Golf, grief and telling insights on a trip to Scotland

Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast; Curtis Gillespie; Crown Publishers: 288 pp., $22.95

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It’s only prudent to beware of zealots bringing out books. The stamp collector, the conspiracy theorist, the deep devotee of sport -- often these people burrow so deeply into their enthusiasms that only so many readers dare, or care, to follow. In this case, the author loved golf enough to leave his native Canada behind, taking his wife and two daughters across the Atlantic to Gullane, Scotland, for a year of driving, pitching, putting, pondering and scribbling.

As a non-golfer, I was mildly alarmed by this. And the first pages of the book didn’t help: Taking us back to the collegiate day when he woke up in bed with a hangover and the purloined flagstick from the 18th hole of the Old Course at St. Andrews, Curtis Gillespie lays on the “isn’t inebriation amusing?” shtick a little thick.

But then -- and this is still before Page 20 -- the prose clears like a coastal course shedding its morning inversion layer, and lo, here’s a fine book. Gillespie looks shrewdly and charmingly through the prism of golf at the pain and glories of fatherhood and the people who live along the Scottish coast where the game was born. The author knows exactly what to bother telling us outsiders about the subtleties of the sport. The inevitable attempting-to-eat-haggis scene doesn’t turn up until Page 86, by which time I was almost hungry for it.

As the book advances, the golf alternates with Gillespie’s recollections of the father he lost at an excruciating time. This is not one of those artificial quests for meaning that travel writers sometimes stitch onto their stories to give them the appearance of depth. This is a mournful, grateful, illuminating, unabashedly sentimental reexamination that brings the senior Gillespie into clear view: a white-bearded, scrupulously honest tradesman, a good but not great golfer, wise but not particularly educated, dangerous with a deck of cards and universally known by the nickname Ghost.

“My father’s authenticity was an organic part of his being,” Gillespie writes. “It wouldn’t occur to him to lie or cheat or say something he didn’t mean. This is a difference between us.”

Gillespie writes with sharp powers of description and cagey narrative management. It’s touching to learn where his father’s ashes went, then startling to discover what happened in the moments before their delivery. It’s also a quiet treat to follow the growth of Gillespie’s golfing friendship with 81-year-old local Jack Marston.

Some readers may find this volume’s off-the-course meditations a little too sentimental, but before long the author will bring them back to somebody like his poker-faced neighborhood shopkeeper, Mr. Rasool, and how one day “he stared at me, and then released a devastating grin, the grin I’d been waiting for all year.”

I should reassure golfers that there’s plenty of the game in these pages -- from the grand, wind-raked Scottish landscape to its storied old courses (St. Andrews, Dirleton, Gullane and Muirfield, among others) and characters.

To a Scot, Gillespie writes, “golf is meant to be played fast. To do otherwise is to participate inadequately in a centuries-old tradition. There can be no worse insult for a Scot than to be labeled slow. Quick play is not just an element of the Scottish game, it very nearly is the point of the game.”

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A tempting alternative

to Tuscany

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Umbria: Eyewitness Travel Guides; Dorling Kindersley: 192 pp., $20, paper

This first edition makes good sense: The Umbria region, which includes the handsome old hill towns of Assisi, Gubbio, Orvieto, Spoleto and Todi, is fast emerging as an alternative to well-trafficked Tuscany to the northwest. This guide is full of color photos, maps and a fair chunk of history introducing an inland territory that fairly teems with tempting art, food and wine.

What you won’t find here are many critical words: The text, written in Italian and translated into English, is laden with tourist-board adjectives and not much plain speaking about realities, such as the lackluster modern cityscapes that often lie below the old hill towns’ medieval walls. Also, though many travelers will choose to begin their Umbrian holiday in Rome (two hours by car from Perugia, less from Todi and Spoleto), you’ll need another source to tell you about hotels and restaurants.

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