on Don Paterson

Wry, Chippy, Unapologetic

Toy Fights is a warts-and-all account of a fraught, working-class upbringing in 1970s and 1980s Kirkton (Dundee). The writing is both explicit and distracted – a bit like listening to someone baring their soul in a crowded room – and unafraid to pull a punch or two. It’s perhaps closer in tone to the aphorisms, or the coarser Nil Nil (1993), than to his later poems or essays. Toy Fights, which comes from a childhood game involving ‘twenty minutes of extreme violence without pretext’, was supposed to indicate, at the time, ‘not serious fights’, but really came to mean ‘senseless fights’ – and has thus defined many of his subsequent conflicts (mainly with God, his father, woke-liberals, drugs and insanity).

There’s a lot of anger – partly against his father for dying, and for not earning enough back in the day. This book was originally supposed to be written for his father about their shared love of music – but when his father died it morphed into a memoir (still with lots of music). Sometimes you get endless pages about Kraftwerk or Keith Jarrett, and wonder if he’s really just talking to his father, or maybe just using the opportunity to dissociate. This anger also manifests in a fierce defence of his working-class background. This is partly to ward off a perceived new wave of crusaders who masquerade as liberals, and who perpetuate what he describes as ‘the unfair treatment of the poor’. In this light, the book is a testament to who he is, and ...