Toy Fights

May 29, 2023
Poet and jazz guitarist Paterson (The Arctic) chronicles in this exuberant memoir his working-class childhood in Dundee, Scotland, up through his departure for London at the age of 20 in 1984. Socially awkward and intellectually curious, Paterson immersed himself in such unlikely pursuits as creating pornographic origami at age 10 and joining a Pentecostal sect as a teen before he settled on the guitar—which he’d played on and off his whole life—as his primary obsession. Elsewhere, Paterson describes his psychotic break after ingesting heroin-laced hashish as a teenager, which caused him to hear voices in his head and become convinced that his parents were poisoning him. Paterson’s musings are shot through with sharp wit, especially when he’s taking aim at hypocrites in the arts and in his life—at one point, he writes that narcissists “usually consist of a paper-thin, wildly overconfident act disguising a crust of fear, over a mantle of shame, wrapped round a core of nothing.” Most enchanting are Paterson’s musings on music, from hilarious reminiscences of the Dundee folk scene (“ome hippy dressed as a returning trawlerman in a sou’wester... sang forty verses about the 1894 Whelk Pickers’ Strike in Buckie”) to gorgeous homages to obscure performers: “The note starts off straight and pure, then suddenly yields to some hidden ache it finds in itself,” he writes about a performance by Norwegian singer Radka Toneff. The result is a raucously funny picaresque laced with hard-earned wisdom.