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Compton Mackenzie: A Life
The life of Compton Mackenzie, author of Sinister Street and Whisky Galore. He came from an acting family, became a best-selling writer, a master-spy in Greece, a Roman Catholic convert, a buyer of islands and a Scottish Nationalist. The author's father was a close friend of Mackenzie.
- GenresScotland
354 pages, Hardcover
First published October 27, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 8, 2023
A really wonderful biography that simultaneously demonstrates a strong critical grasp of Mackenzie's enormous output and helps to explain it. He presents Mackenzie as a sort of captivating universal survey-level genius who bounces from life to life doing things that are too interesting for him to keep doing whatever the other thing was—so he decides to become a novelist and before long Henry James is lauding Sinister Street, but then he goes to war and becomes a cross between a secret agent and a consul of these little islands in Greece and has so much fun he can't get himself interested in resuming his career as the great young hope of English literature, then he decides to buy his own island, then he decides he's a Scottish nationalist and gets pretty high up in the ranks, etc.
All the while everyone is charmed by him and he's getting into weird adventures like meeting the former Kaiser and talking gardening with him or whatever, but he never sticks in one place long enough to extract deep knowledge out of everything. Late in life he is stuck writing comic novels four at a time to pay the bills that come with buying an island and forgetting to pay your taxes, and after 16-20 false starts he becomes really good at that, too, so that insofar as he's remembered at all it's not for writing the great Edwardian novel but for his funny books about guys in kilts.
Also the rare biography where you won't want to skip the great-grandparents and grandparents, who are total psychos. Mackenzie, who could read at two and claimed to remember his entire life after eighteen months (and certainly demonstrated it across his fiction), descended from a line of actors and actresses and child prodigies with absolutely deranged ideas about each other, a kind of gnarled and backbiting Glass family. Never underestimate the weirdness and depravity of the Victorian artist.
All the while everyone is charmed by him and he's getting into weird adventures like meeting the former Kaiser and talking gardening with him or whatever, but he never sticks in one place long enough to extract deep knowledge out of everything. Late in life he is stuck writing comic novels four at a time to pay the bills that come with buying an island and forgetting to pay your taxes, and after 16-20 false starts he becomes really good at that, too, so that insofar as he's remembered at all it's not for writing the great Edwardian novel but for his funny books about guys in kilts.
Also the rare biography where you won't want to skip the great-grandparents and grandparents, who are total psychos. Mackenzie, who could read at two and claimed to remember his entire life after eighteen months (and certainly demonstrated it across his fiction), descended from a line of actors and actresses and child prodigies with absolutely deranged ideas about each other, a kind of gnarled and backbiting Glass family. Never underestimate the weirdness and depravity of the Victorian artist.
July 17, 2012
It was natural that Andro Linklater should write the biography of Compton Mackenzie. His father, Eric Linklater ("Magnus Merriman," "A Prince in the Heather" etc.,) was a well-known writer and friend of Mackenzie throughout much of his life. It was just a coincidence that Andro could and would write.
A complex man (whoever met a simple Scot?), Mackenzie was in his prime in the early part of this century and much of what he wrote all those years ago is slowly fading into the mists of time. Perhaps he is best remembered for "Whiskey Galore," a comedy about a boatload of Scotch washing up on the shore of an island in the Hebrides, and the fun which ensued. In a sense, it was his moment of glory (perhaps his "15 minutes"), since the 1948 film made from the book was popular for many years. Yet he wrote a formidable number of other good novels (sometimes set in Scotland itself, but not always) such as "Sinister Street," and numerous essays and the odd memoir. Like his books, Mackenzie was a colourful character and makes a good subject for biography, which Linklater has competently provided.
A complex man (whoever met a simple Scot?), Mackenzie was in his prime in the early part of this century and much of what he wrote all those years ago is slowly fading into the mists of time. Perhaps he is best remembered for "Whiskey Galore," a comedy about a boatload of Scotch washing up on the shore of an island in the Hebrides, and the fun which ensued. In a sense, it was his moment of glory (perhaps his "15 minutes"), since the 1948 film made from the book was popular for many years. Yet he wrote a formidable number of other good novels (sometimes set in Scotland itself, but not always) such as "Sinister Street," and numerous essays and the odd memoir. Like his books, Mackenzie was a colourful character and makes a good subject for biography, which Linklater has competently provided.
July 27, 2017
Lots of info about the author, but it really rambles.
May 21, 2021
Well researched, sympathetic, lively. I enjoy Compton Mackenzie's writing and I enjoyed this life, by the son of a good friend of Mackenzie's.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews