Scotland and Beyond: Sound and Silence in The Echo Chamber by Luke Williams

One of the most complex issues in any approach to Scottishness is represented by imagination itself, an issue which can be fruitfully approached through the lenses of literature. The literary genre, which seems more suitable to embrace and recount the sense of complexity and plurality associated with Scotland is the novel. The recent history of the Scottish novel (from the 1980s onwards) has been marked by very different tensions and experiences; indeed the focus on the necessity of a construction of a Scottish identity has been progressively rethought in terms of a movement towards impurity and fluidity, that is by what we might define an aesthetics of the beyond. In Luke Williams’ The Echo Chamber sound becomes a language, capable of de-constructing any kind of identity, de-defining not only Scotland and the Scottish protagonist of the novel, but the very idea of the novel form, inviting the reader to exceed the pages of the text to access a complex soundscape in which the very act of reading becomes a musical experience, Williams’ writing is not about complex transcriptions of the Scottish vernacular, it is rather a linear, musical writing which stands as an invitation to listening and as an attempt to investigate the sonic geography of the world.