History: This personal odyssey through 1500 years of Scottish history mobilises two geological metaphors - the 'Stone of Destiny' and 'St Andrews Fault'. Neal Ascherson's stringent, generously motivated, humane book tries to imagine the shape of post-independence Scottish cultural and political landscapes, what they might borrow from Scottish history, writes Ray Ryan
Seven hundred years after being kidnapped by Edward I, the "Stone of Destiny" was finally returned to Scotland in 1996. Because Scottish Kings sat on this stone during their inauguration ceremony, it conferred legitimacy and symbolised the allegiance of all elements of society - Gaelic, Christian, feudal - to the Scottish monarchy. As Ascherson astutely notes, the English retained the stone because they attributed magical powers to their Celtic neighbours, but the theft remained a Scottish grievance for centuries.
Desperate to appease Scottish demands for self-government with some grand gesture, Prime Minister John Major finally announced the Stone's return, but only as a "loan". By asserting the Crown's ultimate ownership, the grammar of power between both countries was, once more, starkly clarified. "Change" was at the behest of an English Tory prime minister and an English queen. Imagine Patrick Mayhew presenting Bertie with the very first sliotar, then asking for a deposit and signed receipt.
Ascherson's second geological metaphor is the "St Andrews Fault": the "traumatic chasm" dividing a confident minority, the middle classes who prospered under Union, from a distrustful Scottish majority wholly alienated from the political process. Deprived of responsibility for their own future, and with radical change permanently unavailable, this majority have habitually converted self-doubt into strident self-assertion, a genuinely communitarian instinct into an often lethal fractiousness. After all the ballyhoo about "freedom", Ashcerson asks why the popular attitude to the long-awaited Edinburgh Parliament is most charitably described as "indifferent".
Wherever the "Stone of Destiny" resides, of course, it still remains inanimate, mute. If real independence was permanently located in Scotland, could historical fissures actually be overcome and glaring social iniquities be bridged? This stringent, generously motivated, humane book tries to imagine the shape of post-independence Scottish cultural and political landscapes, what they might borrow from Scottish history. If Estyn Evans had been a nationalist (small "n"), he might have written a similar book on Ireland.
Ascherson's reading of Scottish history is subjective, passionate, and, in places, a little sentimental. The Highland Clearances and mass emigration created this introspective, brooding, passive majority. "Scotland must be rid of Scotland", of this traumatic legacy, before real freedom can arrive.
The parallels with Ireland hardly need stressing. The fabulously titled 1922 Church of Scotland report, 'The Menace of the Irish Race to Our Scottish Nationality', is just one example of Scottish preoccupations with Ireland. Ascherson's frequent Irish comparisons, linking landscape and language, dispossession and the desire for statehood, pushes the connection a little further to the centre of the Scottish political imagination.
Ascherson is too civilised and intelligent to think the Stone of Destiny is, in fact, unimportant. Symbols matter. The Scots historical relationship with their harsh physical landscape fascinates him. But long stretches of the book do unfold without carrying any real argument forward.
Ascherson's prose is always engaging, but the personal register, the mix of frustration and aspiration, is most compelling.
A founder member of the Scottish Labour Party, and a former Liberal Democrat candidate for the Scottish Parliament, Ascherson's distinguished career as writer and commentator on European affairs has not dimmed his political impatience. There is no turning back, he declares: the logical outcome of Scottish Home Rule is full independence outside the Union.
So if real freedom arrived, if Mel Gibson was declared a permanently undesirable alien in an independent Scotland, and the cliché-ridden Braveheart was given a permanent X-rating, what next?
To find out, Ascherson organised a busload of Scottish intellectuals and writers to travel the country before the 1997 referendum armed only with the best of modern poetry, whisky, fierce idealism and a large banner. This tactic was imported from Günter Grass in post-unification Germany. The Scottish nation was asked what it expected of freedom. The answer, adapted from Lech Walesa's motto for Solidarity, was encapsulated in "our only answer is ourselves", a motto subtly different from "ourselves alone".
The Scots are a practical lot, though. They want brass as well as stones in their pockets. Poet Douglas Dunn's simple hope was that self-government would make notoriously shy first-year Scottish students talk to him. Neal Ascherson's impressive, continuously engaging, always enlightening dialogue with himself and a country he clearly loves, is well worth hearing.
Ray Ryan is the author of Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, 1966-2000, published by Oxford University Press
Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. By Neal Ascherson. Granta, 326 pp. £16.99