Mark McNay’s debut novel is written in a thick, phonetic rendering of a Scottish burr. The undeviating use of this very particular, accented voice — which is replete with oddball phonetic spellings, rolled Rs and various colloquialisms — can also be incredibly irksome, especially because McNay doesn’t use quotation marks and rarely employs dialogue tags.While this means that the reader must work harder to parse out individual sentences and make sense of lengthy conversations between characters, the work, in the end, is worth it. Like Irishman Patrick McCabe and McNay’s fellow Scot Irvine Welsh, the subject here is the low-income worker and family. Unlike McCabe and Welsh, however, McNay’s version of the working class is almost always humane. Protagonist Sean O’Grady spends his days in a chicken processing plant, often drifting off into beautiful daydreams. But when his older brother Archie is released form prison, Sean must scramble to come up with the money he was supposed to have been holding for his criminal sibling. What ensues is funny yet affecting, and entertaining enough to keep us slogging through the burr.
