The Dear Green Place & Fur Sadie

by Archie Hind, Alasdair Gray (Introduction)

Glasgow, 'the dear green place', is the setting for Archie Hind's acclaimed novel. Mat Craig is a young Glaswegian working-class hero and would-be novelist, whose desire to define himself as an artist creates social and family tensions. Set in 1960s Glasgow, The Dear Green Place is an absorbing and moving story, the whole book is invested with strong and sombre descriptions of the city around Mat.

Genres: Scotland, Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Archie 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.

Reviews

[Jackie Burnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Completely forgot to log this one… I read this in its entirety while stuck in the London airport for 13 hours. Would I have read it as quickly (or at all?) otherwise? No. Did it make my layover more enjoyable? Also no. But I read it!

[Kieran Gallagher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can respect the artistry, but this was not an easy book to get through. I learned a lot about Scotland. The portrayal of an artist struggling with their art is clearly personal and hard-won. But the writing is dense, the main character is frustrating and the tone is bleak. All of which makes for a difficult reading experience.

Fur Sadie had the makings of a better book.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because I love to read about Glasgow and the people that make it. All elements of this book (the main and unfinished novels, and even the article printed at the end) delivered on that front and made it an enjoyable read overall. I also really liked Alasdair Gray's introduction - so nice to hear from not only a contemporary of Archie Hind, but also a friend.
In the main novel 'The Dear Green Place', I didn't find the main character particularly compelling and felt that a lot of his musings on creative expression went over my head, so it dragged in parts. The descriptions of the city and the character interactions appealed more to me, and the quality of the writing kept me in it - some examples:
"A feeling of the slow peacefulness of time when life was full, protected, and without anxiety."
"Early morning, fresh and innocent as a lettuce leaf, with the world settled, provisionally, for peace - a truly lyrical moment."
"He felt the abrupt division between the tight inflexibility of his moral concerns and the indulgent whimsy of his thoughts."
On the other hand, I was immediately drawn to the main character and the premise in the unfinished novel 'Fur Sadie', and flew through reading it. It's such a shame that it was never completed - the excerpt was a 5* read for me. My favourite snippet from it:
"Though by that time I knew music. Crammed that fu' wi' it that I was sneezing semi-quavers, with a G clef on my brow instead of a kiss curl."
Lastly, I thought this passage from the 'Men of the Clyde' was a great interpretation of the struggle between ideology and day-to-day reality for working class people of the time:
"They [early 20th century Scottish socialists] had the fire which came from a moral belief in a political idea as expansive, generous and as hot as the head of steam in a boiler. We have a kind of safety valve in this country which lowers pressure of this kind. Perhaps it is just that the style of life in which a living has to be wrung from the world makes for men to whom work is always a preferred alternative to extremity... They had a stake in life which was more domestic than dramatic."

[Tama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alasdair Gray’s foreword:
“Our books were both about low-income Glasgow artists doomed to failure”! As are mine! I’m should lean into this theme I think… Though it’s aesthetic presence is all there in AAV.
“‘The Dear Green Place’ is a translation of ‘gles-chu.’”
“All good novels are historical—describe living people in a definite place and time.”
References Nabokov’s ‘The Gift’ for ‘The Dear Green Place,’ and ‘Für Elise’ for ‘Fur Sadie.’
Says his own work has a “masculine bias” alike other Scot’s like Welsh and MacIlvanney. But Hind writes from the perspective of a housewife. Fassbinder-coded..?

The opening line of ‘Gles-chu.’
“In every city you find these neighbourhoods.” This is the priority, to get to the bottom of cities and neighbourhoods specifically those of Glasgow.
He describes the feeling of being witness to beauty at a young age, the kind of feeling that can be hard to evoke after its happened however many times in the past.

“The sun was very hot and Mat felt the stiffness and dampness dry out of his shoulders as he felt the heat through his jacket.” The ubermensch worker who can shed the stresses of labour with the power of the sun in his spare time.

It takes a turn. A structure of intellectual riches to rags to working riches to intellectual r-rags to being working class with finality.

Reading of a man twisted up by this dilemma for 250 pages is addictive and o dont know why. To see where it ends up. But then what happens if it seemingly ends just with another twist in the other direction. (There’s four possibilities intellectual/working rags/riches that could keep twisting to each other forever). As is right, it ends on an emotional high and I can’t help empathising with Mat. That he suggests that he could be stronger than a man who works for writing instead, but then rejects that idea is admirable. That he is in this game explains the hypocrisy of artistry in a working class-dominant society (and the working class this denotes is the class who works most of their waking hours, or around half).

The final words are a childish negative perspective on Glasgow. Suggesting it as a place where nothing happens. People work at least…

[Isa · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The necessity to write out of what was present in his experience had been too great, the reluctance to externalise the drama or conflict which was implicit in his life too strong, for to do that was to take away what was most significant about his life - the very inwardness of his whole situation - its overt existence, its explicitness was exactly in the undramatic nature of his misery.”

On Fur Sadie,

It was a charming sample but I understand why Hind lost interest in it - still a shame to have not seen where it would have gone, though I I could see similar themes being explored to The Dear Green Place. The inexplicable mention of Sadie’s enormous breasts every couple pages was also redundant and tedious.

On The Dear Green Place,

This took a while to win me over. I was struggling to engage with it and really could not understand why this edition is studded with reviews that confidently claim it’s the greatest novel of all time. Near page 200 the attention to Mat’s thought process is suddenly amplified and accordingly so was my enjoyment. I thought Hind captures the frustrating bewilderment of both the creative process and the human experience really well. While he does not write with much subtlety, he spins words really beautifully, and I would overall recommend the read.

“Then he thought of something which made him laugh. He had got himself into this awful mess on behalf of literature.”

[Fee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuing the themes of artistic freedom vs social responsibility that Archie Hind wrote about in The Dear Green Place , in Fur Sadie we're introduced to a busy housewife who impulsively buys a second-hand piano in a fit of nostalgia.

I am absolutely gutted that Archie didn't finish this novel! The little we do have of it is so beautifully written, and despite only existing in seventy-three pages Sadie is fully realised. Her dedication to her ambition to learn to play the piano, even as she has to navigate around the barely hidden disapproval of her husband and sons, is endearing, and I will always wonder how her relationship with her piano teacher, Mr McKay, might have developed.

"McKay sat down and played Für Elise while Sadie sat stiff and upright on a hard chair, her hand clasped in her lap. ...He had turned to her. 'You know that wee tune, I suppose?'

'Oh yes,' she said. 'Fur Sadie,' and it wasn't until McKay put his head back and laughed that she clapped her hand to her mouth.

'Fur Sadie,' he said, laughing, missing out the umlaut and so turning the word into Glasgwegian. 'Fur Sadie.'"

[Karina O · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had expected a lot from The Dear Green Place but at times found it repetitive and over-written.

Shame Fur Sadie was never finished as you can immediately connect to the characters and would have made an interesting read !

[Kenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I want to like this more than I do. It’s incredible in lots of ways and really quite boring in a couple more. I’m worried this makes me a bad Glaswegian but we are where we are.

[katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF A Dear Green Place

[Amy Alderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up. Brilliantly written and engaging in parts, so dull and repetitive in others that I almost did not finish.

[AdamCl · Rating 3 out of 5]

such good accounts of glasgow but such boring meta-fiction

[Joe Middleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The tale of a Glasgow writer. Rich and innovative.

[Allison Tester · Rating 3 out of 5]

I adored the descriptions of Glasgow and the writing was really distinct and interesting, but the plot sloggggged and I couldn’t get past the inaccessibility of the main character- which was weird because we spend like 80% of the book in his head. But it just felt like I couldn’t actually get in his brain? Also, diva, stop talking about writing and actually write! Your wife deserves better!!!

[Callum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of emotion in this book, and much of it is beautifully written. As a working-class Glaswegian writer, it's scary but also cathartic to discover that many of the feelings and experiences within are entirely relatable (and fascinating on a historical level to see how much has changed in our green-grey city since the 1960s). Dear Green Place could've used more editing as lots of it can be rambling and disjointed, which is a shame because I see in it potential to have been a much greater novel with more international presence. Fur Sadie in terms of its form feels like a maturer work. We can see here Archie Hind's further development as a writer honing his craft - which is a shame, seen as how he never finished this, or any other novels afterwards. Fur Sadie feels like it was just beginning to get into the juicy bits by the time it finishes. He lived a wonderful life as far as I can tell, but writing novels never took off for him in terms of cultivating a sustainable long-term career through it. I sadly suspect that this is due to many of the sorts of obstacles that the protagonists of these two stories come up against.

P.S. One of his sons was my English teacher for a year in high school, and happened to be one of the coolest and best teachers that I've had - so, you might find it gladdening to know that love of literature is still being passed on to Glaswegians through the Hinds on into the 21st century.

[Christie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two great books (or one and a half at any rate) on life, love, work and art, viewed crisply thorugh the lens of 20th century working class Glasgow. 'The Dear Green Place' follows Mat Craig as he struggles between the compulsion to write, the suspicicion with which his calvinistic environment views any perceived artifice and the relative prospects of self betterment and acceptance between investing his time and energy in his writing and investing them in work, family and the economic millieu of a major centre of population.

In 'Fur Sadie', Hind again transposes artistic ambition against domestic and social necessities. Though the harshness and brutality of Mat Craig's immediate post war rememberings and explorations are not as grimly apparent as they are in 'The Dear Green Place', they do inform Sadie Anderson's insecurities and self inadequacies as she pursues mastery of the pianoforté in the wake of a lifetime spent in service of husband, father and sons.

Sadie Anderson ae Parkhead's journey with the bungalow dwelling Mr McKay who drudged his way to something less than brilliance but anything but mediocre was never completed, and we are left with an invitation from fellow novelist Alasdair Gray to complete it on his behalf.

The volume I read completes (poems excepted) with an essay/article about the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, who were in the midst of their famous 'work in' at the time of exploitation. In this more discursive form, Hind allows himself to express the Socialism which forged such a crucial part of the city's identity, and is allowed to bemoan the fact that 'the trade union movement won battle after battle with capitalism without ever engaging in a war'.

'The Dear Green Place & Fur Sadie' is not just an important and pivotal volume in Glasgow's literature. It is a visceral and unparallelled exploration of both, which will surely resonate on as many levels as Sadie's 'Doh' throughout the remaining working lifetimes of anyone who has ever fallen in love with Glasgow, with literature or with both.

I highly reccomend this book.

[Carol Hislop · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Dear Green Place and Fur Sadie are 2 separate books. The first one is the story of a man who wants to be a writer but doesn't have the time to write because he needs to work to earn money. He has a boring job as a bookkeeper which he leaves and then goes to work in a slaughterhouse-he seems to enjoy the work in the slaughterhouse better and the author writes very movingly about that work. Ultimately he decides to stop working to concentrate completely on writing and this is an emotional part of the book. The word "Glasgow" comes from the Gaelic words meaning "dear green place"-hence the title. My problem with this is that I think the story could have taken place in any of several cities in the UK and there was nothing much to link it to Glasgow other than a few references to the Clyde and the history of the city. Archie Hind is a skilled descriptive writer but he has the annoying habit of including long lists within sentences and I found this tiresome and lazy.
The second story "Fur Sadie" is an unfinished work which was compiled after the author's death by Alistair Gray. The title is a play on the Beethoven composition "Fur Elise". Archie Hind writes very movingly about Sadie and her attempts to learn to play the piano. Apparently Alistair Gray asked Archie Hind why he didn't finish writing the story and he said that it had developed a slow puncture-I like that analogy.

[Douglas Yannaghas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Dear Green Place is a sometimes boring but always beautiful reflection of the frustration of trying to work as an artist when trapped by class structure. It has a beautiful section set in a slaughter-house that makes every dragging section worth it. Fur Sadie is an unfinished masterpiece, and possibly a closeted lesbian love story? It's hard to guess at Hind's intentions, but Fur Sadie has far more dynamic storytelling and engaging characters than Dear Green Place did, without loosing any of the first novel's masterful interaction with Glasgow as a setting.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Dear Green Place is supposed to be a classic Scottish novel, but I just couldn't get into it. I found it over-written and excessively introspective. Fur Sadie, on the other hand, was shaping up to be a very engaging read, but Arthur Hind put it aside in the 1970s and never wrote another novel.

[Iain · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book that happens to be set in Glasgow.

Its really a rather overwrought story of writer's angst. I have never written a book, but I cannot see what morals have to do with writing a book.

[Dave Gilmour · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF i just could not relate to this book! Utterly boring.

[Satish · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can’t deny that it was written well, but only in the sense of language / verbiage. I was terribly bored by the plot. While I saw what he was trying to do with the story, it fell short for me.