On Saturday we went to the Christain Aid booksale which is held every two years at St Andrew’s and St George’s Church, George Street, Edinburgh. It was mobbed.

This was my haul:-

The Hoose O Haivers took my fancy just because of its title – it contains short stories by Matthhew Fitt, Susan Rennie and James Robertson.

Rhoda Lerman’s The Book of the Night is a Womens’ Press SF publication from 1986.

The Art Nouveau and Art Deco book was spotted by the good lady (who herself bought 13 books!) It has some lovely illustrations.

Fleck is a verse comedy by Alasdair Gray.

Palace Walk is the first of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy.

Goodness knows when I’ll get round to reading them.
The Hoose O Haivers and Fleck are quite short so I could fit them in easily enough I suppose. The Mahfouz looks like a long project though.

The book sale continues till Friday.

Jonathan Cape, 2011, 375 p.

Sumptuously produced with embossed boards, gold leafing, patterned endpapers and page edges in a blue so deep it’s almost purple this is a consciously literary endeavour. It makes frequent reference to your book, the book you are reading, and also has unconventional upper pagination (the numbers at the bottom of the page are in the normal sequence.) It also explicitly mentions the fact that it has three pages numbered 7 – with a page 18 well out of sequence. In addition The Blue Book has three pages numbered 9, two 8s,10s and 27s as well as 0s and 1s towards the end; not forgetting a 666, a 676, a 678, a 798, an 888, a 919 and a 934 in a book with only 375 pages. (There may be some of these I have missed.) Numbers are an important means of communication for the two main characters and Kennedy has toyed with this notion and with us. Quite how necessary it is to do so is another matter. A further notable feature was the repetition of phrases, “Because he was young,” “A man standing in a doorway,” etc. The narration is not straightforward, sometimes describing aspects of a man’s life in detached third person, at others the internal thoughts of Elisabeth Barber as well as the ongoing narrative. There is also a rather high count of a certain expletive.

One of the scenes tells us of a boy being told about girls by his father. Girls, he says, will not be gorgeous like Dusty Springfield, whom the boy rather likes. Or if they are this will not be good news. Which seems like sound advice.

The meat of the novel is compressed into the time scale of a cruise across the Atlantic to New York but there are various flashbacks to earlier incidents in the two main characters’ lives. Elisabeth is taking the trip with her boyfriend Derek who is on the brink of proposing. In the queue to embark they encounter a man who engages them in conversation. This man’s question to Elisabeth later that day when Derek is absent seems shocking but it turns out Elisabeth used to be his partner, not only in life but also on stage in a show which was basically a con where he claimed to have messages from the dead to their loved ones in the audience. The disintegration of Elisabeth’s relationship with Derek and her renewal of that with Arthur Lockwood – implicit from that encounter in the queue – drives the novel.

A flaw for me though was the fact that The Blue Book depends for its emotional impact largely on the late revelation of a crucial piece of information up till then withheld. To be fair it is withheld from one of our duo of characters but it felt too much like a deus ex machina.

The Blue Book is not one to be read lightly, nor with lack of attention.

Dedalus, 2012, 378p. Translated from the Italian, Nuova Grammaticae Finlandese, by Judith Landry.

To someone like me – obliged to learn Latin at school, and enjoyed it, then dabbled very slightly in German and who subsequently learned the Finnish noun has umpteen cases (I remembered it as nineteen but it’s only fifteen) the attraction of a novel entitled New Finnish Grammar was irresistible. The fact that it was written by an Italian made it even more interesting. Diego Marani has himself invented an international auxiliary language, Europanto, perhaps partly as a joke.

Notwithstanding that, this is a very good book by any standard. It manages to overcome the disadvantage of a substantial lack of dialogue – dialogue is normally a leavening and character revealing aspect of a piece of fiction, diluting the thickness of the prose. To restrict it is a brave decision for a novelist.

Pietri Friari, an exiled Finn working as a doctor for the German army in Trieste in 1941 has brought to him an injured sailor who has the name tag Sampo Karjalainen sewn on to his jacket and a handkerchief with the initials S K embroidered on it in his pocket. The sailor’s wounds have affected his memory and he does not know who he is nor even his nationality. Doctor Friari assumes his patient must be Finnish and sets out to teach him the rudiments of that language. The framing device has Friari find in Helsinki in 1946 the notebook where Sampo had written down his experiences since his time in Trieste. The main body of the text contains these reminiscences – edited for clarity: occasional sections in italics relate Friari’s thoughts and comments on them.

Throughout the early part of the book the thought kept nagging; in what language does Sampo think and why doesn’t Friari ask him? This would be a large clue to Sampo’s origins but the question is never asked in the novel. This is a minor quibble, though. Sampo’s predicament is intriguing enough to see us through.

I wasn’t expecting the book to be about Finnish grammar but in many ways it is, aspects of the language are mentioned frequently. It is also a short history of Finland in the mid-twentieth century and a primer on Finnish myths/legends. Arguably this is necessarily so as anyone learning to be a Finn, as Sampo is, would need that backgrounding. The translator has had to cope with this too. She does it admirably but at one point puzzlingly used the German term panzer for a Russian tank.

While eschewing love and sex – two of the three perennial literary concerns; the third is death – New Finnish Grammar deals with another important aspect of humanity, belonging – or in this case not belonging, struggling to fit in. As such it is not merely about being Finnish but about being human.

Perhaps oddly for a novel whose driving force is memory loss this may be the most memorable book I’ll read all year.

Orbit, 2013, 378p.

Brookmyre’s oeuvre has up to now been the crime/thriller novel, albeit tinged with humour. Bedlam is his first foray into Science Fiction. I came across an as yet unlent copy in my local library so thought, why not?

Medical technology company Neurosphere’s employee Ross Baker, shortly after discovering by chance his girl-friend is pregnant and without talking to her about it, has a new type of brain-scan and wakes up inside a computer game which he quickly recognises as he was an avid gamer in his past. Not long after this he is killed there but immediately “respawns” to start all over again. He soon finds a way out into a series of virtual worlds which are in the process of takeover by an organisation dubbed the Integrity which is citing a phenomenon known as “corruption” to seek by force to keep these worlds forever separate one from another. In these digital adventures Baker adopts his former multiple game-player name of Bedlam. There are, though, occasional chapters set in the “real” world where Baker is/was in conflict with his boss over the rights of digital consciousnesses.

My reservations about stories set within virtual worlds were set out in the third paragraph of my comments on Iain Banks’s Surface Detail. Briefly, if there is no real jeopardy, if there is no danger of death, what threat is there? Beyond tedium of course.

Unfortunately most of Bedlam is set within the virtual worlds and as such is seriously unbalanced. I could not suspend my disbelief and found myself longing for the “real” world. In this regard the pregnancy element is a rather transparent way to try to enlist our sympathies with the digitally trapped Baker. Moreover Brookmyre’s style at times jars badly with the scenario. SF and humour are notoriously ill-matched bedfellows. A successful amalgam of the two is very difficult to achieve. Brookmyre has made little or no concession to the peculiar demands of writing SF and has adopted a similar tone to that in his thrillers. There were also signs of the book being pitched towards the US market (tic-tac-toe, medieval, asshole.)

Brookmyre’s typical readers may enjoy the virtual scenes – or not – but as SF Bedlam is perfunctory at best. Perhaps gamers will take to it.

Faber and Faber, 2011, 504 p.

Preamble:-

I was moved to read this as it features scenes set at the International Exhibition, Glasgow, 1888, in which I have been interested for decades now. Maps of the centre of the Glasgow of 1888 and of the Exhibition site are provided immediately after the title pages. Curiously the cover – not only on this hardback edition (above) but also the different one on the paperback (below) – has a representation of what looks like the main building for the later Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 rather than that of 1888. Both of these buildings had domes but the structures flanking them were quite different in appearance, the ones of 1888 being slender and steeple-like, those of 1901 more ornate with the dome surmounted by a sculpture of a winged figure. The gondolier on the back cover is fine. Both Exhibitions had those.

1888 Exhibition

1901 Exhibition

paperback cover

Review:-

Gillespie And I is the story of Londoner (of Scottish extraction) Harriet Baxter’s friendship with the family of up and coming Glasgow artist Ned Gillespie from their first chance meeting up to and beyond the tragedy around which the tale eventually unfolds.

The book is narrated by Baxter from the perspective of her old age with short sections set in her present day of 1933 interspersed with longer ones in 1888-90. At first it seems to be a tale of friendship and possible attraction with comical interludes but later veers off into one of crime/mystery. The narrative voice is flat, with strange choices of word at times. The prose is curiously prone to cliché as well as to repeating information unnecessarily. In addition the narrative’s approach to foreshadowing is unsubtle – it can feel more like being beaten around the head with what’s going to happen. To attribute this to unreliability in Harriet Baxter’s account of events would be the charitable course. Another interpretation would be hthe narrator’s lack of awareness of how her actions might appear to others. Despite the injunction early on to ignore a Mr Kemp’s recent (in 1933) writings about her past, Baxter’s unreliability is, however, not foregrounded strongly enough – the reference on page 356 to another old – though younger than the narrator – woman’s “ramblings …. as though they were facts” comes rather late.

There seems little reason for Baxter’s interest in the Gillespie family. Notwithstanding the book’s title Ned Gillespie is mostly an offstage figure, his wife Annie distracted and naturally suspicious while his mother Elspeth seems to be present to provide humour (but fails.) Their children are also portrayed curiously flatly, the younger daughter never being more than a plot enabler.

The spelling of Timbuktu is odd for a memoir supposedly written in 1933 when it would have been rendered in English as Timbuctoo. The narrative also asserts that Glaswegians call ice-cream “hokey pokey,” which is a new one on me. (“Pokey hat” for an ice cream cone, yes; but never hokey pokey, which is apparently a New Zealand term for puff candy.) It also has women attending a burial. In Scotland, in 1889? That sort of thing was still regarded askance as late as the 1970s. The scene with the Christmas presents also didn’t ring true: until 1958 Christmas was a normal working day in Scotland. That the – relatively expensive – presents were a plot device, that Harris as the author required them, does not outweigh their implausibility.

You may have noticed that when a narrative starts to bug me its infelicities loom large. This is not nit-picking. (Well, it is; but the nits are there.) Such things destroy trust in the author. As they are the author’s rather than the narrator’s responsibility they do not underline any narrative unreliability, instead they fatally undermine the story.

In Gillespie and I Harris has attempted a difficult task. For me, she failed to convince.

Sandstone Press, 2011, 240 p.

It’s nearly Clarke Award time again so I thought I’d sample last year’s winner.

While having some of the trappings of Science Fiction and a scenario which would appear to be genre The Testament of Jesse Lamb doesn’t read like SF. The experience is more like that of a literary novel, the treatment focuses on Jessie rather than on the Maternal Death Syndrome (MDS) that is the SF element. While there is no sense of wonder here it is nevertheless easy to see why the Clarke judges might choose it. And the Clarke Award has a history of rewarding the “bordering on SF.”

The viral disease MDS – an apparently terrorist-disseminated sort of hybrid of AIDS and CJD for which no-one has claimed responsibility – has spread all over the world and means pregnancy is a sentence of death for the mother, whose brain spongifies over the nine months gestation. Despite there being those who think humanity should accept its fate various avenues are being tried to find a cure or remedy in an attempt to ensure live births but the main one focused on in the book has volunteers known as Sleeping Beauties kept in a coma throughout their pregnancies, incubating frozen embryos which have been vaccinated against MDS. But, of course, these hosts will die after the birth.

Narrator Jessie Lamb is a teenager with bickering parents and the usual adolescent angsts. Her fretting about whether her friend Baz likes her or not and her fears about his dealings with another girl called Rosa are well handled and utterly convincing. This feels like the memoirs of a teenager in a terrible time.

We first meet Jessie while she is being held captive, this segment being printed in a sparse sans-serif typeface. While incarcerated she starts to write down her backstory, the chapters of which are rendered in a more reader friendly font. The reasons for Jessie’s plight become apparent long before they are revealed in the narrative. Captivity segments and their typeface pop up irregularly throughout her story until the envoi.

The ramifications of MDS for society and the future are explored through Jessie’s father, a scientist at a Research Clinic, her Aunt Maddy, lovelorn and childless, and her relationships and interactions with her friends and those she meets.

The circumstance of Jessie’s father being a scientist at a clinic researching into MDS and its alleviation was a bit too pat. There was a sense of targets being set up only so they could be knocked down, tinged with more than a dose of anti-Science.

There was a “Scott” free. Isn’t that normally rendered with one “t”? (It is apparently from the old Norse skot, a tax, via Middle English scotfreo, exempt from royal tax.) Rogers also has a habit of writing “to not” rather than “not to.” And she renders email as e mail. Also strange in a book so otherwise steeped in Britishness is the use of the Usian “different than” at one point rather than the more usual “different from.”

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Jessie herself and her feelings, the awkwardnesses of adolescence, are beautifully conveyed. This is undeniably a superior read.

A Romance. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003, 292 p.

A novel about King Arthur? What new is there to be said?
Well, Massie’s approach is different. This is the second part of his Dark Ages trilogy as told by Michael Scott (known as the wizard) to his pupil, the Hohenstaufen Prince who would become The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.

In Arthur the King the focus is not so much on the legend we all think we know as on Arthur the man, a very human creature, from his humble upbringing, through his kingship to his gritty death. The effect is to demystify, to demythologise, to render Arthur into history. Michael Scott has his own reasons for this, to educate the prince, to remind him of a monarch’s duty to maintain peace and justice, to underline the burden of kingship but it also serves to emphasise the Hohenstaufen line’s links back to the Roman Empire. It’s a nice piece of ventriloquism by Massie and allows the use of wonderful Scottish words like howdumdeid.

In addition he has Scott locate Camelot in Scott’s boyhood environment – the Scottish border country – and mentions, among others, the legend of Arthur still residing in a hollow under the Eildon Hills. There are of course many parts of Great Britain which claim Arthur as their own. Indeed a cave by the Clyde shore at the Havoc in Dumbarton was/is known as Merlin’s Cave (though others have it as Bruce’s cave, such is legend.)

In the narrative the point is made that most of the tales of Arthur are actually those of the Knights of the Round Table. Here, there are some digressions of that sort but they are short and we are never away from Arthur for long.

Characters who might have seemed important, like Merlin and Lancelot, are bit parts; even Morgan Le Fay isn’t Arthur’s main antagonist. Merlin, though an instigator of the sequence of events which lead to the complications inherent in the tale, is disappeared offstage about halfway through.

The main problem with all this is the narrative style. Massie, as Scott, digresses frequently and irritatingly, leading to a certain turgidity in the delivery. I remember this trait as being worse, though, in the first book of The Dark Ages, The Evening of the World, which I read before I started blogging. So much so in fact that I left off reading this one for years.

It probably won’t be so long, I suspect, till I undertake the last in this series, Charlemagne and Roland.

Penguin, 2012, 357p.

The set-up for this is deeply weird. A man called Miles Garth has locked himself into the hosts’ spare bedroom during a dinner party. He’s there for weeks, fed under the door with wafer thin ham or from the next door neighbour’s house via a pulley. Eventually he becomes a TV news and internet fad.

The narrative is divided into four main parts each named, in order, with the words of the overall book title.

There. Is from the viewpoint of a woman who knew Garth briefly as a teenager on a foreign trip called in by the houseowner since her number was on Garth’s phone.

But. Is told by Mark, the man who brought Garth along to the dinner party. Mark hears his (dead) mother talking to him in rhyme.

For. Focuses on an old woman in hospital, whom Garth always visited once a year.

The. A ten year old girl fascinated by word play turns out to be the person who finally makes contact with Garth.

As in The Accidental, the right hand margin is not justified. This is irritating every time the book is picked up after an interval as its appearance is unpolished – like a manuscript rather than a proper book. Once into the swing of the narrative again it becomes invisible, though.

Ali Smith has appeared in at least one Best New Scottish Writing anthology. There is very little to mark her as a particularly Scottish writer. Only one thing here gives any hint of Scottishness – the use of the description black-affronted.

Among Smith’s stylistic quirks dialogue is not rendered in the usual quotes and she also makes significant use of parentheses (some of which last for pages on end) to recount incidents from the earlier lives of her characters.

While the writing is fine (Smith can do fine writing) the narrative meanders rather and never really goes anywhere. It’s a bit like a collection of short stories with very loose connections between them. And we never really get to find out why Garth locked himself in someone else’s bedroom.

Faber and Faber, 2005, 436p. Translated from the Turkish, Kar, by Maureen Freely

Turkish poet, Kerim Alakuşoğlu, who dislikes his name and wishes to be known only as Ka, has returned temporarily from Germany to undertake an investigation for the Istanbul newspaper Republican into a spate of teenage girl suicides in the remote city of Kars in Anatolia and also to report on an upcoming election there. The suicides are by girls who were being forced to remove their headscarves in order to attend state run school. Also on Ka’s mind is the possibility of reacquainting himself with the beautiful İpek, recently divorced from her husband.

The situation he finds himself in unlocks Ka’s writer’s block and poems flow from him – 19 in the few days the story encompasses. He notes these down in a green notebook and assigns them to positions along three axes, Memory, Logic and Imagination, on a diagram of a snowflake.

The narrative is mostly third person from Ka’s viewpoint but chapter 29, where the snowflake appears, and the concluding ones are first person by the author.

Kars is one of those unfortunate places which has seen many upheavals and changes of country in its history. Local factions include Kurdish nationalists, Islamists, secularists, even a few die-hard communists from the Soviet era. Ka’s visit coincides with a snowstorm cutting Kars off from the rest of Turkey giving opportunity for the various simmering discontents to come to the boil. In the middle of a live TV broadcast of a stage show dealing with the headscarf issue a local coup takes place.

The importance of football in modern Turkey is underlined by its several mentions in this book (as it was also in the other two Pamuk novels I have read.) Not a typical reference to find in a literary novel. Imagine the guffaws were the Beautiful Game to feature with any prominence in a British novel by a Nobel laureate.

Another presence here common to those two previous books is the appearance in the narrative of a certain Orhan Pamuk, a friend of Ka and telling his story for him. Is this the secret to winning the Nobel Prize? Put yourself into your books as a character?

Due to its history the tension between religion and secularism is particularly intense in Turkey and it is no surprise the story turns on this. The propensity for such disagreements to turn into violence is given due weight here as is the potential for long memories and grudges to be held.

There is more incident in this novel than in The Museum of Innocence but the background of Turkish society continues to be fascinating and as in that book the translation flows admirably.

A Tale of Adventure. Sceptre, 2007, 204p

This was a delight. The story of two Jews With Swords (as Chabon’s working title had it) in the region of Khazaria on the Silk Road about 1,000 years ago it is a modern Boy’s Adventure Story. It is a long time since I read one of those but as far as my memory serves Chabon writes this much better than the Victorians did.

The two Jews are both a long way from home. Zelikman is from Regensburg in the Frankish Kingdom, and Amram is an African descendant of Solomon via the Queen of Sheba. Their scamming of other travellers by faking fights in order to profit from the betting thereon is interrupted by their encounter with Filaq, heir to a bekdom which has been usurped. Gentlemen of the Road is an admirably short novel but manages nevertheless to incorporate a lot of action.

The sentence structure can be convoluted, incorporating digressions and sub-clauses, but everything is in its place and contributes to the ongoing story. The inclusion (one per chapter) of full page illustrations of lines from the text gives the book the correct retro feel. How it relates to the work of such as R M Ballantyne and G A Henty I cannot say as my memory of those is hazy, but I doubt they had any sexual content as this does, briefly. What was unlikely in those is a woman having the agency one of the characters in this book exerts, indeed any sort of agency at all.

Chabon’s depiction of the times of the book accords with what I know of that era and place and extends it. I did wonder if the bek and kagan dual ruler set up in Khazaria might have been an inspiration to Robert Silverberg for the Coronal and Pontifex of his Majipoor novels and stories.

The end-papers contain a lovely map of Khazaria and the surrounding lands.

Gentlemen of the Road is a beautiful artefact, outside and in.