A prodigious mosaic which tells a man's story in a very epic sense

“Alistair McHarg's extraordinary book held me captive until the very end. Although essentially a memoir, I wouldn't pigeonhole it as such. You see, Mr. McHarg is a true contrarian with a markedly subversive tendency of mind and thus his work combines polemic, satire, exploit, diablerie, and humour throughout. Ultimately though Invisible Driving is a unique and bawdy, playful, slangy, intense, and candid chef d'oeuvre circumscribing a man's plight and triumph over Manic Depression. And like all good explorations of the self it doesn't hold back a smidgen, diving into the ugly, the awkward, the tearfully funny, and the heartbreaking, headfirst.

One soon gets sucked into the frenzied quicksand of his prose. And let me add, quite willingly, McHarg conveys the inner workings of a manic mind with nonpareil wit and so convincingly that you're sure he must have written it in the midst of a manic stint.

Often surreal, more often absurd, and written with a recognizably dark sense of humour throughout, Invisible Driving is a hallucinatory experience, a sublime recreation of Mania portrayed with immense prowess through which it conveys the dizzying myriad twists of the author's life. The changes in tone are nothing short of masterful. McHarg takes hard swerves abruptly so you better be ready when he flies at you like a glaive without a handlebar. It is a challenge but one you wouldn't dream of giving up.

Invisible Driving charts one of the three of McHarg's major Manic episodes first-hand. You skid along, together, on very thin ice through a landscape of his debauched twilight, sometimes laughing, other times lachrymose, but all along you, as a reader, know that underneath the crazed bravado and the cocksure tongue-work there is a man who is about to crash and burn.

There is another dimension to Invisible Driving - one that details McHarg's life either side of the vertiginous peaks. It offers insight into his past and answers questions that prickle your mind.  Eventually you realize that McHarg is someone who's been lucky and unlucky, stable and unstable, blessed and cursed. Primarily eccentric, in both the figurative and the literal meanings of that word, a little odd, idiosyncratic -- more than a little, in fact -- but also someone who has spent much of his life on the periphery of everything that might be considered conventional and someone who tells it with panache.

Thus Invisible Driving is a prodigious mosaic of bewitchingly bent wordplay, outrageous witticisms, and acerbic turns of phrase that come together beautifully to tell a man's story in a very epic sense.”

Justina Jase (Amazon.uk)