An Advent Calendar

by Shena Mackay

The story begins as an ambulance pulls away from the butcher's shop, taking Mick to the hospital after he has carelessly hacked off a finger while preparing John's order. John's wife, Marguerite, and two young children are forced to live with his uncle until he can find work. Marguerite has a brief affair, an escape from the poverty and boredom of day-to-day life - and John, attempting to make amends for Mick's lost finger, is chased down by the butcher's buddies. These tumultuous events all take place during the first twenty-five days of December, leaving each character facing a Christmas of poverty, impossible love and loneliness.

Genres: Fiction

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh in 1944 and currently lives in London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also Honorary Visiting Professor to the MA in Writing at Middlesex University.

Her novels include the black comedy Redhill Rococo (1986), winner of the Fawcett Society Book Prize; Dunedin (1992), which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; and the acclaimed The Orchard on Fire (1995) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her novel Heligoland (2003) was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the spot-on timing of starting this on the first day of Advent, and initially enjoyed Mackay’s slightly macabre habit of taking elements of the Nativity scene or the traditional Christmas and giving them a seedy North London twist. So we open on a butcher’s shop and a young man wearing “bloody swabbing cloths” rather than swaddling clothes, having lost a finger to the meat mincer (and later we see “a misty Christmas postman with his billowy sack come out of the abattoir’s gates”). In this way, John Wood becomes an unwitting cannibal after taking a parcel home from the butcher’s that day, and can’t forget about it as he moves his temporarily homeless family into his old uncle’s house and continues halfheartedly in his job as a cleaner. His wife has an affair; so does a teenage girl at the school where his sister works. No one is happy and everything is sordid. “Scouring powder snowed” and the animal at this perverse manger scene is the uncle’s neglected goat. This novella is soon read, but soon forgotten.

[Fiona MacDonald · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a weird book. It chronicles the 25 days of advent leading up to Christmas but a lot of it was disjointed.. I didn't really get it. The centre plot revolved around John and his family who, after finding out they are going to lose their home, move in with an elderly uncle just before Christmas. The uncle is a disgrace, he is filthy, dirty and keeps his house like a bomb site. They attempt to find decent lives for themselves but nothing seems to work. The book started off okay but by the middle I was a bit bored... sorry.

[Georgina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shena MacKay can do no wrong in my book, (see what I did there)! She writes with faultless attention to both the detail of the scene, and the authenticity of language, and creates worlds you can believe you walked through when you took a wrong turn into the darker corners of Britain: not an extreme Britain, but a humble and struggling Britain, where ordinary lives are etched in extraordinary colour. My husband describes this book as "depressing", and whilst no-one is unscathed, or bathed in a post-epiphany after glow by the end, it is nevertheless a book full of warmth and affection.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an astonishingly careful, lively, intense, funny-wonky, writer. Shena MacKay is brilliant.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published in 1971, An Advent Calendar excels at describing the squalor and hopelessness of poverty-stricken Londoners in that grim decade. There's not a lot of festive cheer in this tale of a dark December in north London. Like other early novels by Shena Mackay, this is written in a distinctive and rather breathless prose where the reader sometimes has to work hard to piece together what exactly is going on. An interesting period piece but not one of my favourite Mackay works.

[Catherine Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alert , don’t eat spaghetti bolognaise while you read the opening chapter. This is a brilliantly constructed novel written in an unusual style. An addictive book that will add an edge to your Xmas reading.

[Bettina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a bit much for me. The sadness and hopelessness of some of the characters and the lifes ahead of them. On the other hand, I appreciate the language, the paintings she draws with words. So - this is an interesting work, but one needs a strong stomach/heart for it...

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

LOVE the writing, hate the story. The author uses words in an incredibly unique and beautiful way, almost like reading another language. If you like incredibly dark dramedy, this is for you.