Luckenbooth
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Luckenbooth
Buy Now for £13.79
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Narrated by:
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Cathleen McCarron
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David McCallion
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Fiona McNeill
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Jeff Harding
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By:
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Jenni Fagan
Stories tucked away on every floor. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is an archetypal Edinburgh tenement.
The devil’s daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910, and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents - a curse that will last for the rest of the century.
Over nine decades, No. 10 Luckenbooth Close bears witness to emblems of a changing world outside its walls. An infamous madam, a spy, a famous Beat poet, a coal miner who fears daylight, a psychic: these are some of the residents whose lives are plagued by the building’s troubled history in disparate, sometimes chilling ways. The curse creeps up the nine floors, and an enraged spirit world swells to the surface, desperate for the true horror of the building’s longest kept secret to be heard.
Luckenbooth is a bold, haunting and dazzlingly unique novel about the stories and secrets we leave behind and the places that hold them long after we are gone.
©2021 Jenni Fagan (P)2020 W F Howesbrilliantly written and performed
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Sometimes I feel I need to justify my reviews, even though I know that all reviews are subjective nonsense and ascribing numbers to art is very silly quite frankly, but I come from the world of reviewing indie Tabletop Roleplaying Games and service staff, which essentially means I start at five and take off and add as I go. More often than not, if something is genuinely brilliant and effects me significantly, I can look past a fair bit and still very much feel comfortable about giving something five stars. With Luckenbooth, there was very little to look past and a lot I adored and even more I liked very much, so this was a five for me, while my experience may shake out as a four or even a high three for others. In fact, the only issue I had was with the tired bullshit about women being there at the beginning and end of life, which is utter shite for so very many cis women, even if you're a transphobic bellend, which, thankfully, Fagan appears not to be (judging by this book and knowing nothing else about them).
Luckenbooth, I have learned seems to really divide people and I'm genuinely fascinated as to why good hearted people wouldn't like it. This is not me saying if you don't like it you're bad or anything like that. I am a sworn protector of the joys of subjectivity. It's simply very easy to understand why, to use Fagan's vernacular, cunts, wouldn't like this book. It being Queer as hell and filled with awesome women (and men).
The story takes place over a number of decades and revolves around the lives of various people who come to live in the tenement building at 10 Luckenbooth close in Edinburgh, which, from the very cursory websearching and at least one real life figure I recognised, seems to be a real place, though the veracity of these stories wasn't the least bit important to me. For various reasons many people find themselves trapped in the building, haunting it, both figuratively and literally, over the years, as the stories meander between the figures and the years, overlapping on interesting ways.
The first line of the blurb (awful things. Never read them until the book is finished, me) and everything else mentions the Devil's Daughter and her complex relationship and families, there is an awesome lass who I am unsure if the text was being explicit about being intersex or trans, but either way she was rad as hell and part of a secret drag ball culture (which I absolutely would have loved to have seen explored more!), there's eloquent, horny triads that combine elements of Squid Game and True Romance in my mind (complimentary), a brave man with an affliction I can very much empathise with, a sapphic spy, a gay poet and his ace(?) lover, and more in this housing association of horrors, joys, pain, fear, and love in this fascinating novel.
The most exciting, interesting, dirty, awful, and glorious elements of human (and devil) nature are explored, contained, and trapped within the walls and pages of this book. These are explored through the stories themselves and exalted by one Mr Burroughs who gets into some truly fascinating pontification on the metaphysical that bizarrely reflected a conversation I had the night before I got to that part, which was spooky.
I suppose it is more accurate to say this is a collection of lives loosely, and sometimes more strongly, bound together through a building and its history more than a novely novel. But what even is a novel? Honestly, after reading Carmen Maria Machado's 272 Viewings of Law & Order: SVU, I believe anything could be a story and the world would be a richer place for more weird and deconstructed narratives. This isn't anywhere as out there as that, but it also isn't a neat bow novel story and that might be a deal breaker for some.
Personally, I absolutely loved it and just how much of a celebration of Queerness of all kinds it was!
Wonderfully Queer in Many Ways
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Another great story by Jenni.
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Disappointing I think and regret
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Yum, The Terrible House
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