The Tenement

<p>The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the febrile lives of the transient human beings whom it shelters.</p> <p>At the time of which Iain Crichton Smith writes, there are married couples in three of the flat; two widows and a widower occupy the others. All of them are living anxious lives of quiet desperation, which Mr Smith anatomises with cool and delicate understanding.</p> <p>The Masons, Linda and John, are the youngest and perhaps the happiest house-hold, who can still look to the future with hope: he has quite a well-paid job in a freezer shop, she is expecting a child. Mr Cooper's role in life is humbler: he is a lavatory attendant, but can take an off pride in his work. The Camerons provide drama: the husbands, once a long distance lorry driver who was sacked for heavy drinking and now a casual labourer, is consumed with unreasoning hate of Catholics, and when drunk becomes a raging brute who batters and terrifies his wife. Trevor Porter, an ex-teacher who like to think of himself as a poet (unpublished), is destroying his marriage by his self-absorption, though after his wife has surprised him by dying of cancer he feel guilt-ridden. Mrs Floss is the tenement's most colourful inhabitant: the widow of a local hotel owner, she still has money and can indulge in holiday cruises and foreign lovers. Mrs Miller, up on the top floor, is odd-woman-out even in this company of loners: since her husband was killed by lightening, crucified on the telephone wires he was repairing, she has become a slatternly recluse, who finds occasional drinking companions among the town's down-and-outs. The course of several of these lives reaches a startling crisis during the little party to celebrate the birth of the Masons' child.</p> <p>But Iain Crichton Smith declines any easy resolution of events. His fascinatingly ill-assorted group of characters, brought together only by grey granite, are left to struggle on, with their own strengths and weaknesses.</p>