Blackden - Softcover

As part of the wave of new Scottish writing, Duncan McLean made a splash in the literary world with Bucket of Tongues and Bunker Man. His second novel, Blackden, is full of humor and beauty, a true find. It is the story of a weekend in the life of an 18-year-old. Paddy Hunter's mom is out of town, his mates are getting drunk, and all he can think about is girls, girls, girls. Paddy wants out of Blackden, the tiny highland village where he has lived his entire life, but sometimes the idea seems like a pipe dream. He's poor, his dad is dead, and his grandparents need him to deliver their dinner, as well as to make sure the heat has not gone out in their tiny shack. Dropping by on Friday night, Paddy hopes to get away quickly and get drunk, but instead his grandfather sits him down and tells him about the day a German plane crashed into the nearby hillside during the war:

A big red hand of fire reaching up into the darkness, that's what it looked like. And then it came down. The hand came reaching down towards us, the fingers of the fire stretching out over the woods in all directions towards Ballogie, and setting the timber ablaze wherever it touched.... And nearer it came, nearer, the hand was closing in about us, your granny and me, it was closing its fingers tighter, tighter.

The quality of his listening even as he dreams of beer is part of what redeems Paddy, what makes him stand out from the guys around him, a creepy bunch who like to make jokes about having sex with sheep and raping girls. Throughout the book, women respond to him in an almost maternal way, offering him rides, giving him free food at the pub. Through these gestures of kindness, we come to understand him from the outside, even as the novel is written solely (and masterfully) in his chattery, contagious first person. Infatuated with Shona, who is in love with her abusive boyfriend, Paddy rides around with her in the middle of the night and tries to talk reason into her, tries to tell funny jokes and get her to look at him instead. Inevitably she ends up going back for more abuse. In the remote and violent backwater of Blackden, Paddy is a gentle soul, a fatherless boy on the verge of becoming a man, on the verge of seeing past the horizon of the only place he has ever known. --Emily White

Duncan McLean is the author of Bucket of Tongues, Bunker Man, and Lone Star Swing. He lives on the island of Orkney.