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Gillespie
A leech, a pirate, a predator, an anti-Christ, a public benefactor and the fisherman's friend; such is Gillespie Strang in this remarkably powerful Scottish novel. Gillespie is the harsh prophet of the new breed of Scottish entrepreneur, prepared to use any means to achieve his insatiable ambition amongst the nineteenth-century fishing communities of the west coast. John MacDougall Hay (1881 - 1919) was born and raised in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, on which he based the setting for Gillespie. A Church of Scotland minister, his knowledge of such communities and his sombre vision of good and evil shape this, his finest novel.
- GenresScotland
512 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1914
About the author
John MacDougall Hay
5 books1 followerJohn MacDougall Hay was a Scottish novelist.
He was born and grew up in Tarbert, Argyll. He was initially a school teacher, but then became a Church of Scotland minister. He was the father of George Campbell Hay, the Scottish Gaelic poet.
He is mainly known for his novel Gillespie, set in a fictionalised version of his home town of Tarbert. It received favourable reviews when it was published in 1914, but was largely forgotten until it was re-discovered in the late 20th century. He also wrote a second novel Barnacles, and a collection of poems.
In poor health for much of his adult life, he died of tuberculosis at the age of only 39.
He was born and grew up in Tarbert, Argyll. He was initially a school teacher, but then became a Church of Scotland minister. He was the father of George Campbell Hay, the Scottish Gaelic poet.
He is mainly known for his novel Gillespie, set in a fictionalised version of his home town of Tarbert. It received favourable reviews when it was published in 1914, but was largely forgotten until it was re-discovered in the late 20th century. He also wrote a second novel Barnacles, and a collection of poems.
In poor health for much of his adult life, he died of tuberculosis at the age of only 39.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 6, 2026
Unrelentingly miserable. Every character is either evil or stupid or drunken, or out to get revenge against one of the above. Scottish fiction went through a phase of this in the early 20th century - lightless novels with misery heaped on grief heaped on despair. I'm sure there have been times and places where that was the case, but I'm certain there was also love, laughter and care, even in those dark times. It's a pity a significant portion of the Scottish literary convention was never to show any of that. Give me some light in the darkness, some joy to temper the grief, some hope to illuminate the despair. In fact, and I say this as a patriotic Scot, give me the English classic literary tradition - Dickens, Hardy, etc. - who all gave something to hang onto to make the bleakness bearable, be it beauty of language, or comic interludes, or love. Abandoned at 25% on the grounds that I'm finding it so depressing I can't bear to go on reading.
June 25, 2018
I absolutely adored this book and I’m a little bit gutted MacDougall Hay has fallen to the wayside over time, definitely deserves his place alongside Mackay Brown, Gray and the rest.
Written in plain English with broad Scot’s dialect, Gillespie is a novel set in a rural West Highland fishing village during the very early twentieth century with some very relevant themes over a hundred years later.
Gillespie, himself, is a horribly recognisable villain by today’s standards. His greed, banality and pettiness only serve to make him more loathsome without ever becoming two dimensional. Hay does allude to one explanation for the character’s behaviour but doesn’t offer it as an excuse.
This is a dark, brutal book juxtaposed with occasional moments of poignancy, memorable characters, vivid imagery, and just downright deserves to be read by more people.
While probably not for everyone, and it does have the odd flaw here and there, I can easily list Gillespie among my favourite books.
Written in plain English with broad Scot’s dialect, Gillespie is a novel set in a rural West Highland fishing village during the very early twentieth century with some very relevant themes over a hundred years later.
Gillespie, himself, is a horribly recognisable villain by today’s standards. His greed, banality and pettiness only serve to make him more loathsome without ever becoming two dimensional. Hay does allude to one explanation for the character’s behaviour but doesn’t offer it as an excuse.
This is a dark, brutal book juxtaposed with occasional moments of poignancy, memorable characters, vivid imagery, and just downright deserves to be read by more people.
While probably not for everyone, and it does have the odd flaw here and there, I can easily list Gillespie among my favourite books.
May 2, 2022
This novel was first published in 1914 - not a good time to make a debut - and was all but forgotten for the next fifty or so years. When it was reprinted in 1979 it was hailed in some quarters as if it was some sort of lost classic, compared to
The House with the Green Shutters
, with which it has some thematic similarities. Alasdair Gray describes Gillespie as having “the worst first chapter that ever introduced a novel worth reading.” The chapter is indeed overwrought, and overwritten, but lasts less than two pages.
The book’s subject, Gillespie Strang, is born under a bad sign. Literally. In an inn whose emblem is a dagger striking down. His mother fears all the male Strangs are doomed. This premonition haunts the book but not Gillespie himself. He is the type of man who might be described as a bad lot. On the make, sly and avaricious, tight with his money, he starts off trapping rabbits on others’ land, swiftly moves on and up, proposes to a local girl to cement a business deal with her father - a deal which condemns a neighbour to penurious widowhood - grows to be a power in the town, the fishing village Brieston, based on Hay’s boyhood home, Tarbert, on Loch Fyne. Structured over four books the novel describes Gillespie’s rise and rise through his and his family’s eyes and those of some of his neighbours. Herring fishing, its ups and downs, is a large presence in the early books; weather, storms and drought, a counterpoint to the tale. All are grist to Gillespie’s acquisitive mill.
Gillespie is a very Scottish novel and has that Calvinist intertwining of the religious with the everyday that pervades Scottish literature and even now, despite the decline in religious observance and belief, affects the Scottish character. Predestination hangs over Gillespie Strang like the striking dagger above the inn. Hay was a Church of Scotland minister, so this flavouring is unsurprising. A key phrase is the Biblical quote, “God is not mocked,” that the widowed Mrs Galbraith pins to her door after her eviction due to Gillespie’s dealings with his future father-in-law. It isn’t perhaps a book you would recommend as an introduction to Scottish writing, it is of its time - or perhaps earlier - and its casual references to “the Jew” who pawns items for the locals jar nowadays. And the overwriting too present in chapter one also plagues the book. There is a glossary at the back but not all the Scots expressions used in the novel can be found there. Yet let it wash over you; in most cases the sense will come through.
The viewpoint characters are complex and individual. One of them claims Scottish exceptionalism, “We are the land that barred out the Romans; the land that has pride without insolence; courage without audacity; blood with condescension.” While Mrs Galbraith reflects on the state of women, “They compromised themselves, not out of vice, but simply to please men, who take advantage,” “A woman will sacrifice everything, even life itself, which often is a slow martyrdom, to satisfy the claims of her family,” she herself plans to degrade Gillespie’s wife as a means to repay him the wrongs he has done her.
In an introduction (which, like most such, should not be read till after the book itself) Bob Tait and Isobel Murray say, “The English novel characteristically limits itself to issues more domestic than the Scots.” The strength of the English novel, “lies in analysis of individual, family or group relationships, of individual psychology, or in forms of novels of manners. Gillespie like other Scots novels, has a wider scope. To find similar scope and ambition we have to go to the Russian or American novel where matters political, social, philosophical and metaphysical are more commonly treated.” They explicitly compare it to Moby Dick in its “relentless questioning of the universe and the source and nature of evil.”
To modern tastes Gillespie as a novel might appear overcooked. Its roots lie in Victorian literature; there are reminders of Thomas Hardy in its grimmer scenes, of Dickens in its length and list of characters. It describes a rural/remote Scotland on the cusp of the modern age - a Scotland that has long gone - but reminds us that human nature is unchanging.
Alasdair Gray’s summation of Gillespie is that it is “good, but not throughout.” I’d go along with that.
The book’s subject, Gillespie Strang, is born under a bad sign. Literally. In an inn whose emblem is a dagger striking down. His mother fears all the male Strangs are doomed. This premonition haunts the book but not Gillespie himself. He is the type of man who might be described as a bad lot. On the make, sly and avaricious, tight with his money, he starts off trapping rabbits on others’ land, swiftly moves on and up, proposes to a local girl to cement a business deal with her father - a deal which condemns a neighbour to penurious widowhood - grows to be a power in the town, the fishing village Brieston, based on Hay’s boyhood home, Tarbert, on Loch Fyne. Structured over four books the novel describes Gillespie’s rise and rise through his and his family’s eyes and those of some of his neighbours. Herring fishing, its ups and downs, is a large presence in the early books; weather, storms and drought, a counterpoint to the tale. All are grist to Gillespie’s acquisitive mill.
Gillespie is a very Scottish novel and has that Calvinist intertwining of the religious with the everyday that pervades Scottish literature and even now, despite the decline in religious observance and belief, affects the Scottish character. Predestination hangs over Gillespie Strang like the striking dagger above the inn. Hay was a Church of Scotland minister, so this flavouring is unsurprising. A key phrase is the Biblical quote, “God is not mocked,” that the widowed Mrs Galbraith pins to her door after her eviction due to Gillespie’s dealings with his future father-in-law. It isn’t perhaps a book you would recommend as an introduction to Scottish writing, it is of its time - or perhaps earlier - and its casual references to “the Jew” who pawns items for the locals jar nowadays. And the overwriting too present in chapter one also plagues the book. There is a glossary at the back but not all the Scots expressions used in the novel can be found there. Yet let it wash over you; in most cases the sense will come through.
The viewpoint characters are complex and individual. One of them claims Scottish exceptionalism, “We are the land that barred out the Romans; the land that has pride without insolence; courage without audacity; blood with condescension.” While Mrs Galbraith reflects on the state of women, “They compromised themselves, not out of vice, but simply to please men, who take advantage,” “A woman will sacrifice everything, even life itself, which often is a slow martyrdom, to satisfy the claims of her family,” she herself plans to degrade Gillespie’s wife as a means to repay him the wrongs he has done her.
In an introduction (which, like most such, should not be read till after the book itself) Bob Tait and Isobel Murray say, “The English novel characteristically limits itself to issues more domestic than the Scots.” The strength of the English novel, “lies in analysis of individual, family or group relationships, of individual psychology, or in forms of novels of manners. Gillespie like other Scots novels, has a wider scope. To find similar scope and ambition we have to go to the Russian or American novel where matters political, social, philosophical and metaphysical are more commonly treated.” They explicitly compare it to Moby Dick in its “relentless questioning of the universe and the source and nature of evil.”
To modern tastes Gillespie as a novel might appear overcooked. Its roots lie in Victorian literature; there are reminders of Thomas Hardy in its grimmer scenes, of Dickens in its length and list of characters. It describes a rural/remote Scotland on the cusp of the modern age - a Scotland that has long gone - but reminds us that human nature is unchanging.
Alasdair Gray’s summation of Gillespie is that it is “good, but not throughout.” I’d go along with that.
June 23, 2024
For those who found The House with the Green Shutters too upbeat, I present this epic of Scottish miserablism from 1914. Set in the picturesque fishing village of Tarbert, Gillespie follows the adventures of the titular brute, a tight-fisted farmer-then-fisher whose lust for the lucre causes village-wide suffering for several painful storm-racked decades. Hay, a Church of Scotland minister, has a penchant for overwrought, bombastic religious imagery, much of which constitutes the slog portion of the novel, although the piece itself is a masterclass in unrestrained, melodramatic prose on a par with Zola at his fieriest pitches of elegant despair. The star of the novel is the West Scotland slang and the writer’s skill for transliterating the dialect of the Argyll folk, while the essential moral of greed corrupting and rotting all caught in its path remains an evergreen.
December 15, 2022
A natively Scottish tale where Capitalism collides head-on with small-town Calvinist values. An objectively different reading experience in 2022, where even Scottish entrepreneurs are praised for money-getting and job creation, young readers may be confused as to why the main protagonist of Gillespie attracts so much shade.
February 9, 2016
This is one of my favourite books. It's hard to find any redeeming features in the main character who is a greedy, egocentric brute yet somehow you find some sympathy for him when he finally gets his just deserts. A fantastically vivid insight into hand to mouth existence in a rural Scottish community in the early part of the 20th century. Written in standard English but with lots of direct speech in vibrant Scots.
March 21, 2007
Good companion piece to 'House with the Green Shutters'. While probably not quite as accomplished, it's even darker and has got probably the most radge ending to a book ever.
August 5, 2025
3.5
a good story but long, dense, and unbelievably moody
a good story but long, dense, and unbelievably moody
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews