Scotland sells itself in soft focus. Heather, hymns, and heritage centres that charge you ten quid to feel “connected” to a past they’ve already declawed. Philip Paris writes straight through that varnish. Not politely. Not as a postcard. He goes after the bits of Scottish history that institutions prefer to file under regrettable, the stories that don’t bolster the brand or flatter the national self-image.
Paris didn’t arrive as some tartan-besotted lifer performing authenticity for the gatekeepers. He’s a working-class Gateshead lad who later moved to the Highlands and started writing because the story grabbed him by the throat: Orkney’s Italian Chapel, built by Italian prisoners of war in the Second World War. That origin matters. It’s not “Scotland as destiny”. It’s Scotland as collision—war, captivity, labour, and the strange tenderness people hammer together under coercion. The chapel becomes a rebuke to the lazy myth that suffering automatically turns noble when you stick it on an island.
Then he keeps going. He writes Men Cry Alone and forces a conversation that the culture loves to dodge: male victims of domestic abuse, and the way ridicule and silence do violence all by themselves. He writes Casting Off—old age, desire, community, the indignities we dress up as “care.” None of this is Scotland-as-scenery. It’s Scotland—and Britain—under pressure, with the polite scripts stripped off.
When Paris turns to the past, he doesn’t pick the safe anniversaries. The Last Witch of Scotland drags Janet Horne’s 1727 execution out of folklore and into the room. Not the “witchy” aesthetic the market peddles—no cosy pagan wish-fulfilment, no candlelit empowerment fantasy you can buy on a tote bag. This is about a state and a church that needed a body to blame, and a community trained to call cruelty “righteousness.” If that makes you uncomfortable, good. You’re meant to be.
Scotland loves to mourn its victims as long as nobody has to name the machinery that made them.
And then there’s A Fire in Their Hearts, set in the 1660s and rooted in the Covenanters and the Killing Times—Scotland’s long lesson in how “order” is just violence with better stationery. Paris ties faith, persecution, imprisonment, and transport across oceans into one narrative line, because that’s how power works: it doesn’t stop at the village boundary. It expands. It exports. It makes its theology a policy and its policy a profit. The point isn’t the romance of resistance; the point is the administrative grind of repression and how ordinary people get crushed between throne, pulpit, and law.
This is where I’m going to be unsentimental about historical fiction, because the genre has a bad habit of turning atrocity into entertainment, then calling it “bringing history to life.” Publishing encourages it. Readers reward it. Give them a brave heroine, a love story to buffer the brutality, a few tasteful horrors, and everyone can feel appropriately moved without having to confront the present. Paris is better than most at keeping the floorboards visible—showing how institutions corner people, how belief is weaponised, how communities participate. But the market still circles, trying to sand his work into something consumable: “epic,” “uplifting,” “hopeful.” That’s the trap. Hope as packaging. Pain as ambience.
Paris’s real value is that he refuses Scotland’s favourite dodge: the idea that the worst things were aberrations committed by monsters, safely sealed in the archive. His Scotland is built by prisoners, policed by ministers, and maintained by neighbours who decide it’s easier to join in than to stand apart. That isn’t heritage. That’s a warning.
If your national story needs tartan to stay lovable, it isn’t a story—it’s a sales pitch.
So read Philip Paris as an antidote to the tourist version of the country. And then don’t stop at being “moved.” Don’t turn Janet Horne into a symbol and walk away. Don’t treat the Covenanters as quaint martyrs and leave the logic of persecution untouched. Take the line he keeps drawing—between belief and force, between silence and complicity—and press it into the present until it hurts. Keep pressing.
