Bucket of Tongues [Paperback]

Duncan McLean (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999

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

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nobody can accuse writer Duncan McLean of having a limited range. His first novel, Bunker Man, was a horrific saga of violence and madness played out against a bleak coastal community in Scotland. But just when you thought it was safe to classify McLean with those other Scottish enfants terribles Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, he turned around and produced the charming Lone Star Swing, a fey and fascinating travelogue through the Texas country-music scene. Now he's back with a collection of short stories that veer off in yet another direction, one that mixes savage humor and the occasional tender moment into the endlessly brutal business of living that occupies most of his on-the-fringe characters.

Sporting titles such as "A/deen Soccer Thugs Kill All Visiting Fans," "Loaves and Fishes, Nah," or "The Druids Shite It, Fail to Show," McLean's stories range from a few paragraphs to many pages. What they all share is a bleak outlook, a ferocious rage, and language that would make a longshoreman blush. In "Bod Is Dead," for example, McLean gives us Buzby, described as "a hot-and-cold cunt" who's "quick to rouse, quick to freeze, he'd punch some bugger's lights out or give them a fucking hug depending on his mood, how his feelings felt that day, that minute, and all for nothing at all." In this particular instance, Buzby feels homicidal after watching his drunken mother seduce his buddy right in front of him. Butchers, workers on North Sea oil rigs, unemployed and underemployed alcoholics, drug addicts, and losers--these are the people who populate the world of Duncan McLean's making, and readers of Bucket of Tongues had better have the stomach to face them. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

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"Ain Scots English dialect, dead brokeAthe 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 coupleAhere only "the boy" and "the girl"Aplaying 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 experimentalA"Thistle Story" is not even a page longAMcLean 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. (May) FYI: Bucket of Tongues is a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 245 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393318974
• ISBN-13: 978-0393318975
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,643,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the USA at last!, June 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bucket of Tongues (Paperback)

Read this book back in '94 during a trip to Scotland... for years I hoped an American publisher would be smart enough to pick it up. Finally. McLean is fresh and original and makes mudane middleclass Scottish worker/slacker lives vibrate with an underlying potential for doom... or at least a good fistfight. These short stories all held me, and sometimes shook me violently about the arms and head. Fantastic. May McLean have a long prolific life. I'll read them all. Check out the novel "Bunkerman" as well.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Introduction to McLean's Range, April 4, 2001

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bucket of Tongues (Paperback)

From the author of the totally creepy Bunker Man and the deftly delightful Blackden comes this collection of 23 short stories ranging in length from a half-page to 42 pages. McLean's voice and fine writing is as evident in these short works as in his two novels. If one placed each of his novels at the end of a spectrum of creepiness and wholesomeness, the stories in this collection would fill the gap between them. Indeed, the longest story, "Hours of Darkness" shares many of the creepy and ultimately nasty characteristics of Bunker Man, while others such as "Tongue" or "The Druids S***e It and Fail To Show" hearken to Blackden. As a whole, the collection is a great example of the new Scottish writing, and a perfect introduction to McLean.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars delightful, March 2, 2000

By 

"grizzellda" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bucket of Tongues (Paperback)

The painful truths told by McLean are bearable because of the humor that they are told with. If you liked the movie trainspotting, you will love this book, as I did.