An epic fictionalisation of the hunt for North Sea oil on Scotland’s East Coast in the 1960s and 70s, Richard T. Kelly’s expansive new novel tells the story of this pivotal moment in our country’s history through the lives of five young men, each with their own place in a changing society. We caught up with Richard here at BooksfromScotland to ask him about his new novel, his craft, and hypothetical dramatisations.

The Black Eden
By Richard T. Kelly
Published by Faber & Faber

Congratulations, Richard, on the publication of The Black Eden. Could you please tell us a little bit about what readers can expect from the book?

Thank you! With this novel I’ve tried to dramatize the great, true story of the hunt for oil in the North Sea during the 1960s and 1970s. The aim, really, was to present in a compelling way what finding the ‘black gold’ did to different people’s lives and relationships across Scottish society – how it transformed livelihoods and life-chances in Aberdeen and the north-east, how it turbo-charged Scottish industry and finance, too. Of course, alongside the benefits there were human and material costs, things that would be sorely contested both within Scotland and in its relations with the wider UK – and that is part of my story, too. It’s all recent history, and we feel its effects today, and will continue to. The characters in the novel are made-up, but still I hope Scottish readers might ‘recognise’ one or two of them from the contexts of their own lives, maybe.

While a work of fiction, The Black Eden follows a real historical timeline of the discovery of North Sea oil. What interests you about this part of British history and all its socio-political implications?

What I love about real-life historical-political subject matter is that it’s full of dilemmas – situations where people have to confront a really tough, conflicting choice between options, where there’s not one which is obviously correct. So, you’re forced to choose, and to take whatever are the consequences, even those you couldn’t foresee them – and that to me is inherently dramatic.

Back in the 1960s the UK badly needed oil to relieve its chronic balance of payments, and Scotland, because of the stratigraphy of the North Sea, became the laboratory for a grand experiment. The UK had already got onto the road to becoming a post-industrial economy – service-based, consumer-focused – and, ultimately, oil revenues would help that process further along. Extracting the crude oil from under the seabed, though, was incredibly hard, dirty, dangerous industrial labour. Once the oil was proven, it gave a terrific spur to those Scots who favoured independence for the nation – because they could see, albeit too late, a means by which Scotland might have been hugely rich had it sought independence sooner. ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ became the famous SNP slogan – but it wasn’t. The oil had been struck and exploited within a context made by the union, an agreement that couldn’t just be unravelled. From that moment, though, I’m sure it became sharply apparent to a lot of Scots just how much Scotland didn’t have its own head in these great matters. At the same time, everything that Scottish people went through and contributed to this colossal endeavour meant they emerged from it, I think, with a new assurance about what Scotland might achieve with a more diverse economy, working for new kinds of livings.

How do you strike a balance between historical accuracy and fictional storytelling?

If you write along the lines of things that actually happened, you’re always trying in some way to borrow a bit of plausibility – also a bit of profundity – from the realness of those events. But the challenge is to recast those events and dramatize them well, perceptively, so as to offer the reader insights they mightn’t get from the history books. The great German writer Bertolt Brecht said some especially brilliant things about ‘history plays.’ He observed that, if we write in that area, we want the pleasure that comes both for us and for the reader by dealing with “a piece of illuminated history” – meaning a certain kind of investigation of the past, or even an argument with the past, where some sharp new light gets shed upon it. But it has to be stressed that pleasure is the thing – fictional storytelling can’t be some arid academic exercise. Brecht goes on to argue that all of us, young and old alike, enjoy ‘stories of the rise and fall of the mighty, of the cunning of the oppressed, of the potentialities of men.’ And the historical record certainly offers that material for writers to play with!

How did you approach the research for this book? Could you tell us about one particularly interesting story or person that you came across while exploring the historical background of the novel?

Essentially I spent a lot of time just wandering round Aberdeen, and up north in Easter Ross, Nigg and Portmahomack, trips that I really savoured. Edinburgh I knew well enough from previous time spent. But then there was a lot of trawling of old print and photo archives, because to a degree the real North Sea ‘gold rush’ moment of the 1970s in Scotland is now a lost world – you can struggle to find enduring physical markers of it.

I heard so many stories that influenced the direction and tone of the novel, as well as some little touches in the margins. This is legendary in petroleum circles, but in the 1960s a top geologist at one of the major oil companies was so unconvinced by the prospects for North Sea drilling that he swore he would literally drink any oil that got found – and that encapsulated for me just how improbable and ill-starred the whole venture seemed at first.

On an earthier level, I enjoyed the tales of when BP established the huge deepwater construction yard in Nigg Bay to build the massive steel jackets for oil platforms to be hauled out to sea. I was fascinated by the Wild West aura of that – how labourers were drafted in to the north-east from all over, so many that they had to be given bunks aboard an old decommissioned Greek tourist ship. And where all these lads could go for a drink was a serious matter, but the one local hotel bar got so busy that the owner had to have an extension built, just for these thirsty workmen.

It did intrigue me, too, that in 1972 the US actually despatched a hugely seasoned diplomat with Middle East oil industry experience to be their Consul General in Edinburgh, as if to watch over what North Sea oil might do to the national question. I knew straight away that I wanted to do a version of that in my novel.

In addition to being a novelist, you have written scripts for stage and screen as well as books on film and filmmakers. If The Black Eden were adapted into a film or TV series, who would you love to see in the leading roles?

That’s a lovely question. It’s like fantasy football, but I could imagine the young Dundonian actor Stephen McMillan being great as Aaron Strang, the petroleum geologist; likewise Jack Lowden as Joe Killday, the Aberdeen trawler fishing scion. I could see Kirsty Findlay being terrific as the book’s heroine, the welder Evie Charlton. Scotland has so many superb actors across the generations, so I’d certainly hope there’s promising material for them here.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

Above all, I hope readers will have felt themselves caught up in an involving human story – that all that the characters go through as the plot progresses, the various dramas about love and work and family, will feel true and affecting. But I’d also be pleased if readers felt some renewed fascination with our recent history, that big-picture story of society and economy and industry, and all the human endeavour that went into it – and that they might even bear some of the novel’s themes in mind when they consider some of the vital societal issues confronting us now, particularly to do with how we get the energy we need as we look toward a low-carbon future.

Lastly, what are you looking forward to reading next?

My summer reading will definitely involve getting round to Alan Warner’s Nothing Left To Fear From Hell, to Don Paterson’s memoir Toy Fights, and to Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan. Looking ahead, I’ll be pre-ordering what looks to me a really promising non-fiction book: Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie.

The Black Eden by Richard T. Kelly is published by Faber & Faber, priced £20.00.