Duck Feet by Ely Percy
The Great Scottish teenager. We’ve all encountered one, right? Indeed, I suspect some of you reading this post might spend many a wearisome day bartering with them. Of course, they’re not all testing and exasperating. Not all of the time, at any rate.
Anyway, in real life we teachers are not meant to have favourites. But that shouldn’t stop us from favouring/rank ordering the literary teenagers we’ve encountered along the way. So, my question to you is this: who is your favourite Scottish literary teenager of all time? Which author has managed to pin down on the page Scottish teenage experiences?
Scottish Literature is replete with brilliant versions of the teenager. We could kick off our “Favourites” list with those intrepid heroes of Stevenson’s adventure novels: Jim Hawkins and Davie Balfour. Then there is Sunset Song’s Chris Guthrie (all two of her). And what about Iain Banks’ psychopathic 16-year-old protagonist, Francis Cauldhame, busy attending to his Wasp Factory on a remote Scottish island?
The list could go on and on: Alan Warner’s 1998 novel, The Sporanos, gifts us the majestically Rabelaisian squad of working-class teenage school girls, let loose for the night in the big city; in Alan Bissett’s Boyracers (2001) we tear through the streets of Falkirk (in a car called Belinda) with the young, naïve (but eternally hopeful) teenage protagonist, Alvin; Anne Donovan’s writing is a landscape populated by Glaswegian teenagers, with Emily Bronte-obsessive Fiona O’Connell (and her love interests Jas and Amrik) in Being Emily (2008) perhaps the most engaging of them. An honourable mention goes to the eponymous protagonist of Mick Kitson’s Sal (2018) – a 13-year-old on the run with her sister after murdering the man who has sexually abused her. If we want to go ultra-contemporary in our list, we can now include Shuggie (he of Booker Prize fame) or Andrew O’Hagan’s embodiment of rebel spirit, Tully Dawson, in Mayflies (2020).
My absolute favourites (if anyone is interested) are protagonists from two novels that almost bookend the last ten remarkable years in Scottish writing: that wondrous creation, Anais, from Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012) and the swaggering Azzy Williams, from Graeme Armstrong’s debut novel, The Young Team (2020). I will hear nothing against either novel – it is the literary hill I will die on.
Excitingly, there is a new Scottish teenager on the scene. To the pantheon of compelling literary characters outlined above comes Ely Percy with their protagonist Kirsty Campbell. Campbell is the heroine of Duck Feet, the fairly brilliant second novel from Percy (released February 2021). In this story, the reader is taken on a pilgrimage to mid-naughties Renfrew, where we follow Kirsty and her ensemble of pals as they try (and sometimes fail) to navigate the perilous terrain of Secondary school. You remember how it goes, don’t you?
At over 400 pages and containing 70 chapters, this will seem (at first glance) a long novel. But reading it doesn’t feel a laborious process. In fact, one of the best features of this novel is its structure. The story is episodic, with each chapter containing a stand-alone vignette. Each vignette combines to tell the complex coming-of-age story of the novel’s central character. This structure lends itself to studying parts of the novel (rather than as a whole) and would be a perfect text to use with junior classes to introduce concepts like commonality (crucial in the Set Text paper at Nat 5 and Higher).
The cover blurb describes Duck Feet as a ‘celebration of working-class life and youth […] that uses humour to tackle hard-hitting subjects like drugs, bulling, sexuality and teenage pregnancy’. But maybe this blurb doesn’t do the book justice? The story and characters pulsate with energy and spirit – just as IRL teenagers do. In fact, reading the novel felt a lot like being a teacher earwigging on the weekend gossip in Regi. Perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay Duck Feet’s author, Ely Percy, is that they have managed to perfectly render my own secondary school experience over the course of 400-odd pages. By the novel’s end I felt that I had been visited by the three ghosts of Teenage Years Misspent: Angst, Aimlessness, and Mortification. Despite the study of grief that takes up most of the novel’s final chapters, the book ends on a fairly optimistic note as the protagonist of this bildungsroman gets set to enter the adult world.
This would be a great acquisition for the school book cupboard.
If you want to teach Duck Feet to a BGE class…
Pitch it at Levels Three and Four. Pupils could study the conventions of bildungsroman (as used by Percy) before applying the genre conventions to write their own version of a coming-of-age short story.
If you are looking for an engaging read for a National 4 class…
Study this as a class novel or read extracts from Duck Feet alongside extracts from other texts listed in this blog. Pupils might do an AVU-style comparison of representations of teenagers in two books.
If you want to do something a bit different…
Use chapters of this novel to think about conventions of situational comedy. Pupils might consider characterisation (main characters, supporting cast and transient characters), or focus on locations – particularly the idea of characters being trapped (as they are for six years by Secondary school) in one place. Other aspects of the Duck Feet that could be considered through the prism of the sit-com are: class values, humour and dialogue.