An Advent Calendar

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Mackay's star has been rising here after fine reviews for last year's Booker nominee, The Orchard on Fire. This early novel, published in England in 1971, also displays the supple economy of her prose, a style that accommodates a constant play of precisely observed and startlingly vivid images. Its humor is macabre, its setting depressing and its view of the human condition grim. Nevertheless, readers in tune with Mackay's dour take on the world will undoubtedly enjoy her characters' comic misadventures. In the opening pages, a butcher's assistant loses a finger, which is ground into minced meat that's accidentally eaten by feckless, chronically unemployed John Wood, who is about to move his long-suffering wife and two children into his uncle's cold, dark and dirty house for the duration of Adventthe 25 days from December 1st to Christmas. The story is told in a series of vignettes in which John, his reluctantly adulterous wife and several other unhappy peopleall enduring poverty, dull jobs, wretched lodgings and all sorts of emotional deprivations, humiliations and paingrope their way through the holiday. Grisly accidents multiply, and so do bloody and feculent images: an abbatoir, "gutters running over with blood"; filthy working-class kitchens; even a sick goat, brought into the house to recuperate, does not seem out of place in this grimy milieu. The story is a thin line away from slapstick, with each of the hapless characters caught in embarrassingly squalid but quite funny situations. Though it ends with a minor Christmas "miracle," Mackay's acerbic last word leaves no doubt about what she thinks the future has in store for her characters and the rest of humanity. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Another native Scot, Mackay published this comic novel to acclaim in 1971. The story takes place during the 25 days of advent leading up to Christmas, and though often funny, it deals with the great poverty of its characters and their attempts to find purpose in their dreary lives.

Kirkus Reviews

A dark Christmas tale with intimations of light, this set in that unmerry old England where unemployment and squalor still distort lives, and things mostly get worse.

Acclaimed English writer Mackay (Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags, 1994, etc.) excels at depicting characters struggling to survive amidst random disasters and sapping tedium. And her latest, a downbeat lead-up to precarious Christmas joy, typically focuses on life's losers and innocents. Here, unemployed (again) John, who has just seen a young man's finger cut off at the butcher shop, is way behind with the rent and must move his family in with Uncle Cecil. For John, the butcher shop accident becomes just another example of the wretchedness of a life that has never been easy since his Socialist parents devoted themselves more to the Party than to their family. Now, John buys an Advent calendar to ease the move, and as the 25 days pass until Christmas, he, wife Marguerite, sister Elizabeth, Uncle Cecil, and Elizabeth's pupil Joy suffer any number of setbacks. John finds a job with the Cleaning Boys, but soon loses it; then, still troubled by seeing the man lose his finger, he tries to help the victim but nearly gets beaten up. Meanwhile, Cecil's beloved goat gets ill; Margaret has an affair with the veterinarian; Elizabeth worries about how she's to spend Christmas, and her plan to help 15-year-old Joy feel better about herself by getting her a part-time job goes awry. It also looks as if there won't be enough money for presents. But even the darkest lives have their brighter moments: Money is found for gifts, John's parents come through with a job offer, and Joy's self-esteem gets a boost. On Christmas Day, all celebrate happily, "carousing on a sandbank in time, music and laughter drowning the sound of tomorrow's tide."

A Christmas story without the mistletoe and the message, but no less moving.