Zoe Strachan's Catch The Moment As They Fly is a Scottish saga

Virtute et industria – by virtue and industry – is the burgh’s motto, and Strachan’s central protagonist, Rena Jarvie, embodies these qualities. In a novel that spans from 1936 to 1966, she is first encountered as a Glasgow teenager, taking desperate measures to protect her mother and siblings from her violent father.

Her mother, Hetty, had taken one too many beatings and Rena skips school to seek the help of her redoubtable aunts, Nell, Min and Margaret: “If we don’t do something, he’s going to kill her” is all she needs to say. Very soon, she and her two younger brothers and mother are relocated to Kilmarnock, where they set up business in a newsagent and tobacconist’s.

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At the court case to settle the divorce, Rena unapologetically lies, knowing that adultery is seen as a greater marital crime than battery. Only years later does she remember that she had known all along that her father had a mistress. Not that she is one to look over her shoulder. The future is what matters, and she advances into it with admirable self-reliance and assurance.

The opening scenes, amid the tenements of Glasgow and Kilmarnock, carry an echo of northern family sagas, such as those by Catherine Cookson, whose plucky heroines eventually prevail to find love.

But there is nothing romantic or rose-tinted, nor cliched, in Strachan’s depiction of Scotland in the wake of the First World War and on the brink of the Second.

As demonstrated in previous novels such as Negative Space and Spin Cycle, she is clear-eyed, honest and searching. Even so, this feels like a change of direction, into fresh territory. Not only encompassing Rena’s story, Catch the Moments manages at the same time to convey, almost tangibly, what it was to live through these eventful years.

William McIlvanney (Image: free)

Thus, what might at first appear to be a workaday story of resilience and perseverance, with strong women – and one very weak woman – at its core, turns into something more interesting. For a start, Rena and her family are not precisely working-class. Her aunts all have jobs – a nurse, an antiques dealer, a seamstress – but when their niece reaches 21, they club together to buy her a fur coat. For the Jarvies, as for Rena, appearances matter. They are a statement of intent as well as character. That fur coat is emblematic, carrying Rena through the entire novel.

It is also what attracts the man who is to become her husband. Noticing her trying it on in the furrier Jacobson’s near Charing Cross, merchant seaman Bobby is smitten.

Bobby is a chancer with intelligence and charm. At the time of seeing Rena, and inveigling her and her aunts into joining him for tea, his coat is in the pawn shop.

Even so he finds the money to borrow a car and take Rena out for dinner; soon thereafter, they marry.

This being war-time, happiness is snatched at, as Burns instructs. Crossing the Atlantic on convoys, in an ageing ship, Bobby has no illusions about what might lie ahead: “alarm bells ringing all damn night and waiting, waiting for the crashing and buckling of metal that no tin hat will survive”.

Yet when disaster does strike, Strachan’s description is strangely bloodless and sketchy. High drama, it seems, is not her forte. Where she excels is in the social and domestic detail that distinguishes each passing year, in fashion, food, and home interiors. On that level alone, this novel is like a living museum, testimony to a third of a century’s social, economic and political progress. From corsets to tableware to menus featuring peach Melba and Reisling wine, this is the middle years of the 20th century incarnate.

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As business partners, Rena and Bobby have the imagination, flair and savvy to negotiate the hazards of the hospitality trade and the snake-pit of local politics and vested interests. When one venture collapses, they move on to the next, working ceaselessly, and in Bobby’s case drinking with equal dedication.

Their daughter Janet is raised between home and their high-end hotel, the Ossington in John Finnie Street, where guests are more of a priority than she is. Fortunately she has inherited Rena’s pragmatic view: “Who are her parents when they aren’t dressed for the evening? Before her father adjusts the lapel of his dinner suit, or her mother slips her feet into her high-heeled court shoes? All the rest is rehearsal.”

Plainly, almost prosaically told from the perspective of her main characters, Catch the Moments as they Fly exerts a fascination greater than the story it tells. Based loosely on real characters and venues, it is an evocation of how one family grafted, dreamed, excelled and endured.

Strachan devotes as much attention to the fabric of their lives as if she were in charge of stage design, ward-robe and make-up.

The result could hardly be less sentimental or sepia-tinted. Addressing the past without artifice, she neither glamorises nor patronises the effortful, complicated, occasionally inspirational endeavours of her flawed but believable cast.

As for its format, it is hard to disagree with Auberon Waugh: “Family sagas have such an endless appeal that whenever one meets a really good one … one wonders why anybody bothers to write a different form of novel.”