Author's island isolation

"It began before I'd even started at school," he says. "I was playing in the back yard when this blond-haired boy called out in a beautiful, sing-song voice, 'Black c***'." Sutherland had never heard this word before, and thought he was being called a currant - a good thing, surely.

Later, he and Paisley pitched up at the local primary school. No sooner were they through the gates than all hell broke out. The other children "danced, hooted, pointed, screamed". They called him golliwog, nig-nog, sambo, Mohammed Ali. He arrived home "battered, breathless and mud-spattered".

To his horror, the boy with the blond hair and sing-song voice turned out to be "a sadistic psychopath", one of his tormentors-in-chief.

Did his parents know what was going on? "Oh yes, they knew. Mum is ferocious. She put paid to the worst of it. She'd go to the teachers and complain. She was the health visitor, she knew everyone. That made her powerful, so she'd launch an attack. You should have seen her in action. I'm in awe of her. The things she put up with! The grief she and my dad got from other adults - that's still what makes me most angry.

"In my case, there were lots of people for whom the colour of my skin just wasn't important. My trouble sprang from a hard core. What turned me inside out was that when they picked on me, a whole load of other people who, usually, didn't have anything to say - people I considered to be my friends - would just turn."

Sutherland also resented the way Orcadians tried to put him in a box, to lump him clumsily together with their idea of black culture - a culture with which he, as it happens, was entirely unfamiliar.

"It was the time of Roots on television," he says. "Suddenly, everyone had this new word: nigger. It was awful. Seeing that programme, being told that's your history, your culture, that's where you're from. I didn't feel connected to it at all. It was so reductive."

When he got older, he was more interested in AC/DC and Robbie Burns than Bob Marley and Benjamin Zephaniah. "That's why the narrator of Venus As a Boy doesn't have a fixed sexuality. I don't like absolutes. The physical fact of where I grew up, the relationships that I had, the jumble of my family background, means that my view of the world is totally chaotic. It was only confusing at first; now, it's exciting, energising."

After Blairgowrie High School, Sutherland, who is 33, went to Glasgow to read English and philosophy. It was there that he began writing his first book, Jellyroll (his second was Sweetmeat), later short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award. After finals, however, the novel then took a back seat while its author and his Indie band, Long Fin Killie, went on tour (the group, a favourite of John Peel's, had one minor hit).

In 1996, their bus crashed and rolled over, and Sutherland was seriously injured. "I got thrown out of one of the windows. I had a punctured lung, broken bones, I was in a real state. But it was while I was recovering that I finished Jellyroll. I started writing as a boy, as a means of escape, and it just never stopped. Now, it's a compulsion."

Racism, he thinks, is inescapable, and it still follows him around, for all that he now lives in Camberwell (his girlfriend is a television producer). "I don't think it is ever finished with. It's everything from being shouted at in the street to the suggestion that I'm more white middle class than black. I don't even know if London is less racist than the Orkneys. In the Orkneys, people were just more open about their narrow-mindedness. "I don't know anyone who's 100 per cent anything, but certain prejudices are almost a natural reflex, and I don't see how to get around that."

HE clearly adores his adoptive parents, and has never tried to trace his biological ones, though the more broody he gets, the more curious he is. Does it concern him that it is no longer acceptable for white parents to adopt black babies? "I'm the person for whom it worked out. I'm sure there are other people for whom it didn't. I can't speak for them, but I can understand why some people might think it would be a bad idea."

Sutherland has been back to Orkney only once, in 1987. While he was there, he came upon two of his former torturers. "One of them offered to buy me a drink, and I had a civil conversation with the other. They're men now."

Is the novel, in which the bullies are ruthlessly laid bare and made to seem so despicable, a way of settling a few scores? "No, that's not one of my motivations. I don't bear any grudges." Even so, Venus As a Boy, with its violence and unfettered sex, must have made uncomfortable reading for his parents. "My mother has read it. She found it difficult, but thinks it is my best book. When I wrote Jellyroll, which is full of swear words, I sent it to her with a bottle of Tippex. She called me and said: 'Luke, I'm only up to page 50, and I'm already out of Tippex." He laughs. "She's up to the task."

These days, his relationship with the islands remains ambivalent; however unpleasant the memories, however reluctant he is to call them home, their siren call (those singing seals!) is hard to resist.

"The idea of going back is exciting. Believe it or not, I like the fact that they are so cut off. I really do love that. They have this incredible singular energy. They are barren, almost like tundra, but they are studded with long barrows and standing stones and rusting battleships, and all these things sit alongside the farms and the more modern buildings. It is as though everything that has happened there is happening now, and all that is brought together by the strong oral tradition. It can bring you to your knees. I don't think of myself as Orcadian, or even as Scottish, really, but part of me thinks those islands might be the best place in the world."

Venus As a Boy, by Luke Sutherland, is published by Bloomsbury, priced £10, on 18 March