In this debut novel, Andrew Ervin works familiar ground: the burnt-out protagonist who gives up a comfortable but spiritually toxic life in order to refresh his soul and seek redemption in a far-off — or, in current parlance, “off the grid” — place, which according to the formula will inevitably be populated by locals for whom the appropriate collective noun is “menagerie.” One approaches the scenario braced for cliché. But Ervin pulls it off, and then some. “Burning Down George Orwell’s House” is a sweet book full of delights. Since many of its best passages are rhapsodies on single malt whiskies, one is tempted to call it a wee bonny dram of a tale.

The off-the-grid locale is the Isle of Jura in Scotland. The burnt-out case is 33-year-old Ray Welter, an advertising guy in Chicago sorely in need of a change of soul. His marriage is a wreck, his father has died grimly, and Ray is stricken with a bad case of agenbite of inwit, a.k.a. remorse, for having pulled off a hugely successful — and oh so devious — guerrilla ad campaign to persuade Americans to buy gas-gulping monster S.U.V.s. Get this man to Jura!

Why Jura? Well, it was there that the famous author of Ervin’s (somewhat overheated) title lived in the late 1940s, and there that he wrote his second masterpiece, “1984.” Ray regards it as the “greatest novel in the history of the English language.” His wife gave him a first edition as a wedding present. He believes — as many do today, and bore us by saying so — that Orwell foresaw everything, and then some: Big Brother government, the Internet, etc., etc. Ray is certain that Jura is far off the grid and that by renting Barnhill, Orwell’s old cottage, he’s traveling to the ground zero of the novel, going back in time to the place where the future was invented. It’s a clever and beguiling conceit.

The menagerie on this windswept isle will remind some readers of the cast of the 1983 movie “Local Hero” and others (those with longer memories) of Compton MacKenzie’s peaty 1947 novel “Whisky Galore.” For eccentrics, uch, ye cannae outdo the Scots.