Fergus Lamont

The class-conscious, early-20th-century life story of Fergus Lamont - who, after being bought a boy's kilt by his ostracized (and soon to be a suicide) mother, never wears anything but aristocratic kilts on his lower half again: uppity behavior for a wee-un from the Gantock slums of Scotland. But not really - because Fergus, it so happens, was in fact fathered by a laird. And, throughout this solid but uneventful tale, Scottish novelist Jenkins closely follows the taking-up and puttingdown of Fergus' assumptions of class. Fergus eventually will become a poet, weathered by a World War I officership and soured by marriage to the unfaithful Betty - a popular novelist whose bitchery leads Fergus to forswear society in favor of self-exile to the Hebrides village of East Gerinish. Life is ducky there, with plain-in-the-head, lovely Kirstie. But when she dies, Fergus, growing old, returns one last time to Gantock and his roots, set-straight finally as to who he really is. Jenkins provides some well-aimed observations about Scottish character, and his forays into dialect are never so overdone as to be less than burr-edly appealing. But probably only Scots-ophiles will find enough satisfaction from the local colors here to make this dry, rather heavy fictional biography a consistent pleasure. (Kirkus Reviews)