"The Disillusioned is a surprisingly compulsive read about what I call the Misfit Generation - the one beguiled at first by the challenge of rational economics and then bewildered by its effects. David Scott's odyssey is to find self-worth, to discover basic human values among the detritus of modern life. At the end you can't be sure he's made it. But his story matters and he tells it with the pace and directness of a pro."
Gordon McLauchlan, writer and book critic
Transcript: Wairarapa Times Age (NZ) September 2005
One Man's self-surgery
The Disillusioned
by D.W.Scott
Reviewed by Margaret Chistensen
An autobiography while not out of one's 20's. Surely only a Martin Amis would have the daring - yet David Scott's The Disillusioned digs deep into a life crammed with action, begun, consciously in the Thatcherite years as they impacted on his home community of South Shields.
This was the North East of TVs Auf Weidersehn Pet, where families limited themselves by accent, work and alcohol into a future which had no future. If you were out of work suddenly at 40, you lived the rest of your life on the dole. Shipbuilding was dead, mining almost so, heavy manufacturing machines worn out, the unions sick unto death.
Scott sets down with a caustic wit the virtues of the North East, its loyalties among his friends, and its deprivations. His most fervent attachment to a lost love, Kerry, killed in a motor accident, evokes his capacity for a depth of feeling and pain which obviously lies beneath the surface Don Juanism, the alcoholic immolation.
Scott leaves his story with an unanswered question as to where to next for himself and his young son. The Disillusioned could well be a study text for anyone close to the addiction and other problems of those whom Gordon McLauchlan calls the Misfit Generation. It is not for the easily shockable reader. Others will acknowledge it as a fine, honest piece of work.
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