Merinder's House

Once, I was involved in interpreting history on a small island at a time when corporate regional images were being carefully manufactured for the benefit of the tourist industry. The protagonists, who took up periodic battle for control of the image, ranged from national agencies (generally portrayed as the big bad wolf) to local authorities and even more local activists. At the end of the day, the further down the chain you went, the more contested the image became, until it was a fight for control and not content. A marketed image, by its very nature, is someone’s invention.

Thankfully, I was tucked away in a remote corner no-one much cared about, so I was able to be a little more inventive in what I did with all the photographs and pieces of other people’s past, and not worry too much about upsetting the fashionable versions of history which encourage homogeneity and a glorification of the mundane over the unusual. Instead, I was – for a little while until it began to show signs of being successful – able to ask questions.

The questions invariably led down unpopular routes. Sometimes they asked whether it was realistic to assume someone was born good because they were poor, or bad because they were born rich. They questioned the convenient perception of small communities, and asked whether everyone in them really wanted to live the same way or should want the same things. On occasion, they asked whether we were looking in the right places for the answers we were seeking from the past, and on other occasions, they simply asked people to ask questions.

Inevitably, this cast a shadow of doubt over all the corporate images, and challenged the authorities and even the mavericks, because some stories will not lie down to be processed or made to stand still, no matter how much people pay for them. Then one day, out of the blue, someone asked me a question I could not answer truthfully without compromise, and I became aware that most questions do not generate answers, only more questions.

Jane Coutts, who recently wrote Merinder’s House, Scottish fiction with a European flavour.