A Son of the Rock

This one is courtesy of my younger son who sent me the photo from his trip to Lochinver last year.

Lochinver is a village in Assynt, Sutherland.

Its War Memorial depicts a kilted soldier with rifle at the ready atop a granite column above a tapering plinth.

Here can be seen dedications to both World Wars. Second World War names shown below. (Great War names are on the memorial’s sides.)

Inlaid Table, Brodie Castle:-

Bed:-

Bedroom:-

Library:-

Stained glass armorial window, bearing the Brodie Arms:-stained glass

Little, Brown, 2020, 442 p.

The sixth Karen Pirie book and again she is juggling two cases.

The first is when a skeleton is discovered in a campervan stored in a house’s garage for years. Suspicion falls on the deceased owner’s former lover, who abandoned her for a life as an artist. The second is a live case of a body hauled up along with a creel by a fishing boat off Elie. Since the dead man is one James Auld, whose brother Ian, a high-up civil servant in the Scottish Office, disappeared ten years before, and Karen had recently reviewed his case, she is given the remit.

James had fallen under suspicion of murdering his brother and to escape that had made a new life for himself by joining the Foreign Legion and then settling in France as one Paul Allard. Since the initial investigation was carried out in Fife DS Daisy Mortimer out of the Kirkcaldy Police office ends up seconded to Karen’s Historic Cases Unit. (This becomes semi-permanent when Karen’s assistant DC Jason Murray – aka the Mint – suffers a broken leg during the investigation.)

Connections in both cases are soon made – though not between them – but take time to tease out. In the meantime Karen is still grieving over the death of her former lover Phil Parhatka and worried about the direction her new relationship with Hamish, owner of a small chain of coffee shops in Edinburgh and a cottage up north. He does perform a useful function here though by identifying a mysterious male in a photograph of Ian Auld found in James’s French apartment. This is David Greig, once an enfant terrible artist, who committed suicide not long after Ian Auld’s disappearance. When Karen learns six well-known Scottish paintings were stolen from the Scottish Office and replaced by forgeries in the years immediately prior to the Toy/Lib Dem coalition government she begins to join the dots.

Pedant’s corner:- Plus points for “amn’t I?” “There were a handful” (there was a handful,)  “James’ message” (James’s.)

A ceiling. As I recall we were told this was plaster made to look like carved wood:-

Another ceiling:-

An armorial ceiling:-

Fire Range:-

A fireplace:-

Heavily carved fireplace:-

Vintage, 2000? 568 p. First published 1961. (The publishing information page gave this edition’s date as 1994, but the author information page states he died in 1999 so it must have been some time later.)

How to approach a novel whose title has contributed a concept to the world’s lexicon of phrases? Indeed, a novel whose cover describes it as “One of the great novels of the century” and was no 99 in the recent Guardian list of 100 greatest novels ever, thus spurring me on to retrieve it from my tbr pile. That makes it 34 of those 100 I have now read. (It made no 8 in the readers’ list.)

And how will it conform to the great novelistic concerns of love, sex and death?

Well, Catch-22 is a war novel, so that’s death ticked off – though not often directly. Fear of death, yes, (the background to the eponymous catch,) but not death itself. Sex is certainly alluded to, but in a perfunctory way, and there is precious little love displayed in its pages. Some of the characters say they’re in love but the reader may beg to doubt it.

War novels have a head start in the importance stakes. They do tend to be taken seriously, as Kate Atkinson noted.

War is, of course, a deadly serious business; but it is also at its root utterly absurd and non-sensical. In Catch-22, Heller has chosen to lean into that absurdity. Heavily. At times so heavily it tips over into farce.

The text is full of digressions, repetitions and conversations which circle back on themselves or have characters repeating to each other what each has just said. It is decidedly non-linear with the narrative sometimes jumping from one scene to another mid-sentence. Scenes from main character Yossarian’s training and the island of Pianosa where he is based in the ‘now’ of the novel slide into each other without demarcation. Character descriptions tend to the grotesque and few of them impress as real people. The treatment of women is perfunctory and off-hand. The overall impression is of a surrealistic collage which goes thoroughly overboard at times with such character names such as Major Major and A Fortiori.

But it is not really so much a novel of war as of the US military mindset. Colonel Cathcart’s desire for promotion (or publicity,) the rivalries between senior officers more important to them than the war itself. Cathcart’s continual raising of the number of missions his charges must fly before their tour ends and they can be sent home is the proximate cause of bomb-aimer Yossarian’s refusal to fly any more, his natural fear of being killed not then being evidence of the insanity which would ensure his withdrawal from combat. Quartermaster Milo Minderbinder’s black market activities – supposedly to benefit all the soldiers on the base – with his fingers in every pie imaginable plus a few more, extend even to dealing with the Germans and undermine the war effort in other ways.

The novel does undergo a mood change halfway through chapter 39 (out of 42) when the narrative becomes more sombre and it is from here on that Cathcart and Colonel Korn suddenly show more perspicacity and cunning than up to that point.

I can’t decide whether this is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (a phrase I have purloined in a bid for comic effect) or the most annoying novel I’ve ever read.

I think I lean towards the latter.

Sensitivity note: the word ‘nigger’ appears – as do ‘kike’, ‘wop’ and ‘spic’.

Pedant’s corner:- “the educate Texan from Texas” (that’s where Texans usually come from,) “a bus depot blazing with red and yellow lights” (wouldn’t they have a blackout?) “clefted chin” (cleft chin,) receptable (receptacle,) german (x 1, elsewhere, as is proper, German,) “threw this arms about” (his arms,) “and order him” (and ordered him.) “Now She sat” (she,)  “how many times she’s packed his bags” (he’s packed his bags,) “like most of all” (Liked most of all,) mispronounciations (mispronunciations,) “Dr Stubbs’ fault” (Stubbs’s.) “‘Another country heard from’”  (elsewhere this phrase is rendered as another county heard from.)

I saw in yesterday’s Guardian that singer Beverley had died in April.

I featured her version of Randy Newman’s Happy New Year on 1/1/2021.

Beverley’s marriage to John Martyn was marred by abusive behaviour on his part and also meant Beverley’s career, certainly in a solo sense, stalled.

This was her second solo single. This time a song written by Donovan – which is obvious when you listen to it.

Beverley: Museum

Though known after her marriage, and in her musical collaborations with John, as Beverley Martyn, in accordance with the Scottish tradition on headstones I commemorate her in death with her maiden name.

Beverley Kutner: 24/3/1947 – 27/4/2026. So it goes.

Brodie Castle from approach drive:-

Side view:-

Dining table:-

Room with chandelier:-

Decorated internal doorway:-

Chaie longue:-

Tor, 2025, 123 p.

Rose House was deceased architect Basit Deniau’s greatest creation, “curled like the petals of a gypsum crystal in the shadow of a dune” in the Mojave desert. Rose House is the house where he died – and his mausoleum, his compressed remains fashioned into a diamond displayed on a plinth. It was left in his will to Deniau’s one-time student turned critic Dr Selene Gisil. Only she can have access – and only for seven days a year.

Rose House is a haunt, embedded with artificial intelligence. Selene hates it so much she left after only three of those days and fled to Turkey to pursue her career there.

Rose House has just telephoned China Lake Police Precinct to inform its officers there is a dead body inside it, as it was legally required to do.

The novella Rose/House is a locked room mystery, whose subject matter lies at the intersection of Science Fiction, horror and crime. A locked room (or locked house) to which the police cannot gain access.

A neat premise, certainly, and a book densely, even philosophically, written.

So, how did someone gain entry to Rose House only to be killed? And how can the police solve a crime or even assess the scene in such a restricted building?

To Detective Maritza Smith – forced to identify as the inanimate China Lake Police Precinct in order to gain entry along with Selene, recalled from Turkey – the house has a pervading sense of menace. To the reader it comes across like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Martine handles all this well. But the novella’s setting in the late 22^nd century seems much too far off.

Pedant’s corner:- “which oughtn’t have surprised her” (oughtn’t to have surprised her,) “Torres’ offer” (Torres’s,) “amongst Los Angeles’ most distinguished” (Los Angeles’s,) “sat in the back seat” (seated; or sitting,) a sentence ending in ‘did they’ but without a question mark, “chile enchilada” (chili enchilada,) putrescene (putrescine – used later.)

By the entrance to Brodie Castle in Moray there is a Pictish Stone:-

Reverse:-

Information Board:-

I spotted this one when driving through Nairn. Has deco touches.:-