A Son of the Rock

The Guardian has published a list of the 100 best novels of all time.

I was particuarly delighted to see Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness appear there but no 89 is really too low. Some of the others are on my tbr pile.

Shockingly – to me at least – Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is not there though I note Maggie O’Farrell did include James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (the quintessential Scottish novel) in her top ten.

The others I have read are:-

80 Rebecca

79 Go Tell It on the Mountain

75 The Bluest Eye

71 Kindred

66 The Master and Margarita

63 White Teeth

62 Half of a Yellow Sun

56 Mansfield Park

51 My Brilliant Friend

50 Wide Sargasso Sea

46 The Leopard

41 Heart of Darkness

36 The Handmaid’s Tale

35 Great Expectations

34 Wolf Hall

33 David Copperfield

31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

30 Frankenstein

29 Pale Fire

23 Midnight’s Children

22 Things Fall Apart

20  Wuthering Heights

18 Persuasion

17 One Hundred Years of Solitude

16 Nineteen Eighty-Four

14 Mrs Dalloway

13 Emma

09 Pride and Prejudice

08 Jane Eyre

07 War and Peace

04 To the Lighthouse

02 Beloved

Fortrose’s  War Memorial is the entrance arch to the cathedral precincts:-

GreatWar dedication and names:-

Second World War dedication and names:-

This song was the only one of Tzuke’s to trouble the top twenty (no 16 in 1979.)

Here’s a live performance.

Judie Tzuke: Stay With Me Till Dawn

On our trip north we were to pass through Fortrose on the Black Isle, so we stopped to look at the remains of the cathedral:-

Reverse view (stitch of two photos):-

Diagram of mediæval layout and ghost hint of how the cathedral looked then:-

Effigy of a former bishop in the precincts:-

Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1923?, 378 p. First published 1920.

Set in the fictional Tweedside town of Priorsford (whose model it is not difficult to infer given the author’s background) this is the story of the kind-hearted – to excess? – Jean Jardine, aged 23 and guardian to her two younger brothers David and Jock, but also to Gervase (nicknamed Mhor,) the son of Mr Jardine’s second wife and also left alone when both his mother and Mr Jardine died. The Jardines are poor and live in a quaint cottage called The Rigs, owned by an absentee landlord. Jean worries over the cost when David is to go to University in Cambridge, and how he will fit in.

The well-to-do Pamela Reston, sister to Lord Bidborough, was brought up in Priorsford, and returns there to visit her childhood haunts. She takes a room in the house next door to The Rigs run by the no-nonsense Bella Bathgate but soon takes a shine to Jean and her family.

Travelling on the same train north as Pamela was successful businessman Peter Reid, the Jardines’ landlord, told to take things easy by his doctor. He comes to The Riggs incognito and is charmed by Jean’s unquestioning acceptance of him as a stranger.

The Great Expectations and will they won’t they get together plot are almost superfluous though. Douglas’s focus is on domesticity, with lavish descriptions of interiors and meals, and Jean’s feelings for her fellow humans. Her depiction of middle-class life in the immediate aftermath of the Great War is also a kind of historical record.

For modern readers, though, it may be jarring to read a sentence like, “He was no Jew, and took small pleasure in the outward cleansing of the cup and platter.” (Are/were Jews more notable than others for cleanliness?) Then an old colonial warns Jock the Indian Civil Service was “hardly fit now for a white man” and a child is quoted as saying of the thought of being a minister, “No, it’s not a white man’s job.”

Douglas is easy to read and does have insight – albeit in a narrow sense – into the human condition. There is no high adventure here, no strong conflict, just quiet lives lived out quietly. Virtue rewarded, though, may have been a novelistic staple of those times but it’s less obviously apparent in the twenty-first century.

Pedant’s corner:- “the Miss Watsons” (several times, ‘the Misses Watson’.)

The hotel we stayed at on our trip north last April was by Torbreck, Inverness.

There was an avenue of trees leading off the road that led (eventueally) to Loch Ness:-

And a nice wee burn with a bridge over it close by:-

The burn from the bridge:-

Hodder, 2023, 249 p.

Godley, who died in 2024, was better known as a comedian and had a viral success with her voice-overs of Nicola Sturgeon’s press briefings during the Covid lockdowns. (“Frank, get the door!”)

This, though, is a reasonably standard novel which appears to draw on aspects of Godley’s early life for its inspiration.

When Sharon learns her mother Senga has been taken into hospital about to die she comes back from Bristol (where her marriage has broken down) to Glasgow. There she finds her mother is anxious for her to read a sort of memoir of her experiences in the 1970s. Senga’s marriage too was a mistake and her husband had left the family home. Sharon had been a practical, studious and dependable daughter, able to hold the ring as an additional support to her younger brother. The memoir is mostly concerned with Senga’s friends, most of whom have also made unsuitable marriages but Sandra’s husband is particularly controlling and prone to violence. As a result Senga becomes increasingly worried about her welfare, encouraging her to leave. But in the 1970s that was not so easy.

The book’s structure is rather unconvincing, alternating as it does between Sharon’s present and the extracts from her mother’s diary. Godley does provide a rationale for this in Sharon’s expressed reluctance to rush reading her mother’s story but surely this is psychologically unlikely. Wouldn’t most people faced with this situation read through the diary as quickly as possible?

The depiction of female friendship rings true, though, and the spirit of Glasgow shines through, while the nostalgic mentions of 1970s staples evoke the era admirably.

The story itself, however, while not inconsequential, is a little thin.

Pedant’s corner:- “The Farrow and Ball grey frontage …. were like every other café” “The Farrow and Ball grey frontage …. was like.) “Clyde was stood over the table” Clyde was standing over.) “Stuart was stood in the hall” (Stuart was standing in the hall.)  “‘Mr Blue Skies by ELO’” (Mr Blue Sky.)

On our trip up north last year we stayed a few nights in Inverness. At the War Memorial I noticed a few changes since I had first photographed it in 2018.

The Edith Cavell gardens are now more open:-

Flower bed with Gaelic inscription stone. This translates as Field of Remembrance:-

There was now a ‘ghost’ soldier:-

Plus three memorial benches.

Two for the Great War:-

And one for 1939-1945:-

Until I checked I would have said that this was Joan Osborne’s only UK hit (no 6 in 1995) but it seems she also had a no 33 the next year with a song called St Teresa.

I must confess I don’t remember that heavily accented little introduction (about the heavenly airplane [sic]) she gives in this video.

The song itself is lyrically interesting.

Joan Osborne: One of Us

I saw in Monday’s Guardian the obituary of writer Dan Simmons. His work ranged over, horror, SF and thrillers and even ventured into historical fiction.

It was as an SF writer that I knew of him but  I did watch the TV adaptation of his novel The Terror based on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition some years ago now.  I posted a photograph of a memorial to two members of the Expedition here.

Looking at my records I see I have read two of Simmon’s novels, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, (though the obit linked to above says they were originally intended as one novel) and I have had two others (Ilium and Olympos) on my tbr pile for many years. The reason I haven’t got round to reading them yet is that they resemble doorstops, which I find a bit off-putting.

Daniel Joseph (Dan) Simmons:- 4/4/1948 – 21/2/2026. So it goes.