Book review: Javascotia by Benjamin Obler

I have had more coffee today than I've had in a long time so I feel eminently placed to review this book, after all it says on the front "if you love coffee you’ll love Javascotia".

I’m usually more of a tea drinker, black tea, not too strong, I like to try different blends and flavours. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of these people who have a low tolerance for coffee nor do I have to stop drinking it at lunchtime it’s just a faff to make real coffee at home and I don’t hold with the current fashion for wandering around clutching a paper cup with a plastic drinking lip like a baby cup as Americans do. If I’m going to have a coffee I like to sit down, have a chat or read my book and savour my coffee.

This book is set in the early 1990’s before the invasion of American coffee chains, before the internet took off and before mobile phones. Melvin Podgorski is living back at home in American hicksville after a divorce, he has depression, no job and no idea what to do next so when he is hired by a marketing company to go to Glasgow and investigate the possibilities of starting a chain of American coffee houses he sees this as a new start. Mel isn't just a coffee drinker he is passionate about his coffee and sets about his task with vigour filling in his 27G forms with fulsome descriptions of the cafés and the terrible coffee he finds in Scotland before forwarding them to his co- worker, Klang, a conspiracy theorist based in London.

Almost as soon as Mel arrives in Glasgow he becomes involved in a demonstration between an eco-group and a construction company who wish to build a new road across some parkland which leads to him meeting the art student Nicole and her militant ex-boyfriend, Ruaridh. Not that Mel knows what an M77 might be, never mind being able to decipher comments such as "I should mind my books".

As the story moves on Mel’s back-story of his disastrous marriage to Margaret unfolds, and you realise this is not quite the funny tale of mis-understandings of a common language between people who speak the same but don’t mean the same.

The story doesn't end at the point you’d expect it to, as I thought it was drawing to the inevitable close I realised I had almost another third to go - this is not a complaint, the actual ending is bittersweet and satisfying.

The characters are well written, especially Margaret, you feel for Mel when he realises that he’s married the wrong person, Margaret is immature, has issues with her absent father leading to her attention seeking behaviour, she cannot understand why Mel might want to pursue his solitary photography hobby when they could cuddle up on the sofa and watch cartoons together. Her changing relationship with his parents is interesting, and as the ill-fated marriage struggles on and Mel feels that he has no-one he can talk to.

Ben Obler has attended Glasgow university so possibly has based some of Mel’s struggles with Glaswegian on his own experiences - it can’t be easy for someone from Chicago to get to grips with the Scottish accent.

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Published by Hamish Hamilton
ISBN 978-0-241-14430-5

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Reviewed by Dianne Blashill
dmblashill@hotmail.co.uk

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