Callum, Reine, Sylvie and Sparrow: A Fragmentary Novel by James Yorkston review: 'bursting with life'

At their best, the stories that make up James Yorkston’s new book have a winning combination of freshness and unpredictability, writes David Robinson

Interviewed last year, Fife musician James Yorkston mentioned that his agent ”has a collection of short stories that he’s trying to place somewhere” but that he also has “the bare bones of a novel sketched out in my head”. This book could be either one of them, though my money is on it being the first. The subtitle has probably been added because of the reading public’s well-known aversion to short stories, although I would have thought its dislike of fragmentary novels is even greater.

Either way, there are multiple links between these nine stories, in which we follow the career of Callum from kitchen skivvy and would-be artist to someone making a decent enough living from his music. Reine is the woman who puts up with him in the days of dead-end drifterdom, Sylvie the mother of his two children, Sparrow a friend who dies too young of cancer.

Although the title implies the centrality of these women to Callum’s life, the text doesn’t. Reine and Sylvie are only perfunctorily described: with Reine we don’t get much beyond the fact that she “was lovely, and that's why I loved her, funnily enough”, while with Sylvie the coup de foudre is so spectacular that he can hardly bring himself to look back at her after he spotting her tending a stall at a Parisian flea market. Neither woman matters to the narrative as much as Callum's own emotions, while the story he tells about Sparrow after her death is the weakest of three told by her friends while disposing of her ashes.

Yet there is another theme at the core of these stories and it is one that has dominated at least two of Yorkston’s three novels. As someone who has successfully sustained a career as a touring musician for over a quarter of a century at a time when this has become increasingly difficult, it is perhaps unsurprising that the risks of artistic failure haunt these stories from the start.

The first, longest and best of them - ostensibly about the lovely Reine, is at least as much about his unlovely friend Alan. The two of them, he writes, were “brought together by circumstances, both born with the burden of art”. This burden compelled them to seek it out on the Edinburgh Fringe, which meant setting up a fanzine to get the media accreditation needed for free tickets. The submissions they received were rubbish (“How superior we were. How we judged. How we laughed”) but so too were some of the shows in which they also saw the sheer desperation of middle-aged solo performers for any printed word of praise.

For all that, back in the day, Alan had the “scrunched up rage and look of disdain”, ambition and arrogance that seemed to delineate the artistic temperament. Yet when Callum receives an invitation to an exhibition of his work at a Kerry gallery, he is aghast to discover that what Alan means by “finding his groove” as an artist means nothing more than churning out tourist tat. This story is echoed in a later one when the now middle-aged Callum meets Mike, a fellow ornithologist still pathetically living on his one shining moment of success - playing bass on a one-hit wonder novelty song on Top of the Pops.

Success isn’t always so ephemeral. A poet friend of Callum’s father has reporters turn up for her funeral, another is mobbed by paparazzi while walking the dogs of a famous Englishwoman (why she is famous is, rather wonderfully, never explained). But Yorkston’s stories are at their best when they have nothing to do with any overarching ideas.

Take that opening story, in which Callum heads to Kerry to see his friend’s exhibition. As with a good road movie, it has a freshness and unpredictability and leads only into itself. A Spanish hippy is picked up en route, an old man is met in a graveyard, a stranger is kissed on a dancefloor, a night is spent joyfully belting out a few easy classics on bass guitar in a bar band. Inconsequential perhaps, but bursting with life all the same.

Callum, Reine, Sylvie and Sparrow: A Fragmentary Novel, by James Yorkston, Oldcastle Books, £10.99

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