Can’t you feel the energy of this place? All those other years are tugging at our coats.[loc. 2415]
Luckenbooth begins in 1910, with Jessie Macrae rowing to the Scottish mainland in a coffin, leaving behind her island home and her dead father, who may have been the Devil. Things do not become any less strange when she lands in Edinburgh, and makes her way to 10 Luckenbooth Close. Jessie has been hired by (or sold to) the unsettling Mr Udnam, property owner and crime lord. ('He has all the keys to all the buildings and every one of them is bloodstained.') She is to be a surrogate mother, since Elise -- the soon-to-be-Mrs Udnam -- is unable, or unwilling, to bear Udnam a child. Jessie's pregnancy proceeds at a fairytale pace: as the child grows, so do the horns on Jessie's head. Mr Udnam is not pleased.
The novel tells the stories of various inhabitants of the building through the turbulent twentieth century: a medium haunted by the sisters of dead Elise; a black medical student from Louisiana who creates a mermaid from bones; a bisexual teenager who yearns to become an assassin; and William Burroughs, inviting his lover to travel to other dimensions with him. There are drag balls, gangland killings, a parrot who's suffered a breakdown, and a miner who is allergic to daylight. And throughout the story there are women refusing to be victims, kicking back against the pricks, taking their revenge in elaborate and witty ways.
Luckenbooth is humorous, horrific, warm-hearted and raw, a palimpsest of lives layered as thick as generations of wallpaper on the tenement walls. (But what's hidden beneath the wallpaper?) It's intimately rooted in, and richly evocative of, Edinburgh's culture, geography and mythology: ritual sacrifice on Carlton Hill, whale bones in Meadow Walk, the 'skittery, lying, drunk, untrustworthy foe' that is the Edinburgh summer. And ultimately, though many of the characters are afflicted by violence and poverty, Luckenbooth is about winning free. Angry, lush and hopeful.
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