The Papers of Tony Veitch (Laidlaw Trilogy Book 2)

by William McIlvanney

Nearby a wino with a huge orange beard that suggested he was trying to grow his own bedclothes was in heated debate with a Guinness poster.

It was the moment when Mickey arrived in Glasgow, in a city that was about proximity not anonymity, a place that in spite of its wide vistas and areas of dereliction often seemed as spacious as a rush-hour bus.

The Puritan Fallacy is that there can be virtue by default. You do the right thing because you don’t know any worse. That is society’s Woolworth substitute for morality. True morality begins in choice: the greater the choice, the greater the morality. Only those can be truly good who have prospected their capacity for evil. Idealism is the censorship of reality.

‘I take water with my whisky,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Not condescension.’

He disliked the way they seemed to him to use literature as an insulation against life rather than an intensification of it.

‘Academicism, of course, can be mental formaldehyde. A way for people to put their brains on display without actually doing anything with them.

the modernity of East Kilbride is demonstrated by the good roads that converge on it and the roundabouts that mark their confluence like whirlpools. The town occurs among them like an archipelago.

Laidlaw had a happy image of the first man out after the nuclear holocaust being a Glaswegian. He would straighten up and look around. He would dust himself down with that flicking gesture of the hands and, once he had got the strontium off the good suit, he would look up. The palms would be open. ‘Hey,’ he would say. ‘Gonny gi’es a wee brek here? What was that about? Ye fell oot wi’ us or what? That was a liberty. Just you behave.’ Then he would walk off with that Glaswegian walk, in which the shoulders don’t move separately but the whole torso is carried as one, as stiff as a shield. And he would be muttering to himself, ‘Must be a coupla bottles of something still intact.’