Myths #06: Dream Angus

- Blurb -

Dream Angus is based on the myth of the Celtic god Angus who carries dreams to people while they sleep. If he's in the right mood, divine Angus might grant you sight of your true love in a dream; you might even fall in love with him-but he'll never love you back. He's too busy making mischief-stealing the palace of the gods from his father, turning his enemies into pigs, etc.-until he is trapped by his own romantic games and falls for an unattainable woman, doomed to seek her forever. There are two strands of narrative in this wonderful story-one telling the story of Angus himself, his father Dagda and his mother Boann, and his great love for the swan maiden Caer. McCall Smith tells this tale effortlessly, as though the shapechanger Dagda, who is all things beautiful and terrible, had himself dictated it to the author. Woven into Angus's story, are five contemporary fables, exquisite short stories in which dreams play a pivotal narrative role. Angus is present in all of these stories, not just because we are given to understand that somehow he has visited these modern dreamers, but because the dreams themselves shape what happens to the characters. We learn what happens for instance to the young wife on her honeymoon, wondering if she can ask her new husband what his deepest secret is. And what happens to Jamie whose brother Davey is being sent away to Canada, what happens to Ginger with red hair when her husband takes her to live in Bermuda. Or to the keeper whose job it is to look after Pig Twenty at a research institute. And in the final story it is a dream which provides the climax to the harrowing story of a young woman betrayed by her husband. This last story brilliantly dramatises the way that Angus not only carries dreams in his bag as he strides across the heather, but is finally too the bearer of love.