A would-be saint: A novel

by Robin Jenkins

Jenkins, Robin

206 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 1994

About the author

Author of a number of landmark novels including The Cone Gatherers, The Changeling, Happy for the Child, The Thistle and the Grail and Guests of War, Jenkins is recognised as one of Scotland's greatest writers. The themes of good and evil, of innocence lost, of fraudulence, cruelty and redemption shine through his work. His novels, shot through with ambiguity, are rarely about what they seem. He published his first book, So Gaily Sings the Lark, at the age of thirty-eight, and by the time of his death in 2005, over thirty of his novels were in print.

Reviews

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the impression that might be given by the front cover the would-be saint in question is not an aspirant to play football in the colours of either Paisley’s or Perth’s best known football teams (or, given the story’s setting in time, even at The Gymnasium) but is instead one Gavin Hamilton, who at first seems a fairly normal lad growing up in the village of Auchengillan. We are shown Gavin’s immersion in village life through the lens of the Great War where his father is off fighting. The tone of the writing in these early chapters portends his father’s inevitable death. All Gavin’s young life he has had no contact with his father’s parents due to some dispute that occurred before he was born but his grandmother introduces herself to him one day in the street, a fact he instantly knows he must conceal from his mother.

In the post-war years Gavin secures a scholarship to Cadzow Academy which creates a barrier with his contemporaries as they shy away from his now perceived difference. At the Academy he forms a friendship with a lad called McIntyre from the intervening town of Lendrick whom he meets on the bus taking him there on his first day. Apart from McIntyre the only other pupil who has time for him is Rachel Hallad, whose father is a writer. However, McIntyre’s father is ill and not long for the world.

When McIntyre has to leave, Jenkins gives us a reflection of that stoicism instilled by the lads’ background and times. “If they had been men they would have shaken hands, if they had been girls or women they would have embraced or kissed cheeks. Being boys, and Scottish boys at that, they nodded, smiled, and turned away.”

Gavin’s life trajectory is changed again when his mother also dies. His grandmother and grandfather come to look after him and he is immediately removed from the Academy as his grandmother thinks folks like them should not get above themselves, (grandfather doesn't get a say,) so instead of University and perhaps a teaching career he ends up with a job with a solicitor in Lendrick.

Gavin is graced by his talent as a footballer and his involvement with the Church. As right half for Lendrick Rangers he helps them win the Junior Cup which brings to the town much needed glory a time of joblessness in the 1930s. He takes the opposition’s buffetings with equanimity and never retaliates. He is clean living (his prospective fiancée Julia, the solicitor’s daughter, is frustrated by his lack of interest in physical matters) as opposed to the team’s other stalwart the notoriously dissolute Grunter Houliston, whose resolute displays meant there was “no necessary connection between a man’s private morals and his public performance, whether as a footballer, a clergyman, or a politician.”

It is when the Second World War comes, though, that Gavin’s real difference shows itself. Kind to a fault, his beliefs mean that he decides he must become a conscientious objector. The relevant Board sends him to work in forestry in the far west of Scotland. Those who live locally do not much take to having conchies nearby but again Gavin shows his indifference to other’s ideas and again shows his prowess in a football match arranged between the forestry workers and the villagers. Even here, though, Gavin is as strange to most of the men he works with as with his fellow villagers in Auchengillan.

The early parts of the book - and not just the football aspect - reminded me of the same author’s The Thistle and the Grail, (some of the incidents have close similarities,) while the forestry scenes echoed The Cone Gatherers. Its structure is made oddly bifurcated by the two settings (village and forestry) but all the characters ring true and come to life on the page. As a depiction of rural Scottish life in the mid part of the twentieth century and of a man apart, A Would-Be Saint is excellent.

[Steven Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the football-themes books I review at: http://bit.ly/1DR9r9O
Robin Jenkins writes really well about football and makes people come to life on the page.
Football is not as strong a theme here as in The Thistle and the Grail, though, and that is, in a way, the point of this book. The main character, Gavin Hamilton, the “would-be saint” is a talented player but he spends (wastes?) his life trying to live by the teachings of Jesus and decides to stop playing football because of the violence it provoked. He perhaps should have listened to his grandfather who said:
“Maybe we get rid of a lot of badness in us at fitba’ matches. So maybe it does us guid.” He continues: “You’ll no’ like me saying this, but you gie a lot mair pleasure playing fitba’ than you dae preaching religion.”
A large part of the book is given over to his role as a conscientious objector and Gavin’s eventual hermit-like withdrawal from the world. There are some interesting questions posed about what constitutes a good life and how possible it is to live without making compromises with conscience and morality. Worth a read.