Tragedy in Tartan

TUNES OF GLORY (211 pp.)--James Kennaway--Harper ($3).

As anyone knows who has ever been blackjacked on the vulnerable emotions by a Highland piper, the Scots have a talent for misery second only to that of the Irish themselves.

This first novel by Scots Author James Kennaway is a tartan tragedy with comic and eerie overtones like drunken laughter heard through a mist and haunting as the sound of army boots on wet cobbles.

In icy barracks somewhere in Scotland's dour landscape, a battalion of Highlanders is waging a pretty grim peace under the command of Colonel Jock Sinclair.

Jock had bravely led the battalion in war, but barracks life is another matter. He is as full of guts, and as hard to take, as a haggis. He sows as much terror among his subalterns as he ever did among the enemy, and runs his mess on lines calculated to make dinner with the Macbeths and Banquo's ghost seem like afternoon tea. And because he had been a ranker who had risen from the gutters of Glasgow, he is a figure of awe and almost superstitious regard to the kilted men who swill their usquebaugh and sweat to master pibrochs (variations on bagpipe tunes). As he warms his "celebrated bottom" before the mess fire (nothing, it should be said to satisfy Sassenach and U.S. curiosity, is worn beneath the kilt), it seems no harm can come to him.

The tragic flaw lies not in his character, but in the fact that he is only an "Acting Colonel." The War Office sends a man named Basil Barrow from London to take over the battalion. A "poor wee laddie," who is colder than Flora MacDonald,* he had spent the war in British intelligence. Which colonel will command the battalion--Jock or this Barrow boy? Jock is handicapped not only by a mistress but a prim Presbyterian daughter named Morag who is in love with a corporal-piper. The newcomer makes the fatal mistake of issuing regulations on how the Highland officers should perform their own wild dances. The climax is as grim and subtle as is proper to a race which could take its whisky along with the hard Knox of predestination. In the end, the reader will have learned something of the manners of nearly extinct fighting tribesmen--and the almost equally extinct art of tragedy in the novel. As the grand and grotesque Jock orders the pipe laments for his dead adversary, he cries to his brother officers the patriarchal clan key to the whole story: "I'm bashed the now. Oh, my babies, take me home!"

* A heroine of the 1745 Jacobite uprising.

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