A Son of the Rock

If you carry on up the main road from the car park at Clava Cairns you reach a further much smaller cairn site accessed by a footpath. This is Milton of Clava Cairn.

Looking back to main site from road:-

Milton of Clava Cairn (and standing stone) from path:-

Milton of Clava Cairn:-

In response to its 100 best novels list I posted about here, on Saturday last the Guardian published its readers’ list of their 100 best novels.

I must admit I did not send in my contribution so have no grounds for complaint but again I note the absence of Sunset Song.

I did better with these, 44 (47 if the Neapolitan Quartet counts as 4; or 43⅓ if the Tolkien is taken as a whole.)

Since I copied and pasted from the Guardian website the links are theirs.

93=  Animal Farm by George Orwell

Love in the Time of Cholera  by Gabriel García Márquez

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

80= Dune by Frank Herbert

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

75= Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brideshead Revisited  by Evelyn Waugh

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  by John le Carré

73= The Unbearable Lightness of Being  by Milan Kundera

70= Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

To the Lighthouse  by Virginia Woolf

63= Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante  (Isn’t this actually four books?)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

62 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

60 Possession by AS Byatt

57 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

52= Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Emma  by Jane Austen

49 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

46  Watership Down  by Richard Adams

41 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

39= Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Stoner by John Williams

37 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

31 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

29 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens  (Also at 29 was Huckleberry Finn which I may have read when very young but can’t actually remember doing so.)

26 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

21 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

20 Beloved by Toni Morrison

19 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

16 Persuasion by Jane Austen

14= Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

8= Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (I’ve now started this.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

7 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

6 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

5 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

1 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (I’ve only read The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the trilogy.)

Picador, 2019, 41 p. lllustrated by David De Las Heras.

This, like The Christmas Truce, is one of Duffy’s Christmas poems. It is inspired by the frost fairs that took place on the River Thames in London during the Little Ice Age when people erected tents, stalls and even set fires on the frozen river during winter.

Duffy’s female narrator disguises herself as a man and wanders through the town describing the scenes she sees and eventually ventures onto the ice (not without initial mishap) to immerse herself in the goings-on, before spending the night sleeping on the river.

Usually the three lines at the end of the irregularly sized stanzas are rhymed.

David De Las Heras’s illustrations could be described as cartoonish, consisting as they do of blocks of colour, but they are effective in conveying the atmosphere and their crowd scenes in particular are reminiscent of Brueghel.

See my previous post on Clava Cairns here.

Kerb Cairn:-

One of the cairns:-

A more mounded cairn:-

A tomb entrance:-

The ring cairn:-

Cairns towards back of site:-

In my mind Clarence Carter, who died last month, was a one-hit wonder.

Of course technically he wasn’t, since that description is supposed to apply only to those who had a no 1 single and no other hits. Carter’s song Patches reached no 2 in the UK in 1970. (I also find he had a UK no 82 in 1989 but that hardly counts as a hit.)

That no 2, Patches, falls into that category of sentimentality which courses through USian culture. (Last week’s entry in this category counts there too but Patches bears more resemblance to The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp, a success for O C Smith in 1968.)

Clarence Carter: Patches

Clarence George Carter:  14/1/1936 –13/5/2026. So it goes.

Clava Cairns is a site near Inverness containing the quite well preserved remains of prehistoric structures used for burials. It’s also very close to the Culloden battle site.

General view from entrance:-

Looking back from inside site:-

Cairn (with entrance hidden by standing stone above):-

Interior of cairn:-

Cup and ring marks:-

Pocket Books, 2005, 661 p, plus vi p Dramatis Personae.

The usual fare from Turtledove as his mirroring of the Second World War in a world where magic/sorcery is a prevalent feature and fantasy creatures abound comes to an end. The episodic structure, returning to its viewpoint characters every so often, continues to frustrate with its repetitions of things the reader already knows about the people portrayed and their circumstances. So, too, does the misogyny of many of the characters. But this is an unenlightened world, and while it has good people in it there are not enough of them to make a material difference. They are only operating at the margins.

The equivalences with our world are not exact. For example there are no republics here, King Mezentio, the leader of the racist aggressors, does not die by his own hand but asks a soldier to do it and the magical counterpart to the Manhattan Project achieves its goal only unlike in our world is demonstrated to citizens of its proposed victims before its final deployment – on the capital city rather than provincial ones. It is interesting, though, that the developed magic/sorcery has been throughout the seven Darkness books subject to theoretical calculation. (Not quite magic then?) Though apart from drawing energy from the not always handy ley-lines it still needs life force to power it.

As Turtledove’s Derlavaian War winds down several of those we have come to know (very few of whom have experienced character development) meet their ends, others have happy endings – of sorts. The parallels with our world extend to an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials. The book doesn’t end so much as stop, but as far as its survivors were concerned this was also true of our Second World War. Life goes on, if in different circumstances. Not all of them congenial.

Pedant’s corner:- “Tsavellas’ small kingdom” (Tsavellas’s,) “Iskakis’ wife” (Iskakis’s,) “not as if he’d take a step” (context suggests ‘not as if he’d taken a step’,) “floating fortress’ stick” (fortress’s,) “the marquis’ air” (marquis’s,) “but we liked to come into Priekule to listen to him” (not Priekule; Pavilosta,) “‘I should have won Algarve should have won’” (is missing a punctuation mark after that first ‘won’,) “Captain Frigyes’ bloodthirsty magic” (Frigyes’s,) “‘Assuming what you say about Mezentio is true, will will grant your soldiers their lives’” (… is true, we will grant …,) “Balazs’ smile” (Balazs’s. Balazs’ appeared again once,) “the ballocks” (I assume Turtledove, being USian, has only heard this word and doesn’t realise it’s spelled ‘bollocks’,) “Gyongos’ skirmishes” (Gyongyos’s,) Kunhegyes’ battered old palisade” (Kunhegyes’s.)

On that trip north last year our hotel was in the south of Inverness. It was only seven or so miles  from the village of Dores on the eastern shore of Loch Ness.

Loch Ness looking south from east shore:-

Looking west:-

Looking northwest:-

As you can see the shore curves round almost due west. On that south facing shoreline is a small beach from which there is a fine view south:-

Looking southeast from that beach some of the village can be seen:-

A stone cross above a tapered rectangular column situated on a small hill at the junction of the A 862 and A 831 a mile or so west of Beauly itself.

World War dedications and names. An inscription states “Parish of Kilmorack” in which parish Beauly lies. There is also a name for 1979, presumably a death in Northern Ireland:-

Polygon, 2007, 265 p, plus 5 p Introduction by Frederic Lindsay.

Sandy Ross has retired from his life as a sailor to live out his time on a croft on his ancestral soil. An intrusion into his settled world comes when local policeman Nicol Menzies arrives to tell him a murder – of Menzies’s brother, Robert – has taken place and he needs to search the croft. The perpetrator is Allan Innes, one of a group of youths who used to frequent the croft.

A discomfited Sandy, all too aware Menzies is fired with an uncompromising zeal, pretends to unlock his barn and doesn’t mention the resistance he felt when pushing the door open. His more or less unconscious decision to try to help Innes lays out the novel’s path. When Menzies leaves, Sandy provides Innes with enough food to last a day or so.

Innes avoids the search for him by hiding on the Crannock (a crannog) in Loch Deoch, swimming across and back to keep in touch with Sandy, who plans to provide him with money and disguising clothing.

Fate intervenes when Sandy takes his cow to be served by the local bull. In her eagerness the cow pulls Sandy over and breaks his ribs, rendering him bed-bound. His everyday needs are looked after by the widow Macleay, a neighbour, who calls in the doctor and a redoubtable local nurse is also arranged. The widow Macleay is looked upon as a suitable husband for Sandy but he is wary of such a prospect.

A more surprising carer is Liz Murison, the woman over whom Innes and Robert Menzies had quarrelled, who turns up on Sandy’s doorstep saying she’d heard he needed help. In her pregnant state she has left the orbit of her father’s ire and his religious strictures.

The local minister drops in to try to persuade Sandy to return the girl to her family home. The minister – fond of a secret dram – says to him, “‘But if man does not take a stand on the great moral issues, woman never will. It’s not in her nature. There are times when a woman has no more moral sense than a fly on a windowpane.’”

Sandy isn’t swayed, Liz has no desire to go back and he sees no reason to ignore her wishes.

Things go on the way to their conclusion as the determined Nicol doggedly pursues his quarry to the bitter end.

Each of the characters (except perhaps for Nicol) is portrayed sympathetically. Sandy’s humanity in particular shines through.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; “Nicol Menzies’ brother” (Menzies’s,) “Allan Innes’ sweetheart” (Innes’s.) Otherwise: a missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech, one missing before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “It’s door was ajar” (Its door,) “finger prints” and, later, “finger-prints” (nowadays one word; ‘fingerprints’,) “fo’c’stle” (fo’c’sle – or fo’c’s’le.) “The pain, like the bruises, were on his left side” (The pain, …, was on his left side,) “tried to ease his shoulder out if its bandaging” (out of its bandaging,) a missing opening quotation mark before a piece of direct speech. “‘May be so’” (Maybe so.)