A Son of the Rock

Alnwick Castle is surprisingly hidden from the town of Alnwick itself (except if you go along the street known as the Peth  -which I haven’t done.)  It has been owned by the Percy family since 1307.

It’s very impressive from the approach from the nearest car park:-

Entrance:-

Inner entrance:-

Courtyard:-

Door and cloister:-

Cloister:-

Lantern:-

Model of castle:-

Gollancz, 2020, 260 p.

This novel charts the distanced relationship between Shaw, a man recovering from “a rough patch” and whose tetchy mother is in a care home, and Victoria Nyman – or Norman, Shaw initially can’t remember which – who inherits her own mother’s home in another town.

Then again, everything in this book is distanced, starting with Shaw. We are never given his first name, a fact which detaches him from the narrative and puts a barrier between him and us as readers, as though, like us, he is merely an observer of proceedings. This is of course, a deliberate choice on Harrison’s part, a pointer to oddness. Throughout the novel Shaw’s interactions with others are reserved, emotionally unengaged. His mother may be partly to blame; she had had a succession of relationships with unsuitable men and is dismissive towards Shaw.

Not that Victoria is much less detached. The pair’s communications are sparse, almost ad hoc, their relationship more off than on, her experiences too tinged with oddity.

By chance Shaw meets Tim Swann, who goes on to give him a job which takes him round the country. Tim’s sister, Annie S Swann, is a medium whom Shaw consults. Her name is so close to that of all but forgotten Scottish writer Annie S Swan that it is unlikely to be a coincidence – a thought reinforced by one of the book’s chapters being titled The Swanns’ Way, an obvious reference to Proust.

Victoria becomes friendly with a waitress named Pearl, with whom she goes swimming in a pool near to Victoria’s inherited house and it is with her that the book’s oddness creeps in as she simply disappears (though not drowned) while swimming on her own.

This is a world which is apparently normal but in which strange things happen at its margins and in which none of the characters ever appears wholly part of it.

A paragraph which perhaps sums it up goes – “Poor Shaw! Compelled to believe he doesn’t believe in anything, in case he unearths from himself the one belief – the one deep consolation he daren’t relinquish; that he was always one of us. So much of his attention bound up in the work of denial that what happens to him can never really be experienced, only stored, and interpreted later as symbolic. So marginally conscious that the endless return of the repressed is all he has to work with.”

Harrison’s prose is always measured and lucid.

Pedant’s corner:- sometimes there was no question mark when a question had appeared in dialogue, acquifers (aquifers.)

Sons reward for beating Keith on Saturday is another home tie, this time against either Johnstone Burgh or Formartine United, whose game was postponed. The Third Round tie is scheduled for the weekend of 28/11/26.

This presents the possibility of Sons facing former manager Stevie Farrell who took over the reigns at Johnstone Burgh not long after leaving us. They’d have to get past Formartine first, obviously.

Scottish Cup, Round 2, The Rock, 24/10/26

Well, a win’s a win and we’re into the next round which is the main thing.

I didn’t go to the game – the Amber Warning for winds and rain put me off the 144 mile round trip.

It seems we weren’t very good but the conditions were apparently dreadful, wind and water on the pitch both holding the ball up. Leighton McIntosh took his goal well according to Pie and Bovril.

In the circumstances we’ll take the win and move on.

We’re away to Edinburgh City next week so that’ll be nul points. They own us.

In the Pictish Sculptured Stone Museum.

Pictish Beast Stone. Depiction possibly a precursor to tales of kelpies:-

Hogback stone (these are more usually associated with Vikings):-

Stone with Christian motifs:-

A song which really ought to be dear to my heart, since Chemistry was the subject I studied at University and then taught in schools.

(The video does have in it that typical agglomeration of chemical apparatus which visual media use as a shorthand and actually doesn’t make much sense – the green and red solutions are particularly incongruous. I liked the rotary evaporator though.)

Semisonic: Chemistry

Last July we went back to Meigle to see the stones at the Sculptured Stone Museum. (This time I phoned first to see if it was open.) There’s an impressive array of Pictish stones.

View of Museum stones:-

Cultural crossover stone with Pictish and Christian symbols:-

Reverse of stone in previous photo. The symbols are thought to depict the story of Daniel in the lion’s den:-

Strange fish like symbols:-

A hunting scene:-

Gollancz, 2025, 330 p. Reviewed for ParSec 15.

Halcyon is a generation starship en route to Vanderdecken’s star. The vast structure’s interior, containing many distinct neighbourhoods, including a large lake, is lit by a Skytube which contains the ship’s neuromimetic core and darkens at ‘night’ to display star configurations. Every so often Halcyon’s apparently serene progress is interrupted by disturbances known as growlers, when its forward shield is impacted by interstellar dust particles and the reverberations are felt throughout the ship. The ship’s social hierarchy is topped by the Urry and DelRosso families, whose behaviour is more or less like that of rival criminal gangs. A notable feature of ship life is the Hibernaculum, a building nicknamed Sleepy Hollow, where, for a price, the personalities of the recent (or not so recent) dead can be stored for later revival in new bodies.

Our viewpoint character is not an Urry nor a DelRosso but rather, one Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin (yes, that Yuri Gagarin,) emerged from Sleepy Hollow many years ago and complete with memories of that first human journey into space. Yet this illustrious history has not been parlayed into anything like celebrity for Yuri: he is a humble private detective and we first meet him when a surveillance job on a cheating spouse goes wrong.

Then we have a classic film noir/detective story set up. A woman calling herself Ruby Blue and claiming to be from the ship’s Department of Works turns up at Yuri’s office and asks him to investigate two suspicious deaths, those of Julianna DelRosso and Randall Urry, seemingly typical Romeo and Juliet-like star cross’d lovers, reported dead weeks apart. Being from those prominent families, the police are an unsuitable option to probe into their deaths, hence Ruby’s recourse to Yuri.

In all this something begins to nag at the attentive reader – unremarked on by most of Halcyon’s present inhabitants since it is their daily existence – but the technology on display is resolutely low rather than high. The camera destroyed in Yuri’s failed surveillance attempt wasn’t digital (or even something more advanced) but instead contained film. Telephones are restricted to fixed locations, there are printed newspapers, railway lines and tape recorders. How on Earth does this square with the developments required to build a generation starship; or indeed the operation of the Hibernaculum?

Only Yuri’s friend Milvus has suspicions about Halcyon’s situation, that the powers that be are hiding something. He suspects that Halcyon may in fact have stopped in space.

The wounds sustained by Randall Urry, as if he had been blasted by one of the ship’s photon cannon, deployed to ward off anything approaching Halcyon obliquely, suggest the answers lie outside the ship. As Yuri’s subsequent trip outside (in a submarine which doubles as an excursion vehicle) discovers, some of them do, but the real ones are internal and more alarming than Milvus had conceived of: revelations which both explain the true status of Halcyon’s journey and why the technology on board is now so low tech.

Throw in some degraded robots (Yuri forms an attachment to one he names Sputnik and which helps advance the plot,) Ruby Blue’s equally enigmatic sister Ruby Red, cynical but resourceful ex-policeman Lemmy Litz and wronged wife Vedette Apolisi, not to mention the supremely world-weary matriarch of the DelRosso family and we have a collection of characters to savour.

In sum, Halcyon Years is a clever and well-thought-out mash-up of the noir style thriller and SF but one which absolutely depends on its science-fictional content for its resolution.

I’m not so sure Halcyon’s Yuri Gagarin would have spoken with such garbled syntax, though.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian. Otherwise; sprung (sprang.) “‘Then I hoped you’ve booked’” (‘Then I hope you’ve booked’,) “‘to let them know you’re on your up’” (‘you’re on your way up’,) “outside of” (just outside; no ‘of’,) “to throw himself in the machinations of a case” (to throw himself into the machinations,) “‘and what makes think Lemmy Litz would’” (and what makes you think.) “He opened and it examined the documents” (He opened it and examined the documents,) “another black car heaved into view” (hove into view,) “pages that referred eyewitness accounts” (that referred to eyewitness accounts,) “and bid them temporary farewell” (bade them,) “the band were tuning up” (the band was tuning up.) “‘I didn’t think it would it help’” (the second ‘it’ is superfluous,) “keeping on automatic on her” (keeping the automatic on her; or, keeping one automatic on her,) “the door sprung out” (sprang out,) “Yuri bid farewell” (bade farewell.)

I haven’t done an astronomy post for a while. This makes up for that.

The image is from Astronomy Picture of the Day for 10/10/26.

It looks like maybe one of Jupiter’s or Saturn’s moons:-

It is in fact our own Moon but a view we don’t normally see.

This is the lunar far side.

With no maria and apparently many more craters it’s very different from the familar picture of our nearest celestial neighbour.

John Murray, 2023, 329 p, including 3 p Contents, 5 p Historical Notes and 1 p Acknowledgements.

In 1883 former emigré Niall Munro returns from the US to Scotland to practice his new trade of shoemaking with a firm in Rutherglen. He is told by someone on the bus to the town that the widow Bain may have a place for a lodger. Mrs Bain hesitates slightly before taking him in, setting strict ground rules for his stay.

She was once Jamesina Ross, from Glencalvie in Strathcarron, with a musical bent and hopes of fulfilment but has had a hard life since and bears the literal scars to prove it. In her youth the local Minister, Reverend Aird, had taken her under his wing, and taught her Latin, which in her later years she still used to examine the words and phrases with which people spoke to her. But life in Glencalvie was about to change, evictions were in hand. Reverend Aird says in answer to Jamesina’s questioning, “‘People have always had to leave the places they love because of the folly of others. They get by in the end, most of them, and some may even flourish, but no one should imagine on that account that dispossession is right.’” He tells her the evictions are about race and shows her a newspaper column sanguine about such clearances since, “This exodus might allow for settlement of racially superior people of Teutonic stock in districts from which the Gaels have been removed.” (The main replacement, of course, was by sheep.)

Music in the Dark, however, is also a story of love in later years. In interspersed chapters, all beautifully written, some set in the kitchen bed where the two reflect on their lives and relationships, others as a relaying of Jamesina’s experiences of growing up, we see, because of Mrs Bain’s singing her songs of remembrance, Munro realise that, as a boy, he knew her, and, despite themselves, their closeness grows.

In a fairly restrained manner, matter of fact but not gratuitously, in Music in the Dark Magnusson has placed the forced removal of Gaelic people from their ancestral homes at its focus, and, moreover, highlighted the resistance of local women to those evictions and the brutality meted out to them. It by no means a chronicle of doom, though. As Reverend Aird said, most people get by in the end. Take solace where you find it.