Blog tour: Tombstoning by Doug Johnstone
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘Your best mate just fell off a cliff in mysterious circumstances. You were the last person to see him alive. What do you do?
‘If you’re David Lindsay from Arbroath, you leg it – and don’t go back. Not for 15 years.
‘Then Nicola Cruickshank – yes, that Nicola, the girl you always fancied but never had the guts to speak to – gets in touch. She wants you back for a school reunion. At the very place it happened. Of course you say yes. Not to lay ghosts to rest, but because you still fancy Nicola.
‘The thing is, if you are David Lindsay, then returning to Arbroath isn’t going to bring closure. Because when someone else tumbles off the cliffs – an act the locals now call tombstoning – David has a choice: run away again, or finally find out why people around him keep dying…’
Tombstoning, Doug Johnstone’s 2006 debut, follows Edinburgh web designer David Lindsay on a reluctant trip down memory lane to Arbroath – the hometown he hasn’t been back to since he completed his Highers, 15 years previously.
The catalyst for David’s departure in 1988 was the death of his best friend, Colin, in circumstances that made no sense: Colin had everything to live for, and David last saw him walking in the opposite direction to the cliff he fell from.
Persuaded to return for a school reunion by old classmate and budding love interest Nicola, David finds he’s not the only one who’s still thinking about Colin – especially when another of his cohorts is found at the bottom of the cliff the morning after the party…
Chris Brookmyre’s concise introduction to this reissue of Tombstoning pre-empts a lot of what I want to say in my review: going back to a well-established author’s earliest work is a gamble that in this case pays off; the writing is tight and every scene moves the story forward; and you can already detect the working-in of interesting facts and “big ideas” that so strongly characterises Johnstone’s more recent work.
Brookmyre’s analogy of listening to a great band’s minor-label debut and, to your relief, finding it coheres with the rest of their output, is spot-on. To extend this, I’d say Tombstoning is a progenitor to Johnstone’s later writing with a bigger budget, more studio time, and more space to experiment and take risks. The characters are very ordinary compared with the Skelfs and the humans in the Enceladons series (though no less fully-realised or compelling for it), and a quick skim of the author’s Wikipedia page reveals he started off with “write what you know” in terms of their age and home town.
Accordingly, Tombstoning has a brilliant sense of place. I’ve never visited Arbroath, but found it easy to picture thanks to Johnstone’s descriptions of its landmarks, geography, and history, as well as David and Nicola’s personal relationships with these.
It also feels like a tribute to the town, and small towns more generally: David initially looks down on it as an unglamorous, faded place he’s been fortunate to escape, but comes to appreciate some of the charms that were lost on him as a teenager, and see his former schoolmates as individuals with complex inner worlds and good reasons to stay in the town who have (mostly) grown and changed in his absence. Not to mention, he’s not doing that well himself.
Other aspects of the book I really enjoyed were how the suspense built up over the course of the story (sometimes so subtly, I didn’t even realise at the time!) before suddenly and dramatically coming to a head, and the ingenuity David and Nicola respectively displayed in tracking down one of their classmates who was conspicuously absent from the reunion (no Facebook in 2003!) and navigating the sticky situation they ultimately ended up in.
Tombstoning is a tightly-plotted and compelling debut with a strong sense of place.
