The Cone-Gatherers (1955) may currently be Jenkins’ best-known novel, simply because it has featured for some years on the Scottish school syllabus. It is a short novel, economically and clearly written, which nevertheless is a work of great depth and ambiguity. It is set in the woodlands of a Highland estate where the brothers Neil and Calum have the job of gathering pine-cones for seed. Calum is deformed and simple-minded, and (unusually among Jenkins’ characters) he is wholly good, in tune with nature and sickened by any kind of cruelty. The gamekeeper Duror finds him disgusting and unbearable; Jenkins shows us that this unreasonable hate arises from the deep misery of Duror’s own life. The meaning of The Cone-Gatherers has been much debated. Does the situation in the wood reflect the war (World War II) in progress outside? Is Calum a Christ figure whose death brings healing and redemption? In any case we can say that certain elements in the novel – the beautiful countryside full of evil; the obsessive, violent character who can yet be seen as pitiable – are recurrent in Jenkins’ work, reflecting his constant search for truth and his refusal to settle for a simple solution.
The Changeling (1958) is also set in the Scottish countryside, which seems like paradise to the boy Tom Curdie after life in the most deprived slums of Glasgow. He has been taken along on a family holiday by his teacher Charlie Forbes for the best of motives: to give this bright boy a chance, to show him what is possible if he can break free from his disadvantaged background. At least, Charlie tells himself that is his motive. There is in fact much self-deception involved – Charlie likes the feeling that he is doing a good thing – and Jenkins asks the (possibly unanswerable) question: would it have been better to leave Tom in the slum? Things go seriously wrong. Charlie’s wife and children are uncomfortable with Tom, and Charlie himself begins to resent his presence. Tom’s terrible family turn up and implicitly accuse Charlie of having paedophilic leanings. (Even Charlie would have foreseen this in a novel of today; in the 1950s he sees it as evidence of the unspeakable depravity from which he is trying to save Tom.) Meanwhile Tom has indeed had a vision of a better life, and the prospect of going back to his family – as he knows he must – is more than he can bear. This is one of Jenkins’ blackest and most questioning novels.
Fergus Lamont (1970) is technically a departure from Jenkins’ usual style of fiction, being narrated in the first person by Fergus in his old age as he looks back at his past life. It is sometimes considered Jenkins’ finest novel, and certainly has one of his most complex and ambiguous central characters. Fergus, a slum boy, re-invents himself as an aristocrat. He wants to be a poet. He blames all his troubles on his childhood and upbringing. He is not an easy character to like, but is he to be condemned or pitied? And are we to see him as a symbol of Scotland, torn between idealism and braggadocio, with a sense of inferiority always waiting in the wings?
The Thistle and the Grail (1954) is, perhaps unexpectedly among Jenkins’ works, a football novel, following the progress of a small-town team, Drumsagart Thistle, towards the holy grail of the Scottish Junior Cup. Of course, the team carries the hopes of the community, and for this depressed little industrial town somewhere in Lanarkshire it is, as Jenkins makes clear, their only hope. Football has long taken the place of religion and no other ambition has survived. Through the prism of this obsession Jenkins presents an unsparing picture of a small Scottish town, and again, perhaps, of Scotland as a whole.
Guests of War (1956) follows the evacuation of ‘Gowburgh’ (Glasgow) schoolchildren to a quiet Borders village at the outbreak of World War II. On one level there is a good deal of dark humour in the situation: the horror of the villagers at the dirt and coarse behaviour of their guests; the equal dismay of the evacuees at the unnatural quiet and the fearsome cows. But at the centre of the book is Bell McShelvie, one of the evacuee mothers. Unlike Charlie Forbes, she questions her own motives for coming away with her youngest son, leaving the rest of her family in danger; she accuses herself of a selfish longing to return to the countryside of her childhood, and expects punishment for this sin. Jenkins indicates that she is judging herself too harshly, but lets the punishment follow, though he leaves her in a difficult and tentative kind of hope.
