Bucket of Tongues

by Duncan McLean

Overview

From the author of Lone Star Swing, this winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, is "lean, maggoty writing. More: it's subversively funny" (Janice Galloway).

In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Duncan McLean shows us real life — and real death — in all its many guises. Equally adept at black farce, brutal rants, or tender epiphanies, McLean plunges us headlong into the lives of his characters: partying, and all it entails, with soccer enthusiasts; shivering inside the butcher's man-sized fridge; stumbling bloody-footed along the cliff-top path at midnight, lost in a liver'n'onions-fueled fantasy of sex and violence. The men and women in these stories are mostly unemployed or in dead-end jobs, often on the edge of madness or destruction; but just as often they are on the brink of simply leaving: walking away from relationships, responsibilities, and the reassurance of alcohol and aggression. Told with enormous skill, fierce humor, and a dark emotional drive, these stories are as various as the characters themselves. Their commonality derives from a merciless realism, and an almost fanatical adherence to the rhythms and cadences of spoken language. "McLean wants to capture the unremarkable, but it is his remarkable stories which transport. Expressed here at last is a psychic disorder, so contemporary, so unsafe; here is swaggering, sneering, frustrated, self-scepticism on the pavement." — Guardian (London)  Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393318975
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/1999
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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

What People are Saying About This

Janice Galloway

Lean, maggoty writing.

Irvine Welsh

The power and versatility of Duncan McLean's writing is inspirational and is evidenced to full effect in this excellent collection of stories. In fact, it's very hard to think of a better short story writer in Britain today.
— (Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting and The Acid House)

Editorial Reviews

For those of you familiar with Duncan McLean, there's no need to continue reading. I know you've already bought or ordered Bucket of Tongues. For those who haven't yet heard of him, though, this is the one you want to buy first.

It was his first book published in the U.K., in 1992. It's a collection of short stories -- some very short -- that give a picture of, well, life. It's life in Scotland, the gritty, ground-level side of Scotland, where life is often hard and sharp and we all know how it ends. But it could be anywhere in the world -- anywhere there are people who hope and dream and struggle to survive.

The best story is "Hours of Darkness." And "Lurch." And the soul-freezing "Tongue." And most of the others. You see what I mean. Purists will say that some of the short ones aren't stories, and they may be right. Perhaps moments like "Thistle Story," "The Big Man That Dropped Dead" and "Jesus Fuckeroo" are nothing more than pieces of a whole. So what? Skip over them if you want -- but if you do, make it a point to go back, because they are indeed pieces of the whole.

Whether you take it in pieces or a single gulp, take it all in before you judge, because McLean's landscape is a wide one. Among his other books, he wrote an allegorical tale about a psychotic janitor -- and followed it up with a documentary travelogue on Texas swing music, for Christ's sake!

It seems there's always something more with McLean. His own story is one of those background bits that aren't essential to the books, but you still like knowing. He was a janitor in Edinburgh when he and some friends started typing up their stories in booklets, called themselves the Clocktower Press and sent the stuff out to writers and artists and just about anyone else they could think of. Then one night McLean was giving a reading and a London editor was there. He asked to see everything McLean had written -- and proceeded to publish it as Bucket of Tongues.

In the meantime, McLean kept turning out the booklets, which included work by James Kelman, Alan Warner, Janice Galloway and some chapters of an odd novel called Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. The rest is, well, you know.

I'd like to call this a rags-to-riches tale, but McLean hasn't hit big yet in the States. Last I heard, he was living up in Orkney -- that's off the northern coast of Scotland -- working at a bookstore or hustling after some other job. I hear he's got a new book coming out in the U.K. this year. I don't know what it's about. But I'll read it. I'll read his books any time.
—Salon

Steve McQuiddy

Committed, as Irvine Welsh is, to the stubborn inflections of Scots English, McLean (Bunker Man) seeks out the gritty and the down-at-heel. Unemployed and "skint"--in Scots English dialect, dead broke--the characters in these 23 short stories shiver through the night and squabble the days away. The unemployed couple (she, 30; he, 28) in "When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels" return from a night at the pub to find that their ill-appointed flat has been robbed of their most precious possessions: a brand-new gas canister and a cache of mix tapes. "Shoebox" sees another young couple--here only "the boy" and "the girl"--playing house and making light of pinching eggs and tins of beans from the grocer. In these stories, as in the collection's intense and lengthy centerpiece, "Hours of Darkness," McLean's characters wade through dire straits with the wide ironic grins of those whose facade of cockiness might at any moment crack. Those not mooching or stealing are exploited by the needier characters. Formally experimental--"Thistle Story" is not even a page long--McLean nonetheless does not come across as self-indulgent, writing clean, sober prose. With sharp, accurate descriptions of the natural world, or even of the phenomenon of kettle-steam hanging in a cold kitchen's atmosphere, McLean mends the hem of ragged lives and finds in the rawness that he writes about both beauty and humor.FYI: Bucket of Tongues is a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Alternately brutal, tender, comic and macabre, Bucket of Tongues...is a collection to be relished...Many of these stories—some no more than a paragraph long—have the feel of a good gag...As in his novels, McClean at times reveals an altogether black sense of humor, but while [the book] features some disturbing scenes, its author never indulges in simple shock tactics.
—Time Out NY

Eve Claxton