Today I’m joining the blog tour for The Ossians. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the blog tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Connor is twenty-four, brilliant, broken, and out of control. He’s the swaggering frontman of The Ossians, a Scottish indie band on the brink of signing a major record deal.

Desperate to make their mark, they head off on a two-week winter tour across the cities and hinterlands of Scotland – a last-ditch attempt to find fame, purpose, and themselves.

But the tour soon spirals into a surreal, chaotic odyssey. From seedy bars and snowbound towns to a final, defining Glasgow gig, the band hurtles through a whirlwind of seagull massacres, botched drug deals, a mysterious stalker, radioactive beaches, bomb-testing ranges, epileptic fits, riotous Russian submariners, deadly storms, epiphanies, regular beatings and random shootings.

Raw, darkly funny and wild with energy, The Ossians is a gloriously anarchic story of rock’n’roll obsession, national identity and self-destruction, and what it means to belong – in a band, in a country, in a life unravelling at speed.

Review:

The Ossians is the second of Doug Johnstone’s early work that I’ve read recently that has been republished by Orenda this year. As a self declared fan of his, it is interesting to see where he started and how these novels compare to the later ones. The writing is definitely more raw and there seems to me to be more shock factor in this novel, which isn’t for the faint hearted, but beneath all this, there is still some very sensitive character development and a deep dive into some very real issues in society which are still prevalent almost 20 years after the book was first written. 

This novel tells the story of The Ossians – a band comprising of four people in their early twenties. The plot is centred around their latest tour, during which they travel throughout Scotland. The description at each location in the tour is brilliant, and I love Doug Johnstone’s sense of place, which allowed me to follow the tour clearly despite not being familiar with most of the locations. 

The band members are Connor, his girlfriend Hannah, his sister Kate and best friend Danny. They are all carefully written characters with heartbreaking flaws and emotional outlooks on the world, but it is Connor in particular whose alcohol dependence and drug addiction really made a mark on me. Doug Johnstone’s descriptions of what was going through his mind under the influence of alcohol and drugs really helped me to understand his feelings and his description of how it was affecting those around him really resonated with me. I felt incredibly emotional as I was reading. 

I finished The Ossians thinking a lot about these characters, and I am still wondering what happened to them and where they would be now.

The Ossians is available from Amazon.

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