Gollancz, 2009. 296p

Lavinia is a historical novel set in mythical antiquity, Bronze Age Italy in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Le Guin has taken a (very) minor character from Virgil’s epic The Aeneid – in the poem Aeneas’s last wife Lavinia has no line of dialogue whatsoever – and given her voice. And a powerful and seemingly authentic voice too. The landscape, homes, religion, politicking, people and battles are all convincingly portrayed. When reading this you feel as if you are there, immersed in prehistory. Even the scenes in the place of oracles where Lavinia talks to the apparition she knows only as the poet – she could merely be dreaming of course – have the stamp of authority. At any rate Lavinia believes in him, and his revelations are borne out by events. There is, too, enough of a body count – foretold by the poet in a long, disturbing list – to satisfy the bloodthirsty.

For Lavinia starts a war. Not by allowing herself to be taken by men, she says (in a beautifully understated inference to the much more famous Helen) but instead by choosing one for herself. I quibble slightly at who actually chooses Aeneas for Lavinia; she is swayed not only by the lack of suitability of the other candidates for her hand but also by her conversations with the poet. Otherwise she is a strong decisive character, who stands up to both her father, the King Latinus, and mother, Amata, and later to Ascanius, Aeneas’s son by his previous marriage.

Given the book’s context the perennial follies of men are an unsurprising theme of Lavinia, the character and the novel.

Despite its setting the book was on the short list for the BSFA Award for best novel of 2009, which on the face of it is baffling, even if Le Guin is a stalwart of the genres of SF and fantasy. I suppose its proposers could argue that since in the book Lavinia speaks with the ghost of a poet not yet born in her time there is an element of fantasy present. (Le Guin uses the spelling Vergil. I know his Latin name was Vergilius but in my youth the poem was always known as Virgil’s Aeneid.) True too, the past is always a different country. Fictionally it takes as much imagination to invest it with verisimilitude as it does to describe an as yet unrealised (SF) future. Except – sometimes – you can research the past.

This is an admirably realised and executed novel, though, whichever genre you wish to pigeon-hole it with.

Or you could say, as I do, that it is simply an excellent novel, full stop.

Little, Brown, 2009. 404p

Despite being published without the M in the author’s name – except in the US – this Iain Banks novel features parallel worlds, and flitting between them, and has as a plot point the existence or not of alien intelligences somewhere out there. As such it can scarcely be described as mainstream. But then early Iain “no M” Banks offerings (Walking On Glass, The Bridge, Canal Dreams) were suffused with SFness and/or sensibility (The Wasp Factory.)

Transition does, though, signal its literariness from the outset – its strapline is “based on a false story” and the first words of its prologue are, “Apparently I am what is known as an unreliable narrator.” There is, too, a high degree of characterisation throughout even though, with the aid of a drug known as septus, most of its main characters can flit from one body to another. In typical Banksian fashion there is a shadowy organisation – here known as l’Expédience, or the Concern (which last is a pun) based on a world unusually known as Calbefraques rather than Earth – in charge of the use and distribution of septus and of recruitment to and training for the transition process.

I did notice that while at one point it is said that there has to be a recipient body for transitioning to take place – the one left behind has only rudimentary function as a husk – later transitions to uninhabited worlds do take place without added explanation.

The narrative is divided between various viewpoint personalities, Patient 8262, who is in hiding in a hospital in a country where the local language is not his own, The Transitionary, who may be an earlier incarnation of Patient 8262, Adrian, a former drug dealer turned hedge fund manager, Madame d’Ortolan, foremost member of the Concern’s ruling council, The Philosopher, a legal torturer, and occasional others. The Transitionary’s is a first person present tense narrative, others are past tense, sometimes first, sometimes third person. The most intriguing character is the rather prosaically named Mrs Mulverhill – who is not married, merely likes the name.

In the sort of inversion beloved of SF authors one of the parallel worlds has a set of Christian fanatics pitted against the state and indulging in suicide bombings and the like. The scenario gives Banks the opportunity to riff on how proportionate a response society ought to have to terrorism and on the (in)efficacy of torture. One of his characters also skewers “the invisible hand.”

Devotees of Iain M Banks will probably find this a treat. Followers of his M-less namesake ought also to find enough in it to satisfy them.

Black Ace, 1994, 143p.

Butlin had made a reputation as a poet but this was his first novel* and an unusual debut it was. Presented from the viewpoint of Morris Magellan, a married man with two children he refers to as “the accusations” it is an absorbing study of an alcoholic and his descent into self-disgrace.

What marks The Sound Of My Voice out as especially bold is the use of the second person to carry the narrative. Second person novels are rare; successful ones are rarer still. That Butlin carries the conceit off is a tribute to his writing skill. It helps that in its opening the novel concentrates on Magellan’s childhood where his remote father is presented as a major (negative) influence on his subsequent life.

Using the second person could have been an invitation to the reader to be complicit in Magellan’s woes but it is not merely a literary trick, the voice is there for a purpose – which I shall not spoil even though the introduction, by Randall Stevenson, does. (Or would have had I not taken the precaution of avoiding reading it till after I’d finished the novel.)

This is a short book but all the better for it.

* Published in 1987 by Canongate. This Black Ace edition is described as definitive; corrected and revised by the author.

8/7/10-11/7/10
Phoenix, 2007, 329p.

This is an odd artefact. It depicts an attempt to introduce salmon to rivers in the Yemeni Highlands via the largesse of a local sheikh and the expertise of a UK government agency.

The book – it can scarcely be described as a novel – is constructed from supposed diary entries, letters, emails, extracts from Hansard, fragments of autobiography, a TV game show script, transcripts of television and press interviews, Select Committee Report conclusions and interrogations of the various participants in this madcap scheme. All have differing viewpoints and narrators. As such the whole becomes diffuse and bitty.

While there is an overall narrative thread the disparate voices too often fail to suspend disbelief. Instead of being presented with a convincing rendering of a diary extract or interview transcript we are given novelistic embellishments. The diary extracts contain information that we as readers ought to have but a diarist would not find it necessary to include. In one of the interviews a respondent states a person spoke mildly when surely they would report only the relevant conversation’s content, in another there is an (uncredited) interruption which reads, “The witness became emotional after the consumption of custard creams and was incoherent. The interview was resumed after a break of four hours.” This authorial interpolation is, I suppose, intended humorously but is, instead, bathetic, if not pathetic. The Hansard extracts do not quite reflect accurately the format of Prime Minister’s Questions. While it might be said that this is a comic novel and some licence is allowable, to get details such as this last example wrong detracts from the intended effect. Infelicities such as those above totally fail to create the necessary degree of verisimilitude. The name dropping of real people as interviewers – Andrew Marr, Boris Johnson – while the politicians and aides are fictional (yet recognisable) is also a mistake.

The book is obviously meant to be a satire but its approach is so scattershot that it is difficult to tell exactly what or whom is the intended target. Is it the workings of bureaucracies, office politics, communications directors/spin doctors, career women, politicians, even Islamic terrorists? All are featured, but the focus never stays in one place for long. The only character who has any semblance of solidity is the supposedly mad sheikh; and he has no viewpoint narrative.

After the novel’s end we also have “Reading Group Notes” containing items “for discussion.” Some may find this condescending.

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen has its moments; but they are few.

Abacus, 2007, 373p.

I’ve not read them in order of publication but it’s possible to discern a recurring pattern in Brookmyre’s novels, apart from the obvious humour and violence. A bunch of bad guys (mercenaries/terrorists here) interrupts the daily business of some ordinary punters (in this one it’s a school reunion.) Add in too a denouement in an isolated setting (a converted oil rig.) There may also be passing reference to someone living in, or a citizen of, the US.

The more interesting parts of One Fine Day In The Middle Of The Night are based on the interactions of the former schoolmates. Brookmyre manages to convey the excruciating nature such reunions surely entail. That scenario might have been enough to carry a novel on its own without the intrusion of the thriller elements (which admittedly would have been a different kind of book.) Here, while the comedy terrorists are necessary for the book’s plot, they are too unconvincing to suspend disbelief.

I note that schooldays have also figured strongly in the pasts of other Brookmyre protagonists, particularly Angelique Di Xavia.

One Fine Day In The Middle Of The Night might be a good enough introduction to Brookmyre’s oeuvre but I didn’t find it as satisfying a read as A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away nor The Sacred Art Of Stealing.

Modern Library, 2002. 259p

Set mostly in New York Fury is perhaps the fruit of Rushdie’s move to the US after the restrictions necessitated by the fatwā made life in the UK less than congenial for him.

It is not a vintage work, no Midnight’s Children nor Shame. Too much is told, not shown. It also begins inauspiciously; with a very Dan Brownesque first sentence, “Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker, and since his fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticised) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age.”

Now, it could be said that Rushdie is playing with the reader, essaying a fable, but, really, three of those crudely dumped slivers of information are examples of newspaper prose and the knowledge they bring us ought to have emerged more organically during the course of the novel.

The novel deals with Solanka’s life after leaving his second wife. He was so full of fury he had almost killed her and their young son and he fled to New York to escape that horror becoming reality. He was also the creator of a TV series in which a doll called Little Brain hosted a kind of chat show where various historical and philosophical figures were interviewed. It became a cult hit, was taken up further, spawning the usual commercial opportunities attendant on success, but in the process was dumbed down. The doll masks which are one of the manifestations of the show’s popularity later become a plot point.

Rushdie’s usual scatter shot referencing is present, not only to the Erinyes (Furies) of Greek myth – along with allusions to more popular culture – but also copious descriptions of SF stories (eg The Nine Billon Names of God) and films (Solaris, even – heaven help us – Star Wars.) The three Furies have their counterparts in the three women whom Solanka is involved with in the course of the book.

There is a sub-plot involving a republic known as Lilliput-Blefescu (where the doll masks take on a political significance) and which allows Rushdie ample scope for Swiftian allusions.

As a novel, Fury is too tied up in itself. Rushdie is riffing on his concerns but here his orotund, fabular style is distracting, the characters are not as rounded as in his earlier works and the plot not as engaging.

Flamingo, 1994. 403p
Translated from the Danish Frøken Smillas Fornammelse For Sne by F David.

Smilla Jasperson is half Danish, half Greenlander. Brought up in Greenland till her mother died, she now lives in Copenhagen and has a distant relationship with her Danish father. Isaiah, a boy she has befriended and also a fellow Greenlander, is found dead in the snow with no tracks near him, apparently having jumped off a roof. But Smilla has a feeling for snow, and she knows Isaiah had a fear of heights. The police mark his death down as a suicide despite her complaints. The novel explores her efforts to find out the truth about Isaiah’s death, a search which encompasses the Cryolite Corporation Danmark and several ill-fated expeditions to Greenland over the years since 1939.

The book is strong on the injustices suffered by the native peoples of Greenland yet acknowledges the improvements in Greenlandic existence brought about by Western influences.

Høeg presents Danish life as overly bureaucratic in comparison to the freer ways of Greenland – it seems there are forms to be filled for everything – but it certainly seems so even in relation to the UK. He has a marked tendency to introduce scenes part way through before flashing back to their entry point and also a prodigious habit of describing settings minutely. Smilla’s back story is interweaved with the scenes in such a way as to be almost integral, as if the story could not have been written in any other style and these digressions rarely, if ever, interrupt the flow. That this seemingly artless artfulness works and never becomes annoying is a tribute to Høeg’s skill as a writer.

While towards the end the book loses its focus slightly, even veering a little unconvincingly towards SF territory before drawing back, the novel is always engrossing.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow is not unputdownable (no book ever truly is) but it does get very close.

Canongate, 1985. 216 p.

Hogg is the author what is perhaps the prototypical novel of Scottish identity, or lack thereof, The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner. Its themes of Calvinism, doppelgangers and identity have rung down the decades in Scottish fiction.

Astonishingly given that book’s importance and considering Hogg was writing in the 19th century, the collection of stories and poems in Tales of Love and Mystery was not brought together until 1985. Some of the stories and poems within it had not been in an accessible form since their first airing nearly 200 years ago. Partly this is due to the disparagement and Bowdlerisation Hogg underwent in the majority of the intervening years.

Hogg wrote in Scots and English with equal facility. For those who require it a helpful glossary of Scots words is appended, though there are some omissions within it.

There is an introduction by David Groves which is better left until the book itself is read as it contains spoilers.

As is to be expected with Hogg, religion and the supernatural are to the fore – as are relationships between the sexes. There is a wonderful use of “burke” as a verb (Hogg was writing in the 1820s and 30s.)

None of the stories speaks to the modern reader quite as strongly as Justified Sinner does but the two poems are as relevant as ever. As reminders of a time and a culture long gone, though, Tales Of Love And Mystery is worth a look – but perhaps only for those with an interest in Scottish fiction.

Dog And Bone, 1990. 244p

Jack Naylor is a solicitor for a Glasgow legal firm (working from their branch in Dumbarton!) He has frequently acted for the activists of a local peace camp located in Glen Douglas. When two of their number are arrested for the murder of a noted and well-liked peace campaigner in Glasgow he is asked to take on the case. It is his first time acting for someone accused of murder; hence the title Blooding Mister Naylor. About halfway through the book as the plot began to complicate and fold back on itself I began to form the suspicion that the title would perhaps become all too literal.

One of the two accused, a woman, is released early on. The usual sorts of complications ensue. Naylor’s bosses do not want him to take the case, there are hints of MI5 and SBS involvement, multi-national corporations lurk in the background, Naylor’s movements are followed, his phone calls tapped and his professional integrity questioned in the press.

This is a work in the comical/thriller style later mined so enthusiastically by Christopher Brookmyre and as such is very readable, but is a shade or two darker.

Unfortunately the book is littered with typos and/or misspellings. Dog And Bone was, I fear, a publishing venture based on less than a shoestring though with a striking set of covers unmistakably designed by Alasdair Gray.

If you like Brookmyre, though, give this one a go.

Sadly there will be no more like this from Chris Boyce as he died in 1999. So it goes.

Secker and Warburg, 1995. 233p

An ex-convict calling himself Morrow is asked to a house to give his opinion as to the authenticity of eight paintings of classical scenes belonging to a Mr Morden. In the course of one of his subsequent visits he meets a woman whom he only ever names as A, whose sexuality turns out to be complex and masochistic and to whom the narrative is addressed. However, on occasion “Morrow” seems to address, rather than A, the reader directly.

The novel mainly charts the progress of the couple’s strange relationship as well as the other complications in Morrow’s life; a distant cousin he calls Aunt Corky, a gang boss known as Mr Da, a police inspector named Hackett. All this is delivered in a series of long rambling sentences replete with sub-clauses and digressions and, for the first few chapters, very little dialogue. As well as this taste for prolixity the narrator also has an extensive vocabulary – a typical Banville trait. In the background there is a series of murders by a killer dubbed “The Vampire” which are referred to throughout the book but of which no more than that is made.

The nine (longish) chapters are interleaved with descriptions of what I presume are meant to be seven of the paintings. The individual artists concerned are given as Johann Livelb, L. van Hobelijn, Giovanni Belli, Job van Hellin, L.E.van Ohlbijn, J. van Hollbein and Jan Vibell. The eighth, mentioned in the fourth last page, is Birth of Athena by Jean Vaublin. A passing knowledge of Greek mythology might be a help in disentangling all of this. Curiously the (unattributed as far as I can see) cover picture of a man-like creature with strong upper arms and back but bearing a bull’s head – quite the most unprepossessing on my shelves I might say – does not seem to relate to any of these.

There is no sense throughout the book of linkages between the various strands until four pages from the end where some, if not all, is revealed and a measure of sympathy induced.

Athena is an extremely literary diversion. For those who want a bit of plot in their fiction it is somewhat lacking. As a portrait of a dysfunctional relationship and an exercise in unreliable narration it is, however, accomplished, but perhaps too over-elaborate and ultimately unengaging.