Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100661 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Nicholas Royle, Time Out
`An extraordinarily powerful and redemptive work, as impressive for its use of language as for its emotional appeal. Butlin's only precursor is Kafka'

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 unique evocation of domestic alcoholism
Butlin is truely unique in his evocation of domestic alcoholism.

The conception of the fictionary 'alcoholic' has most definetely been moulded into a ridgid persona in such popular works as 'Leaving Las Vegas' and in the Philip Marlowe novels of Raymond chandler. Although these works have (quite rightly) attracted much praise in their representation of the alienated male mind, trapped both within and without of society, they have undoubtedly created a rigid stereotype. It appears that the alcoholic protagonist in fiction is almost always eccentric, somewhat masculine and always aloof.

Butlin bravely shatters this stereotype through his representation of alcoholism within the family the workplace. Domestic alcoholism in fiction is notably characterised by selfish spouce/child abuse and mindless gambling/violence. Butlin offers a much deeper insight than this. through the conceptualisation of the 2nd person narrative, the reader very quickly becomes the protagonist, and very soon developes a sensitive empathy for him.

This is surely one of the most evocative representations of the unspoken desperation which occupies contemporary suburban British life.

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.