“Schizophrenia... narcissists... origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania...” are included in Don Paterson’s long list of what this book is about. Not surprisingly for a poet who loves music more than poetry – “my minor curse is that I seem to be a bit better at the thing I love a bit less” – the list includes “the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene, and... the lengths we go to not to be bored”.
Paterson’s Dundee is labyrinthine and multi-faceted – Dundee United, Dundee hash, Dundee music, Dundee religion – every aspect is explored obsessively, “The absence of any town planning whatsoever left Dundee as a town one could only know as an insider... And what one memorises, one inevitably comes to love. It is a city that’s difficult to be bored by.”
Paterson’s monumental combat with boredom is the reader’s gain. From his early memories of his grandfather’s manse to the lonely, bullied schoolboy, even when he is admitted to a psychiatric ward at age 18, Toy Fights is rich in characters, wonderfully detailed, often very funny.
Childhood food looms large, especially sugar, the addict’s delight, “The Scottish diet draws heavily from the Tan Food Group... contains so much sugar, it’s amazing that the Scottish pancreas hasn’t done a kidney... cloned itself to split the workload.” The “dauphin” of traybakes is Tablet, “a semi-hard square of fawn heaven that tastes like what it is, 40 pints of milk squashed into a block of gold. It is milky and buttery and crumbly... both hard and soft... sweeter than anything you’ve tasted in your life... electricity rushes up the sides of your face... Mum... had crammed around 10,000 calories two-storey Bento-style into a large piece of Tupperware, including a bar of Tablet the size of my head, and even the teachers could tell it was killing me.”
However, when he describes himself as “an ideal narcissist’s ‘supply’... a class of narc [maybe best learn that abbreviation now, if it’s new to you] who always come on like they have the power to redeem you...” it feels as if we’re wandered on to some popular psychology website where diagnoses are handed out with the same certainty which he assigns to those “supercharged” narcs. These “narcs” tend to be shadowy, so many of them yet in the future but one early “guru” is vivid, “red-blond, slicked-back hair, huge Francis Rossi sideburns... a de Gaulle nose... dirty green trousers and... a huge arse. We thought he was really cool.”
There are some odd, jarring and reactionary footnotes too. “One has actually had a couple of ‘I suppose some of your best friends are black’ snarls off young white BLM-ers on social media... after decades of not only friendship but romantic [one died; cheers, kids!] and working relationships with black folks...” It’s disappointing when there’s so much to love here.
His greatest characters are parents, beautifully revealed through their desires. Russ, his phenomenally, hardworking father, also a musician, bought a “cheap Harmony sunburst mandolin and didn’t tell my mother, hoping he could sneak it into the house... Dad didn’t understand... that Mum was then developing a serious hire-purchase problem... racking up a formidable tab at Goldbergs for soft furnishings... he was too music-obsessed to notice: my dad could rise from a pink sofa in the morning and plonk himself down on a green one in the evening without remark, if his copy of BMG magazine had arrived in the meantime.”
Paterson doesn’t spare himself here. Nearing the end of teens, intensely irritated by his father, Patterson was desperate to get away, “Dad would clatter back in from his gig with his guitar and PA to find us all camped in the livingroom, talking crap... getting high... drinking tea... he’d hover in the doorway in his cowboy boots and Russ belt trying to make conversation... This was a perfect agony to me... In future years, if I ever needed another reason to hate myself, I could... look back... with authentic shame...”
The book ends as Paterson boards the train for London with his guitar, aged 20. The timing is right, he’s been so many things already including a master of origami and a fundamental Baptist but especially a serious jazz musician. “We got to the station around 9pm... Mum miserable and weeping... Dad smiling and weeping. I was light and blank and stomachless with fear... astonished that I wasn’t doing what I’d imagined doing a thousand times, and bottling it on the platform.”
