The Last Peacock

by Allan Massie

184 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1980

About the author

Allan Massie was a Scottish journalist, sports writer and novelist. He was one of Scotland's most prolific and well-known journalists, writing regular columns for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times (Scotland) and the Scottish Daily Mail. He was the author of nearly 30 books, including 20 novels. He is notable for novels set in the distant past and Vichy France.

Reviews

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Belinda has come up from London to the family home, an old Manse in Perthshire, as her grandmother is dying. Belinda is divorced but her ex-husband Oswald still hangs around. While Belinda will inherit most of the money her elder brother Colin will get the estate. But does not know what to do with himself and wastes his days in drinking and idle pursuits. Her other brother Andrew is homosexual (which Belinda finds “somewhat sordid” while acknowledging that at her brothers’ school it was rampant.) Her straightlaced sister Fiona has fallen under the spell of one Gerald Morgan, recently returned from overseas, a nasty piece of work “‘wanted for rape in seven countries and genocide in Outer Mongolia, where men are men and they don’t normally trouble about such things,’” and who wants to restore hierarchy to the country starting with the local MP (at the book’s time of course, a Tory,) Mansie Niven, who has held a torch for Belinda since young adulthood. Morgan has a black chauffeur/manservant whom he treats abominably. The children’s awful mother stravaigs about the world with a succession of young men barely older than her children and carefully, as they knew she would, keeps herself away until her mother, the matriarch, has died.

It is difficult (all right, it is impossible) to find any of these characters or their views attractive, burdened as they are by too much money and not enough responsibility nor any feeling of social solidarity. If this is the way the landed gentry think and behave it is long past time their privileges were dispensed with.

There are some memorable lines though:-

“What is the sexual act without love but a cry and rejection, the assertion of the ego?”

“The trouble with this city” (Edinburgh) “was it couldn’t decide whether it was a museum or a place to live in, a capital or a shopping centre; it didn’t know its own essence.” (That is essentially true about Scotland as a whole.)

When the supposedly devoted Kwame’s complaint against Morgan comes to light, Fiona’s husband Gavin says, “‘It’s like marriages. You think everything’s fine, between two chums, and then, bang, you discover they can’t stand each other. Or the husband’s been having it off with the maids or the wife having it off with his best man or the gardener. You just can’t tell what people think of each other.”

At the end Colin laments, “‘The death of will… the idea of service … all gone.’”

There is a peacock - the last of many once on the estate – but as Colin says after it dies and has been stuffed it is “symbolism, nothing but symbolism.”

(Note to the sensitive; the book contains instances of the n-word.)

[David Lowther · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Last Peacock is an early Allan Massie novel. I'm continuing my trawl through his back catalogue.

This is a comedy set amongst the well-healed in Scotland over thirty years ago. There are some outrageous characters including a drunk, a dying grandmother who holds the purse strings, various crazy couples whose marriages have either fallen apart or are in the process of falling apart and a gay grandson who pursues young office workers. Oh and a couple of fascists!

Some, but not all, of the characters spring to life and there are some funny moments. I did quite enjoy it.

David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen and Two Families at War, all published by Sacristy Press.