Employing a strong dialect is a risky move for a novelist. Get it right – Trainspotting, The Color Purple, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – and it pays off, but get it wrong and it runs the risk of sounding parodic. Four years ago, Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, set in early 1990s Scotland and featuring a teenage boy going through considerable trauma. By locating his debut in the same terrain, with a similar-age protagonist and comparable ordeals, Tom Newlands, perhaps unwisely, allows Shuggie’s shadow to loom large.
It’s 1994, and Cora Mowat is living with her wheelchair-bound mother and surrogate stepfather while taking tentative steps into the dating world. If there was any doubt about her heritage, they’re put to bed by her incessant pishpuddles, weans, pee-the-beds, hoaching and boaking, which are scattered like Caledonian confetti across every page.
The best young narrators – from Jim Hawkins to Christopher Boone – draw the reader in through a blend of mischief and vulnerability and while Cora displays touches of both, she’s so humourless that it becomes hard to wish her well. Despairing of the broken landscape of Muircross in Fife, her greatest aspiration is to move to Glasgow but perhaps if her ambitions lay further afield the reader might get a better sense of her frustration. The Dear Green Place, after all, is only a bus ride away.
That said, Newlands is capable of some good lines. The glow of an oven door is “like a tiny shop front at Christmas”. Snow goes “sideways in places, some of it swooping and floating up like all it wanted was to go back towards the moon”. And, while eating breakfast, Cora presses “dry Coco Pops down into the milk with my spoon and heard them muttering”, which is a striking image.
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A reader doesn’t need to like a central character to appreciate a novel but we do need to care about them and Cora’s sense of entitlement, exemplified by her complaining about a free room she has been offered, makes her sound more like a millennial than a child of the 1990s. As with most sullen teens, it takes considerable work and goodwill to enjoy her company.
