About the book
Dream Angus is one of the earliest of the Celtic deities, and one of the most beloved. Angus comes bounding over the heather with his bag of dreams to dispense to those who want them. He is lithe of foot and beautiful – as befits one who is also the Celtic Eros, the god of love, youth and beauty.
Angus is a playful trickster, given to frightening people and cattle. He will reveal to you in a dream your true love, if asked, and if in the mood. He is a romantic, and one of the main stories associated with him is his search for the young woman who had appeared to him in his dreams. Eventually he finds her, but she is under a spell which makes her assume the shape of a bird for a year. Angus changes himself into a swan and the two lovers fly off together.
In McCall Smith’s inimitable retelling of the myth, the setting is twentieth century Scotland. Angus is a psychotherapist who helps people understand their dreams, but there are limits to what he can reveal. Mesmerically weaving the modern day with the tales of the Celtic god, Alexander McCall Smith unites dream and reality, leaving us to wonder: what is life, but the pursuit of our dreams?
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About the author
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and of The Sunday Philosophy Club series. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and was a law professor at the University of Botswana and at Edinburgh University. He lives in Scotland. In his spare time he is a bassoonist in the RTO (Really Terrible Orchestra).
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Read an excerpt
Introduction
This story is a retelling of the myth of Angus, a popular and attractive figure of the Celtic mythology of Ireland and Scotland. Angus is a giver of dreams, an Eros, a figure of youth. He comes down to us from Irish mythology, but he is encountered, too, in Celtic Scotland. He is a benign figure — handsome and playful — who in modern times has inspired not only the poem of W.B. Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, but also the lilting Scottish lullaby, ‘Dream Angus’.
In this version of the story of Angus, although I have taken some liberties with the original, I have tried to maintain the central features of Angus’s life as these are revealed to us in the Irish mythological sources. These sources, though, do not provide much detail, and so I have imagined what his mother, Boann, might be like; I have interpreted the character of his father, the Dagda, in a particular way and have deprived him of the definite article that precedes his name; I have assumed that Bodb was rather overbearing. Purists may object to this, but myths live, and are there to be played with. At the same time, it is important to remind readers of the fact that if they want the medieval versions, unsullied by twenty-first-century interpolation, they still exist, and are accessible. We must bear in mind, however, that those earlier texts are themselves reworked versions of things passed from mouth to mouth, embroidered and mixed up in the process. Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze.
Celtic mythology is a rich and entrancing world, peopled by both mortals and gods. It embraces the notion of parallel universes, the real world and the otherworld. There are signs of the otherworld in the real world — mounds, hills and loughs — and the location of mythical places is frequently tied to real geographical features. It is no respecter of chronology, though, even if the later Irish heroic tales claim to have happened at a particular time in history. Angus belongs to the early body of stories — stories of a time beyond concrete memory.
In retelling the story of Angus, I have brought him into the modern world in a series of connected stories which for the most part take place in modern Scotland. The part played by Angus, or the Angus figure, in each of these, may be elusive, but such a figure is present in each of them. Unlike some mythical figures, Angus does no particular moral or didactic work: he is really about dreams and about love — two things that have always had their mysteries for people. Angus puts us in touch with our dreams — those entities which Auden described so beautifully in his Freud poem as the creatures of the night that are waiting for us, that need our recognition. But Angus does more than that: he represents youth and the intense, passionate love that we might experience when we are young but which we might still try to remember as age creeps up. Age and experience might make us sombre and cautious, but there is always an Angus within us — Angus the dreamer.
Alexander McCall Smith, 2006
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