Tilleadh Dhachaigh

Description

Clàr, 2009. 119 pages.

A ghost makes a train journey from Aberdeen to Kyle of Lochalsh. But is he really an apparition or just an echo of a bygone age before technology enveloped us in our own personal bubbles?

Angus Peter’s fourth Gaelic novel is full of humour and pathos and manages to be simultaneously heart-warming and satirical, while containing some big questions.

“If Angus Peter Campbell’s oeuvre were a car, it would be a custom-built vehicle, constructed from Gaelic ingenuity, and fuelled by a diverse mix as global as any brand of oil – equal parts South American magic realism, Huxleyite dystopia (see his second novel Là a’ Dèanamh Sgèil do Là), and Italian postmodernism (his English-language cycle of stories, Invisible Islands owes an obvious debt to Italo Calvino). For his fourth Gaelic-language novel, Tilleadh Dhachaigh (Returning Home) though, he takes the train. A quick inspection of the ticket on the cover (a Scotrail day return to Belgium, price £2 4s 8d) lets us know we’re in for no ordinary journey, full of irreverent humour and surreal juxtapositions. Our narrator is a ghost, a soldier from the Great War, making the return journey he didn’t take in 1918, travelling incognito with his twenty-first century fellow passengers. Each short chapter is a stop along the line from Aberdeen to Inverness, and on to Kyle, allowing Campbell to digress from a richly cohesive whole. It enables the reader to step between the parallel tracks of times and cultures.”
Mark Wringe, Scottish Review of Books, Vol. 5 Issue 3, 2009.

Read a review of this title on GoodReads

Reading Level: Upper Intermediate/Advanced (Suitable for more confident readers)