In 1720, the young William Nelson leaves Edinburgh to make his fortune in Europe, where his story begins to unfold. To celebrate the release of this entertaining historical tale, author James Buchan tells us a bit more about his newest release, as well as recommending a fair few books along the way.
 

A Street Shaken by Light
By James Buchan
Published by Mountain Leopard Press 

The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?  

I was the youngest of a numerous family, and books often came down to me in more than one piece. Our copy of Stuart Little, by the American author E. B. White, printed in 1945, was missing some pages. Our copy ended with a full-page drawing of a tiny motor-car, driven by a mouse, on an undulating back road in America. I long ago lost the book but retain the mental picture. Years later, in a gallery at the upper end of Madison Avenue in New York, I came on a small drawing by Edward Hopper: a ribbon of road, a couple of circles to show the tops of gasoline pumps, and power lines loping away into infinity; and had the same feeling of immensity. 

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest book A Street Shaken by Light. What did you want to explore in writing this book?  

I had written a biography of the Scottish adventurer, John Law of Lauriston, who in the eighteenth century was briefly finance minister of France. It was published in 2018. I had spent five year following Law’s traces in Europe and North America and, what with lockdowns and all, found it hard to surface from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first. I thought I might cast up my impressions of Law’s age into a novel, and then a suite of novels, which would have more battles and ship-wrecks than are generally found in a realistic work of fiction set in present times. 

The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?  

The visit of Joe Gargery to Pip in Chapter XXVII of Great Expectations stopped my twenty-year-old self in his tracks. If Pip had become obnoxious, he was nothing to what I had become. I suppose Dickens was also thinking of himself.  

The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book?  

Nothing prepared me for the sight, in a glass case in the library of a millionaire’s country-house, of James Audubon’s Birds of America, engraved on double-elephant paper in Edinburgh and London in the 1820s and 1830s. The memory is tinged with regret for the birds shot or stabbed for the drawings and for the extinct races.  

The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?  

My parents lived apart. One summer holidays, at the age of about thirteen or fourteen, having exhausted Alistair McLean, Ian Fleming and Hammond Innes, I asked my mother to suggest something different. She took from a set in her book-case, Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. I read that, and then Scoop and then Vile Bodies, and so on to to her least favourite, Put Out More Flags. My father was much in Paris. On a visit to him, the same year or the next, he suggested I read a pet novel of his, Le grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War. I did so, with difficulty, but French was never so hard again.  

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you? 

I dreamed one night that I was reading the quatrains of Attar and found the secret of existence in four short lines. I stumbled downstairs, took down Attar’s Mokhtarnameh and read Persian quatrains till my eyes ached and light was coming in through the window. I did not find the secret of existence. 

The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you? 

Like all my schoolfriends, I read Basho’s A Narrow Road to the Deep North when it was translated in the Penguin Classics. Recently, my son lent my a translation of the poems of Saigyo, Basho’s model and predecessor. I would like to walk the roads of old Japan, composing dreadful verses.  

The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next? 

Buchanan’s Travels in the Western Hebrides, printed in 1793, a most generous present from my brother. I feel I should wear white gloves to hold it, like a snooker referee.  

A Street Shaken by Light  by James Buchan is published by Mountain Leopard Press, priced £16.99.