From the beginning of his writing career Andrew O’Hagan has pushed at the conventional limits of literary genre, blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, documentary and journalism. What characterises all his work however, is a resolute political and historical engagement. Though particularly perceptive in detailing the bittersweet experiences of 1970s childhood and the layered community histories of both rural and urban Scotland in the post-war era, his writing has most force in confronting British ideological fragmentation, and the many questions surrounding Scotland’s troubled claims for a coherent national identity. The Missing (1995) shows O’Hagan’s instinct to shape life as fiction. Though factual in its basis, this account of the children and adults who inexplicably disappeared in Britain over four decades delves imaginatively into the background details of their lives, engaging with distressed families and painstaking detective inquiries, and speculating on the ghostly nature of disappearance. Referred to by police as ‘mispers’, these runaways, amnesiacs, or victims of crime remain shrouded in mystery: ‘The space they occupy lies somewhere between what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead.’ The Missing is given added poignancy by the author’s autobiographical identification with the children who have disappeared. In a prefatory ‘book’, O’Hagan details his own childhood in Scotland’s Clydeside, tracing his extended family’s recent past and its links to the area’s shipbuilding industry. He describes too, his own grandfather’s disappearance, at sea during a wartime naval battle, as the first in a chain of connection from one vanishing to another. Not only people but entire streets and districts of Glasgow itself have disappeared in the reconstructions of the post-war era. Such losses can only be recovered through family memories, for as O’Hagan explains, ‘[p]eople didn’t move around much in Glasgow, or, at least, they didn’t in the generations previous to my own, which has decanted and redeveloped in the usual modern ways. So to properly know your own family in an old city is to know something of the history of the city itself.’ Glasgow thus joins the lists of the ‘missing’, and the book seeks partially to restore its obscure identity to view, teasing it out from under the new urban developments grafted onto its rural outskirts. ‘In my own time’, writes O’Hagan, ‘because of what’s happened, because of the death of the big industries, we’ve been given to singing a hymn to Glasgow’s industrial might’. But the human costs of that strength are also recognised, in the harsh physical conditions endured by labourers in the dockyards, and in the sectarian violence erupting between Scotland’s Catholic and Protestant communities, a resentment which fuels a continuing tension between its rival football teams, Celtic and Rangers. The development and decline of Scotland’s urban landscape also forms the thematic core of O’Hagan’s subsequent novel, Our Fathers (1999). The story told by the main character, Jamie Bawn, is of a Glasgow childhood blighted by the violence of his alcoholic father, Robert. When home becomes unbearable, Jamie leaves to live with his grandfather Hugh, an old-fashioned socialist whose life has been dedicated to post-war urban redevelopment and the provision of affordable tower-block housing. Now, years later, Hugh is dying, his civic dream turned to nightmare by rumours of a construction scandal and by his grandson’s decision to pursue a career in urban demolition, the antithesis of all Hugh himself has stood for. In this collapse of continuity between past and present, the novel signals towards a breakdown of family inheritance and an irreparable fracturing of political traditions. More pointedly, O’Hagan gestures towards a crisis in paternalism as characteristic of general elements within Scottish culture. In the drunken melancholia of Robert, Jamie’s abusi