Latest news with #MichaelPedersen
Daily Mail
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Roving reflections in the best Literary Fiction out now: ABSENCE by Issa Quincy, MUCKLE FLUGGA by Michael Pedersen, THE BOOK OF RECORDS by Madeleine Thien
ABSENCE by Issa Quincy (Granta £14.99, 192pp) A big influence on the 21st-century literary novel is the essayistic fiction of the late German writer WG Sebald, whose imprint can be seen on Rachel Cusk and Teju Cole, two of many authors to ditch plot and character in favour of roving reflection. The latest book to tread that mazy path is this seductively conversational debut from a British writer based in New York. It starts with the narrator disclosing his feelings about a cherished former teacher, whose murky past emerged only after an encounter with another ex-pupil. We then range across Europe, America and Africa in a dizzying chain of densely nested episodes circling themes of trauma and remembrance. While the writing is always absorbing, you might feel you're being led a dance – but the novel's style is its own reward. MUCKLE FLUGGA by Michael Pedersen (Faber £16.99, 320pp) Poet and memoirist Michael Pedersen turns to fiction for the first time in this offbeat and tonally unpredictable coming-of-age debut, set on the Scottish island that gives the book its title. The action turns on a life-changing encounter between two men: Firth, a troubled writer visiting from Edinburgh, and Ouse, a daydreaming teenager in imaginary dialogue with the Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson. Each character widens the other's horizons as they get to know one another while roaming the deserted seascape. Soon Ouse is in conflict with his drunkard dad, a widowed lighthouse keeper who wants his son to inherit his job and uphold tradition against technological change. Pedersen's style is exuberant with curveball coinages, but despite the whimsical feel, he handles his age-old subject – how to find your way as an adult – with heart and sincerity. THE BOOK OF RECORDS by Madeleine Thien (Granta £20, 368pp) Canadian writer Thien made the Booker Prize shortlist with her previous novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which tackled chewy themes of history and politics by tracing the interwoven bloodlines of a Chinese refugee and the Vancouver household that takes her in. Her new novel is even more labyrinthine in structure. We're in a mysterious refugee centre known as the Sea, where Lina, the daughter of a Chinese dissident, encounters other migrants whose tales echo those of real-life figures, including the 17th century philosopher Spinoza. While Thien deploys some whizzy narrative machinery to explain the overlap, a substantial part of the novel is essentially fictionalised biography, framed by sinister disclosures about Lina's father. A tricksy splice of historical fiction and sci-fi – easier to admire than enjoy.
Scotsman
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen review: 'an extraordinary first novel'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Like all the best adventure stories, Michael Pedersen's debut novel Muckle Flugga begins with a map. It's a map of an imagined island at the far northern tip of Shetland; a small island complete with lighthouse, bothy for accommodating visitors, cliffs, caves, coves, and also unexpected gardens, and wild places. It's to this island that the book's central character, a young Edinburgh writer and artist called Firth, makes what he intends to be a final journey, after he abruptly cancels his planned suicide off the Forth Bridge. He is inspired to live a little more by a visit - as he dangles from the ironwork - from a passing gannet; the bird reminds him of a promise he once made to his old seafaring grandfather - who used to tell tales of Muckle Flugga - that he would go there and paint a gannet for him. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Shaun Murawski | Shaun Murawski So it is that Firth arrives on the island, inhabited only by the fierce widowed lighthouse keeper and his gentle 19-year-old son Ouse; and begins a physical, emotional and psychological journey so vivid, intense, and fiercely tragic-comic that it often threatens to take the breath away. Indeed Firth himself seems to spend much of his time gasping for air, as he is overwhelmed by rain and seawater, pitched by the swaying hammock in his bothy into the bath that sits beneath it, attacked by the ravenous sea birds known as bonxies, or - most significantly - increasingly heart-struck by the beauty, wisdom and genius of the boy Ouse, a quiet lad relentlessly bullied by his distraught father since his mother's death, yet nonetheless filled with an inner poise and creative energy that enables him to survive his father's rages, and even to continue to love him. Until now, Michael Pedersen has been known primarily as a poet; currently Edinburgh's Makar, he has published three powerful collections of poems, as well as his acclaimed 2022 memoir Boy Friends, a study of love and friendship inspired by the death of his friend Scott Hutchison, of the indie band Frightened Rabbit. In Muckle Flugga, though, he delivers an extraordinary first novel, that takes a fairly simple narrative arc - despairing hero travels to a far place, where he rediscovers the will to live and love - and packs it with the most audacious forms of strangeness, including a weird, tangential relationship with the normal timelines of human history. It is difficult to know, on Muckle Flugga, whether we are in an internet-free past where a demented solo lighthouse keeper might avoid the attention of the authorities, in a disintegrating future where such systems are breaking down, or in a parallel reality altogether, where past and future collide in Firth's tormented, whisky-fuelled dreams. What is clear, through, is that Firth's time on the island reconnects him with the natural world in ways that are both comically emphatic and unbelievably rich in brilliant and rotting detail; and that that encounter with the physical extremes of life on Muckle Flugga has nothing to do with 'escape' from Firth's previous city life, and everything to do with a new recognition of the reality on which all life rests. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad For all its geographical distance, Muckle Flugga is intensely linked to the wider world in myriad ways that race and dance through Pedersen's story. There is the lighthouse lamp itself, and its intense connection to the lives of the ships and sailors whom it guides to safety, all filtered through the disturbed but energetic mind of The Father, who tends the light with fanatical dedication. There is the great library Firth discovers on the island, tenderly cared for by Ouse, and rich with stories and histories from across the globe. And there is that strand of Scottish history that links islands and maps and lighthouses through the Edinburgh family of Lighthouse Stevensons, builders of the Muckle Flugga light; and their rebel son Robert Louis Stevenson, the magical storytelling creator of the best loved of all treasure islands, who appears on Muckle Flugga as Ouse's familiar spirit and guardian angel. Stevenson, of course, is also the author of The Strange Case of Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and it's difficult not to see autobiographical elements both in Pedersen's self-mocking account of the briefly fashionable Edinburgh writer in flight from the shallowness of his world, and in his portrait of the strength, steady sweetness and sheer creative genius of Ouse, who designs and makes the most beautiful woollen artefacts Firth has ever seen. Pedersen's first novel, in other words, is as rich in meanings and resonances as a gorgeous painting laden with significant detail. And all of its threads and strands are transformed and re-energised by the brilliant refracting lenses of Pedersen's prose; sometimes tumbling over itself in haste and over-exuberance, sometimes glinting in perfection, but always conjuring up vital new realities, just when we need them most.
