The Wishdoctor's Song

The Wishdoctor’s Song, set during the spring of a year early in the 1970s, marvellously evokes an era when the spirit of the ’sixties was still very much alive. The setting is Scotland but culturally it might have been anywhere in the West, for this was the time of long flowery dresses, greatcoats, Che Guevara posters on students’ walls, International Times and Oz, ‘pot smoking’ and cushions on the floor. Steele has a sharp eye for the details of the period, both large and small, from ‘the Alan Watts industry’ and a young man wearing a bell-sleeved chemise in gold-hemmed cream cheesecloth to an HMV Stereomaster. Ronald Binns London, Spring 2008