From Orwell’s satire to Woolf’s room of her own, great writers have shown us the personal and political freedoms that must be fought for and cherished
Say “Scotland”, say “Freedom!”, and you probably have an instant vision of Mel Gibson with blue paint on his face in the film Braveheart. Erase that image (if you can), and the next picture to swim into focus might well be Saltires in George Square, as September 2014 seethed with sunshine and debate on the Scottish referendum on independence. Or the words might conjure an empty glen with a vast blue sky, a stately stag on a distant purple mountain, an open road on which to walk.
When I wrote my novel Rise, I wanted to take all these images together and have Braveheart ride a deer through the shopping precinct of Sauchiehall Street. Well not quite, but you get the picture. By setting Rise among the standing stones of Argyll, but focusing on the run-up to the independence referendum, I was aiming to splice the ancient and the contemporary, and trying to capture a cresting wave in Scottish history. What I didn’t realise at the time was that a wave can herald a sea change, which continues to shape and redefine today.
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