Emerging from his emotional nadir, Jock McLeish reaches this understanding of the centrality of place to his personal growth close to the conclusion of Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine. By painfully gaining this ultimate acceptance of home, Jock, the Scottish Everyman, signals his willingness to proceed in a realistic yet hopeful manner with his life in actively local terms. Learning to refuse the self-hating escape clause of misogynistic fantasy, for Jock life is positively not elsewhere. The ‘process’ (as Marshall Walker puts it) of Jock's renewal also marks the beginning of the end for the Scottish cringe.

Published in 1984, the anachronistic date of the title relates Gray's novel to the Falklands War of March–June 1982 – a British victory with echoes of imperial grandeur that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's second-term General Election landslide of 9 June 1983. Jock is at war with himself at the same time as Britain is at war with Argentina for the Falkland Islands, a place he describes as a ‘remote souvenir of the Great Britisher's Empire’.