Karl Miller wrote a book called Doubles, exploring the duality of human nature, Jekyll and Hyde, and such like. Duality fascinates him. Another book was Cockburn’s Millennium, a study of the Scottish judge and autobiographer, an Edinburgh Reviewer, a figure so prominent in Edinburgh’s Golden Age that the society which sets out, not always successfully, to defend the urban heritage, takes its name from him. Cockburn, intensely sociable, was however never happier than when able to retire to his rural retreat on the slopes of the Pentland Hills.
Miller himself, academic and journalist, founder of the London Review of Books, is a hard man to pin down. He is a Londoner, having passed most of his adult life there, but one who delights in urban foxes and other wildlife at home in the city; he is also a Scot of Irish extraction who seeks out country places, and quotes with approval Ronald Blythe’s assertion that ‘it is man’s rightful place to live in Nature and be a part of it’, whereas ‘city life fragments a man’. Nevertheless he seems whole enough himself, unfragmented perhaps, as this collection of often rambling essays, and the affectionate introduction by Andrew O’Hagan, suggest, because of his forays into the countryside — with an especial fondness for the Border Counties — and his absorption in that species of literature known as ‘pastoral’.
If Cockburn is one of his heroes, a modernising lawyer in the age of parliamentary reform, who yet looked back nostalgically on the 18th century as ‘the last purely Scotch Age’, another is James Hogg, author of that disturbing masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and also the subject of a ruminative biography by Miller, Electric Shepherd. Self-educated, Hogg was a writer of rare originality, and an accomplished parodist too; yet one who drew deeply on the ballads and oral traditions of the Ettrick Valley where he was born and reared. Moreover, Hogg was not only an author himself but, in his own lifetime, a semi-fictional character, featuring as ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’, wandering conversations on every topic under the sun published in Blackwood’s Magazine. They made him a celebrity, much better known as the garrulous and bibulous ‘Shepherd’ than as the author of remarkable novels. He both delighted in this celebrity as a public character, and resented it. His friend Sir Walter Scott loved the Borders Hogg and deplored the Edinburgh one whom the clever young men of Blackwood’s presented as an idiot-savant and learned buffoon. Hogg is part-subject of a fascinating essay here, ‘Carnival Scotland’, in which he is compared to Irvine Welsh, not always to his advantage, for Miller has a characteristically generous admiration for Trainspotting, being an eclectic reader and critic himself.
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