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The Guardian
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen review – anything can happen on this remote Scottish island
Often thought of as the northernmost point of the British Isles, the Scottish island Muckle Flugga lies on the outer reaches of the Shetland archipelago. Norse legend has it that this craggy and almost uninhabitable place was created by two warring giants, obsessed with the same mermaid. While throwing boulders at each other, one of the rivalrous giants' missiles accidentally plopped into the sea: and so the island was born. A version of this mythic tussle is central to Michael Pedersen's debut novel. When the narrative opens, delivered in a lively present tense sprinkled with Scots, The Father and his 19-year-old son Ouse are the only residents on the island. The Father mans Muckle's lighthouse, and is as volatile as the waves he illuminates. A gossip from a neighbouring island describes him as irascible, with 'a viper in his throat and … a broken soldier's thirst for whisky'. Ouse, meanwhile, is 'a queer sort' 'who sounds as if he's been sooking helium out of party balloons … always staring off into the distance'. He's famed in the area for being an 'artiste', a dab hand at needlework with a reputation for producing beautiful handmade textiles. What unites father and son is that they take their stewardship of the island seriously. They are devoted to the extraordinarily various wildlife – puffins, gannets, sea otters, peacock butterflies – and hypnotised by the thrillingly chimeric weather. Unspoken grief for The Mother, who drowned two years before the story begins, also binds the two together. The Father assumes his only heir will eventually take over the family business. Enter Firth, a foppish twentysomething failed writer from Edinburgh with griefs of his own. Racked with self-loathing, he has vowed to kill himself after fulfilling a promise: to visit the enchanted isle of Muckle Flugga, much loved by his late grandfather. Almost as soon as he arrives, Firth is entranced by Ouse's mercurial demeanour, as he parses landscapes and seascapes alien to Firth's urban eyes. Firth is struck, too, by the blazing potential of Ouse's artistic talent. He wants to whisk him away to the mainland and make him a star. Thus begins the tug of war for Ouse's allegiance: The Father, familiarity and tradition yank one way, but Firth, possibility and the seductive unknown pull just as hard. This perhaps presents the plot as neat and fairly recognisable: a narrative of masculine archetypes vying for one-upmanship, with notes of The Tempest. But Pedersen introduces wild cards – spooky visions of religious zealots, a pumpkin-punching contest – that emphasise the strangeness of this remote place, so far away from the norms of the mainland that anything might be possible. Significant among these zany additions is the ghost of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson – who came from a family of lighthouse engineers – acts as imaginary friend and confidant to Ouse. He counsels Ouse for his maternal loss and guides him through the decision about where his future might lie. Pedersen threads the apparition's dialogue with aphorisms from the real Stevenson's work and correspondence. The novel's most memorable feature, and perhaps most potentially divisive one, is its loudness. The characterisation of the villainous but vulnerable father, of the hapless city type and of the ethereal innocent is bold and broad – sometimes cartoonish. The setting, rich with images of the aurora borealis and storm-lashed shores, is almost psychedelic. But the narrative voice is loudest of all: constantly baroque, with the linguistic and emotional dials turned up high. Firth receives an unexpected letter, and the missive is 'a Pandora's box, a bete noire, a curse, a lifeline, an arch nemesis, a fairy godmother … a gift from the gods'. A flurry of snow after an exchange between the protagonists is 'a divine offering, the impetus for reconciliation under the auspices of a natural phenomenon'. Pedersen is known as a poet, and his wonder at the magic of language is evident in this self-consciously high style. In places, the linguistic busyness occludes the plot's more interesting undertones: the queer desire between Ouse and Firth, considerations about our place in and responsibilities to the natural world. But there is, ultimately, something immensely charming about this novel. It is weird, rambunctious and repeatedly demands the reader surrender to its particular wildness. Its generosity of spirit, its unrestrained warmth and humour – the brilliantly kinetic description of a surprise ceilidh is a case in point – steadily worked away at my scepticism. Like Ouse's flamboyant designs, inspired by the spectacular landscape around him, it is 'garishly alive'. Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
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.
