Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger, and Toddler on the Run

by Shena Mackay

Two novellas in which youth kicks against a besieging authority. Abigail pines for her lover during school assemblies, but romance is snatched from her when he crashes the car stolen for their joy ride. The author also wrote Redhill Rococo, Dundin and The Orchard on Fire.

Genres: Fiction

105 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 1964

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

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

These two pleasantly bizarre novellas by the 17-year-old prodigy Mackay really hit the spot. In the first, what begins as a series of seemingly benign and unconnected encounters suddenly shifts into an absurdist romp as a teenage couple and their disaffected peers drift through London, heading toward certain disaster. Along the way Mackay gleefully maligns the Catholic convent system. It reads like a demented YA novel, the likes of which would never emerge from the slush pile at HarperCollins. The second is somewhat more straightforward plot-wise in its tragic tale of a misunderstood dwarf named Morris standing on the wrong side of the law. Twining two story threads together with Morris as the common denominator, Mackay slowly reveals Morris to be a much more complex man than the sinister one-dimensional thug that law enforcement and the media would have you believe him to be. Quirky in its humor with a steady undercurrent of pathos, this novella presents a view of the world where those on society's fringes are more kind and understanding than their more staid bourgeoisie counterparts, whose rigidity can lead them to rationalize the most inhuman of actions.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are quite different from the later short story collection I'd read. I especially enjoyed Eugene Schlumburger's sparse, clean prose, the almost aphoristic chapters, and the unrelentingly grey goings-on.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

These two novellas were written when Shena Mackay was just seventeen, and were originally published in 1964. They share a sort of crazy energy, spiralling off in unexpected and often unexplained directions, and stake an early claim on the territory that Mackay would later mine so successfully; the marginalised and misfits of Home Counties suburbia and forgotten corners of London. Of the two, Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger works best, maintaining an unceasing disjointed momentum and with vivid descriptions of the perils of a bitter bedsit winter in the days before ubiquitous central heating.
I found this, together with three other unread Shena Mackay novels and a collection of literary criticism by Clive James in the Oxfam bookshop in Headingley; what a wonderful bookshop - I could easily spend a fortune there!

[Rebecca]

Mackay wrote these two novellas when she was SEVENTEEN years old. They were originally published in 1964. I only managed a few pages of Dust, but got 40 pages into Toddler before giving up. It has an amusing premise – a dwarf participated in robbing a school’s swimming pool fund; a newspaper describes the accomplice as a three-year-old. He sets off for the Kent seaside with his girlfriend. It was all … okay! I’ve still only found one Mackay book I truly loved, The Orchard on Fire. Direct me to more like that.

[zunggg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Undoubtedly the best thing I’ve ever read that was written by a seventeen year-old. The deadpan black humour and subtle anarchy of these novellas reminded me of Stevie Smith… and their uncompromising morality of the young Muriel Spark. It doesn’t entirely hold together, but I don’t think it’s meant to. There are subplots that threaten to overrun the plot and abrupt changes of tone and pace on every other page. I liked Schlumburger, in which a schoolgirl and a no-good older chap embark on a doomed romantic escapade around London — which makes it sound dull, when it’s anything but — a tad more than Toddler, about a malfeasant midget and his normally-proportioned girlfriend trying pathetically to abscond to the continent. But I’ll be reading more Mackay; this is seven shades of bonkers.

[Chris Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange and disjointed as they are, both novellas hold a weird and almost troubling effect that’s difficult to shift. I certainly enjoyed these more than Mackay’s more conventional Orchard on Fire. There’s a theme of women betrayed or let down by men, although even this is blurred - Eugene and Morris, both ultimately doomed heroes, are doomed because of a level of immaturity, the black joke in Toddler being that everyone assumes he’s about three but is far older. There’s a sort of black humour about the role of women in society here, but it is slightly squandered by the way Mackay sometimes feels like she is creating subplots out of discarded short story ideas. There’s an abundance of ideas but an occasional sense of someone who doesn’t always know how to fully develop them. Very good though

[Mind the Book · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kräver nog en ung, anglofil läsare och originalspråk för full läseffekt. Den här låg utgallrad på Donnerska Huset i Klintehamn och självklart fick den följa med mig hem i cykelkorgen.

Läsvärd inte minst för det fina förordet av Andres Lokko. Skrivet 2001, så texten doftar ännu av The Smiths och Morrissey, men de här raderna är också talande för romanen: "Karaktärerna är få. Miljöerna ofta lika karga och suddiga i bakgrunden som på Ingmar Bergmans Fårö."

[Alexandra Daw · Rating 3 out of 5]

hmmmm....weird....not really my cup of tea....I feel like I'm in a bad dream.

[Kathryn Castles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really exciting writing and cool ideas in here, though they feel more like experiments than fully fleshed stories.

"They went into a small cafe which was empty except for the Italian proprietor, who was reading a comic. They slid into a yellow plastic seat. There were red and green plastic tomatoes containing tomato sauce and pink salt and pepper flowers on the yellow speckled tables. 'Two cappucinis' said Charley, and Eugene hated him. The walls were decorated with archaic 7-Up advertisements. The juke box was dead and it was quiet until the waiter switched on 'Five to ten, a story, a hymn and a prayer'."

"He picked up a copy of Woman and started to read. There are practically only two stories which appear in various disguised in women's magazines: one is about a country girl who goes to Chelsea and meets a gay artistic bachelor, an interior decorator - they found they shared a passion for Strauss waltzes and Debussy nocturnes - but after a few parties gets jilted and decided she doesn't want to be a sophisticate any more and marries the boy from back home whom she jilted to come to London and sees from the window of the boutique where she works. The other story is often called 'And Baby Makes Three' and sometimes 'Welcome Stranger'. The young married couple, aged 24 upwards, don't want this baby - their parents told them they were too young to marry and they're beginning to think they may have been right. But when it's born the father sees it's got fingernails and everything's alright."

"'That's my girlfriend', presenting a photograph of a limp girl with scrambled egg hair, flabby shorts and a sun top. 'She's nice, isn't she', bleated Rosemarie. 'It was taken last year at Butlin's, Skegness.'"