Scottish Review of Books: The Ossians

The road trip genre may be a worn old path by now, but it’s to Johnstone’s credit that he manages to freshen it up. Connor is the archetypal angry young man; angry at his country and all its clichés, it’s inevitable that all he can do is repeat those clichés he loathes so much while actually inhabiting one as well. His anger at Scotland – how it treats its history, how it treats its present, what it can see and what it can’t – is merely misplaced anger; the real object of his ire is himself, but barely intuiting that, he consumes drugs and booze and takes advantage of his long-suffering girlfriend throughout his tour of Scotland with his band, The Ossians, instead. A musician himself, Johnstone is well aware of the clichés surrounding the music industry, and he has fun with the characters that crop up along the way. Johnstone has a good ear for dialogue, and he likes his characters – for all the anger in this book, there’s a lot of affection too. But it could have gone deeper; Johnstone’s more than capable of a walk on the darker side.