McX

McX is five foot five. If you gave him a dose of muscle-relaxant he might come out an inch or two longer on the examination table, for he stoops, from the neck, the swooping stoop of dromedaries. He is not hump-backed – he has the look of someone frightened of what is going on to the rear.’
McX is also a fearful and unsuccessful inspector of Weights & Measures; he is unhealthy, unsightly, unloved and – as if that wasn’t enough – he comes from Fife. His grim existence centres on the ‘Auld Licht’, a dank, malodorous public house haunted by the dank, malodorous and dreadful McPint; a man who survives gleefully on a diet of beer, peanuts and pornography. McX, meanwhile, dreams of fair women and requited love in a rural idyll – a Scotland without rain, without repression, and without McPint: He resolves, quite simply, to escape.
In this hilarious, savage novel, Todd McEwen balances the two oldest clichés about Scotland and finds the truth somewhere between. Aware of the nation’s deep schizophrenia he has written, on the one hand, a corrosive satire of a grey and sodden place full of drinkers crippled by Calvinism and anal retention, and, on the other, a glorious literary send-up of Scots romanticism: where the glens are always alive to the sound of bagpipes and the baronial halls are decked in claymores and tartan.
Somewhere between the two stands the round-shouldered, uncomfortable figure of McX, squinting through cigarette smoke: a man of our times, a good Scot, a kind of hero.