Book description
When Farchar MacNab goes on a blinder of a drinking session at
Hogmanay he stays away for three days. The temperature drops to minus
22, and he returns to his remote unheated cottage in the thaw to find
that his partner and newborn baby have frozen to death. Fach retreats
to Glasgow, where he tries to hide from the world by living in a
derelict Victorian railway station below the Botanic Gardens in
Glasgow's West End - "a black airless hole with pigeons for
neighbours and a park full of beauty on the roof of his world".
Scared of the light, Fach leaves his tunnel only at night for the
safety of The Coffin - Glasgow's first 'death theme' pub - and The
Gravy Star, the cafe where people don't stare too much. Slightly mad,
he raves to himself, and tries to overcome his past. Obsessed with his
Baden Powell-influenced upbringing at the hands of his Uncle Duncan,
Fach dreams of leaving the tunnel for the Strath, place of his birth,
in the Highlands. When he does, he strides out through post-industrial
Glasgow, reflecting on his own family history, a hysterically funny
trip to Berlin, and the toll Maggie Thatcher took on Scotland over 11
years. His return to his home village brings a dramatic reckoning. His
return to the tunnel brings a positive turn-around that makes him
approach the 21st century with new hope.
