The Black Eden
Richard T Kelly
Faber & Faber, £20
Review by Rosemary Goring
Few subjects are better suited to drama than the discovery of oil in the North Sea. For years, the 20th century’s version of gold prospectors sank bore holes and brought up samples from beneath the seabed, desperate for a trace of oil. Not until 1970 did it become clear that vast reserves of crude oil lay below, and it was later still before the first fields were able to go into production.
One of Britain’s most momentous and controversial industrial stories – was it the UK’s oil or Scotland’s? - was dogged by political, commercial, ethical and personal battles and disasters. The tragedy of an explosion on the Piper Alpha rig in 1988 was the most high-profile calamity, its name now a shorthand for horror. Yet, as Richard T Kelly’s gripping new novel shows, the path to pumping black gold was paved not just with fatalities but with losses of entirely another order too.
Known for novels that weave politics, the workplace and social concerns - The Crusaders was set in deprived 1990s Newcastle, The Knives was about a Tory Home Secretary at Westminster – Kelly has a compulsion, relatively rare in novelists, to understand what goes on at what you might call the coalface: the contribution of manual and skilled workers to the fortunes of corporate giants, small private companies, and the political sphere in which both must navigate.
Comparisons with coal mining are too obvious to detail. Suffice to say that last century, as in previous times, the dangers, hardships, exploitation and greed involved in the fossil fuel industry remained a reliable barometer of human venality, adventurousness, and need.
In Kelly’s hands, the unfolding of the hunt for oil off the Scottish coast takes on the momentum of a thriller. Childhood friendships and a small fishing business are the bedrock on which it is constructed. There’s Aaron and Robbie, who grew up in a village near Tain, in north-east Scotland, who share a love of diving. Aaron’s fascination with fossils eventually leads to a career as a geologist. His convictions could stand as a motif for everyone engaged in wresting wealth from the earth’s crust: “Human life often feels awfully limited to him next to the enormities ingrained in rock and stone.”
Then there’s Mark and Ally, who attend “an Edinburgh private school built like a French Gothic palace”, and the fractious Killday clan, who run an Aberdeen trawler-fishing firm. The patriarch’s son, Joe, has ambitions beyond the boats. His degree in economics from Edinburgh University “has led him to endorse Adam Smith’s idea that a man has ‘natural liberty’ to develop his own interests are long as others are not molested.” Soon enough, he is running his dad’s company, bringing it into the orbit of the oil rigs during the years of unbridled speculation, borrowing and avarice that typify the Thatcher era.
Aaron, meanwhile, is steered by a mercurial professor into turning his talent as a geologist towards finding oil: “These people need us, Aaron. We’re like the x-ray chaps in the hospital, telling the surgeon where to insert the scalpel. Or, in this case, the drill.” Yet despite the thrill of the challenge, he remains uneasy amid roistering American entrepreneurs, who bring with them a whiff of the Klondike.
When eventually his work results in a cache of promising rock fragments “he carries his tray back to the office as if he were bearing an infant down the aisle of a church to the font”. Over-reaching for effect, or similes that are off the mark, are a minor flaw throughout. While Aaron is desperate to find an oilfield, his good-looking friend Robbie is proving a success with the girls, and living from one labouring job to the next. That is, until he too is sucked into the maw of the North Sea project.
Drawing these young men and a host of other vivid characters into his net, Kelly proceeds to unwind a decades-long saga that concludes shortly after the first vote on Scottish devolution. There is a staginess to the opening chapters, as the main players are introduced, and although Geordie accents are well rendered, the Scottish north-east dialogue doesn’t ring true, with its west-coast tic of ending sentences with “but”. Even so, The Black Eden swiftly grabs the attention, becoming that unusual thing: a thoughtful page-turner.
There is a hint of American-style ambition in the reach and intensity of this book and its focus on the workplace; Kelly’s rendering of occupations such as welding or underwater exploration, or his depiction of the prison-like conditions aboard the earliest rigs, is achieved so convincingly you could almost believe he has done these jobs himself.
With Mark and Ally, he widens the canvas. Mark’s career in journalism, followed by politics, allows a glimpse of burgeoning Scottish nationalism. Ally, initially a lawyer, sets up shop as a merchant banker. While crediting Noble Grossart as the Scottish pioneers in this arena, he nevertheless mirrors the late Angus Grossart in acquiring and renovating an ancient castle in Fife. In this, and many other respects, the historical reality and Kelly’s fictional version intertwine.
Moving at a lick, incorporating a carousel of individuals - some feeling like ciphers, others, such as Aaron and Robbie, subtly drawn - The Black Eden is a long-overdue cameo of the impact of North Sea oil on Scotland and the UK. It is far from perfect – Kelly loves tying up every loose end, and his prose would benefit at times from being sharpened – yet it is a galloping and impressively wide-ranging read.
And, despite a nod to Local Hero when he locates the Killdays’ weekend cottage in Pennan, this is not a story of self-discovery or renunciation of the corporate world. Gordon Gekko’s creed of “Greed is good” could sum up some of its leading figures. What is most memorable about Kelly’s view of an aggressively macho world is that ultimately it is the workers in the front line, those risking all in this terrifying endeavour, who are honoured and remembered.
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