SOURCE: “A Talent to Perform,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1987, pp. 572-73.

In the following assessment of Andro Linklater's biography of Mackenzie, Mangan surveys Mackenzie's life and literary output.

During the First World War, when Compton Mackenzie's reputation as a serious novelist was at its height, very few of his admirers would have believed that his posthumous fame would rest largely on a pot-boiler written in his sixties. Whisky Galore (1947) and other Highland farces have now effectively eclipsed the greater part of his gargantuan output, both serious and comic; but it may well be their continuing popularity that has ensured the renewed editions of his sombre early Sinister Street (1914). It was that immense Bildungsroman that inspired Henry James to welcome him as “by far the greatest talent of the new generation”, and later exerted an acknowledged influence on the young Scott Fitzgerald.

From those high judgment-seats, the young...