Scotland Before the Bomb by M.J. Nicholls

Scotland Before the Bomb Reviews

• 
  MJ Nicholls

  TOOT TOOT, VAGABONDS. This novel is now available to order from platforms various. What are the critics saying, you wonder? Steven Moore said this:
  
  Unlike most dystopian novels, this one is hilarious. Devoting a chapter to each former Scottish county, each in a different format, Nicholls does what many sci-fi authors do, extrapolating from current issues and ideologies to set them in an alien new light. Nicholls takes all the current frustration, depression, anger, phoniness, intolerance, and political divisiveness of our era and transforms them into three dozen Monty Pythonesque skits. ... Scotland does indeed deserved bombing if readers there remain unaware they are harboring one of the funniest, most inventive writers living.
  
  Order at
  Indie Bound or
  Small Press Distribution or
  Amazon
  
  Contact me on GR for review copies.
  
  Pitch:
  
  If you can imagine a world where a country becomes so fragmented, becomes so tribally tetchy, so regionally rattled, so locally loco, that individual counties howl for independence like snarling hounds of self-determination, and those individual counties become individual countries—with their own laws and leaders and lunatic fringes—then you will probably find my latest novel imaginatively vacuous. If you cannot imagine such a world, my latest novel imagines a series of dystopian and utopian countries, formed in the froth of a frightening new dawn, and milks every concept thoroughly for every drop of nervous amusement. This novel is not a vision of The Shape of Things to Come. This novel is a vision of What I Really Hope Will Come, Because I Am Unhinged and Frankly I Prefer My Own Dystopian Mayhem to This One. Coming at your face in a few months.
• 
  David Katzman

  Joyous anarchy. Scotland Before the Bomb was a blast to read.
  
  See what I did there? Bomb. Blast. Get it? Tough crowd, I'll show myself out. Don't forget to tip your bookseller staff for the holidays--they are a long suffering lot what with ebooks and paper being anti-enviromental and no one reading anymore because of Netflix and etc. etc. But never mind all that I'm sure everything will work out what with the U.S. poised to re-elect a psychopath as President (as if we live in some kind of surreal mashup of Frank Miller's Elektra: Assassin in which a demon takes over the mind of a Presidential candidate who wins the election and 1984 in which half the country's minds are taken over by the fascistic Fox News and the other lying liars who lie). But nevermind the never minds, I'm reviewing this book Scotland Before the Bomb. The name is prophetic because we are all right now right before "The Bomb." Right before civilization falls. Right before global warming slams the lid down on us squirming frogs in a slow boiling pot.
  
  To offer up some reference points that almost no one will recognize, I would describe SBtB as being a bit like the transgressive Stewart Home with a splattering of Mark Leyner, a sprinkle of Flann O'Brien and a smidge of David Markson. It's experimental but accessible. It's weird but entertaining. It's ridiculous yet kept me interested. It's unafraid to show its insecurities, if you follow me. But not too closely please. Nicholls takes chances, and I appreciate his courage. There are no sensitive characters here struggling with their relationships. There are no relatable relatables. There is no unexpected redemption in the end. There are no characters to root for nor did Ellen DeGeneres leave this book as a gift under your seat. She's too busy partying with that guy who started the Iraq War based on lies, you know the (weapons of) mass (destruction that don't exist) murderer guy? The prequel to Trump the Movie that we let go about his business afterwards like there was nothing to see here, move along?
  
  Anywho.
  
  If you enjoy word-play and absurd humor and violent illogic then this book might be for you. Nicholls probably didn't write it for you though. I think he wrote it for himself, which is the kind of book I love the most. Iconoclastic. Original. Fierce. Uncompromising. [Insert other words here that sound dramatic. Also, play dramatic music here. Dance a little perhaps. Eat something, you look hungry, don't you like my soup?]
  
  In conclusion: the end.
• 
  Manny

  "The Straight Review" [Appenzell Innerhouden]
  
  My name is Karl-Bruno Röstigraben. Manny Rayner has asked me to review this book. I would not normally accept such a request, particularly when it comes from a Genevan, but Herr Rayner is very persuasive and I have moreover been foolish enough to allow him to do me a few small favours in the past. I have read the book and will give my considered opinion. Then I trust my obligation to Herr Rayner will be at an end. I will now proceed.
  
  The cover of the book says that it is "funny". This is not true. The author imagines that Scotland, a small country with a few million inhabitants, fragments into a large number of independent countries, each with their own laws. He presents this as an example of nationalism run wild and invites us to laugh at his tiny democracies. It is only too obvious which real European country the author has in mind. The Swiss Federation, as everyone knows, is divided into 26 sovereign cantons, each with its own laws. The canton of which I am proud to be a citizen, Appenzell Innerhouden, has a population of 16,145. Evidently Herr Nicholls thinks this is very "funny".
  
  I do not enjoy being mocked by Herr Nicholls and his thinly disguised satire. Our country's history and the many setbacks we have suffered should not cause any true lover of freedom to laugh, but rather to shed tears over our fate. Yes, Appenzell was only an "associate member" of the Federation until 1513. Yes, our already small canton was divided in two during the course of the Reformation. Yes, under the Napoleonic Occupation of 1798 to 1803 we were made part of the new canton of Säntis. But we held firm to our beliefs and we endured. All, I am sure, extremely "funny".
  
  Even the final humiliation, in 1991, of being forced by our more powerful neighbors to introduce female suffrage, has not broken our spirit. Our proud and beautiful women do not wish to vote. We chivalrously defended their preferences at the ballot box until our fragile democracy was crushed beneath the iron-shod mountain boot of Bern. But we will rise again and recover what is rightfully ours. And meanwhile, we take quiet pride in creating one of Europe's greatest culinary delights, renowned among gastronomes from Lisbon to Moscow. I am particularly hurt by Herr Nicholls's insensitivity when I recall how many times I have told my country's tale to an English diplomat or military attaché, always to be met with moving words of sympathy:
  
  "I say old chap. Hard cheese, what?"
  
  
  
  Herr Nicholls, I will not ask for an apology. I understand that such a concept is foreign to your mentality. I ask you merely to search your heart and consider whether your cruel Appenzellinnerhoudenphobic parody is quite as "funny" as you first imagined it was. Thank you.
• 
  Lee Klein

  The macro structural imagination of Calvino (Invisible Cities), the micro sentence level good-natured attentive playfulness of Perec, and the committed meta-meta-metafictional hall of mirrorship of at this point none other than the author himself. It's the rational exaggerated conclusion of Brexit, self-determination for all, at first for each area of Scotland but ultimately in a way for every citizen, especially someone who is and is not (but probably mostly sort of is) the author when admitting worst yet truest and therefore best and often most delicious/lolicious thoughts about his writing and the so-called writing world in general. Worth it for that end alone, the most seemingly stripped down, transparent, personal writing I've seen from the author so far, albeit still nevertheless wrapped in protective layers of metafictional metaphysicality, nods to Markson and Vilas-Matas, and jammed at the end of a charmingly structured story collection of a novel. Through it all, no matter how oblique each region's report, compiled by an M.J. Nicholls of New Jersey well in the future after the end of Scotland (nuked by low country over petty matter), there's a sense of poignancy, of doom impending, of all-out death that makes the concatenated absurdities and sillinesses seem more meaningful than meaningless. Similarly, the ending projects unexpected yet believable pathos about the author's current (dis)spirit regarding the disparity between what's required to conceive, compose, and complete comedic novels like this, with every sentence maximized for sound/vision and joy/delight, with deeply embedded jokes about The Fall, and the reception all this work receives from readers worldwide. It's a crackup novel that puts its world back together again one unexpected yet always attentive phrase at a time, a lovable book by an author who loves books -- warm gooey feelings in bound print form available for all who crack it open.
• 
  Manny

  
  
  
  An extract from Scotland Before the Bomb, in LARA form, read by the author himself!
• 
  Arthur Graham

  "It isn’t that I loathe all writers [I do], or that I despise their success [I do], or that I am repulsed by the literary marketplace [I am], or that I hate what literature has become [I have], or that I am sickened by the dwindling numbers of readers [I am], or that I crave more success and attention [I do], it is more that everyone else in the universe except me is a fucking idiot [no it isn’t]."
• 
  notgettingenough

  I've read this in an unconventional way and I haven't finished it, but I've read a substantial portion. I began with a couple of the episodes that were on themes I warm to.
  
  The first, a diatribe on the Fringe Festivalisation of Edinburgh. As a resident of Adelaide, at the other end of the world, which vies each year to be bigger than Edinburgh, I entirely sympathise. These festivals suck. They suck the life out of theatre for the rest of the year. They suck the life out of originality and complexity. As Fringe Festivals around the world become more and more about extracting money 'for the economy' from back packers, many of whom have no English, linguistic complexity is an absolute no-no. Preferably one can dispense with language altogether. Physical 'theatre' take a bow.
  
  The next one I turned to was about Amazon. Our future Amazon-driven world. I've listed this book under comedy, but the laughs are often bitter.
  
  Having a couple under my belt that I immediately took to, I started dipping into others. This is a strange, compelling book, probably because the author doesn't give a flying f*ck about the reader. He is doing what he wants. As Odetta (among others) had it:
  
  rest here:
  https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
• 
  Jeff

  Wow, this book man….
  
  If you aren't familiar with M.J. Nicholls, familiarize yourself. He's one of the most intelligent satirists working today. Every book is an exquisitely constructed literary prank.
  
  Post-Brexit Scotland finally wins its independence. Then Dundee declares its independence from the rest of Scotland, and then other cities follow suit, until Scotland becomes a mini-continent of its own--and then it’s eventually nuked by Luxembourg. Soul-crushing hilarity ensues, and ensues, and ensues, and that’s the joy that is this novel--M.J. Nicholls takes an absurd situation and then escalates the absurdity with each passing sentence until you’re wondering how he was able to sustain the comic energy as he takes us from life in one city to the next:
  
  The smog in Stirling is so stifling people begin to ration their words, and spoken language deteriorates into nothing.
  
  Argyll & Bute hires Scandinavian consultants to shadow each citizen in order to teach them how to be happier, more productive people.
  
  Edinburgh devolves into a giant art festival (imagine Patreon but as a giant organic, all-consuming blob) you can’t leave without paying the performers.
  
  And so on.
  
  When all the strands finally tie together in a brilliant way, you’re left marveling at the weight that would’ve crushed a less capable writer. I’ve never seen world-building done on such a microscopic level. I’d say Calvino is probably the most obvious analogue here (or Zinn/Terkel with a keen satirical bent), but Nicholls takes it even further, going from city to city and finding humor in the mundane minutiae most of us leave in discrete google docs we’ll never look at again.
  
• 
  Paul Dembina

  This is not a novel and not a collection of short stories, it's a sequence of short absurdist pieces each relating to a different part of a (highly) devolved version of Scotland in the near(ish) future
  There are hordes of small independent countries (some just individual cities) and Mr Nicholls takes an idea and runs with it. It's a little hit or miss but for me definitely mostly hits. Among my favourite sections are:
  Realm of Sapo - Where a (slightly) fictitious Internet shopping giant called Sapo enslaves it's workers and hassles consumers with drones
  Just A Lifetime - The residents of Braemar are subjected to a vicious form of Just A Minute where failing to get through the allotted time results in terrible punishments
  The Sport of Kickballs - Basically about the ridiculousness (probably not a real word, but am I bothered?) of a certain national sport
  
  I really like the longer final section Textual Dysfunction where the author has a good old rant at the world
• 
  Bill Hsu

  I'm rather enjoying the absurdist inventions here, though I'm sure I'm missing a lot of the Scottish references. Then on p.66, we get an overview of the films of Alex van Warmerdam, one of my favorite directors. Wow.
• 
  Zadignose

  I hesitated to write an insufficient review (I.e., I wasn't up to the task because there's so much I could say), and thus I wrote no review at all, but that's not fair. There are a thousand bright ideas, clever turns of phrase, and apt reflections on the ridiculous conceits of us humans. It is humorously hyperbolic. I'll omit some of the quotations that would make this a fuller review, and get straight to the praise: This was brilliant, funny, inventive, surprising, and well executed at every turn. I think I've read all of M.J.'s book-length works so far, and this was the best yet. Read it y'all!
• 
  Ian Wickstead

  3.5
• 
  Katey

  I was telling a friend about this book, and she told me a joke: "Two Tunnocks biscuits are having a chat in Glasgow Airport and one of them says to the other 'How long you been away fer?'"
  
  With my limited knowledge of what a Tunnocks biscuit is, I started thinking: Is it a controversial confection, like Hostess Sno-balls or Peeps? Is it now manufactured elsewhere? The simple dad joke punchline completely went over my head at first.
  
  That was a bit like how I felt whilst reading this book. With knowing so little about Scotland, I thought I was missing out on some very funny in-jokes. And maybe that was a mistake to focus so much on that, rather than the overall theme of the absurd conclusions of nationalism and tribalism. So I can't give a rating to this having not finished it, but this review serves as the reason why I did not finish it.
  
  
• 
  Andrew Sare

  "Why cant a writer's nervous breakdown make for a fun filled literary form?"- M.J. Nicholls
  
  Reminiscent of Calvino's Invisible Cities - here, the future states that make up what was previously Scotland are described in much absurdity and diversity of form.
  
  The Chapter "Glasgow and & Renfrew" seems to have started as a stream of consciousness about writing (or maybe a mock stream of consciousness. Mark keeps us guessing), and would make a fantastic piece of reading for a first year writing student - or maybe better yet, given to a high school student to open their eyes to literature, and how weird the imagination can go.
  
  
• 
  Gerchia

  3 Stars.
  
  Is this book supposed to be a metaphor for something? Because Wtf is this book? And Wtf did I read The sheer ridiculous sequence of events that takes place is mind boggling makes it hella funny. And it's filled with a real-world logic we're experiencing which makes it unsettling. So??? It's like seventies baby got high on shrooms cooked up the plot. I'm confused. And I can't even.
  
  I almost read all the words in this book. I just couldn't continue with the last chapter. I might just finish it when I'm the mood for absurdity.
• 
  André Viegas

  Gave up midway into the book.
  
  A good and original story with a bad premises. The writing style is not compelling and does not keep you wishing for more.
  
  I think what turned me off completely was the silly, childish, not-so-funny overall satire. It's just too over the top and at times felt like a child writing the book.
  
  What a disappointment.
• 
  Kathleen Nicholls

  A unique, beautifully and skilfully written book full of humour, absurdity and brilliance! I'd say im biased as the author is my incredible brother but in reality I'm seething with deep seated rage at his having taken all the talent-genes. Read this, and everything else he's written!