Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes review – state-of-the-nation novel with a feminist heart
An unpopular Tory government, a country riven by social inequality, a generation of young activists demanding change: 1990 was a defining year, with the so-called poll tax riot a focal point. That protest is at the centre of Kirstin Innes’s explosively ambitious second novel, which takes a fictional figure – Clio Campbell, a Scottish folk singer and political crusader whose outspoken views make her a touchstone for a generation – and weaves around her the story of Britain over the past three decades.
This fierce, funny novel opens in uncompromising terms, with the discovery of Clio’s body, dead three days before her 51st birthday from an overdose of pills and vodka. She is found by her long-suffering friend Ruth, one of the novel’s several narrators who build up a portrait in flashback of Clio’s half century. Each is fixated on their own interpretation of Clio, whom we never hear from directly. The real woman remains hidden, her more problematic aspects easily shuffled off on to another lover, friend or undertaking – similar to the card game Scabby Queen, a Scottish version of Old Maid. “The queen goes round and round, and the object is to get rid of her – pass her on to the next one as quickly as you can … Poor girl, int she.”
After a dysfunctional upbringing in the Highlands, Clio finds brief stardom in the early 90s with a hit single, “Rise Up”, peaking in an iconoclastic appearance on Top of the Pops. A brand before the advent of the internet and Instagram, she is caught up over the years in a range of causes, often to damaging effect.
Innes’s range is as wide as Clio’s passions – from an anti-globalisation group in a mid-90s Brixton squat through to the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit, and ranging from rural Ayrshire to the 2001 G8 riots in Genoa and a yoga retreat on the Greek island of Santorini. The supporting characters are vividly drawn, and Clio herself is always larger than life – although a posthumous credo at the novel’s end fails to convince – and either blazing with self-righteousness or dimmed by depression. This is an opportune state-of-the nation novel with a feminist heart.
• Scabby Queen is published by 4th Estate (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
