The Storyteller

The Tusitala restaurant, where I lunched with John McLeod the other day, keeps its Robert Louis Stevenson connections discreetly low-keyed. No dishes are named after him, so far as I can see, and nothing else supplies a link other than a few pictures in the entrance hall and a printed explanation of the restaurant’s name, meaning  “The Storyteller.”  It’s a popular  place on the edge of a new housing estate, and there have been rumours, fortunately false, that it is soon to be transformed into a supermarket. 

This does not take my mind off Swanston, the author’s nearby village on a slope of the Pentland Hills, to which a modern American writer,  Paul Theroux, has devoted a chapter of his seemingly factual novel, My Other Life. The book is full of real people, including Anthony Burgess, the Queen, and Prince Philip, along with the things they may or may bot have said to him, at one time or another. 

  Hiring a car and driving to Swanston in an escape from the Edinburgh Festival, Theroux makes contact with the current occupant of Stevenson’s childhood abode, “a majestic house of stucco and mellow granite” amid a cluster of cottages. An ill-tempered mother, surrounded by untidy children, says “Yes” when he knocks, but seems never to have heard of Stevenson. Stalking away from the fast-closing door, Theroux encounters not Stevenson himself - that would be too much to hope for, even in a novel - but his own private doppelganger, a smug and irritating old East German called Andreas Vorlaufer, a fellow author who claims already to have written all Theroux’s books and who, like Theroux, is visiting the Festival. 

 Since Theroux is easily irritated, one of his most admirable traits, this chapter of the book is made to  ring curiously  true. Vorlaufer, in Edinburgh on exacrly the same mission, points out to him the local sights with an airily knowing wave of his hand.  But is he really there?  Who is Jekyll and who Hyde? The meeting is odd enough to make you think that an alter ego is just what you need for a visit to Swanston.

17 May 2014