Penguin, 2007, 306p

Reasonably successful writer Eve Smart, her philandering lecturer husband Michael and their family are renting a house in Norfolk when they are intruded upon by a female stranger called Amber, who proceeds to inveigle her way into their home, befriend Eve’s twelve year old daughter Astrid and seduce her teenage son Magnus.

The novel is split into three sections, The Beginning, The Middle and The End in all of which each family member has a narrative strand. Astrid’s narration is initially irritating as she has a habit of using ie (or even id est) in circumstances which do not warrant it. Thankfully, she – or Smith as the author – grows out of this by The End. Each section is preceded, and hence followed, by a framing narrative in the first person from Amber’s viewpoint. (This does not illumine Amber’s behaviour overmuch.) The unravelling of the Smart family’s life under Amber’s influence is the meat of the book.

There are several infelicities. Not only are a couple of characters unsympathetic but the changes of viewpoint initially jar and for a long time the lack of justification in the text irritated me. The ragged right hand margin was too much of a distraction. By The End, though, the characters (apart from Amber) are more established and these concerns fade.

I noticed that the “cloud” on my Library Thing tags this novel as Scottish Fiction. (According to the book’s blurb Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 but now lives in Cambridge.) Fantastic Fiction also designates her as Scottish. There is nothing identifiably Scottish about The Accidental, though; not its setting, its themes, its dialogue nor its vocabulary. Mind you, the same could be said about Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Father or Andrew Crumey’s Music, In a Foreign Language both of which I read recently. Interestingly enough, Library Thing has those two books tagged as Scottish Literature.

Hutchinson, 1991, 299p.

In Argentina in 1964 two young lovers, Franz Schmidt and Rebecca Czinner, children of German emigrés, decide to marry. When the two sets of parents meet, Becky’s father, Eli, a concentration camp survivor now blind, thinks he recognises something about Franz’s very affable father Rudi. Despite his reservations about all that the state of Israel represents and his past complicity as an economist with the Nazi regime, he contacts Jewish authorities in Vienna and Tel Aviv. The ramifications of this decision and of the continuing effects of the Holocaust both on individuals and on Israel are the backbone of the book.

Franz’s father disappears. His associates in Argentina reveal Franz’s father’s past to him and kidnap Becky and her friend in a bid to prevent Rudi’s transportation to Israel. It is too late, a trial date is set and the girls are set free. The love story here is a twentieth century variation on Romeo and Juliet but any animosity between the two families can barely be described as such.

The bulk of the book is set in Israel to where Franz has gone to support his father and try to understand his past actions. Becky joins him to avoid their relationship falling apart. They fall into the orbit of an Israeli journalist who speaks out against the trial. In a rather unlikely coincidence which stretched credulity, another journalist covering the trial turns out to be the former husband of Becky’s mother and the lover of a boy whom Franz had an affair with at school.

The inevitable outcome results and in a coda the lives of the main characters thereafter are described through the medium of Becky’s English cousin Gareth of whom up to then we had never heard.

The Holocaust is a sensitive subject and while Massie treats it obliquely he is clearly attempting to deal with serious issues. In this respect it is unfortunate that he renders the sentence Arbeit Macht Frei under which Franz’s father was photographed during the war with an “s” at the end of its first word. His control slips at times too. This humdinger of a sentence leapt out at me. The evening was spread out peacefully as they left the hotel, and looked for a taxi. This, with its strategically placed comma, can only mean, “The evening looked for a taxi.”

If I was to sum this up in one phrase it would be, densely written but flawed.

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.