Docherty by William McIllvanney

The story of Ayrshire miner Docherty covers three generations, telling how Tam Docherty came to be the giant of his local community and his subsequent fall from grace as his sons grow up in his shadow, and as his aging father comes to stay, bringing with him all the ghosts of the family's Irish immigrant past. 

Set against the backdrop of the Great War, the rise of the labour movement under Keir Hardie, and the growing revolutionary political consciousness of the early 20th century, Docherty maintains a tight focus on a single family and a small community, using their experiences as a lens through which to view the tail end of the Industrial Revolution.

The characters are intimately drawn, and McIlvanney's effortless perspectival shifts give moving context to the human drama, showing us life in the small town from the eyes of Docherty's sons and daughter, his wife, and his friends. In particular, the street corner, which serves as courtroom, duelling spot and philosophical locus in the novel, is vividly drawn, evoking a lost era before working class communities in Scotland were blighted by the evils of social housing, slum clearances and heroin. McIlvanney's prose is terse, muscular and dramatic, deploying metaphors and similes like half-bricks. A riveting family saga, with genuine importance as a piece of social history, at once elegiac and full of righteous fire. [Bram E. Gieben]