nature, the first rule of which is the inevitability of
doubt. We must doubt not only others but also ourselves.”
Now, that’s really
good, not to mention very timely at the moment, but there’s so much
of this kind of thing that I could have done with just a bit more
novel and a bit less philosophy to make it a more balanced read.
This could just be me and it’s still a very good book, but for me
it’s not quite in the same league as its predecessors.
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