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.

Dedalus, 2004, 243p

Not being a straightforward narrative this is a difficult novel to describe. Tenses shift within sections, there are stories within stories, false starts, rewritten chapters, repetitions of scenarios and the narrator is at pains to point out the fictionality of it all, indeed at times it reads more as a disquisition on literary efforts than an attempt at one. Yet, for all these strictures, it was immensely readable.

The tricksiness begins early as the novel starts with Chapter 0, where the narrator is thinking post coital thoughts about two characters who meet on a train and about whom he intends to write a novel. The bulk of Music, in a Foreign Language deals with the back story of one of these, a young man called Duncan, and the events leading up to the death of his father, Robert Waters. Waters and his friend Charles King had at the time been involved in slightly subversive activity in a Soviet style post-war Britain. This was the first appearance of that altered history in which Crumey also set parts of Mobius Dick and Sputnik Caledonia. The compromises such a society demands, the paranoia it engenders – and the betrayals it necessitates – are allowed to emerge organically from the story. Despite the title, music as a motif appears sparingly.

My one minor caveat is that the female characters are not as fully rounded as they might be, but the book’s main focus is on the friendship between Waters and King, so perhaps that is understandable.

I was equally as impressed by this, Crumey’s debut novel, as I was by both others of his I have read. If you like well written, thoughtful – even playful – novels you could do worse than give Crumey a try.

Abacus, 1997.

A wealthy and powerful newspaper owner is murdered in a luxury house in Perthshire. The police have apprehended the four burglars responsible. But one of them has left a package with his lawyer, to be opened if he didn’t make a quick return to her office. And the security consultant Donald Lafferty, friend of journalist Jack Parlabane, dies minutes after uttering an oblique message to the assembled TV crews outside the police station where the suspects are being held. A tale of intrigue and conspiracy follows where skulduggery at the heart of government is revealed and unravelled. While the plot and its resolution is not entirely convincing the book is vastly readable with the occasional joke or reference thrown in to lighten things. I particularly liked, “I’m a man of stealth and haste.”

It is interesting that this was written in the dog days of the 1990s Conservative Government yet reads as well now as it might have done then; as if nothing has changed, which of course, in some respects, it hasn’t.

I have noted before Brookmyre’s usage “borne of” when “born of” makes more sense. He adds here, “up to high doe” (which gave me an image of a deer on a plinth) and “thrusted” as the past tense of thrust.

This was only Brookmyre’s second novel so a few infelicities are to be expected. But he has the increasingly irritating habit here of beginning every new scene in medias res and then flashing back to its beginning. He also feels the need to provide backstory for every new viewpoint character when they take up the narrative thread. While this is a timeworn literary technique it is no more than a form of info dumping.

The Country of the Blind is a Brookmyre. It does what it says on the tin. All well and good. Sometimes that is what hits the spot.

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.

Serpent’s Tail, 2006, 241p.

At the start of Belonging Jack McCall is a janitor come handy-man at a remote set of luxury flats in the Swiss Alps. One day in the middle of winter a middle aged male resident arrives with a young woman called Thérèse. The next morning the man is dead, having slipped on the balcony during a snowstorm which has cut the site off. Jack has to help deal with the body and he and his girlfriend Anna look after Thérèse till the police arrive.

Due to a disturbed childhood and regular psychoanalysis Anna over-interprets things and constantly questions Jack about the reasons for his actions. She also desires to settle down. Three months after the incident she persuades him to go back home to Edinburgh to get married. En route, at the Gare Du Nord in Paris, Jack has cold feet, slips off the train – and seeks out Thérèse. He takes up with her and finds she is a child of divorce. The dead man was in fact her estranged father whom she had only just sought out. She blames herself, through her revelation of their true relationship, for her father’s death. Jack and Thérèse subsequently travel to a remote location in Spain where a small group of people live a very basic life in not much more than huts. At this point the novel loses its way a little as the motivations of the various characters are obscure.

All of this is played out to an occasional backdrop of overheard news of the Iraq War and the July 7^th and Madrid bombings which is not germane to the plot and does no more than locate the story in time.

Unlike Butlin’s earlier The Sound of my Voice or Night Visits, both of which employed second person narration – wholly or in part – Belonging is a thoroughly conventional first person tale, narrated from Jack’s viewpoint. Both of those earlier novels were more tightly focused, with fewer characters. Though Anna is displayed in all her annoying smugness, Thérèse’s motivations remain opaque – her parents’ divorce and mother’s remarriage aren’t really sufficient to explain her malaises – and some of the bit players are not as well delineated as might be hoped for. The climactic event was certainly unexpected but the novel seems to dribble away afterwards, taking what felt to me to be a wrong turning as Jack’s life reassembles.

Belonging is nevertheless finely written, just not as satisfying and meaty as Butlin’s previous novels.

Jonathan Cape, 2006, 390p.

Warner has been known principally for stories featuring women, eg Morvern Callar and The Sopranos, or with Scottish settings, The Man Who Walks. The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven represents a departure, a different focus. None of its themes nor concerns could be considered narrowly Scottish.

A man is told by his doctor he has The Condition, which is nowadays not an inevitable death sentence. The novel is constructed from his activities of the next few weeks and his memories of the women he has known. (Not as many women as he once planned.)

There are striking stylistic and narrative echoes of other authors; William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms and John Banville’s The Sea, The Sea but more particularly of JG Ballard. This tendency was clinched on page 94 when a sentence was begun with the word already – a typically Ballardian usage. Reflecting this there is a Science Fictional tone to some of the language. A winter festival of gift giving is known as Three Kings, an area of construction and development is Phases Zones 1 and 2, a train destination is Kilometre 4. The Heaven in the title may be the local cemetery, which is mentioned several times.

As with Ballard and earlier Warner novels the tone is dry and distanced, hence none of the characters entirely springs to life. Indeed certain characters are not named but only given attributes, The Woman Who Watched, Puta of Asunción, Beautiful Screamer, Manic Coma, though admittedly these last few are inmates of an asylum.

Despite hints – a past Civil War, a fascist regime – which clearly point to Spain, the author, through his narrator Manolo Follana, resolutely refuses to name the country in which the story is set, only saying variously our language, our country, our region, the Capital City. Said narrator has a particular animus against English as a language, with its similarly spelled words with totally different meanings, eg tear. He is, incidentally, capable of the spectacularly ugly (and ungrammatical) sentence; for example, “I showed Teresa the new units my Agency were designing the interiors of,” and occasionally uses “less” when “fewer” is the better choice.

A flavour of magic realism tinges the narrative, albeit at a less heightened level. A more or less adult Manolo is taught to swim by two Vietnamese girls in the confines of the rooftop water tank of the hotel where he was brought up. An old man dies in a bath in one of the hotel’s rooms with the taps still running; the bath ends up cascading through the ceiling of the dining room below where his granddaughters were eating. On two occasions, one fatal but offstage, the act of sex is accompanied by the shedding of blood.

In amongst all this there was the – in context rather jarring – Scotticism of the phrase “sweetie” wrapper.

The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven is an example of accomplished modern world fiction. For me, though, too many of the characters are insufficiently fleshed out.

Canongate, 1985, 181p.

Every Gray book is a visual delight. This is another of those beautifully produced Canongate editions of Gray’s works, as usual with wide margins and illustrations by the author, though here there are no footnotes nor marginal annotations. In the main these so-called sorry stories feature, as the book’s title suggests, put-upon protagonists and include more than a few tales of unsatisfactory or failed marriages. They vary in length from two or so to 44 pages.

Gray’s narrators tend to have an air of detachment about them and it is unsurprising that their relationships are dysfunctional. Some have especially unfortunate habits. Job’s Skin Game’s narrator is so fascinated by his own eczema he subject his scabs to almost Linnaean levels of classification.

Of the other stories that do not focus on marriage Aiblins features the suppression by an academic of a younger poet’s works and acts partly as a device to smuggle in some of Gray’s own (accomplished) poetry which he nevertheless deconstructs in typical Gray fashion. Wellbeing is about the necessity of not being sane in our crazy world and Big Pockets With Buttoned Flaps is an unusual erotic preference.

15 February 2003 is not so much a story as an account of an anti-Iraq war march. Here Gray mentions that the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956. He is confusing this with the invasion of Hungary in that year. The (crushed) Prague Spring was in 1968.

With its illustrations of disconnection mixed with the odd desultory polemic, as an introduction to Gray’s world view this collection couldn’t be bettered.

Little Brown, 2005. 407p.

Well, this was a first. Never before have I thought of a Brookmyre novel, “this is a bit slow.” There have been digressions and lacunae interspersed in the plots but these have always been leavened by the humour permeating his writing. Once the action gets going this one does perk up a bit but then slows down again before picking up once more.

Two chapters (crucially including the first) are almost entirely devoted to information dumping disguised as back story. Where such information is essential to the plot (and here some is) it would be better unfolded in the narrative, shown to us rather than told. Admittedly that would have made the book even longer than it now is, but still.

The plot itself revolves around a worker in the arms industry, Ross Fleming, who has invented a device that threatens to turn that murky world upside down. The heroine, though, is his middle-aged and previously homely (yet ex-punk) mother, Jane, who is “recruited” by the team tasked with the job of recovering Ross after he disappears suddenly.

In the end it all becomes more than a little unbelievable – and Jane’s transformation into Action Woman is too quick – but Brookmyre plots have never really withstood much close scrutiny.

The book is still characteristically readable but somewhere along the way the author’s distinctive humour seems to have been mislaid. It is almost as if Brookmyre might have thought his usual comedic approach is somehow unworthy and he was making an effort at being a more “serious” writer. There are still flashes, though; a nice aside on the Catholic Church’s propensity to move doctrinal goalposts and a rant on the disproportionate contribution of Scots to human progress.

If I were recommending a starting point for potential Brookmyre readers I’d suggest other books of his, though.

B+W, 1991. 144p.

(The cover shown on the right is different to my copy’s. My Library Thing link showed the correct one.)

This is a collection of 19 short stories – some very short indeed. Their settings lie mainly in Scotland and explore a variety of domestic and other situations but a few consecutive ones are set in the USA (where some gentle fun is poked at USians feeble grasp of the geography of the wider world) and one features Australia.

The most successful are the longest two A Little Irony, where a female artist uses photographs of her narrator boyfriend’s penis in an exhibition, and What Do You Want, How Do You Feel?, about a marriage going through a rocky patch. These feel more rounded perhaps because their length gives room for character exploration. The latter also comes closest to providing the standard twist that people used to expect of a short story.

The social background of Bottle, wherein ne’er-do-weels are employed inside bottle banks, could almost be read as SF. As indeed could Problem, where a man’s wife reveals that she is in fact (or has somehow become; it’s not quite clear) a man. Within the story this sort of transformation appears to be a wider social phenomenon.

Robertson can certainly create atmosphere. The first story, Border, isn’t about much (a young boy travelling north by train looks for the border point after Berwick) but says it well.

If I have a criticism it is that a lot of the stories tend to peter out rather than end. Indeed there is one which finishes with the words, “Any time now something would happen.” Isn’t it the happening that a short story should be about?

Despite this stricture, Close is a well rounded and diverse collection.

Faber, 2000. 282p.

When he was young, to escape his alcoholic father, Jamie Bawn ran away from his home in Berwick to live with his grandparents in Ayrshire. His grandfather, Hugh, “Mr Housing,” was the major driving force behind the building of tower blocks in Scotland and encouraged the taking of short cuts in the construction process to get as many as possible built for the money in order to remove people from slums. The generation before, Hugh’s mother Effie was a turn of the century socialist famous for leading a rent strike. Now (in 1995) Jamie has returned to Ayrshire to be with his dying grandfather.

The ramifications of family relationships, how each succeeding generation reacts to – or against – the previous, are the theme of the book – though at one point it does seem that O’Hagan’s title may be more of a reference to the Lord’s Prayer. (Catholicism is a given in the two O’Hagan books I have read.)

As in his later novel Be Near Me O’Hagan has a priest making sexual advances on minors and makes light of it. This is a very small incident in Our Fathers, mentioned in passing, treated as a matter of fact, and as a result it reads oddly after the scandals revealed in recent years.

The meat of the novel is in Hugh Bawn’s unshakeable belief that what he did was for the best. This is something that is perhaps characteristic of those of a religious bent.

The prose can be opaque at times, as if O’Hagan was trying too hard. It was his first novel after all.

Not a lot happens in Our Fathers and the text does not quite live up to the claims made for it on the back cover. But O’Hagan can turn a sentence.

The subjects of other O’Hagan novels, one about a young woman clearly modelled on Lena Zavaroni and another narrated by Marilyn Monroe’s dog, do not appeal to me, however.

Span count:- 1. (We also had swang – as the past tense of swing – which I confess I’d never heard of before but a few online dictionaries give as archaic or now chiefly dialect.)