A short, elegant rural tragedy, set in the 1950s in a farming community somewhere in the north of Scotland (around Aberdeen?), pivoting on the long-standing rivalry between Hugh Riddel, a steady, reliable agricultural worker, employed as dairyman on a large farm, and his sometime schoolfellow Charlie Anson, who has ambitions to get into local politics and has been seen hanging around Hugh's daughter. When Hugh is invited to give the "Immortal memory" toast at the Burns Supper and the text of his address gets into the local papers, Anson is burning with jealousy, and trouble seems inevitable.

Kesson takes an odd approach to structuring the story, where we start in the aftermath of the trouble and then loop away into the back-stories of characters indirectly involved in it — Hugh's cattleman father; Sue Tatt the shameless village "woman of shame" (based on Kesson's mother?); the Vicar; Hugh's social-worker daughter Helen (Kesson herself?); the gossiping Greek chorus of farmworkers in the dairy — and she tells us a lot about conditions of employment in agriculture, the social structure of villages, the misguided way youth work is organised, the eccentricities of Scottish local buses, and so on. We keep feeling that we are losing our grip on the story just at the point when she swoops back to where she was meant to be and we suddenly see how relevant it all was. In the background throughout is the figure of Robert Burns, as a farmer and as a lover, his experiences contrasting with and sometimes paralleling the lives of the modern farmworkers. But there's also the important symbolic presence of a hill with a Pictish horse on it, and of a modern mental hospital: neither ever quite enters into the story, but they are both clearly essential somehow.

I also loved the way Kesson quite naturally and undemonstratively reaches for a Scots word whenever that expresses what she wants to say better than standard English could. She doesn't write in dialect, but she ends up with English prose that feels unmistakably Scots.

Wonderful stuff, it seems to pack something like the breadth and scope of a Thomas Hardy novel into 150 pages... ( )