A Country of Eternal Light: news and reviews
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The Herald, August 19, 2023: Scots writer Paul Dalgarno on A Country of Eternal Light
In 2020, I read and loved the novel Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan. It made me laugh and cry with its take on love and friendship, life and death, which is to say: its universal themes.
But it’s also, to my mind, a prime example of what I think of as distinctly Scottish literature – the type that could theoretically be written elsewhere but tends not to be. There’s a kind of class consciousness and cultural awareness that ensures the big messages are delivered in down-to-earth, often pulse-quickening, prose that could be described in many ways, but never as pretentious.
The Courier, 5 August, 2023:Author Paul Dalgarno on his new novel A Country for Eternal Light
He left school at 14 with no qualification and no interest in reading but a love for music inspired Paul Dalgarno to go back to school to study English literature. Now the Aberdeen-born writer and journalist has published his first novel in the UK.
A Country of Eternal Light dips in and out of various episodes in the life of narrator Margaret Bryce, “who has been having a hard time since dying in 2014.”
A Country of Eternal Light is Paul Dalgarno’s first novel to be published in the UK. Paul is now based in Australia, having moved to Melbourne with his Australian wife (who was 36 weeks pregnant at the time!) and one-year-old in 2010.
Press & Journal, August 4, 2023: Paul Dalgarno: Author’s return to Aberdeen with a new novel and shock at how much the city has changed
Paul Dalgarno was always expected to conform to a working-class normality when he was growing up in Heathryfold in Aberdeen.
It was drummed home to the youngster that there were certain books he couldn’t or shouldn’t read and arcane ideas he probably shouldn’t engage with, along with the message: concentrate on learning a trade and forget about going to university.
The Herald, 3 August 2023: A Country Of Eternal Light, by Paul Dalgarno. Review
Death is not the end. In this story, it’s just the beginning. Margaret Bryce, born 1950, dies of cancer in 2014. But instead of oblivion she finds her disembodied consciousness darting back and forth in time to observe episodes from her life, and even events that occurred after her death.
Margaret makes a wry and articulate narrator, a tenacious woman who loved her life but faced its end with resigned composure.
With an ending that forces you to reassess everything that’s come before, A Country of Eternal Light is a beautifully poignant record of a life that brought great sorrow but, nonetheless, was one well-lived.
Aurealis, July 2023: A Country of Eternal Light review
The tenderness with which Dalgarno covers everyday living and the levity he imbues in acts as grave as a cremation unite to make A Country of Eternal Light both uplifting and maudlin – an intimate third eye to an afterworld you want to visit.
Tender in its loves and aggressions, cruel in the darlings it chooses, this highly-accomplished novel in its randomised unchronology is a textured Picasso. Blink, and you will never miss it – right there, pencilled yet the most picturesque, never at the edge, finest in your sights.
Dalgarno is easily your favourite author – you just don’t know it yet.
The Conversation, 14 February 2023: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again’ – in A Country of Eternal Light, Paul Dalgarno explores a life fragmented by grief
A Country of Eternal Light is a journey like no other. The lightness of the prose and Margaret’s adventurous spirit hide a devastating burden, one that Dalgarno suggests can be overcome through attention to the ephemeral. We need to look into the gaps, look beneath the story, to find its hidden truths. The beauty of the novel is that it celebrates Margaret’s life, her ability to love and laugh and forgive and rage, while also acting as witness to her great grief. It is not only a meditation on the sorrows that rip a family apart, but a celebration of the love that threads it back together.
Sydney Morning Herald, February 10, 2023: A visit to eternity with a voice that’s playful and poignant
At first the light in Paul Dalgarno’s much-hyped second novel is a shimmering rectangle seen from under bathwater. Our mysterious speaker has no mouth, no back, no body. Light might be the just-out-of-reach land of the living, in this case, a nebulous string of events Margaret Bryce has remembered from her past, or observed in a future she will never have the chance to physically inhabit.
ArtsHub, 31 January 2023: Book review: A Country of Eternal Light, Paul Dalgarno
A Country of Eternal Light overflows with beauty and pain, twin concepts with emotional tendrils that are irrevocably intertwined. A subtle sense of foreboding permeates this stunning narrative about the ephemeral nature of human life, culminating in a conclusion capable of cracking a reader in two. As funny as it is sad, this book will resonate with humans – dead or alive – and beings whose awareness prevents them from vanishing wholly into the void.
Australian Book Review, March 2023: Human constellations
… the success of a first-person narration comes down to character, and Margaret’s company is a pleasure. Disarmingly direct in a late-life (well, after-life), no-fucks-left way, she’s honest with the reader, even when she’s not being honest with herself. It is always good to meet an older woman in fiction who remains complex and human and flawed, never a victim of her life and never a villain. She is fully embodied to such an extent that she sometimes forgets she doesn’t have a body at all.