The Next Stop Is Croy, and Other Stories
by Andrew McCallum Crawford
Skepdek Publishing, 2011
ASIN: B005REWV5Q, e-book: 156 KB, 30 pages, £2.42

Andrew McCallum Crawford doesn't really "do" women. Not in the literary sense. Not in this collection. Except for the barely-there wisp of a wife in the highlight of this sextet of sombre Scotland, "The Watchmaker's Wife." And here he excels.

The Next Stop Is Croy charts the lulls between major events in the life of an ordinary Scottish family, focusing mainly on the strained relationship between a father and his son, Alan. Most authors in this age of misery memoirs and rolling news channels are drawn to the vibrant, the dramatic. McCallum Crawford chooses a different path here and finds truth in the saying "sometimes a whisper proves louder than a shout."

He notes in the preface that these stories "were not written in the order in which they appear here," nor were they "conceived as part of a continuous narrative." However, the themes of frustrated familial and nonfamilial relationships, the starvation of hope in contemporary suburban Scotland and, in the penultimate story "Norwood Junction," South London too, flow through this volume as painfully as the aging father's tears.

According to his biography, McCallum Crawford, a Scottish ex-pat now living in Greece, studied Science and Philosophy at University, and this thoughtful mindset is displayed well in the measured precision of his observations here. This is a quiet, truthful collection, and a well-balanced read, of which the first half is the strongest.

"The Watchmaker's Wife" is the only story of the six highlighting the female in the family's point of view—a sister is mentioned briefly in another piece, but only as a foil, not a fully fleshed character. As the title implies, and the language reinforces, Alan's mum, or rather Alan's dad's wife, is the character in focus here. And this story is the treat of the collection, setting up the following pieces beautifully and casting a slightly different light over the ones that came before. It shares the quiet simplistic language of the first story, "Golf Balls," and again it is wholly appropriate to the piece. This time, there is sentence after sentence beginning with "She," one after another, reinforcing her lack of a separate identity and the monotony of her days, the muted tragedy of her life. In a less-accomplished writer's hands this could easily grate on the reader, but Crawford pulls it off well. If you only read one of these stories, make it this.

It's important to notice what McCallum Crawford doesn't write about, for they are the things a lot of contemporary families don't talk about, as this quote from the titular final piece "The Next Stop Is Croy," illustrates: "Love is a feeling. You feel it, you don't have to say it. Not in Scotland, anyway, not to your dad." Their absence along with the telling details Crawford does include are what give this narrative its power.

The careful dialogue, pacing, and realistic plotting are his strengths to which Crawford generally plays. He has a tendency to include a somewhat-didactic paragraph near the end, telling the readers details of the back story or character's reasoning as if he thinks this might be crucial to make sense of the end. It's neither necessary nor fluid—it jolted me out of the story each time.

It was refreshing to read a collection with such a Scottish flavor to it but no mention of the usual stereotypes. The text is peppered with Scots terms but in such a way as to allow a reader unfamiliar with the language to make sense of it, for example "Some of the strokes he saw getting played were howlers, the ball skiting straight down into the water" (from "Golf Balls") and because of this if I were to choose another writer's work for comparison, I would say Alan Gillespie rather than Irvine Welsh. Read this on a train ride to work, or on the sofa with a biscuit. It deserves a peaceful read.—Gill Hoffs