Faber, 2007

Is it possible to review a book without regard to its content? To treat only of its literary merits – the prose, the characterisation, the plot – and not their ramifications? If so, then Be Near Me is a fine novel, well written. The prose is fluid and consciously literary, if a little over florid in a few places, and the characters are well enough observed.

A more or less English Catholic Priest, David Anderton, comes to a small Ayrshire parish where he is regarded with suspicion as an incomer. Only his part-time housekeeper, Mrs Poole, and two fifteen year old parishioners called Mark and Lisa make any effort to see him as an individual and not an interloper. The remainder of the book, interspersed with flashbacks of Anderton’s childhood and his life as a student, when he had a boyfriend who died in a car crash, an event which precipitated his retreat into the priesthood, deals with the unravelling of these latter relationships.

I may be wearing my teacher’s hat here but from its inception Anderton’s relationship with the teenagers was ill-advised and implied trouble. His response to the views they express – and the language they used – on their first meeting during a school lesson was inadequate at best, diffident and lacking in the moral guidance you might expect from an educator – or a cleric.

O’Hagan intends this of course. Anderton’s confused and ineffective response in this early encounter is emblematic of his attitude to his ministry and to the crisis that later engulfs him. He seems lost and insecure, but wilfully – and frustratingly – so. As a portrait of a man unable to prevent, indeed intent on, his own ignominy Be Near Me is exemplary.

This review could finish here were it not for the caveat expressed in its first sentence. Potential readers of the novel unwilling to have their reactions possibly prejudiced should also stop here.

As O’Hagan has reservations about the treatment of Roman Catholicism’s adherents in Scotland – which admittedly not all of his co-denominationalists necessarily share – I hesitate to write this; but I found his subject matter troubling. Or, rather, the way in which it was approached.

He has Anderton remember his school at Ampleforth and mention tales of abuse by the Brothers but say he neither witnessed nor suffered any himself. Is there a hint of disingenuousness here; is this too dismissive of the issue?

Later Anderton reveals himself as guilty of what is essentially a sexual assault (even if a minor one) on Mark. That his “victim” is nearly of the age of consent and that the act was not followed through neither excuses nor expiates it.

Yes, Be Near Me has things to say about jumping to conclusions, mob rule and vigilantism, the tabloid tendency to simplify complex matters and the failure of an adversarial justice system to penetrate to the truth of things.

But it comes close to implying that such abuse didn’t happen or, if it did, was relatively inconsequential; misunderstood even.

I am not saying that one ought not to write about paedophiles, nor that they may not be considered sympathetically in fiction, only that, if they are, it should be with due care and attention to their victims and to its seriousness; and in this I think O’Hagan fails, which is an extremely severe defect. In his choice of narrator and in the age of that character’s “victim” O’Hagan seems to be skating round the issue rather than confronting it. Minimising it, if you will. And is that not reprehensible?

Notwithstanding this objection, however, whatever else Be Near Me does as a novel, it made me reflect on these matters. And, in the end, to promote such reflections is one of serious fiction’s functions.

Recently Elizabeth Bear, guesting on Charlie Stross’s blog, and Ian Sales have commented on the writing process especially as it applies to Science Fiction.

Both touch on what is SF and what is not.

Bear bemoans the expectation that SF writers know what the future will be like.

We don’t of course. No one does. At best we can suggest possibilities and post warnings.

Bear states what is obvious with a little thought: that she writes for today’s audience about today’s concerns.

Sales also emphasises the point that SF writers are only ever actually writing about the present and then proceeds to wax more or less lyrical on the info dump and its special salience, necessity even, in the SF story.

For anyone interested in writing both posts are worth a look.

Picador, 2004, 312p

This book was not marketed as Science Fiction but in any straightforward reading of the term would be so, as it is fiction about Science, specifically quantum mechanics and wave functions. Science Fiction as understood, though, is not generally thought of in this light but rather as extrapolative. However, Mobius Dick fits the bill in this sense also, as its background involves a set of experiments to produce a vacuum array which can generate energies in excess of 1000 Eka-electronvolts which could lead to wave functions not collapsing on being observed and the end of the world as we know it. Fear not if you know nothing about the behaviour of subatomic particles, the necessary details are lucidly set out by Crumey in the appropriate places. (Or did I just find it lucid because I had encountered most of these ideas already? Studied them, even, when a student.)

The narrative is multi-stranded, beginning with an enigmatic text message to a physicist, John Ringer, reminding him of a lost love. Another strand is set in a hospital where patients are being treated for Anomalous Memory Disorder, AMD, a condition in which they appear to have false memories. A third contains extracts from a book by a certain “Heinrich Behring” but which is copyrighted “the British Democratic Republic 1954” and which focuses on Erwin Schrödinger. An Altered History too, then.

It is, as well, a consciously literary endeavour featuring in addition to the above; Bettina von Arnim, the composer Schuman and a letter from an unsuccessful Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne. No surprise it’s not marketed as Science Fiction. The John Ringer sections are Ballardian in tone and when he ventures into rural Scotland also have a tint of the testament of Gideon Mack, which I reviewed recently.

Crumey never pushes the connections between the sections. We are left to ourselves to infer that AMD is a manifestation of superimposed quantum states and the many worlds of uncollapsed wave functions. The characters, on opening doors etc, by and large treat any incursions into or from other worlds as if they are hallucinations, which interpretation is also entirely adequate.

The afterword, also by “Heinrich Behring,” like the sections featuring Schrödinger and Schumann, is written from the perspective of a world where Goebbels replaced Hitler, Britain was invaded but after liberation became a socialist/communist state and neither Melville nor Thomas Mann achieved critical acclaim. “Behring” depicts Schrödinger – who never amounted to much in this altered history – finding his famous (in our world) equation Hψ = Eψ in the scribblings of a madwoman.

What makes Mobius Dick ineluctably Science Fiction (whther it is labelled as such or not) is this looking in at our world, where a woman can become Britain’s PM, an actor President of the US and the many worlds theory is taken seriously, and finding it absurd.

But to label the book at all is to do it an injustice. It hums with ideas and wit, and not a few literary puns.

I haven’t been so impressed by an author new to me for a long time.

Time was when the Science Fiction crime/detective story was a rarity. This may have been because there is a fundamental disparity between the two forms. In Science Fiction the essence is that the tale is of something changed or changing, by the end of the tale the world is no longer the same. In crime fiction, by contrast, order – normality – is restored, the world is made safe again. There is also a necessary withholding of information in the crime story (or at least a need to disguise it.) In Science Fiction the more information is granted to the reader the more real the changed world seems, the more we believe in it.

The first truly successful SF crime stories that I recall were written by Larry Niven and featured teleportation booths. In A Kind of Murder the resolution and solving of the crime depends solely on a ramification of this SF element. Niven then went on to write novels featuring the detective Gil the ARM Hamilton who as the result of an accident lost one physical arm but then developed a psychic one which he subsequently used in his investigations.

Perhaps because of the infiltration of so much of what was SF into both the modern world and the modern detective story/thriller, especially televisually; perhaps because the conventions of the detective story are so embedded, the SF crime story is nowadays no longer so problematic and SF detectives are far from rare.

These thoughts were prompted by the SF book which I am reading at the moment, The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod. It has elements of the detective story and part of the action takes place in Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a marvellous setting for detective/horror/supernatural fiction as it is so wonderfully Gothic. There is the unmissable landmark of the castle brooding on its rock, Arthur’s Seat, Calton Hill with its curious, apparently unfinished buildings in the classical style, the bizarre under and over layout of the streets just off the Royal Mile, the contrast between the Old Town and the New (and nowadays the peripheral estates.) The Old Town itself has so many mediæval associations – not to mention underground warrens – several atmospheric churchyards with attached cemeteries and of course there is the bodysnatching/Burke and Hare connection; all of which make it almost perfect for the unfolding of skullduggery of various sorts. Glasgow, by contrast, while its estates are bleak, has only the area by the Cathedral which is truly old. Its streets tend to be more grid like – with no dark, tunnel-like thoroughfares analogous to The Cowgate (unless you count the Hielanman’s Umbrella.) For all its energy and (misplaced?) reputation for violence it seems so much more prosaic a place, more bustling certainly, but more modern, more down to earth, less prone to fancies.

Little, Brown, 2002, 419p

This is another novel featuring Detective Inspector Angelique De Xavia, who appeared in A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away (see my review here.)

Its prologue was faintly annoying as Brookmyre seemed to be indulging in explicitness merely for the sake of it. Moreover, when the book proper unfolds it is apparent that its chronology and the bulk of the narrative don’t quite fit. However, the main story as it progresses is engaging and the complex plot is revealed at just the right pace.

Brookmyre’s signature blending of humour with crime is again a key component. The set up, here, involves a bank robbery carried out by a gang dressed as clowns, or rather as one member of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. The robbers are at pains to make sure the hostages they have taken (which include De Xavia after she infiltrates the building and is captured) are put at ease; their leader insisting they are not the bad guys.

The character of DI De Xavia does not convince as it did in A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away as, here, she enters into a, quite frankly, unbelievable relationship. But, for plot purposes, she must. Brookmyre’s touch lets him down with this but the book is never less than readable; at times laugh, or at least chuckle, out loud funny and the plot is well worked out.

It was also refreshing to read a depiction of members of the criminal fraternity who were not unremittingly ill intentioned – though, of course the real baddies in the book are.

Christopher Brookmyre, one of whose books I am reading just now, says he has been a Buddy since 1976. Given that, I found it a little surprising that the novel contains an extended riff on the vicissitudes of being a Rangers fan (otherwise known as Bluenoses, Teddy Bears or – by the uncharitable – Huns.)

Like they would know anything about the trials and tribulations of being a football supporter. When was the last time they went decades without winning anything? When were they ever in danger of relegation; or suffered such a fate? Their only contact point with the perennial disappointment of being a fan is in the European arena – and even there they mostly refuse to acknowledge the fact that they usually punch above their weight.

Brookmyre gives himself the best excuse by making his main character a season ticket holder at Ibrox. Perhaps making her a St Mirren supporter would have been too much of an exposure of private grief. And it does give him the opportunity to lampoon the less analytical supporters of both of Glasgow’s ugly football sisters.

But did he perhaps fear the book’s sales would be smaller if he’d made her a fan of a wee team?

Jonathan Cape, 2004, 519p

This is the fruit of one of the local library book sales I have mentioned. A previous reader has “kindly” corrected the German spelling in it. Pity they didn’t do the same for the English. (The word for floral tributes spelled wreathes, anyone? Flowers called gladiolas?)

Or should that be American? I really resented having to omit the second “l” in traveller in this post’s title. The edition I read was printed in the UK. Why were British spellings not used? I’m quite sure that British novels released in the States are made over for that market. In these days of “Find and Replace” it is relatively simple to amend a copy-ready file, surely? Or is it just too easy for the publisher to take the US version whole and make us swallow it?

Notwithstanding that, there is something unsavoury about the whole enterprise. This begins from the cover (see above) which shows, from the waist down, a young girl in a skirt and knee socks, while lying beside her on a blanket on the ground is a man’s shirt on which his shoes are placed.

The central relationship involves Clare, who meets her future husband Henry when she is six and he is thirty years older. The catch is he is a time traveller who when she first encounters him is, in her future, already married to the woman she will become. It is nevertheless unsettling to be reading about clandestine meetings between a grown man and a child who is also his wife – even if Niffenegger is at great pains to point out that the affair is not consummated until Clare is eighteen. I don’t think this absolves her of the whiff of transgression, however.

Henry does have an excuse of sorts. He does not meet Clare in real time until she is twenty and he twenty-eight – and he has no conscious control over his time-travelling.

Each section is headed with a date and a note of Clare and Henry’s respective ages at the time. This is indicative both of flaws in the concept and/or inadequacies in the writing. It is really only a species of information dumping. Such background is surely more smoothly imparted via the narrative. We should not need our hands held in this way. Or, rather, the crutch it offers the author should be eschewed. Each section also begins with the name Clare or Henry to indicate viewpoint. Should we not be able to distinguish different narrators by their individual styles?

While there would be no story without it, the time travelling is itself problematic. The episodes we are shown (we are told there are others) are there purely to unveil the plot. Henry usually travels into the past but can on occasion go into the future. He also sometimes meets himself. Yet we are to take it on trust that he doesn’t let his future self know about Clare – the love of his life – until after they meet in real time. And they never try to alter what happens to them (except for Henry, once.) Nevertheless Henry and Clare are not above using his foreknowledge to play the stock market in order to make their lifestyle comfortable. Plus Henry still keeps on his job in a library.

Niffenegger is having her cake and eating it here.

Moreover, the rationale provided for the time travel is inadequate. It is a genetic variation, yet “a bit like epilepsy,” as Henry describes it to his boss when two of his incarnations turn up at the one time. Henry is supposed by another of the characters, a medic, to be a new stage in evolution; the first Chrono Displaced Person. And nowhere is the space travel aspect of time travel addressed.

Henry is also a bit of a prick, the sort of man whom Clare would be unlikely to fall in love with or be attracted to were it not for the unusual circumstances in which she met him. There is an implication of predestination here, or self fulfilling prophecy, which sits badly with free will. In the one instance where Henry does affect the future he is also manipulative.

Rid yourself of these quibbles, though, and the novel is a more-or-less engaging love story. But no more.

Sirius, 1992, 320 p

The same conceit as in Kaeti And Company (see my review here) runs through this collection. In each of the nine stories in the book we have the same repertory company of names for the actors but they “play” different characters in the different tales. An addition to the ensemble seems to be Tennoch, a Glaswegian woman, who pops up in “The Green Place” and subsequently. Some of the stories are fine, if inconsequential, but they are all let down by this extremely irritating framing device. There is, too, within every story a quite prodigious use of the words “leastways” or “least” to start either a sentence or a subordinate clause, which does not just happen in Kaeti’s “voice;” others join in with this annoying practice. Thankfully, this time the linking pages between the stories do not feature any dialogue between “the author” and Kaeti but instead feature only the actors.

The two most successful stories, to my mind, were “Kaeti And The Village” – set in somewhere like Oradour-Sur-Glane – and Londinium, in Roman London just as Boudicca’s hordes are about to sack the city. Both would have benefited from being lifted out of the context of this book.

In some of the other tales the characters too often drifted without explanation between different realities and/or times, lending the whole an insubstantial air. Had the characters been separately defined this might have been less of a drawback.

Roberts was a fine writer. It’s a pity his obsession with his creation “Kaeti” blinded him to the faults inherent in this repertory company concept.

Sceptre, 1999, 248p

This comes with an encomium from Gore Vidal on the front cover, ‘Master of the long ago historical novel.’ Since Vidal’s own Roman excursion Julian was no petty achievement this is high praise.

The book is essentially the reminiscences of Scaurus, an offshoot of ancient Roman aristocracy; in his youth an intimate of Vespasian’s son Titus and friend of Titus’s brother Domitian – all of whom were to become Emperor – as well as an admirer (and, much later, lover) of their sister Domatilla.

Written as a series of letters to Tacitus in reply to requests from that historian to provide background for his endeavours, interspersed with the narrator’s own reflections on his early life, it provides a close-up view of the turbulent Year of the Four Emperors that followed the death of Nero. Accordingly, the focus is not quite as sharp as it was in some of Massie’s other Roman novels; events are sometimes related at a distance. Hence, while Nero’s Heirs is always readable, there are some passages which read more like history than the dramatisation usual in a fictional narrative.

I suppose they are only to be expected in a work set in this period but the asides on early Christianity struck a wrong note for me. I would have thought that someone of Scaurus’s upbringing would most likely have paid scant attention to the doings and beliefs of a then minor, not to mention proscribed, religious sect whose adherents were mainly slaves. (No matter how beautiful his slave was.)

Massie is certainly in control of his subject matter, though, and his knowledge of the times shines through.

The novel concentrates more on Scaurus’s relationship with Domitian than either Titus or Vespasian, as he is present in Rome, with Scaurus, at the appropriate time while the others are busy quelling the Jewish rebellion in Judæa. The traits which would come to the fore when Domitian succeeded to the imperial purple are well foreshadowed by Massie, a study in the jealousy of a younger son for an older, apparently more favoured, brother.

A finely written example of the novelist’s art, Nero’s Heirs is also a painless way of immersing yourself in the history of the early Roman Empire.

John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers. Edited, decorated by Alasdair Gray
Bloomsbury, 2007, 312p

Lanark’s publication in 1981 marked not only Alasdair’s Gray’s arrival as a major Scottish novelist but also of his distinctive style. Ever since it has been impossible when sampling his work to escape the fact that you are reading a Gray book.

Old Men In Love is no exception. The usual Gray appurtenances are present; illustrations, marginal notes, typographical excursions. The Bloomsbury edition also comes with a nice internal bookmark.

The book is presented as the literary papers of John Tunnock, a retired primary school teacher, and includes extracts from Tunnock’s diary and from the various writing projects he had started, abandoned, and perhaps restarted. As a result, a couple of (short) chapters of Old Men In Love are set in renaissance Florence, there is an abortive History of Scotland from the Big Bang, a longer section dealing (in two well separated parts) with Socratic Athens, another with the origins of a small nineteenth century English religious cult called the Agapemonites, also known as the Lampeter Brethren. This last becomes a trifle tedious as it meanders on. Aside from the diary extracts the most successful of these is the part featuring Socrates – especially the scenes of his trial.

In the diaries, Tunnock is revealed as a curmudgeonly socialistic Scot, ill at ease with the modern world. But then, he was also uneasy in his youth, being brought up by two aunts and unaware till much later of his illegitimate birth.

All of this is tied up in a metafictional conceit since there is an introduction, as by Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar (an Englishwoman, now living in the US, who is the supposed beneficiary of Tunnock’s will) which mentions Gray himself in less than flattering terms. As does the epilogue, attributed to Sidney Workman – an educator marooned in Fife (I know the feeling) whose address is given as 17 Linoleum Terrace, Kirkcaldy, which, of course, does not exist – wherein the book is said to be a ragbag collection of previously published stories, plays or television transcripts. This is another Gray trope, attempting to defray criticism by anticipating it. The epilogue treats extensively with Lanark (“Workman”’s contribution to which is maintained to have sabotaged his career) as well as the remainder of Gray’s œuvre which “Workman” characterises as derivative and not worthy of the acclaim it has garnered.

Whatever the truth of these criticisms and whether Gray himself believes them or is merely presenting a posture of self-effacement, Lanark did prise open a door through which an array of Scottish SF/Fantasy writers at first trickled (Banks 1984, MacLeod 1995) then breenged (eg Cobley 2001, Gibson 2004, Duncan 2005, Campbell 2007.)

Had it been Old Men In Love which had been published in 1981 that flowering might not have taken place.

Edited to add:-
The Guardian’s Review section had a capsule review of Old Men In Love on Saturday 10/10/09. I can’t find it on their website so I can’t link to it. However, if you caught it, I wouldn’t demur from its assessment one jot.