Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

Charlie Grant, an intense young student at Glasgow University watches his father die. Overwhelmed by the memory of this humble yet dignified death, Charlie is left to face his own fierce resentment for his adulterous mother.

With shades of Hamlet and Camus, William McIlvanney's first novel is a revelatory portrait of youth, of society and of family.

Genres: Fiction, Scotland

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

William McIlvanney was a Scottish writer of novels, short stories, and poetry. He was a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as "the father of 'Tartan Noir’" and has been described as "Scotland's Camus".

His first book, Remedy is None, was published in 1966 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1967. Docherty (1975), a moving portrait of a miner whose courage and endurance is tested during the depression, won the Whitbread Novel Award.

Laidlaw (1977), The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991) are crime novels featuring Inspector Jack Laidlaw. Laidlaw is considered to be the first book of Tartan Noir.

William McIlvanney was also an acclaimed poet, the author of The Longships in Harbour: Poems (1970) and Surviving the Shipwreck (1991), which also contains pieces of journalism, including an essay about T. S. Eliot. McIlvanney wrote a screenplay based on his short story Dreaming (published in Walking Wounded in 1989) which was filmed by BBC Scotland in 1990 and won a BAFTA.

Since April 2013, McIlvanney's own website has featured personal, reflective and topical writing, as well as examples of his journalism.

Adapted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

Reviews

[Angela Cowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boy, this famous-son-of-my-home-town can write. Beautiful prose. An angry young man failing to come to terms with his family's past or his own future. The self-absorption of youth unravelled. Jings - I've come over all poetic. I hadn't read this, his first novel, before but I'm off to re-read Docherty now.

[Al · Rating 2 out of 5]

McIlvaney is best known for inventing "tartan noir". Remedy is None, though, was his first book, published in 1966, long before the detective stories. In this book, the protagonist, Charlie, is a young college student, slacking his way through his education. His life is disrupted when it appears that his girlfriend is pregnant, and then changed forever when he learns that his father is dying of cancer. The book follows Charlie's psychological deterioration after his father dies, and recounts the tragic effects of his angry, destructive interactions with his family and friends.
The strength of the book is in McIlvaney's insightful renderings of Charlie's anger and anguish. Despite some penetrating insights and excellent writing, I found the book to be too static and too long (although it was only 250 pages)--readily identifiable as a first novel. But, for all that, certainly one which gives evidence of Mcilvaney's bright future.

[GaP · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you have unresolved issues in your psyche and you just let them clank around and fester, you may as well be setting a ticking time bomb. The book begins with a boring, droning lecture at Glasgow University. Charlie Grant is worried that he might have knocked up his girlfriend and he's awaiting word on that. But the letter he does receive really starts the clock. His dad is terminally ill. And his father's well-meaning deathbed speech touches off a downward spiral that ends catastrophically and finally gives him all the answers he wants...at deep cost.

[DOLLY · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well written covert %v_array_gen[1]% book.

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing is solid, even beautiful in places. Definitely interested in seeing how McIlvanney developed as a writer from this early work. Some will be put off by the extreme self absorption of the main character, a very typical "angry young man" who feels wronged by what he perceives as his mother's betrayal of his father and their family. The mother is presented quite one dimensionally as a social climber; for that matter, the female characters in this work are not given any depth. I assume we are supposed to feel sympathy for the protagonist in the end but instead felt only frustrated that his assumptions about the people around him seldom exceeded certain narrow limits.

[Geraldine O'Donnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the author's debut novel and I am so glad I have read it. When it was published all those years ago I could not have appreciated it.
The story was as real and vivid as though it was actually being played out in front of me. Perhaps it is just that the author has disguised our Ayrshire of the 1950s so thinly.

As in his later novels, the plot and the characters are cleverly constructed. What starts off as a gentle read builds up to such a profound outcome that it is almost shocking to the reader.

I felt I had lived with the main characters the whole time I was reading it.

A powerful novel and a one which should be a rite of passage for all of us.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aah. This man. This his first novel, and from the first he hooks the reader with the rich magnificence of his writing. Then holds onto him by delivering such a character in Charlie, such insights into the way we really are, really think (even when we've not the words to tell it to ourselves), so that throughout there is an incipient lump in the throat in fearful anticipation of how it will all pan out.

[James M · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book features a young man dealing with a pregnancy and a family member’s cancer, from the author of the original tartan noir.