The Year's Midnight - DC's Page

The Year’s Midnight

by Alex Benzie
Penguin: £8.99
ISBN 0-14-025130-8

In the Aberdeenshire village of Aberlevin, a man is hanged unjustly late in the eighteenth century; the enraged townspeople attack the clocktower and destroy the clock. A century later, William “Watchie” Leckie — a gifted watchmaker — is commissioned to repair the clock…

This is the bare skeleton of Alex Benzie’s superb novel, but more detail would be pointless since the plot, although much more than adequate, is not the chief pleasure in this book. Reading this is to enter another world, to feel the slow rhythms of life in rural Scotland at the turn of the century; above all, it is to meet a series of living, breathing characters, skillfully drawn. Each example of animosity and hypocrisy stirred by Watchie’s obsession with the clock is limned with such an adept hand that it is difficult to believe this is only Benzie’s first novel.

It is a novel with a perfect sense of place and time, a novel with a distinctive texture appropriate to it setting; I found it impossible to put the book down until I had finished it. Benzie, although a Glaswegian, makes deft use of the Aberdeenshire dialect of Scots, its rhythms playing a major part in enticing the reader into the story. What is possibly the most impressive feature of the novel is the extent to which Benzie already has his own voice.

This book is a very Scottish story, but that does not mean it would only speak to Scots: this is, simply, one of the best books I have ever read.