Review: Whisky galore

Accents are funny things. Think of a Welsh accent and, unless you’re welsh, you probably think of a blend of coal-dust and valley-dwelling simpleton blended with the sort of ready access to phlegm that is a pre-requirement of pronouncing all those words with too many ‘L’s in them. The Irish accent can be southern, all deedily deedily, or northern, used to shout sectarian claptrap. The English accent is a different proposition altogether. If asked what an English accent was like, most people would affect a posh voice and trot out a home counties drawl, all gymkanas and strangled vowel sounds. But of course Brummie is an English accent too, as is scouse or East Anglian, although that last is too close to folk music to be rightly considered an accent.

The Scottish accent is usually played by its stunt-double, Glasweigan. But the odd thing about the Scottish accent is that the further north you go, the clearer and more musical it becomes until, in the highlands and islands, the soft and marvellous accent is possibly posher and clearer than anything the English can attempt, but with an added musical lilt that lifts it into the realms of the otherworldly, much like the people that softly speak it. Probably this is because when the weather is wild, the people can’t be and while the climate may be foul, your neighbours at least should be civil to you.

What’s quite uncivil is war. Even here in the remotest parts of Scotland, the second world war is making its ugly presence felt, touching even the smallest and remotest of communities. The young men are either going into the services or into the merchant marine, the morale is the island is scrutinized by officious officials from the mainland who consider the combination of abuse, banter and complaint that flows around the hotel bar as more than the simple ABC of conversation but rather a threat to national security and, worst of all, there’s rationing. And not just any rationing, we’re not talking about powdered egg or a lack of curved yellow fruit, no, we’re talking alcohol rationing, in particular, whisky!

Whisky galore describes the drink in such loving detail that it will have you reaching, grasping and gasping, for a dram. The first half deals with the whisky drought on the island and the cruel effects of the rationing on the inhabitants as they euologise about the drink they are denied. The longer the drought persists, the more the topic is discussed and the more acutely the lack is felt. And when the drought breaks, in the form of a genteely shipwrecked cargo ship that is transporting boundless bottles of bounty to America, exported to help the war effort, the transformation is startling as the islanders are soaked in scotch and good humour.

Whisky is the 40% proof life blood of this little community. Nothing gets done without it, especially those activities that require inspiration and moral courage and poetry in the soul, such as wooing, standing up to your mother and composing poetry. Luckily it also assists the more mundane pastimes of sitting down and blethering and, of course, binge drinking.

The novel also offers an interesting take on sectarianism, with one island being protestant and the other catholic and the only resulting tension being that each set is shamed into being devout by the other, believing that an observed lapse would lead to a loss of face. The protestants in particular have a hard time of it ‘keeping the Sabbath’ essentially entailing, as it does, a day of enforced inactivity – something of a religious trial when the activity concerned is a spot of rowing combined with a little light salvage.

‘Galore’ is, in and of itself, such a marvellous word. One simply cannot associate it with anything negative. ‘Nazis galore’ for instance, is a phrase one is unlikely to see. Ah, but whisky galore is glorious, as musical as the language, as wild as the landscape and as rich in flavour as a truly great scotch, with a ruggedness balanced by notes of wet heather, warm peat fires and warmer characters.