There is, to my mind, no one who writes quite like Rory MacLean. If I were forced to reach for a comparison, I would pause over Bruce Chatwin as a possibility, but then probably stretch far, further back: to John Mandeville, to St Brendan and to Marco Polo. These men made their ‘wonder-voyages’ and returned bearing tales that were not to be submitted to the usual tests of verifiability and falsifiability, but in which the actual and the miraculous rubbed shoulders, and in which genres and forms promiscuously coupled and bred. They told piebald, pidgin, patchwork, mongrel stories, then: but books whose unreliability was not mere whimsy, but aspired to a different kind of truth-telling. They sought, in their inventiveness, to pattern reality into a greater clarity… I think of MacLean’s stories not as ‘tall’ but as ‘high’; a category difference. Tall stories are exaggerations, distortions. High stories take flight, gain fresh perspective, occupy a different atmosphere.