Product Description

Morris Magellan is an executive who runs a biscuit company in Scotland. He has a house in the suburbs, nice wife and kids and seems, on the surface, to be an embodiment of Thatcherite values. However, there is one major problem. He is a chronic alcoholic and, from the start, we sense that he is doomed and his life is about to disintegrate. He isn?t a coke-and-booze bingeing style victim with one eye on the clock, hoping to meet Ms Right and acquire the two kids and the suburban home that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn?t straightened out anything. Magellan?s journey will never end. The Sound of My Voice is as extraordinary a vision of alcoholism as Malcolm Lowry?s Under the Volcano.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #242390 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
'The Sound of My Voice is the sound of a writer at the peak of his power, and one of the most inventive and daring novels ever to have come out of Scotland. Playful, haunting and moving, this is writing of the highest quality' Ian Rankin 'A powerful portrait of alcoholism and self-destruction... brilliant to see it back' Bookseller

Observer
‘A powerful first novel’

Glasgow Herald
‘Compulsively readable... a cleverly orchestrated, unique work of fiction’

Customer Reviews

Astonishing
.... For a Scottish novel of the 1980's that slipped the net, you might think 'The Sound of My Voice' would be stylistically akin to James Kelman say, or a precursor to Irvine Welsh's 'scots' monolgues who has helped dig this book out of the 'lost fiction' department and put it back where it belongs. However Ron Butlin's 114 page novel, illuminates not the disaffected working classes of 1980's Scotland, but a successful executive, Morris Magellan as it's central character, and it's stylistic triumph has little to do with 'vernacular', more the second-person narration that draws the reader from the outset into a very tense and disturbing place.
What Butlin's book does have in common with the cannon of Scottish writers who include Kelman, is that the daily grind is heart renderingly captured here, Magellan who runs a biscuit company may have the wife, kids, suburban house, car and well paid job but he is caught between the house and the office in a meaningless cycle, where his emotional disintegration is dramatised by his alcoholism, something Butlin has captured with rare skill, so much so that for a short novel this is emotionally harrowing to read and hauntingly so. In between this office, home trajectory littered with violent bursts of consumption, through Magellan's voice we follow him back to memories of early childhood and teenage years, incidents that are both defined by the presence of his father. Memories of a small boy in the country, confused about perspective, how far off buildings get closer when you move toward them, or of a teenager at a party, drinking with a girl would perhaps be happy incidents, but they are almost nightmarish in Magellan's mind, both emblamatic of the inability to communicate emotion that defines his internal collapse.
This is as much about a man in crisis of age as it is about an alcoholic, a man in his thirties who has suddenly found himself, trapped, numb, and empty, "You are thirty-four years old and already two thirds destroyed," Magellan notes, "every day, every moment almost, you must begin the struggle over again-the struggle to be yourself."

A stone-cold classic
Probably the outstanding Scottish novel of the 1980s. Irvine Welsh picked up on this one as a lost masterpiece, and he's right. Written in the second person continuous present tense, this novel is funny, scarey, hilarious, troubling and profound as our alcoholic narrator slides towards the end of his life as a biscuits executive. My heart was thumping as this story moves towards its end - which I won't give away, except to say its perfect, deeply moving, and oddly life-affirming. This novel is as perfect as it is short.