Glower of Scotland

Despite the frequent bleakness of its themes, Toy Fights is a blast of pure reading pleasure.

-  LIAM MCILVANNEY

TOY FIGHTS: A BOYHOOD, by Don Paterson (Faber, $39.99)

A memoir? Don Paterson? That Don Paterson? The idea that Scotland's phlegmatic laureate of gloom, the laconic sensei of Zen Calvinism, should drag out his entrails and read them for our edification across 400 pages of autobiographical prose seems, well, a bit unlikely. Bare his soul? I once saw him deliver an hour-long lecture to a transfixed - and slightly scared - freshman English class at the University of Aberdeen without removing his Crombie overcoat. Or even unbuttoning it. He was like an eloquent undertaker. "Whatever I do with all the black," he wrote in an early poem, "is my business alone."

Now, it seems, it's our business, too. And that turns out to be a very good thing. Toy Fights, Paterson's attempt to answer the question posed by the man in the mirror ("Why did we end up this guy?"), is wise, tender, eloquent, dark and funny. It takes the story of Don Paterson up to his 20th year, when he leaves his hometown of Dundee for the dubious delights of 1980s London. Along the way, it throws out entertaining insights into pretty much everything you could think of: the folk music revival, competitive origami, sex, municipal corruption, the Protestant work ethic, Kraftwerk, narcissists, school discos, self-loathing, ring-roads, Enid Blyton and Greek mythology.