Jenni Fagin (2021) Luckenbooth.

Luckenbooth in Edinburgh dialect means Lockedbooth, the kind stall holders carted about to sell goods. Jenni Fagan whittles down her writing to what is true. She’s full of surprises. So when the devil’s daughter rows away from a Scottish island in a coffin made by her father and ends up in Leith docks, it’s no bigger surprise than Mary Anne McLeod leaving Tong, marrying Fred Trump and fathering the devil’s child Donald.

The structure of the book is much like one of those dramas, homes through time. Thus when Jessie McRae (21) the devils daughter parks her coffin (care of the North Sea), she walks quickly along Constitution Street and goes to stay with Mr Udanam, the landlord of the tenement building 10 Luckenbooth and his fiancée and lover Elise. They have a contract with Jessie’s dad that she should bear them a surrogate child. Since Jessie has murdered her dad, the contract is now with her. Udanam’s spunk gets her pregnant, but it is Elise that is her lover. Hers is a quick birth. From conception to delivery takes three days. Hardly enough time to take your breath, but enough time for Jessie to grow a full set of horns from the nubs on her head. Her child, Hope, has those nubs too. The pious and Trumpian Mr Udnam is the real devil. There’s a sickness in 10 Luckenbooth. Jenni Fagin casts her spell over the horror and delight about how far man has fallen.

Listen, for example to Levi (32), Flat 3F3, 1939, who makes mermaids from bones. A black American from the deep South that hangs black Americans from the deep South for being black and believing they are Americans. He’s writing to his brother Leo about the sickness in Luckenbooth and the murderous Udnam. ‘I will focus on inequality in education. I will teach a class on ideas. And on ideology…ideas were created so people could find a way to control billions of other people…a way to profit, a way to order society, a way to warehouse humans.

We must file our history differently and put false stories to bed. There are no different races of humans; there are only humans and we are all made from stardust every single one of us, we are children of the universe and we are one fucked-up race and there is no God—only good and evil and every shade of possibility in between.’

That black American from the deep South, sounds to me a bit the way Jenni Fagan might sound an anti-Trumpian horn without Jessie’s horns. I’m listening. I’m believing. Amen to that. Read on.

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