Roll up, roll up for a charmingly surreal literary festival on a remote Scottish island where even the alpacas are aspiring writers
That The Brilliant & Forever, the new novel by the author of A Method Actor’s Guide to Jekyll and Hyde and Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides, is laugh-out-loud funny doesn’t mean it isn’t, in essence, a tragedy. The unnamed narrator is an aspiring writer and expert in “haiku-kery”, a form of cuisine that must abide by strict rules of three meals of five ingredients, seven ingredients, then five ingredients. His best friends are Macy Starfield, an aspiring writer and pioneering “fishermanwoman”, and Archie, an aspiring writer and spittoon-carrying alpaca – and all three intend to compete in their island home’s annual literary festival, the eponymous “Brilliant and Forever”. The island is fiercely divided – between tourists and residents, the middle-class whitehousers and the traditional blackhousers, alpacas and humans, and northern alpacas and southern alpacas. Anyone who knows anything about Scottish culture will be aware that this greatly underestimates the number of divisions we Scots can conjure. But they are united in their love of, pride in and anxiety regarding their literary festival, despite the Judge’s Decision being notoriously corrupt and the People’s Decision being – well, that would be telling. I have been to a great many Scottish literary festivals, and some of the satirical swipes are palpable hits. I worried when I came across a character called Summer Kelly, but I doubt that the 22-year-old female writer, “radiant in beer and acceptance”, is my fictional alter ego.
From the title of the opening chapter, “If On a Summer’s Night an Alpaca”, the reader will realise that this charming, sad novel is inspired by Italo Calvino. After sketching out the leading trio’s slightly helter-skelter lives – including being mistaken for Death, the twinning of their island’s only major hill with Mount Fuji and an interest in alpaca rights – the bulk of the novel comprises the readings given at the aforesaid literary festival. Other contributors include a depressive waiter, an American psychopath, a local supermodel and a man born with a film projector in his head. It is a showcase for MacNeil’s virtuosity that also forces the reader to make quite stark choices: how seriously are we to take any given story? Is Macy’s “Homer and the Cèilidh” genuinely good, or are we just assenting to her friends’ generosity? Is the self-regarding Tabitha Tessington’s offering, “This Is a Castle, This Is a Kite”, saccharine whimsy or something of merit that the friends are too obtuse and prejudiced to perceive? This is a book that keeps the reader on hot coals, and my, but we caper the better for it.
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