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Home / Publications / Books / Scotnotes Study Guides / Scotnote 28

Scotnote 28

Alan Spence’s
ITS COLOURS THEY ARE FINE
& WAY TO GO

John Burns

Published in: Paperback.
By: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2010
Price: £5.95
ISBN 978-1-906841-02-7

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Alan Spence’s series of linked short stories, Its Colours They Are Fine, is a classic of modern Glasgow fiction, vividly evoking the city and its inhabitants. His second novel, Way To Go, is an at turns darkly humourous and deeply poignant novel about the ultimate questions of life and death.

John Burns’ Scotnote examines the social and philosophical backgrounds of Spence’s work, exploring the ties between the surface events and the deeper currents beneath. These notes are suitable for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

CONTENTS

  • Alan Spence: his life and work
  • Its Colours They Are Fine
    • Introduction
    • Tinsel
    • The Ferry
    • Its Colours They Are Fine
    • Brilliant
    • Greensleeves
    • The Rain Dance
    • The Palace
    • Changes
    • Blue
  • Way To Go
    • Introduction
    • Interpretative summary
    • Style and characterisation
  • Conclusion
  • Coda
  • Glossary of Eastern philosophical terms
  • Bibliography

Primary Sidebar

Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

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