MY BOOK OF REVELATIONS

Iain Hood 

(Renard Press, £10)  

Trust humanity to invent the calendar and use it to worry ourselves sick about apocalypses. Iain Hood’s time-obsessed third novel opens with a potted history of how the Gregorian calendar came to see off all its rivals and take over the world. 

And how the Republic of Kiribati hopped over the International Date Line, ostensibly to simplify its internal affairs, but also reputedly for the publicity value of being the first country in the world to welcome in each new year.

They’re all such arbitrary, man-made divisions – but the approach of the year 2000 still provided a focus for the human race’s obsession with apocalypses. “Is it because the actual end of everything only has to come once, whereas the continuation of everything has to happen over and over again?” Hood asks.

 My Book of Revelations is set, if a novel so concerned with temporal displacement can be meaningfully said to be set at any point in time, on the last day of 1999, as thousands gather on the streets of Edinburgh, self-appointed home of Hogmanay, to bring in the Millennium.

Months earlier, the unnamed narrator was hired by Scotland’s richest man, Toby Mole, to secure the computers of his company, Molextrics, against the Y2K bug. But Mole has hired a complete chancer. Having bluffed his way through the interview with the help of an accomplice coaching him through an earpiece, he’s spent his whole time there skiving, convinced that the Millennium will have no adverse effect on the company’s systems.

 A student of genetics as a Glasgow undergraduate, he had switched his attention to memes until he got bored with that too and passed himself off as a visionary futurologist at Molextrics. Instead of working, he plans a book of short stories with punning titles like Far From the Mad In-Crowd and Modern Rubbish is Life, or thinks about devising a meme that people could incorporate into their belief system.

 What you get from this book will largely depend on your tolerance for experimental post-modern literature. It’s the most challenging of Hood’s three novels to date, eventually leaving even the flimsy reality of Molextrics behind for a flight through a Scottish dreamscape in which Milne’s Bar (the poets’ pub) morphs into the Café Royal, where the spirits of Dame Muriel Spark and Jean Cocteau, with an improbable Scots accent, debate poetry and interrogate Scotland’s vision of itself in a clamorous multiplicity of voices, while around them the final 15 minutes of 1999 stretch out for a seeming eternity.

The mid-section consists of a rambling email exchange between the narrator and an American friend, a conversation that touches on the Millennium Bug, Kiribati, Robert Louis Stevenson and Alain Resnais’s concept of temporal reality, amidst numerous inconsequential diversions. It’s disjointed and increasingly frustrating to read, until it dawns that Hood has purposely structured it to achieve precisely that effect.   

Though it won’t be to everyone’s taste, this novel is driven by an inexhaustible stream of imagination and Hood’s fearless desire to leave narrative conventions behind and fly unfettered into a realm of pure ideas.

There are definite echoes of Lanark, particularly in the final third – which brings to mind A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle channelled through Alasdair Gray – and a sense that the Glasgow-born Hood is joining in, and extending, a conversation that’s been going on in the more adventurous Scots literature for the past century.