<\/p>\n
Cumbrian writer Shaun Wilson has made his longform debut with a self-deconstructive work of experimental autofiction, and if you wanted to make Malc\u2019s Boy<\/em> sound far more forbidding and less accessible than it actually is, that\u2019s the way to go about it. Malc is the author\u2019s dad, in these pages and in real life, and the median reader can but speculate how much truth there is behind father and son\u2019s exploits as related here, but as characters in a novel they\u2019re drawn with aplomb.<\/p>\n Wilson shuffles between formats and tenses to allow himself to comment on his own book, and at a sense of reserve the literary culture in which he\u2019s now embedded. This has happened against the odds, it would seem. The upbringing depicted in Malc\u2019s Boy<\/em> was far from impoverished, but perpetually adjacent to what passes for a criminal underworld in the Lake District, and when every night on the town is likely as not to end in a fight then the development of one\u2019s authorial voice may take a back seat.<\/p>\n Some of these recollections, which date back to the mid-1980s when Shaun had just started primary school, are told straight-bat. Others are presented as transcripts of conversations between Malc and boy, in heavy Cumbria dialect (if you\u2019ve limited familiarity with this, basically keep in mind its dual proximity to Newcastle and the Scottish Borders and you\u2019re on track), and as well as hashing out the finer details of the historical skulduggery the pair debate what the book should or shouldn\u2019t feature, and the mechanics of how it might come together.<\/p>\n Towards the end, Shaun\u2019s partner Martine exerts her influence similarly \u2013 a female (and feminist) voice in a book predominantly shaped by and around men and their destructive tendencies. She\u2019s knowingly positioned as a counterbalance to the machismo that\u2019s baked into nearly every page of Malc\u2019s Boy<\/em>, and if this is a case of the author having his cake and eating it there are rich pickings left over for the rest of us too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n