Ascension Day Book

There are five main characters in Chris Dolan's remarkable new novel: William, a Glaswegian living the good life, retired out in South Africa, his only trouble being his very openly naturist (and septuagenarian) neighbours. That is, until he starts to receives strange letters from back home. There is Cannibal, who knows nothing but contemporary Glasgow and its raw realities. "He'd been Cannibal ever since he was 13 and had bitten a great lump out of his mother's face." He inhabits a twilight world of half-deserted housing estates and children's homes, among friends, or acquaintances, called Mags, Bubbles, Photofit and Koff. There is a girl called Paris: and although "it might be all right being called Paris in Surrey or Sevenoaks or New York", in Glasgow it gets her into all sorts of trouble. There is Morag, who turns out to be William's letter-writer. And not least, there is Glasgow itself, remembered still in William's imagination, as the old shipbuilding centre of the world, where "the factories pump and bellow, cranes raise their fists," as in former days of glory. But Dolan's Glasgow post-industrial, and post-imperial: "such quiet, modest little groupings of streets, yet their shadow stretched and fell for thousands of miles, as afar as Africa, India, America". This long-range view gives the novel great power, as Dolan draws his characters inexorably together, in the lost, once-great, city on the Clyde. -- Christopher HartRead More