This Is What You Get by Iain MacLachlain

A gripping novel written in Doric Scots

Back in the 1980s I lived in Aberdeen for three years, and for two of them my roommate was a Turra loon [lad from Turriff] called Graham. For the first few months I had no idea what Graham was saying to me because his Doric language and accent was impenetrable. Even meeting up would be a problem: if we agreed to meet at half six, he took that to mean half to six and not half past six, so I was generally an hour late. I got used to his way of speaking though, and he was a braw lad.

I thought about Graham while I was reading Iain MacLachlain’s This Is What You Get, because it is written entirely in Doric Scots. The dialogue of my own novels is written in Perthshire Scots, but the main narrative is in Standard English, so I was fascinated to see how MacLachlain’s novel would read. And the answer is that it reads just grand.

The novel was the recipient of a grant from the Scottish Book Trust intended to promote the Scots language. MacLachlain said of the award: ‘The broad Doric spoken by my grandparents seems to fade further with every passing year, so I am delighted that fresh life is
breathed into oor mither tongue by the Scottish Book Trust, allowing Scots writers to be heard from the page, and to entertain and bring pleasure to readers in Scotland and beyond.’ I know what he means. When I hear Aberdonians nowadays they’re nowhere near as broad as they were when I lived there, and that’s a great pity. It's a fine aim, then, and it is also very pleasing that there has been quite a resurgence of Scots writing in recent years. This Is What You Get is a very welcome addition.

As it happens, my arrival in Aberdeen in the 1980s would have broadly coincided with the departure from the Granite City of the main protagonist of This Is What You Get, Zander, who leaves to join the army. We are in Thatcher’s Britain, a nasty and brutish place and time, ‘Thatcher’s wasteland,’ as the novel describes it, a place where people ‘were nae strangers tae hardship or lack o opportunity.’ That proved fertile ground for the armed forces, with a lot of young lads signing up for want of any other options. Zander, though, has signed up because he wants to ‘be like my faither’. For him, and for many, there was a romance to signing up for the old regiments, famous through history, their regalia and insignia evoking strong passions.

This call to tradition, the novel tells us, was something that was played on by the authorities. Boys usually joined the military in the geographical area from where they came. ‘An the military liked it that waye… The divisions an the rivalries were there tae create competition, tae make ye strive tae be better and tougher than the rest’. Such competition ‘made them easier tae control,’ and so the authorities encouraged the soldiers to regard their own regiments as better than anyone other. One soldier explains:

When ye get posted, yer biggest enemy winnae be the IRA or the Soviets, it’ll be the regiment in the next camp. That’s why the Tories like competition. They like us tae be fightin amongst each ither an missin the big picture. That’s why they fuckin let folk buy their cooncil hooses for peanuts. They kent maist folk wid get greedy an sell them on. They kent they’d break up communities. They dinnae want you getting the gither an getting ideas about social equality. They want ye bitchin and squabblin an bein a selfish cunt. They ken the next generation winnae hae social hoosin an they’ll be scrapin their wages the gither tae pay inflated rent tae Tory fuckin landlords.

Divide and conquer, then. But the new recruits in This Is What You Get play the game. They become passionate about their own regiment, about being the best. The regime is harsh, beastings and punishments common, the officers in charge taking an almost sadistic delight in making life difficult for the nigs, the New In Germany soldiers. It was all about control. ‘Some boys thought they knew the script’, the novel tells us, ‘but it wasna initiative [the authorities] were lookin for, they were lookin for obedience’.

We follow Zander and his fellow recruits through their initial training in Edinburgh and their first posting in Germany. Those who survived the early days flourish. Friendships develop. Enmities too. And then their training changes. Becomes more intense. ‘They dinnae want ye tae ken anythin,’ one soldier says. ‘But ahll tell ye this. This is fuckin Gulf trainin… We’re goin tae the fuckin Gulf, boys. We’re goin tae fuckin war.’

And they do. This is a highly dramatic, indeed traumatic section of the novel, powerfully written, compelling, devastatingly tense. The connections forged by these young men become challenged. Things break. People break.

MacLachlain’s prose is crisp and beautifully controlled. At times, it reads like Hemingway has settled in Aiberdeen and taken up the Doric (a sentence I could never have predicted writing):

Fraser barked mair orders at the CO’s request an the recruits grounded their rifles and the CO gave a speech aboot trainin an service an achievement an the plums fell oot of his mooth and doon ontae the tarmac and the parents were proud an Zander sucked in the hot air an his chest swelled an he wiggled his taes to keep the blood movin and tried tae blank oot the bead of sweat on his foreheed.

The novel reaches a strange and vivid climax some thirty years later, when some of the former squaddies meet up again. They reminisce. ‘The army wasnae aboot money tae me,’ one says. ‘It wis the life. It was the brotherhood, You boys were ma brothers.’

The blurb for the novel states:

This is what you get when you tear apart our communities and leave us with no hope and little choice. This is what you get when you train us to kill and then throw us on the scrap heap. This is what you get when you mess with us.

And, as one of the characters says near the end: ‘We hae tae dae somethin drastic once in a while.’

Drastic and awful. Men trained to obey. Men trained to kill. Men betrayed. Who can blame them if all that training is turned towards different ends?

This Is What You Get is a fascinating read, highly recommended.