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The Dear Green Place
This is an autobiographical novel about a working class writer. The Dear Green Place is the city of Glasgow in which the writer finds so much beauty.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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249 people want to read
About the author
Archie Hind
3 books3 followersArchie Hind was a Scottish writer and the author of The Dear Green Place (1966).
The Dear Green Place was his only completed work, but it won four major awards and has been listed as one of the best 100 Scottish novels of all time.
The success of The Dear Green Place, a reference to his birthplace and hometown of Glasgow, turned Hind from a trolleybus driver/former slaughterhouse worker into a successful and notable writer. He won 1966’s Guardian First Book Award. Hind went on to publish journalistic articles and wrote several plays and theatrical revues, notably for Glasgow's Citizen's Theatre.
The unfinished manuscript of Fur Sadie was thought to have been lost or destroyed, but it was pieced together by Alasdair Gray and journalist/literary agent John Linklater, and was published along with The Dear Green Place on 15 March 2008.
The Dear Green Place was his only completed work, but it won four major awards and has been listed as one of the best 100 Scottish novels of all time.
The success of The Dear Green Place, a reference to his birthplace and hometown of Glasgow, turned Hind from a trolleybus driver/former slaughterhouse worker into a successful and notable writer. He won 1966’s Guardian First Book Award. Hind went on to publish journalistic articles and wrote several plays and theatrical revues, notably for Glasgow's Citizen's Theatre.
The unfinished manuscript of Fur Sadie was thought to have been lost or destroyed, but it was pieced together by Alasdair Gray and journalist/literary agent John Linklater, and was published along with The Dear Green Place on 15 March 2008.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 14, 2015
A classic of writer-failure and the tormented writing life, on a par with Zola’s The Masterpiece and Gissing’s New Grub Street. Mat Craig is a working class intellectual whose intellectualism is a matter of pride for his supportive wife (a supportive spouse? what writers have those?!), but one of a complex nature for himself, possessing ambitious notions of the artist’s role in the world and whatnot, and a matter of embarrassment for his no-nonsense mother and brother. Stepping down from his soulless office position to take up work in a slaughterhouse (a profession described in squeamish detail in this novel), Craig wrestles with the writer’s dilemma—form and content—and struggles to find a place for himself in the harsh industrial climate of 1960s Glasgow, where writing and culture were never the workingman’s priority. A strange kind of paean to the city, also.
December 10, 2024
Fantastic. Has parallels to John's Edwards "Stoner" in that it is very human, realistic and existential to the core. People can have so much passion for something yet never see those passions fulfilled. A book where not much happens but it's writing that turns the pages.
He had lived all his life until present with some vague expectation. He had as Scott F Fitzgerald put it "a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life". For of course, what he had expected didn't come; he had expected all life to retain the quality of youth, to be always latent with growth, movement, interest, and he expected too some particular event, some achievement which would mark, signify thet the promises of life were to be kept. In some way his sons birth was significant in that it marked the time when his expectations, the note in which he held, had become due. But it was as if life, the payee, had become bankrupt"
"That dew dropped leaf seen fresh and new with only it's greeness and wet is now seen through a haze of memory and association. The physical world comes to us again and again until we become tired of it and for moments become just a little bored and satiated. His desires become more complex, richer; and it is here that he is often drawn up short, feels the violent tug of the curb."
He had lived all his life until present with some vague expectation. He had as Scott F Fitzgerald put it "a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life". For of course, what he had expected didn't come; he had expected all life to retain the quality of youth, to be always latent with growth, movement, interest, and he expected too some particular event, some achievement which would mark, signify thet the promises of life were to be kept. In some way his sons birth was significant in that it marked the time when his expectations, the note in which he held, had become due. But it was as if life, the payee, had become bankrupt"
"That dew dropped leaf seen fresh and new with only it's greeness and wet is now seen through a haze of memory and association. The physical world comes to us again and again until we become tired of it and for moments become just a little bored and satiated. His desires become more complex, richer; and it is here that he is often drawn up short, feels the violent tug of the curb."
August 4, 2024
A love story to writing and to Glasgow. Author Archie Hind is emotive, bringing a distinctive voice and intimate kinship with the people he writes about and the people his protagonist Mat Craig lives with, a kinship that is strained by his simultaneous disengagement from them and the way they exist in the world and in their heads.
"As the nights got duller, they'd talk in mysterious hushed voices about all the important things in life, like stars and ghosts and sex and war and from the older boys there would be strange rumours of that other faraway world of men and women. Mat and Geordie would stay there in fascination listening to these stories, feeling strange incumbencies, vague premonitions, the glamorous awesome fear of living."
"He was standing on the bridge looking over the parapet into the dirty water, at the very spot where Boswell had stood and looked at the widest streets in the whole of Europe. Gles Chu! Glasgow! The dear green place! Now a vehicular sclerosis, a congestion of activity! He felt for a cigarette in his pocket and the match which he lit flared bitterly in the cold air. The city about him seemed so real, the buildings, the bridge, the trams, the buses, so separate and hard and discrete and other. He felt again a wave of nostalgia for another kind of existence - waxed fruit, sword sticks, snuff, tobacco, shining brass valves, steam pipes, jet ware, wag-at-the-wa's, cahootchie balls -- all the symbols of confidence, possibility, energy, which had lived before this knotted, tight, seized-up reality which was around him had come to be."
"He remembered how he and Helen had made plans about their marriage. They had imagined a house of their own, cosy nights by the fire, long slow evenings with the clock ticking slowly and Mat sitting writing, and their friends would all come and sit and eat open sandwiches, drinking coffee and talking; and music, listening to the Vienna Philharmonic under Furtwangler on the gramophone. Instead of the vicious knockout drinks like whisky and gin they would drink wine and there would be talk, witty, relaxed, and coruscating with ideas. Out of all this Mat was sure he could write brilliant and exhilerating books. He had the young man's sense of the particularity of his thoughts, their uniqueness, and he would think like Andre Chenier when knocking at his head, 'There's something there.' They would gather round them a circle of friends, young, modern, talented, and their whole lives would be lived in a glow of creativeness and love."
"The choice of foreign writers came from the same sense of deprivation. A whole background against which the drama and the seriousness of life could be played out was missing from their lives. All the background against which a novelist might set his scene, the aberrant attempts of human beings and societies to respond to circumstances, all that was bizarre, grotesque and extravagant in human life, all that whole background of violence, activity, intellectual and imaginative ardour, political daring. All that was somehow missing from Scottish life. In lieu of all this artistic and human extravagance, all the menace, violence and horror which had been the experience of so many European writers, in Scottish life there was only a null blot, a cessation of life, a dull absence, a blankness and the diminuation and weakening of all the fibres of being, of buildings not blown up but crumbling and rotten, of streets not running with blood or rivers of fists but with wan puddles, a withering of existence, no agony of living, no cry of warning which extravagance and outrageousness sets up. It was a country which seemed wrapped in a Scotch mist of understatement, where the edges are blurred, shapes and colours taking on the neutrality of spiritual deprivation - a lack of definition, phlegmatic, timorous, apologetic, diffident, hesitant. The canny Scot with his death stultifying safety."
"As the nights got duller, they'd talk in mysterious hushed voices about all the important things in life, like stars and ghosts and sex and war and from the older boys there would be strange rumours of that other faraway world of men and women. Mat and Geordie would stay there in fascination listening to these stories, feeling strange incumbencies, vague premonitions, the glamorous awesome fear of living."
"He was standing on the bridge looking over the parapet into the dirty water, at the very spot where Boswell had stood and looked at the widest streets in the whole of Europe. Gles Chu! Glasgow! The dear green place! Now a vehicular sclerosis, a congestion of activity! He felt for a cigarette in his pocket and the match which he lit flared bitterly in the cold air. The city about him seemed so real, the buildings, the bridge, the trams, the buses, so separate and hard and discrete and other. He felt again a wave of nostalgia for another kind of existence - waxed fruit, sword sticks, snuff, tobacco, shining brass valves, steam pipes, jet ware, wag-at-the-wa's, cahootchie balls -- all the symbols of confidence, possibility, energy, which had lived before this knotted, tight, seized-up reality which was around him had come to be."
"He remembered how he and Helen had made plans about their marriage. They had imagined a house of their own, cosy nights by the fire, long slow evenings with the clock ticking slowly and Mat sitting writing, and their friends would all come and sit and eat open sandwiches, drinking coffee and talking; and music, listening to the Vienna Philharmonic under Furtwangler on the gramophone. Instead of the vicious knockout drinks like whisky and gin they would drink wine and there would be talk, witty, relaxed, and coruscating with ideas. Out of all this Mat was sure he could write brilliant and exhilerating books. He had the young man's sense of the particularity of his thoughts, their uniqueness, and he would think like Andre Chenier when knocking at his head, 'There's something there.' They would gather round them a circle of friends, young, modern, talented, and their whole lives would be lived in a glow of creativeness and love."
"The choice of foreign writers came from the same sense of deprivation. A whole background against which the drama and the seriousness of life could be played out was missing from their lives. All the background against which a novelist might set his scene, the aberrant attempts of human beings and societies to respond to circumstances, all that was bizarre, grotesque and extravagant in human life, all that whole background of violence, activity, intellectual and imaginative ardour, political daring. All that was somehow missing from Scottish life. In lieu of all this artistic and human extravagance, all the menace, violence and horror which had been the experience of so many European writers, in Scottish life there was only a null blot, a cessation of life, a dull absence, a blankness and the diminuation and weakening of all the fibres of being, of buildings not blown up but crumbling and rotten, of streets not running with blood or rivers of fists but with wan puddles, a withering of existence, no agony of living, no cry of warning which extravagance and outrageousness sets up. It was a country which seemed wrapped in a Scotch mist of understatement, where the edges are blurred, shapes and colours taking on the neutrality of spiritual deprivation - a lack of definition, phlegmatic, timorous, apologetic, diffident, hesitant. The canny Scot with his death stultifying safety."
December 18, 2024
The only redeeming feature is the vivid descriptions of Glasgow and life in the city at the time of writing. Distracted by what becomes a self indulgent spiral about exceptionalism and wasted talent. For me, the main character’s pretentiousness distracts from what could have been a more in depth analysis on working class experiences in the arts.
March 13, 2023
This book is Scotland's answer to the incredible Stoner by John Williams. It's the story of Mat Craig and his struggle to balance his work and family life with his desire to be a writer, a dream at odds with his Calvinist upbringing in working-class Glasgow in the middle of the 20th century. I found Mat so incredibly relatable. His Sophie's Choice is surely one that every creative has had to face at some time in their lives - the curtailed comfort and security of the nine-to-five life, or the freedom and reward of the hand-to-mouth life of the artist?
I cannot stress enough how much I loved this book. It is captivating and it is sharp, and it's a tribute to a city that Archie Hind knew and loved so well. Mat's story is very much an echo of Archie's own life, so much so that it almost reads as metafiction. It makes perfect sense to me that Archie and Alasdair Gray were such good friends because their writing styles are so similar - intelligent, evocative, precise - I'm just sorry that this book doesn't seem to have as much of a reach as Alasdair's work because it deserves so much more.
"Sometimes ... he would feel again his own ridiculousness weakness and inadequacy, the meagreness of his spiritual possessions, his physical poverty, his feeble stumblings and gaucheries, the paucity of this world, the refractory city, the numbing tenements and streets, his crumbling damp rooms, the Scotch sneer on his neighbour's face, the load, the weight, the density, the insistent immediateness of what is called living. His writing would become to him a jeering, ugly travesty. He would feel this sneering disgust which was in itself disgusting, a double disgust. And he was never sure whether his revulsions came from the grim, twisted mockery of life at art, or the inflated, lying mockery of art at life."
I cannot stress enough how much I loved this book. It is captivating and it is sharp, and it's a tribute to a city that Archie Hind knew and loved so well. Mat's story is very much an echo of Archie's own life, so much so that it almost reads as metafiction. It makes perfect sense to me that Archie and Alasdair Gray were such good friends because their writing styles are so similar - intelligent, evocative, precise - I'm just sorry that this book doesn't seem to have as much of a reach as Alasdair's work because it deserves so much more.
"It just seems like a week or two since the beginning of last spring. Every year gets shorter." Mat stood for a moment sawing his hand in the air... opening his mouth to speak, changing his mind. Then he burst out, "I mean you have a kind of crazy idea that you are exempt. That you have some kind of purpose. Something which you've forgotten but will remember someday. Then you look out of the window and you see that the light mornings are drawing in again. And you think - another year gone - and faster every time."
June 19, 2025
The most tortured I have ever seen an artist. The philosophical context of the book is a bit outdated and the book was certainly heavy on its philosophical monologues. I would probably not recommend this book to most people.
Nevertheless, it also has some of the most intimate and personal descriptions of the writing process I have ever read. I felt myself struggling with Mat, laboring over every word, struggling to find theme and connection in a random universe, hating my own lack of innate brilliance, forgetting that the ability to labor is its own brilliance. Some of these tortured passages so resonantly describe the pain, jealousy and self doubt that accompany the insane assumption that we have something worthy to say in this world.
I might have identified a little too strongly with Mat. Highkey would take a job at the slaughterhouse over whatever accounting thing he had going on for sure.
Nevertheless, it also has some of the most intimate and personal descriptions of the writing process I have ever read. I felt myself struggling with Mat, laboring over every word, struggling to find theme and connection in a random universe, hating my own lack of innate brilliance, forgetting that the ability to labor is its own brilliance. Some of these tortured passages so resonantly describe the pain, jealousy and self doubt that accompany the insane assumption that we have something worthy to say in this world.
I might have identified a little too strongly with Mat. Highkey would take a job at the slaughterhouse over whatever accounting thing he had going on for sure.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 23, 2024
Amazing writing. The language used to describe the ordinary life and its activities brings these to 3D life. The author brings us through the torturous and torturous process of seeing to establish himself as a writer/artist. I’m never sure whether the novel’s hero is passionate about writing, or about the idea of being a writer, and we’re often frustrated by the decisions he makes in his journey to get there. The ultimate failure of the quest, leading to his return to an “ordinary” job, though, leaves us sad if not surprised. There are some amazing passages of prose, including his first description of the work in the slaughterhouse - not necessarily comfortable reading, but incredible writing. He also brings to life the period and people of Glasgow. I changed upon this bill in the shop, never having heard of it before. My life is richer as a result.
April 28, 2019
The Dear Green Place is a look into the life of Mat Craig. A man in an impossible position: he is a working class Glasgow man who wants to write literature. Society demands that he put the books down and get to work - particularly so he can support his wife and child and 'make something of himself' in a stereotypical working class way. But he meditates - he muses - he hangs around with arsehole literary types - he wants to write - he knows that writing and being working class can't be mutually exclusive positions - or are they?
A great book about a small man from a small world trying to see he can rise above and see the smallness of the everyday life alongside the greatness of all history that has he is allowed to read about, but never take part in.
A great book about a small man from a small world trying to see he can rise above and see the smallness of the everyday life alongside the greatness of all history that has he is allowed to read about, but never take part in.
March 4, 2021
This book ebbs and flows from the reality of a working class Glaswegian to the rambling, artistic thoughts of his work, influences and conflicts. I personally preferred the former sections, but there is no doubt the writing throughout the whole novel is rich, textured and – at points – quite touching.
July 16, 2021
An at times unwieldy mix of a writers life juxtaposed with a workingman's life with a dollop of philosophy and political theorizing set against the grimy backdrop of Glasgow. A case of perhaps too much thrown into the word soup to produce a fully satisfying meal, this novel still retains a strong sense of time and place with Glasgow and the people who lived there vividly described.
February 20, 2022
A story rich with detail and one man's struggle with what art means to him in a world where you still gotta work.
March 25, 2025
Novel about a working glass Glaswegian who is conflicted between his social roots and responsibilities, and his desires to be a writer. Some poetic descriptions of industrial Glasgow.
dnf
April 12, 2025DNF 30%
February 6, 2017
Difficult to rate. I enjoyed the portrait of Glasgow, finding beauty in a failing industrial landscape, as well as the skilled and emotive depiction of working class life. But I was disappointed by the sections in which the protagonist wrote about writing; they often were quite protracted and somewhat turgid, telling rather than showing. The ideas were more interesting than their execution, but still worth reading.
January 3, 2015
Enjoyed this book--partly because I related to it, always trying to accomplish something that seemed unattainable or only relevant in my imagination, then being brought back to mundanity by the daily grind. Very marxist :)
October 22, 2016
Beautiful prose and paints a wonderful picture of old Glasgow.
December 28, 2025
Dare I say trying too hard 🫣
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews