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Overview
Duncan McLean has been called "Scotland's answer to Roddy Doyle" (Cosmopolitan), but he has his own unique, scruffy voice full of quirky humor and surreal images.
In the highland town of Blackden, things have gotten overheated despite being overtaken by the chill of winter. Inside the head of eighteen-year-old Patrick Hunter, an auctioneer's assistant, the blood is boiling. Fueled by a potent mix of yankee doodle pie and beer, Patrick spends a November weekend on his own when his off-balanced mother goes to the city. Racing around the hills and dens of his hometown, he is half in escape from worn-out friends, drudging work, and painful memories, and half in pursuit of a girl, his father's ghost, and a new life. "Brilliantly funny: fast, sharp, constant banter, even when the narrator is only talking to himself."—Times Literary Supplement "A hilarious and touching insight into the mind of a young man, balanced between naivety and maturity."—The List
Synopsis
A wickedly offbeat look at a Scottish Holden Caulfield trying to make his way out of his small, native village even as he pursues sex, laughs, and a witches' Sabbath.
Publishers Weekly
Set in the titular rural Scottish highland village of Blackden, McLean's kinetic novel examines the supernatural possibilities in a small town and in the complicated adolescence of observant narrator Patrick Hunter. "Paddy" is a fatherless, imaginative 18-year-old, left alone for a weekend while his emotionally unstable mother goes to visit his "brainy" sister, Helen, at university in Edinburgh. The boy is obliged to look after his fragile but loving grandparents, but he also has ample opportunity to exchange good-natured insults with his layabout mates and to cynically survey his provincial hometown. Paddy is hoping for romance with Shona Findlay, a local girl just returned from the outside world to work as a chef in the village pub. He's also drawn to her claim that she witnessed a gathering of witches in a nearby glade. Shona's occult yarn becomes Paddy's emotional outlet as he copes with his unstable home life and increasingly dismissive and disappointing friends. Eventually, he finds himself alienated from the community and agitated over unanswerable questions about witchcraft, smalltown legends and family legacies. Mired in his grandfather's eerie, phantasmic folklore, Paddy's conscious and unconscious fears overwhelm him, and his mind begins to unravel. Burning is a consistent metaphor here for the uncharted roads of adolescence, and the witches' gathering becomes a symbol for the locked gate through which Paddy must pass to gain access to the world beyond. "I want to get somewhere under my own steam for a change," rants Paddy to his bewildered Aunt Heather, mingling a man's resolve and a child's fear. With a decidedly ambiguous ending, Scottish writer McLean (Bucket of Tongues) captures the ripe cadences of highland dialect, creating miasmic tension and a sturdy wit. In Paddy, he conveys the awful sensation of standing on the edge of something inevitable yet unknown. (Jan.) FYI: McLean's Bucket of Tongues won the 1993 Somerset Maugham award. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.