Call it the Braveheart factor: chutzpah emboldened by hype. There are those who dub it a writing renaissance. One or other - neither or both - what is undeniable is the shelf-space (some would say shelf-life) in evident volume on the Scottish writing front.
This spring and summer an armful of novels, short stories and poetry published by major London houses proves the undiminished potency and persistence of this literary foray. Last year it was led by Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, the ubiquitous Irvine Welsh (whose first three books have just come out, rewrapped as an Omnibus edition).
This year in the vanguard are A.L.Kennedy, Alan Spence and Allan Massie, followed, and hustled, by Alan Warner's second novel (abob in the wake of Morvern Callar - much over-rated), Ali Smith's first, and John Burnside's debut as a novelist, in tandem with the publication of his sixth collection of poems, tagged to a volume by Don Paterson: God's Gift to Women.
God's gift to literature - the Scots? All kinds of theories about the genesis of the upsurge in Scottish writing are doing the rounds. None of them so far implicates God. Notions of nationhood, of identity reaching its crisis in the face of 18 years of Tory misrule. Of Scottish writing as a riposte, the notion that the film Braveheart is a calculated ploy to annexe the metropolis under London's very nose (and imprimatur), are all patent nonsense.
The conspiracy theory is nothing less than a xenophobic joke, a monocular vision. Scottish writers have neither the necessary sense of close identity, not the essential paranoia to pull off a coup.
Instrumental in their progress during the Eighties was the existence of Polygon Press, under Peter Kravitz's magpie editorial eye. The emergent Scottish (g)litterati, burnished by Kravitz, were published in Edinburgh before shifting camp to London, coaxed and nurtured by Robin Robertson, an editor first at Secker, now at Cape, and, as it happens, an Aberdeenshire Scot.
He published Kelman, whose stature and catalytic role are essential factors underpinning the current flux. Kelman's testy, biting intelligence, wit and sorcery with language run like a molten underground mutter through the several streams of influence - and confluence - in the new generation's work.
Along with Gray, with his landmark Lanark (1981, Kelman sustained an outward-embrace and an inward-dreaming - of the urban kind - that distanced itself form concerns with the Siamese twins of the Scottish literary psyche: resolve and despair, and permitted many younger writers to detect and express their own voices: demotic, lyrical, pedantic, psychotic, unburdened by cultural cringing, and on a binge.
Kelman and Gray are formidable presences - largely by proxy, though each of them features in two current paperback anthologies: New Scottish Writing: Soho Square VII (first published last year, containing the work of established manes), and Ahead of Its Time, a bracing stir-fry mixing wunderkinder such as its editor, Duncan McLean ("Scotland's answer to Roddy Doyle" - what was the question?) with manes still barely known in the tenements and streets where they reside.
Ahead of Its Time takes the more eclectic approach, is a visceral, patchy, yet punching collective weight, as a chorus ought when throwing more than its skein of voices, achieving a sense of place and displacement, couched in Scots-English, Lallans, Shetlandic, Doric, Glaswegian. The Shearing, by Duncan McLean, a tale of longing, wooing and foreplay, is as compact and enduring as anything else he has written. With equal clarity, Ali Smith recreates the detritus of life in Instructions for Pictures of Heaven - a series of snapshots torn into blinks, confetti-like flickers of everyday life that make you stare, as do the snappy, blatant verses by Shug Hanlan, all matter-of-fiction, hard-to-swallow sexual nastiness, language on edge.
By contrast, too much of Soho Square VII is flat, predictable, a montage of drugs and decay, an urban voicescape with literary accents, some of the run. Candia McWilliam's Shredding the Icebergs attempts the voice of a woman running a cockle and whelk stall but fails to convince. The voices of Welsh and Duncan McLean are as sharpened and broken as the glass-strewn inner housing schemes they depict. It is the equivalent of absorbing an Ireland mediated only through the voices of Roddy Doyle, or the Dublin ambience and argot of early Bolger in Night Shift or The Journey Home.
Paradoxically, though, the book is redeemed by Welsh's A Fault On the Line. This is utterly gripping, the gullet-spew of a waster, Malky, watching the local football derby in the screen in a hospital waiting room, cursing his wife, who has just had her legs cut off by a train; yet he is the stunted one, loathing already thoughts of sex with an amputee.
In the latter collection is a story by A.L.Kennedy, the supremely original writer among a gifted generation. In Original Bliss, comprising 10 stories and a novella, a book shot through with sex, lies and X-rays, Kennedy shows that the workings, the deeps, the particulars, of love - like those of the body - are most acutely revealed when they founder.
In Animal, an actor, axed form his soap role, shrivels. Ben in Rockaway and the Draw is a Stepford husband between the sheets, while his wife ponders murder, using a pencil shoved through the portal of the ear. Yet more quietly, in The Cupid Stunt, X-rays become the means of chosen interior penetration, a subtle conversational reference to pris loose "little thoughts of anatomy", conjure "the milky ghosts of bones...the smoke cages that held a smirr of tender organs".
Kennedy's prose is all claws and sheen, the work of a sphinx. Only John Burnside's poetic precision - A Normal Skin, his latest collection in search of self, in the course of which he returns to Fife, is a marvel of lightness rooted by love - comes close to Kennedy's evocation of a twilight zone, the borders of dream and waking where thought lies exposed without the protection of wakeful pretence.
Burnside's The Dumb House, his debut novel. Less successfully, but memorably, locks on to the voice of Luke, mad, a seeker obsessed with power over others' worlds, his quest for the origins of speech being a crucial manifestation of his urge towards domination, using his babies in an experiment to satiate both his enquiry and his need to steal others' souls.
Reading these writers proves nothing so much as the diversity - both of locale, and of writing talent - now on the loose. There is no "school" of Scottish writers, and no renaissance. As in Ireland, the urban voice has become assertive. But within its own range of consciousness, plurality is as evident as in the range represented by Bolger, Aidan Mathews, Catherine Dunne, Doyle, Hugo Hamilton and Ferdia MacAnna.
The point is graphically reinforced by Alan Warner's second novel, These Demented Lands, a closet-sequel to Movern Callar, set on an island, a microcosmic Caledonia, a quest tale with fantasy frills, and a sense of otherness and misrule, transcending the urban/rural dichotomy. It bespeaks a generation rediscovering, reinventing their native place. What we are witnessing is tradition in evolution, accruing evidence, staging a rally, bringing hope (not-withstanding the hype) of something lasting and substantial.
Tom Adair is a critic living in Scotland