Whisky Galore by Compton MacKenzie
This title was new to me but, being a whisky drinker, immediately caught my attention. I heard about it in an unusual way. I happened to read about an artist in Scotland, anonymous but known to be a woman, making paper sculptures out of books to celebrate Scottish culture and then leaving the sculptures hidden in libraries. One of the books she honored this way was Whisky Galore. I’ll drink to that!
The novel takes place during the Second World War in the winter to spring of 1943, from before Lent to Easter week. The setting is two fictional islands in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland named Great Todday and Little Todday. The islands are separated by a short boat ride, but separated from the mainland by a longer distance that requires the services of a ferry that only makes the trip a few times a week and is canceled when the weather is bad.
Because of war rations, and the geographic isolation, the islands suffer from shortages. Particularly bothersome is that whisky has run short at the beginning of the novel, and then dries up entirely. The folks are stuck with only beer, and then beer, too, runs short and the bar at the hotel limits even the beer to a half pint every other day.
Meanwhile, two couples are trying to arrange weddings. Two years before the novel begins, Sergeant-major Fred Odd fell in love with Peggy Macroon, a young woman on the island of Little Todday. Before he could marry her he was sent away on military assignment. Now he’s back and wants to marry without further delay, preferably on the Wednesday after Easter. Her father, Joseph Macroon, though, being a widower, is reluctant to let her go and talks vaguely of a date perhaps at the end of summer. The other couple is Catriona Macleod and George Campbell, the head of the school on Great Todday. But George’s mother is a disapproving woman who objects seemingly to anything that would make her son happy and Norman is too cowed to stand up to her.
A final strand of the story is that the men of the islands are supposed to be organized into a Home Guard, ready to defend the islands in case of a German invasion. Managing the Home Guard is the responsibility of the richest man on the island, Paul Waggett. He owns the hotel on Great Todday that houses the bar. Waggett is uptight. He accuses the islanders of being lazy and defeatist because they don’t show up for military drills. Sergeant Odd, who is assigned to help Waggett with the training of the Home Guard, explains that the villagers by the winter of 1943 feel the threat of a German invasion is remote, and beside, with no whisky who can blame them for feeling unmotivated?
The problems are all solved when about halfway through the novel a sort of miracle occurs. A boat called the Cabinet Minister, bound for New York, off course in a heavy fog, founders on rocks just off the coast of Little Todday. The crew is OK, and the boat stays balanced on the rocks more or less above water, but it won’t sail again and the cargo is a loss. And what a cargo: fifteen thousand, or maybe even fifty thousand cases of whisky! Whisky galore!
I loved this list of the bottles the islanders discover:
“Besides the famous names known all over the world by ruthless and persistent advertising for many years, there were many blends of the finest quality, less famous perhaps but not less delicious. There were Highland Gold and Highland Heart, Tartan Milk and Tartan Perfection, Bluebell, Northern Light, Pretonpans, Queen of the Glens, Chief’s Choice, and Prince’s Choice, Islay Dew, Silver Whistle, Salmon’s Leap, Stag’s Breath, Stalker’s Joy, Bonnie Doon, Auld Stuarts, King’s Own, Trusty Friend, Old Cateran, Scottish Envoy, Norval, Bard’s Bounty, Fingal’s Cave, Deirdre’s Farewell, Lion Rampant, Road to the Isles, Pipe Major, Moorland Gold and Moorland Cream, Thistle Cream, Shinty, Blended Heather, Glen Gloming, Mountain Tarn, Cromag, All the Year Round, Clan MacTavish and Clan MacNab, Annie Laurie, Over the Board and Carbarfeidh. There were spherical bottles and dimpled bottles and square bottles and oblong bottle and flagon-shaped bottles and high-waisted bottles and ordinary bottles, and the glass of every bottle was stamped with a notice which made it clear that whisky like this was intended to be drunk in the United States of America and not by the natives of the land where it was distilled, matured and blended.” (p. 135)
The islanders waste no time unloading as much cargo as they can. They get drunk, of course. What spirits they can’t drink immediately they spirit away in secret places. Only the uptight Paul Waggett objects. He writes to the authorities about the theft but can’t get anyone to care very much or act very quickly.
Sergeant-major Odd and Peggy, supplied at last with whisky, and on Mardi Gras, the last possible night for a big celebration before Lent begins, throw a traditional party called a reiteach (raytchach) to celebrate their engagement. Her father, loosened by the drink agrees to the wedding date in April they prefer. Norman, too, drinks enough at the party to get his courage up and confronts his mother that evening, so his wedding to Catriona will go ahead, too.
Eventually the salvage inspectors arrive to make a pro forma visit to the boat. They cause no trouble. The only tragedy being that Joseph Macroon’s daughters, Peggy and her sister Kate, fearful of being caught with the stash and with their father away to Edinburgh for the day, break a couple of hundred bottles to keep the inspector from finding them, the water of life seeping into the ground.
The book is gently funny rather than laugh out loud slapstick. The minimal marriage plots and even the whisky bonanza are merely frames on which to hang the real charm of the novel: loving characterizations of the people of the islands. There’s good-natured gossip, talk of fairies, men sitting vigil at the death of a friend, helpful advice from a beloved Priest, and plans for community projects: maybe a new school, maybe a new road. It reminded me a little of the world of Dubliners. Although Little Todday is Catholic and Great Todday, Protestant, everyone gets along. Sergeant-major Odds converts to Catholicism as a gift to his wife. Prickly Paul Waggett and George Campbell’s domineering mother are humored by the rest, not really villains in the community, or in the novel.
Mackenzie sprinkles Gaelic phrases throughout the dialogue and includes a glossary at the back. There’s a running joke that Sergeant Odd, being English, can never properly manage the pronunciation of Reiteach, the party he must throw to announce his engagement.
“Whisky galore,” in gaelic, is uisge bertha gu leoir (ooshki beh-ha gul-yor). MacKenzie notes in the glossary that “Gu leoir is almost the only Gaelic phrase that has passed into English so nearly like the original.” (p. 262)
And then “galore” evolved a little further into another English phrase we use today. Shortly after Whisky Galore was published, in 1947, a nightclub owner borrowed the name for his new club in Paris, “Whisky a Gogo ” known as the original discotheque for its use of recorded rather than live music. The famous West Hollywood “Whisky a Go Go” (or “The Whisky”) took almost the same name when it opened in 1964 following clubs of the same name in Chicago and Washington DC. From those clubs we get go-go dancing, and go-go dancers, all derived from Whisky Galore.
Compton MacKenzie, who I had never previously heard of, wrote a ton of books, more than 40 novels, including an earlier novel set on the islands of Little and Great Todday, and more than 30 books of history and biography, among others. He was involved in a movie version of Whisky Galore filmed by a British production company in 1949. A remake was made in 2016. He lived from 1883 to 1972.