Driscoll's Folly

About the Book

Driscoll remembers a time when he could fly. And he can remember why he stopped. His childhood seems to belong to someone else and he would like to get it back. His father is going mad. Driscoll knows he can cure him, but he has fallen in love and is distracted by some curious symptoms of his own. He’s losing control and knows it. His imagination is playing tricks on him. But there’s still a chance that things will work out. Something must have happened – But what?

Driscoll´s Folly is a novel, set in the West of Scotland, between the mid 1950s and the late 1970s. Part confession, part suicide note, it is a suburban psychological thriller that charts the developing madness of its central character. The facts of the case are simple. A young man kills his father. In a matter of months his physical and mental condition collapses. The crime is detected and he is confined in a psychiatric hospital. Driscoll´s Folly is a series of texts produced by the young man during the succeeding period of treatment. It is a desperate attempt to reconstruct his life-story in such a way that it does not lead to his father´s death and his own madness. But he fails. The fabrication ends by confirming the very events it set out to deny.

Cover image from Bernard Forest de Bélidor (Paris, 1782) Architectura Hydraulkica, courtesy of Glasgow University Library.

About the Author

Harvie Ferguson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and author of a number of well-known works on philosophical and psychological aspects of the development of modern society.