One of the sub-themes in Tim’s narrative is that of flux, specifically the changes that affected working-class people during the post-war years.
One significant change was in housing, and this is discussed in the early part of the novel. The old Victorian slums were being demolished and replaced by outlying housing schemes or, in the case of the Gorbals, modern high-rise developments. This process was actually well underway by 1967, and the old Gorbals was by then a rapidly diminishing reality that was about to disappear forever.
This change provoked strong views at the time. Many people, notably activists in the Labour Party, were instrumental in making it come about. While their motivations were noble – to end the misery of overcrowded slum living, sadly much of the housing that replaced the old tenements was inadequate, and has all either been demolished, such as the notorious damp-ridded Hutcheson C flats which were inhabited for less than 30 years, or is earmarked for demolition. It is fashionable to knock the competence of the city fathers who drove this process; certainly in the case of the outlying schemes they were guilty of wildly over-optimistic socialist idealism, supposing that they could create brand-new, instantly functioning communities from scratch, but perhaps the scale of the problem they faced was simply too huge, and the monies realistically available to them inadequate. And remember what they were striving to replace: slums in which people, often youngsters, died from entirely preventable diseases due to poor sanitation and squalid living conditions. This in the middle of the twentieth century, with space exploration in full flow, was considered, quite rightly, as unacceptable. It is easy to be nostalgic for poverty, much harder to live amid it.
Yet the process was a controversial one. Some people, like Tim’s friend Mark, who still had to endure Gorbals living, couldn’t wait to get out. The promise of a spacious, clean apartment with an inside bathroom was too much to resist. Yet others, such as Tim (somewhat hypocritically considering he had moved out of the Gorbals a year before into such an apartment in nearby Toryglen) mourned the end to the vibrant, colourful Gorbals character, with its warmth, humour and strong sense of community spirit.
This debate has become something of a cliché in my hometown, but the impact of the slum clearances changed Glasgow forever, and it is worth considering what was lost, as well as what was gained. I was born in 1972, therefore more or less at the moment ‘old’ Glasgow – a place of smog and shipbuilding, shillings and half crowns, slums and steamies, trams and razor gangs, fish teas and dance halls – died. Yet the idea of that place, passed on by my parents’ generation, casts a long shadow. It lives on in the sharp patter of Glasgow’s inhabitants, which is in a way a memorial for a lost world; my generation possesses a strange, sentimental nostalgia for something we never really knew.
As Tim tells Mark on page 13: ‘Understand this. An entire era is about to end, auld Glasgow is about to slip over the horizon. And something precious will be lost forever.’
Monday, 7 May 2012
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Writing Tim's narrative
I HAD a few abortive starts to the novel, in which I tried to come at the project from a radical angle, but neither did I just want to regurgitate the screenplay…
I guess I didn’t want to tire of the same characters and situations, but also writing prose is really quite different from screenwriting. The two don’t necessarily lend themselves to each other.
Therefore I really evolved a host of new characters out of the screenplay, and it seemed to work really well. Lots of people ask me what it’s like co-writing a novel, but to be honest it went incredibly smoothly, and there wasn’t any conflict between Martin and me.
In fact, you could argue that it was half as difficult as writing a novel by yourself, in that I only had to write half a book!
The fact is that the narratives were distinct; Jock and his men are preparing for the match while Tim and his pals are on the road, so, as I already said, there wasn’t that much scope for overlap. Having a co-author meant that we could bounce ideas off one another, and, just as importantly, edit each other’s text.
The fact that we are both experienced editors (we work in newspapers) meant that this was meat and drink to us, and it meant that any submission was liable to be of a cleaner, better structured standard than usual.
The fact is that if you have a clear, shared vision, and you are naturally respectful towards folk, the process needn’t be a difficult one, and it wasn’t.
In terms of that vision, as we are from Celtic-supporting families, we both understood at quite a profound emotional level what Lisbon actually represented. That’s a matter for later blogs (and the book itself!) but suffice to say that we were both writing on the same emotional pitch.
I should also mention Mark ‘Stan’ Stanton, who is an agent with Jenny Brown. Stan told us that he ‘loved’ our initial offerings, and obviously he went on to sell the book to Birlinn.
In fact, Stan had given initial encouragement not long after Martin had come up with the idea, and even before I had come on board.
I also have to mention Pete Burns at Birlinn, who, like Stan, saw the merit of the idea, and it’s been a pleasure working with him. Clearly Stan and Pete have excellent taste!
Charles McGarry
I guess I didn’t want to tire of the same characters and situations, but also writing prose is really quite different from screenwriting. The two don’t necessarily lend themselves to each other.
Therefore I really evolved a host of new characters out of the screenplay, and it seemed to work really well. Lots of people ask me what it’s like co-writing a novel, but to be honest it went incredibly smoothly, and there wasn’t any conflict between Martin and me.
In fact, you could argue that it was half as difficult as writing a novel by yourself, in that I only had to write half a book!
The fact is that the narratives were distinct; Jock and his men are preparing for the match while Tim and his pals are on the road, so, as I already said, there wasn’t that much scope for overlap. Having a co-author meant that we could bounce ideas off one another, and, just as importantly, edit each other’s text.
The fact that we are both experienced editors (we work in newspapers) meant that this was meat and drink to us, and it meant that any submission was liable to be of a cleaner, better structured standard than usual.
The fact is that if you have a clear, shared vision, and you are naturally respectful towards folk, the process needn’t be a difficult one, and it wasn’t.
In terms of that vision, as we are from Celtic-supporting families, we both understood at quite a profound emotional level what Lisbon actually represented. That’s a matter for later blogs (and the book itself!) but suffice to say that we were both writing on the same emotional pitch.
I should also mention Mark ‘Stan’ Stanton, who is an agent with Jenny Brown. Stan told us that he ‘loved’ our initial offerings, and obviously he went on to sell the book to Birlinn.
In fact, Stan had given initial encouragement not long after Martin had come up with the idea, and even before I had come on board.
I also have to mention Pete Burns at Birlinn, who, like Stan, saw the merit of the idea, and it’s been a pleasure working with him. Clearly Stan and Pete have excellent taste!
Charles McGarry
Monday, 30 April 2012
Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll ... and football
THE night Jock Stein died on the touchline at Ninian Park, Cardiff, I was seven-years-old and in Yorkhill hospital in Glasgow having my tonsils removed. I remember my dad mentioning it, but its significance passed me by until I was much older.
I loved playing football, but was not so interested in any one team or player (Star Wars figures were my passion in 1985), a feeling that has not changed much over the years.
So, age prohibited me having any personal experience of Stein. Does this disqualify me from dramatising parts of his life in a novel? Some might say, but people's opinion should be based on having read the book rather than preconceptions.
In researching, I have immersed myself in almost everything that has ever been written or recorded about Jock Stein. I read about 30 books - some of which had been out of print for decades - and watched every interview, pored over newspaper cuttings and talked to dozens of people who knew him. From coming up with the idea to the finished manuscript took three-and-a-half years.
His life has been well-documented, no question. So why, in my arrogance, did I think I could add to the body of work on Stein? Well, his life may be down in black and white, but I felt there was colour missing. The complexities of his character, the drama of his achievements, there deserved to be many more splashes on the canvas, I felt.
We were also aware of the cultural, social and political context. Society was changing rapidly in 1967. It was the Summer of Love - a hippie counterculture movement that found its expression in an explosion of creativity, politics, sexual freedom, drugs and music (Sergeant Pepper was released exactly a week after Lisbon).
We wanted to get all that into the novel.
Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll ... and football. Something for everyone.
Martin Greig
I loved playing football, but was not so interested in any one team or player (Star Wars figures were my passion in 1985), a feeling that has not changed much over the years.
So, age prohibited me having any personal experience of Stein. Does this disqualify me from dramatising parts of his life in a novel? Some might say, but people's opinion should be based on having read the book rather than preconceptions.
In researching, I have immersed myself in almost everything that has ever been written or recorded about Jock Stein. I read about 30 books - some of which had been out of print for decades - and watched every interview, pored over newspaper cuttings and talked to dozens of people who knew him. From coming up with the idea to the finished manuscript took three-and-a-half years.
His life has been well-documented, no question. So why, in my arrogance, did I think I could add to the body of work on Stein? Well, his life may be down in black and white, but I felt there was colour missing. The complexities of his character, the drama of his achievements, there deserved to be many more splashes on the canvas, I felt.
We were also aware of the cultural, social and political context. Society was changing rapidly in 1967. It was the Summer of Love - a hippie counterculture movement that found its expression in an explosion of creativity, politics, sexual freedom, drugs and music (Sergeant Pepper was released exactly a week after Lisbon).
We wanted to get all that into the novel.
Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll ... and football. Something for everyone.
Martin Greig
Friday, 27 April 2012
The Road to Lisbon: A brief introduction
WELCOME to our blog. My name is Charlie McGarry, co-author of The Road to Lisbon.
The novel, for those who don’t already know, is dual narrative; that is, it’s written in the first-person of two separate voices. One is Celtic’s legendary manager Jock Stein, and the other is a fictional Celtic supporter, Tim Lynch.
I wrote the Tim Lynch narrative, Martin Greig wrote the Jock Stein one.
I chose the name ‘Tim’ to coincide with that nickname for Celtic supporters, thus making him a kind of generic representation of all Celtic fans. Certainly he comes from a typically Celtic background. He is third generation Irish and was brought up in the largely Catholic ghetto of the Gorbals.
I reckon I had an easier job than Martin, in that I was creating Tim out of the ether, and wasn’t constricted by the historical reality of a particular person who actually lived and breathed quite recently, and whose life has been recorded in some considerable detail. People often say that novelists tend to base fictional protagonists upon themselves. While I’m sure that this inevitably holds a modicum of truth, I think that it’s quite an unconscious process.
Certainly there are a lot of outward differences between myself and Tim, not least that he’s a bit of a tough guy who used to run with a notorious street gang!
The two narratives of Jock and Tim are over the seven days up to and including May 25th 1967, the day that Celtic became the first non-Latin football club to win the European Cup. There isn’t actually that much direct overlap between the two stories, but we, and I think more importantly everyone who has read it, says that it works well.
The story alternates from one voice to another, several times within each day. There are a lot of flashbacks, particularly in Jock’s narrative.
The match itself, in which Celtic destroyed Inter Milan with an outrageous display of attacking play, is obviously a shared experience between Tim and Jock as they are both present at the stadium. Martin and I deliberated for quite a long time over how to best represent this, and we decided to tell the highlights of the game chronologically, with one piece of action told by Jock, and the next by Tim, then back to Jock, and so on. It’s the part of the book that I’m most proud of, which is just as well, because this match is sacred to Celtic fans the world over and we really needed to do it justice.
The novel, for those who don’t already know, is dual narrative; that is, it’s written in the first-person of two separate voices. One is Celtic’s legendary manager Jock Stein, and the other is a fictional Celtic supporter, Tim Lynch.
I wrote the Tim Lynch narrative, Martin Greig wrote the Jock Stein one.
I chose the name ‘Tim’ to coincide with that nickname for Celtic supporters, thus making him a kind of generic representation of all Celtic fans. Certainly he comes from a typically Celtic background. He is third generation Irish and was brought up in the largely Catholic ghetto of the Gorbals.
I reckon I had an easier job than Martin, in that I was creating Tim out of the ether, and wasn’t constricted by the historical reality of a particular person who actually lived and breathed quite recently, and whose life has been recorded in some considerable detail. People often say that novelists tend to base fictional protagonists upon themselves. While I’m sure that this inevitably holds a modicum of truth, I think that it’s quite an unconscious process.
Certainly there are a lot of outward differences between myself and Tim, not least that he’s a bit of a tough guy who used to run with a notorious street gang!
The two narratives of Jock and Tim are over the seven days up to and including May 25th 1967, the day that Celtic became the first non-Latin football club to win the European Cup. There isn’t actually that much direct overlap between the two stories, but we, and I think more importantly everyone who has read it, says that it works well.
The story alternates from one voice to another, several times within each day. There are a lot of flashbacks, particularly in Jock’s narrative.
The match itself, in which Celtic destroyed Inter Milan with an outrageous display of attacking play, is obviously a shared experience between Tim and Jock as they are both present at the stadium. Martin and I deliberated for quite a long time over how to best represent this, and we decided to tell the highlights of the game chronologically, with one piece of action told by Jock, and the next by Tim, then back to Jock, and so on. It’s the part of the book that I’m most proud of, which is just as well, because this match is sacred to Celtic fans the world over and we really needed to do it justice.
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