Emily Mackie's debut novel And This Is True was nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award.
It was widely praised for being quirky, shocking and having a central conceit - a boy's romantic love for his father - that was, at once, unlikely and convincing.
Her second novel is focused on a character whose name might be Jacob Little. One day Jacob has an "epiphany" and decides to leave his girlfriend who calls herself Solace. They met in a nightclub where Jacob initially misheard her name as Soulless. Names mean everything and nothing in the story, and if they occasionally reference cliches from the self-help industry one assumes that that is deliberate. Jacob spends many years trying to find Solace again while adopting a string of different names and identities. He's a pagan, a theatre critic, a historian, archaeologist, Christian, Buddhist and alcoholic among other things. Eventually his search takes him to the Scottish Highland town where Solace was born.
Jacob gathers other characters to him as he goes. He is verging on physically repulsive - bad teeth, bad skin, bad breath - yet a source of fascination to almost everyone he meets. There is his landlady Fat Sal whose abusive husband works on the oil rigs, a little girl called Lizzy who renames herself Max and a teenager called Lucy. Lucy is so taken with Jacob that she transforms her appearance to resemble Solace's. Throughout it, Solace and Jacob are themselves being shadowed by their old landlord Mr Burton, a clockmaker, who is keeping a terrible secret.
The narration is directive and we follow Jacob and the others by way of a Dear Reader device which insists that we look here or there, examine this or that or remember seemingly minor characters or incidents that happened earlier. The reader is companion and co-conspirator while the story shifts back and forward in time, uses instant rewind to look at things again, and sometimes rearranges itself into scenes from a play or images on an artist's canvas.
Jacob's epiphany turns out to be the need to answer the question "Who am I?". Before long he discovers that the only identity he has is the one that others assign to him, a revelation he repeats ad nauseam. He is prone to pretentious speeches with some help from the narrator who laces the story with references to Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Camus. Jacob is interested in how time works and wishes he could fly or be invisible. Sadly, the novel is fatally undermined by the growing realisation that no matter how you dress him up or what name you give him, Jacob is an insufferable bore.
Given his centrality to the story, the absence of anything interesting about Jacob spreads through it like a contagion. The fact that women are not content to love him but want to "be him" is not just unlikely but inexplicable. And as the Dear Reader directives become more insistent, the more inclined one is to resist them as they invariably lead back to the main character.
Mackie puts a lot of narrative inventiveness at the service of a central character who does not deserve it while sacrificing potentially interesting side stories to Jacob's relentless central one. The child Lizzy who becomes Max, for instance, has a gender identity issue which feels much more important than Jacob's "'Who am I?" quest but gets a lot less attention.
It comes as little surprise that Jacob is planning a novel himself. It would "f*** conflict, f*** climax, f*** resolution" and be about "how life really is". Fortunately it is never fully realized though he does find another unlikely route to immortality. Some elements of In Search Of Solace suggest that Mackie may have been tempted by her own character's prescription for a "real" novel but, if so, it is resisted. In the end, she gamely pulls together all the threads of the story in a fairly standard way even if YouTube is required to record some of it. It is a resolution of sorts for Jacob but unfortunately this Dear Reader lost interest in him some time ago.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article