Book review: Clanlands

I had a bad feeling about this book at first. Page after page, no mention of the Great Highland bagpipe. In a book about Scotland. In a book about two movie-star Scots (Sam and Graham) traveling around Scotland looking for the most Scottish things there are. Bad signs abounded: three mentions of "drone" in the first few pages that had to do with cameras, not bagpipes; a generic mention of "musicians" that were to be visited and heard; abundant mention of whisky, kilts, feuding, mountain rambling, and other things Scottish -- but no bagpipes! I am well aware that not everyone loves bagpipes the way I do; I am well aware that some people in fact hate the bagpipes. But could it be possible that I was reading a book about Scotland that would go to some lengths to avoid them?

You know what would've been nice? An index. Nothing in a nonfiction books says "I really don't care about myself as a book and have no respect for you, the reader" more than the lack of an index. There is a burgeoning genre of book that is the offshoot of a media production -- in this case Outlander -- one of many possible product lines, aka "merch," that involve assembling out-takes, converting them into written form, and massaging them into a final draft "with" a writer-masseuse not mentioned on the cover, in this case Charlotte Reather. She made a good book! She brought form to this "you take the high-road" trip and concealed (with some heavy hinting along the way) for as long as possible that the book finally does appear as a series of its own called [spoiler alert] Men in Kilts.

So why not reward her with an index? How much can an indexer be? Look, the drone is saving you on a helicopter with a pilot. Frees up some money. Plus, hey, robotic indexing software is dirt cheap; speeds up the process; heck, I would spec it for them with a budget that would figure to be less than minimum wage.

As it happened: I was not reading a bagpipe-less book. ("Ha!" snort the producers, clinking another round of whiskies, "That's right!  No short cuts for the likes of you! Had to read the whole thing! Hahaha!) Finally, on page 78, a bagpipe appears, and it is in the context of the very first event -- other than whisky -- that Sam and Graham track down: the massacre at Glencoe.

And then: more! Much more! Many more mentions of bagpipes! So many that I began to imagine an index with an entry "Bagpipe, Great Highland." This is what it would have looked like:

Bagpipe, Great Highland: blood-curdling, at the Battle of Culloden, 115; deafening, at Simon Fraser (Lord Lovat)'s rapacious marriage of Lady Murray, 173;  declared to be weapon of war by British after Culloden, 250; not quite as elating as getting TV show with Starz, 290; haunting notes played at Glencoe Massacre felt by Graham, 80; mournful notes filled with foreboding, 262; part of sensory overload at the Battle of Culloden, 235; raising mood levels to murderous intent, 235; Rob Roy dies before end of dirge, 269; Scotland the Brave blasting, 235; screaming and maddening notes at the "Battle of North Inch," 111; shrill cry hacking marrow and muscles, 253; skirl as part of the romance of Jacobitism, 251.

(Let me just say that these seem not to be people who associate the sound of bagpipes with such aural concepts as "majesty," "beauty," "soaring," "inspiring," or "uplifting.")

And another then: I watched a couple episodes of the actual show, just for comparison's sake. While it is satisfyingly (to me) bagpipe-forward from the outset, the patter between movie stars Sam and Graham becomes annoying (to me) filler, with the latter -- who is so knowledgeable of Scottish history in the book -- resorting at times to such "are we there yet?" randomness as imitations of the U.S. southern accent and an enthusiastic rendering of the Flintstones theme song. The scenes in which the movie stars engage human repositories of Scottish skill as often as not focus on the ineptness of the movie stars rather than the "eptness" of the skilled. The episode on music ("song and dance") features a single bagpiper, from whom we do learn (as we did not in the book) that pre-Culloden piping was the province of a single piper; it became a band thing after the battle, when the Brits absorbed it into the military of the empire. 

Sure, the drone shots are beautiful, and one does *hear* bagpipes. I bet on the whole it's red meat for the Outlander fan. But to me, as usual, the book is better than its filmic rendering. And this surprises me, somehow. Maybe this burgeoning genre of book-offshoot-from-media-production is worth something after all: the hours you might otherwise spend watching it.