Customer Reviews

Night Falls on Ardnamurchan: The Twilight of a Crofting Family

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NIGHT FALLS ON ARDNAMURCHAN is hard to categorize--part musing, part straight biography, but with a sizable (and enjoyable) amount of autobiography thrown in as well. Publishing companies usually shy away from manuscripts that are hard for them to pigeonhole, but I guess Penguin just HAD to publish this one. It's that good.

Maclean, a poet by trade, brings his formidable powers of observation to bear on the scenery and lifestyle of the crofting community of Sanna on the Ardnamurchan Penninsula is the Western Highlands, the home of his crofter parents. Through inference and empathy, he delineates a hard way of life that was not without its own built-in rewards. He contrasts it with the easier life of those in suburb and city, never sentimentalizing the earlier way of living, but leaving us to draw the conclusion of which was the more satisfying way to spend one's days.

Maclean is intelligent and his prose is thought-provoking on nearly every page. He is occasionally exasperating and always highly opinionated--an individualist sometimes rugged, but more often all-too-humanly vulnerable. He is even at times a downright curmudgeon. But he is always a poet. This is a book to savor, to share, and to keep.