So Many Lives and All of Them Are Yours
Ron Butlin 
Polygon, £12
 
For Morris Magellan, it’s a dream come true – an opportunity to kickstart his life “and this time get it right”. As chronicled in Ron Butlin’s brilliant 1987 novel, The Sound of my Voice, Morris sacrificed his family and his career as a biscuit company executive for drink. In this sequel, we find that he’s been living alone in an Edinburgh flat and making ends meet by writing jingles for slot machines. 
Somehow, though, word of his musical talent has got around, and he’s been commissioned to write a string quartet. It’s such an unlikely and precious opportunity that Morris resolves to quit drinking and rent a quiet place in the country to compose his opus. At 70, he realises this is surely his last change to write the kind of music he loves and truly be himself.
In his search for a suitable location, he finds that his childhood home near Lockerbie is on the market. Despite its woefully derelict state, he can’t resist renting it. But, inevitably, living there is bound to dredge up unhappy memories of the terrifying, abusive father he left home on his 16th birthday to escape. 
Though he still has a son and daughter who worry about him and keep in touch, his stay in the village is going to severely test both his new-found sobriety and his mental health.
 Within days of moving into the dilapidated cottage, Morris has committed a series of faux pas, embarrassing himself in front of the whole village, and is vacillating between falling off the wagon and clambering back on. 
What’s more, local bigwig Jess Cairns has caught his eye, and the prospect of deepening their relationship is a strong motivation to stay sober, but can he patch up the damage he’s already done?
 The present-day narrative is interspersed with flashbacks of Morris running away to London at 16 and, after months of homelessness and begging, escaping the streets for a hippie crash pad called Middle Earth. We learn how his father’s death focused his mind on succeeding in the straight world and starting a family – but with drink as a ticking time bomb, destined at some point to destroy everything he’d accomplished. 
Morris never makes an explicit connection between his abusive childhood and his alcoholism, but the trauma clearly runs deep and can’t be batted away by pouring a bottle of Grouse down the sink and thinking positive thoughts.
 At no time does Butlin lose sight of the centrality of music to Morris’s life. It’s been a constant comfort, evoking the peaceful times when his tyrannical father was away and he could sit and listen to his mother playing the piano. 
He remembers his first hearing of Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife as a life-changing, almost synaesthetic, experience in which the music grew to encompass the whole world, and how, during his squatting days, the music running through his head could help him hold poses for hours as an artists’ model.
 Every bit as masterful as its celebrated 1987 predecessor, it’s an almost painfully insightful and honest depiction of a man struggling with drink, his past and ultimately himself. 
Butlin has said that, growing up in Scotland, he saw alcoholism all around him, and he’s brought a lifetime’s understanding and empathy to his story, while avoiding sentimentality and the peddling of false hopes. 
But it isn’t devoid of optimism or humour either, and Morris’s awareness of his own ridiculousness mines laughter from a desperate situation and lightens an otherwise melancholic mood.
 
                 Alastair Mabbott