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'The dual narratives of father and son run concurrently, and while Edward's near-death experience and the changes it brings about him are compelling....... told in measured but insightful prose, IN ANOTHER LIGHT is unsentimental but moving and feels all the more powerful on account of its factual origins. (THE OBSERVER )
Andrew Greig, TLS
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Customer Reviews
He is a STUNNING writer. I came upon him almost by accident and got immediately hooked, and am trying to work through his works quite slowly, with lots of gaps between the books, as he really deserves a slow read.
His characters are all beautifully drawn, the plot lines are good and absorbing, and his ability to create a real sense of time and place wonderful - but it is the writing itself which enchants me, his use of language, his ability to paint with words, particularly the evocation of landscape. His 'poetic' background is very much in evidence - but not in any sort of showy or deliberately 'clever' way, just that I have such a sense of words being used with layer and precision.
He's a really tender writer, and the human fragility and complexity of his characters is carefully and heartfully explored.
I know I'm going to end up even reading the mountaineering books!
After an illness that took him near to death, Edward Mackay determines to find out more about his late father's mysterious past, and to make good on a promise. While working on an pioneering project whose aim is to make electricity from the awesome power of the waves that batter a remote Scottish island, he investigates the chain of events that caused his father to destroy most of the evidence of his time as a doctor in colonial Penang.
Dr Alexander Mackay's story is revealed by his son's account of his findings, and by the novel's own narrative, which switches between present day Orkney and the dying days of the British Empire in South East Asia. The young doctor has an eventful sea crossing in the company of an eclectic crowd including two sisters, "both beautiful, one a gazelle" (and of an unattainable social class). There is a notorious incident on the quayside on arrival, but the doctor is gradually accepted into Penang society, with regular visits to the Simpson sisters (one of whom is married) for tiffin. He soon agrees to do a task for a friend he met on the voyage that threatens to compromise his integrity as a man of medicine, and following a mysterious accident and a holiday in the Sumatran highlands, he leaves the island under a cloud of scandal.
It's an entertainingly told story, with unexpected turns and coincidences, and evokes the conditions of pre-WWII social stratification in Penang as well as it does the complications of Edward's life as a single, forty year old man in a small island community in modern-day Britain, where customs dictate that knocking on someone's door, before entering their flat and walking into their bedroom, is untrusting and unfriendly.
Edward's investigations, which proceed by way of clues including a buddha figurine and a double-one domino, and helpers including an old lady (who may not be exactly who she claims to be), and a dippy blonde whom he literally bumps into in London, add spice to the present-day story. His recovery, his debt to the past, and a newly discovered interest in music are aided by a feisty Orkney woman called Mica and an odd assortment of colleagues. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- Mica's own emotional problems, and with a nemesis in the form of a belligerent fisherman by the name of Kipper, he manages to come to terms with the person he has become since his devastating illness.
I was encouraged to read this by the fact those who had read it went on to read more of his works - always the sign of a good author. I'm now going to read That Summer!
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