Scots on the page usually gets treated like seasoning. A wee shake of it to signal “authenticity,” a bit of phonetic sparkle to reassure middle-class readers they’re somewhere real, then back to safe Standard English before anyone gets uncomfortable. The industry loves the performance of place, hates the implications of language. Margaret McDonald’s Glasgow Boys walks straight into that cowardice and refuses to play along. The Scots isn’t garnish. It’s authority.
McDonald comes out of Glasgow, first-generation, with the kind of biography publishing likes to flatten into a “rising star” arc. But the point isn’t inspiration. The point is she writes like she knows what language does to a body. Glasgow Boys centres two teenage boys, Finlay and Banjo, shaped by the care system, class pressure, masculinity scripts, and the constant background hum of needing something you’re not allowed to ask for. This is where lesser books slap in dialect to make characters “gritty” and call it realism. McDonald does something sharper: she makes Scots the native operating system, not a costume.
Scots is treated as a cute accent until it starts behaving like a language—until it claims space, sets terms, and stops asking permission.
When Scots is used as decoration, it’s safely othered. You can point at it, smile, enjoy the texture, and remain in control. When Scots is used as power, it changes who gets to be legible. It shifts the centre. It makes the reader do work. And that’s what McDonald quietly forces: not a lecture, not a manifesto, just the steady refusal to translate her people back into a language that has historically been used to manage them.
The result is that voice becomes stakes, not style. In a care narrative, language isn’t just how you speak; it’s how you’re assessed. It’s how you’re believed. It’s how professionals file you away. In a masculinity narrative, language is also camouflage—how boys hide softness, how they posture, how they dare each other into silence. McDonald’s Scots carries tenderness without turning it into a Hallmark product. It carries rage without romanticising it. It carries humour without turning the characters into entertainment for outsiders.
And this is exactly why her approach matters right now, when Scottish writing gets packaged for export. There’s a lazy international appetite for “Glasgow grit” that reduces working-class life to swagger, violence, and the odd lyrical line about rain. Scots gets pulled into that package as a branding element: edgy but controlled, rough but lovable. McDonald refuses the branding. She doesn’t use Scots to make her characters look tough. She uses it to show how toughness is constructed—and what it costs.
Her book’s tenderness is page-turner tenderness: propulsive, intimate, readable. But it isn’t soothing. It doesn’t flatter the reader for “caring.” It keeps pointing at the systems that train young people to ration themselves—care placements, poverty logistics, institutional language that pretends to help while constantly evaluating, correcting, and downgrading. In that environment, a boy’s voice isn’t a quirk. It’s a battleground.
When a writer is allowed to keep their language intact, it stops being “local colour” and becomes what it always was: a claim to reality that threatens the people who profit from flattening it.
The quietness is the point. McDonald isn’t shouting Scots into the room like a party trick. She’s normalising it, letting it sit in the narrative as ordinary speech with ordinary complexity—capable of lyricism, cruelty, tenderness, contradiction. That’s the reinvention: Scots not as a nostalgic relic, not as a comic wink, not as a poverty badge, but as an instrument for interiority and control.
And if that makes some readers uneasy—good. Unease is honest. The genre, the market, the institutions around “good taste” have had decades of treating Scots as something to be edited down, cleaned up, politely contained. McDonald’s work is a reminder that containment is political. You can’t keep praising “voice” while demanding it arrives pre-diluted for your comfort. Let the language stand. Let it set the terms. Stop asking it to perform. Insist on its right to be unaccommodating.
