Muckle Flugga
Michael Pedersen
Book of the Month: May 2025
Reviewed by Frances Cannon
Michael Pedersen’s new novel, Muckle Flugga, has the air of a modern fairy tale: a whimsical nod to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and a more gender-exploratory and queer cousin to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. The book brings readers to the penultimate island in northern Scotland, Muckle Flugga. Looking further north, only the uninhabitable Out Stack stands before the great oceanic expanse—according to the local legend described in this book, these islands were formed by stones that two giants tossed at each other while fighting for the love of a mermaid.
Muckle Flugga is home to a lighthouse keeper known only as The Father, and his nineteen-year-old son, Ouse. The Father is tough, damaged, and mourning his wife; Ouse is peculiar, quiet, talented in culinary and fiber arts. Ouse only has a few friends, including a library of literary ghosts, most prominent among them in Ouse’s imagination being Robert Louis Stevenson. The absence of The Mother hangs heavy over these isolated characters, and only a handful of other humans step foot on the island throughout the course of the book: Figgie, a woman who delivers groceries and mail each week, and a boarder named Firth from Edinburgh who rents a bothy in the shadow of the lighthouse. The tension of this city-dweller and the island’s main residents provides the central conflict and intrigue—Firth’s presence disrupts the careful balance of The Father’s alternating rage and benevolence towards his son, and Ouse is drawn out of his solitary reveries towards Firth’s charisma like a shy moth to a flame.
The pretence for Firth’s trip to Muckle Flugga is to observe birdlife on the island, but his unspoken motivation is to specifically paint a Northern gannet to honour his grandfather’s memory as his final creative pursuit before taking his life. (Content warning: this book explores the murky depths of depression and suicidal ideation, but the book is also ripe with delight, humor and magic.) Ouse reminds Firth why life’s worth living; he gives Firth a tour of the island and its nonhuman inhabitants: seals, otters, puffins, a whooper swan—wildlife proliferates, as does the whisky and cullen skink. Ouse takes Firth on several adventures, including to an ephemeral sandbar known as a tombolo, then to Out Stack to meet Nile the pet ostrich, and finally a trip to the mainland to attend an artist market and a raucous ceilidh.
Pedersen is a highly celebrated poet, currently serving as Edinburgh’s Makar and as the Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. It’s delightful to track the poetic impulses and techniques in his fiction—the book is lyrical and rich with metaphor. Themes from Pedersen’s previous non-fiction prose publication, Boy Friends, resurface in Muckle Flugga, specifically the complicated nature of male friendship, communication and affection. The Father struggles to express his emotions; as a result he sucks whisky continuously like a bairn to a bottle and erupts in yelling rampages towards anyone who contradicts him, including his own son, and especially the pompous visitor from Auld Reekie. The relationship between Firth and Ouse blooms in a nuanced, complex manner—they deeply admire one another, and they share a mutual crush, the nature of which is platonic with the potential for romance, yet beyond the scope of the book’s plot.
The poetic style of the book is simultaneously its most compelling quality as well as an occasional hindrance to clarity—often, the dialogue feels artificial and overwrought. Some passages are oversaturated with metaphor and verge into saccharine territory: “daily dawns deliver their squashed-strawberry morning sun and purple gloamings end each day. The birdlife outdoes itself in both song-singing and feather-fluttering.” Similarly, Pedersen’s extraordinary vocabulary impressed me but also slowed me down—I kept a running list of unfamiliar words that I was happy to research but which served as a distraction from the story, such as “tintinnabulation,” “gallimaufry,” and “carnaptious”—depending on your taste for word play, this verbosity will either be a treat or a bother.
Perhaps this is a Brechtian technique, calling attention to the craft to remind the reader that this is a work of literary fiction, and not a memoir or journalistic essay, or to keep us on edge and maintain an intentional distance between the reader and the protagonist—he is, after all, a very unreliable and complex narrator. Yet the lyricism is also addictive and captivating, and I underlined countless sentences to admire and delight in, particularly the passages in which uncanny imagery is described in more simple language, such as “Ouse on all fours gazing at a single raindrop hanging off a gorse bush,” or “the frost can be skin-needling and the haar comes in like wet ghosts.” The setting, characters, and plot are solid and golden. Pedersen seems to have crafted a new flavor of magical realism, where the story is nearly feasible and loosely based on historical facts, but also sings with absurdist visions, such as an ostrich that Ouse keeps as a pet in a secret cave on Out Stack.
Muckle Flugga is a fresh and thrilling book with echoes of ancient myths and sea shanties. The pages pulse with the flora and fauna of northern Scotland, the aurora’s sheen, and the glimmer of Edinburgh’s city lights. This book is a welcome addition to an already impressive and growing collection of multi-genre books by Pedersen. I will be recommending this broadly, and hope to soon visit the far northern rocky shores of Scotland’s own treasure island.
Muckle Flugga is published by Faber & Faber
Frances Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist. She is the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College and is an editorial reader for the Kenyon Review. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont.