I was interested to read Mr. Mac and me as I knew very little about Charles Renee Macintosh, other than the basics, that he was a Scottish architect famous for the Glasgow School or Art building. This book therefore offered an ‘intimate’ look at a less well known part of his life and work. Although this was not without interest, ultimately I found the book to be disappointing.

The basic story centres on Thomas Maggs, the youngest child and only surviving son of the local publican. Born with a twisted foot, Thomas has always harboured a desire to become a sailor, but is kept firmly on dry land by his father, who often becomes abusive when drunk. However, a fishing village on the East coast of Suffolk offers few opportunities for a teenage boy, and in between attending school, helping the local rope maker, and performing his ‘chores’ for his mother, Thomas strikes up an unexpected friendship with Mr. Macintosh. However, once war is declared in 1914, people soon become suspicious of the enigmatic artist.

From the begining, I thought that this novel showed promise, and the unexpected connection with the well known architect did provide some interest. However, by the end of the book, I sadly found the overall experience to be disappointing. Like the author’s other books, the entire story is narrated by a child, Thomas in this case. Given Thomas’ limited experience of life, and his unfulfilled longing to go to sea, that was going to be a challenge for any author. Add in the remote setting on the East coast of Suffolk (an area which remains poorly connected with the rest of Britain to this day), and it was going to be a challenge to provide the material for a full length novel.

While many of the characters in the book seem realistic, the cast having a significant role is reasonably small, and most of the focus is on Mr. Macintosh and his wife. The fact that the two central characters only make an entrance some way into the story, means that the book suffers from a slow start, which is exacerbated by the disjointed nature of the early narrative. While I can understand that the nature of the community means that a gentler pace is entirely realistic, it does make it difficult to remain engaged with the book, which could easily have been shorter with no real loss. Two events which had the potential to disturb the village, the shipwreck and the Zeppelin raid, seem to have had remarkably little impact. Indeed the salvage operations seem to have been remarkably efficient, perhaps too much to be entirely believeable!

One of the problems of using a child as the narrator, is that his knowledge of events was always going to lacking. In order to provide the material to tell the story, particularly of Mr. Macintosh, Thomas had to resort to steaming open the letters home to Glasgow. While a little minor espionage: checking on the beach, or listening at doors, is relatively harmless and no worse than the adults were doing, reading someone else’s letters seems to cross a line, making Thomas a less sympathetic chatacter.

In all fairness, Thomas was encouraged in the act of steaming the letters open by his sister, and this is really a symptom of the hightened level of suspicion, much of it officially sanctioned, during wartime. Yes, binoculars could be used to spy for the enemy, but they could also be used, more plausibly, for entirely innocent ends. In that sense, this book does show how easily war destroys communities, even before a single bullet is fired. Also of interest was the way in which Alard, the rope maker, set up the windmill to turn the wheel in the absence of Thomas. This is arguably symbolic of how mechanisation has reduced the need for labour, and changed the nature of work. Turning the wheel wasn’t much of a job, but it was still a source of income for Thomas, and arguably preferable to being sent up a chimney, or cleaning underneath the machines in a large factory.

In summary, while this was potentially an interesting book, I was disappointed by the slow plot. Some of the characters were good, although Thomas’ father ultimately proved to be the surprising one. The main difficulty was the lack of real action, giving little justification for some of the detail that was included. Similarly the ending was deeply unsatisfactory with an entire century passing in the space of a few pages, leaving me to wonder what really happened to Thomas, or his grieving mother. What the book does best, however, is to raise awareness to the two interesting artists whose work was sadly underappreciated at the time.