They Know Where They’re Going, by Jenni Daiches review: 'a dreary plod'

That, at least, is the premise of Jenni Daiches’ latest novel, which on the face of it has two hot-button topics - climate change and nationalism - covered. As the first of these falls into the increasingly prominent cli-fi category - last year saw the introduction of the first Climate Fiction Book of the Year award - and as Daiches is not only such a respected figure in the Scottish literary establishment, but was also one of the few writers openly in the “No” camp in the 2014 referendum, one opens her fifth novel with anticipation.

It is, in large part, the diary of a 15-year-old Ishbel Saddler, whose taciturn father Luke is being forced to sell his drought-hit Cambridgeshire farm and move north to the Wester Ross home of his late Scottish wife’s mother. Ishbel has always loved her Scottish gran and looks forward to seeing her again, but her siblings are more ambivalent: 18-year-old Finn because he had always counted on taking over the farm, and 20-year-old Evan because he has a good job working for the tech company who are to buy it.

Oddly, their father is set on journeying north not by train or car (cross-border trains and motorways are still working) but by horse and cart, accompanied on a mini-caravanserai by his bohemian blacksmith neighbour. Why he does this is never properly explained, nor - although he has assiduously mapped out the drovers’ roads route they will take wherever possible - does he seem particularly interested in the rules by which the border is policed or the full extent of the jeopardy into which he is placing his family.

Short of flying a St George’s flag on their carts, it is hard to think of a more inept way of smuggling his family over the Scottish border as economic migrants. The whole business is devilishly slow (more than two months), far too obvious to police, allows them to be mistaken for travellers and enrages drivers stuck behind them on narrow country lanes. Why bother?

My own guess is that Daiches imagined all this would be outweighed by the slow drama of the 600-mile journey across Britain, gradually pencilling in the details of climate change (punts stranded on the muddy Cam, abandoned Midlands villages etc) as the family trekked north like an 21st century take on the Joads in Grapes of Wrath, with its message that “all men’s got one big soul everybody’s a part of”. Perhaps the idea of centring the story on Ishbel’s diary would open its cli-fi themes to a YA readership, and one can easily see the value in that.

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Unfortunately, it never quite works. While Ishbel’s diary may be realistic, with its emphasis on how tired, hungry and grubby everyone feels, it is also dull. There is a small amount of tension in whether or not Evan will ditch his tech job, but this vanishes early on when not only does he join the trek north but brings his girlfriend too. A sense of risk never resurfaces, least of all where you expect it to, at the Scottish border.

Ishbel is an awesomely bright teenager, forever quoting Scott’s Guy Mannering, which she reads en route, but Daiches lacks the confidence to tell the story entirely in her voice, with the result that nearly all of her diary entries are followed by a third-person explanation of what she hasn’t noticed. This never stops being jarring. The further north we get, the shorter the chapters become, almost as if Daiches is tiring of her novel, and that it has become, as Ishbel writes early on in her diary, “On the road again and another dreary plod”.

They Know Where They’re Going, by Jenni Daiches, Scotland Street Press, £12.99

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