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'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
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‘A powerful first novel’
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First Sentence
If you ask any student of Celtic literature to name the classic works of fiction originating from the Scotland in the last twenty or so years, the list would be pretty predictable. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
If you ask any student of Celtic literature to name the classic works of fiction originating from the Scotland in the last twenty or so years, the list would be pretty predictable. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have often wondered what it would be like to be an alcoholic and this is about as close as I want to get. Reading this book I often felt disorientated and anxious, as if I was seeing Morris' world through his brandy-goggles. Although it is a short book it is long enough. Its brilliance is oppressive. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it but I won't forget it in a hurry. A real experience for those looking for something that little bit different.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
.... 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."
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."
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