Archives » 2008 » October

One Night In Winter by Allan Massie

The Bodley Head, 1984

One Night in Winter cover

Dallas Graham, a former writer with one novel long behind him, now runs an antique shop. He has a more successful and still sexy wife who has affairs from time to time and who reacquaints him with Candida, a woman he knew years before. Dallas writes about this past, relating the tangled circumstances of Candidas involvement in a high profile murder, as if his former self was a character in a novel and he has little connection to him. These passages are interspersed with others set in the contemporaneous world in which Dallas is writing.

In the 60s – there is a reference to what can only be the Torrey Canyon – Dallas falls into the orbit of a well-connected businessman and charismatic womaniser called Fraser Donnelly who is a flouter of conventions of all sorts, with thuggish tendencies. Donnelly has a coterie of hangers-on who appear to varying degrees mesmerised by him. Candida is a friend of Fraser’s much put upon wife Linda and wishes to protect or even free her from his influence.

Dallas interacts with a few of these characters – who curiously spend a lot of time talking about the drawbacks of being Scottish and the merits or otherwise of independence. (Is this a reflection of the fact that the novel was published in Thatcher’s time, before devolution? It does not seem a necessary part of Dallas’s story, except as a philosophical illustration of his (and most Scots?) inability to escape his upbringing.)

Things come to a head on a sojourn to Crete where Donnelly behaves in a way which upsets the local inhabitants and takes coarse delight in informing Candida that he has subsequently buggered Linda.

This incident seems less than startling nowadays – Bridget Jones appeared to accept the act with equanimity in the film. But it is supposed to have occurred in the 60s and attitudes were different then. Candida and Dallas are suitably revulsed.

Partly as a consequence, Dallas begins to spiral loose from Donnelly’s orbit and, one night in winter, after a drinking session, is beaten up by Donnelly who apparently feels scorned. Due to Donnelly’s belligerence, Candida senses Lorna is in danger and asks Dallas to fetch the police, but he is caught drunk-driving and they ignore him. That same night Donnelly is murdered, the trigger being his attempted rape of his latest hanger-on, Caroline. Candida attempts to cover up the crime but is doomed to failure.

The trial which follows fails to bear out Dallas’s perception of the truth of what happened. There is a strange parallel here with The Fanatic which also featured a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion.

There is a coda set in the 80s present where Dallas is revealed still to drift through his life.

One Night In Winter was fine while I was reading it and the prose is elegant and readable enough but in the end, beyond Candida’s self sacrifice, it all seemed rather inconsequential.
Perhaps it had more resonance in the 1980s.

Levi Stubbs 1936 – 2008

The Four Tops lead singer, Levi Stubbs, has died.

He had a distinctive voice which I first remember hearing on Reach Out I’ll Be There. You couldn’t possibly mistake him for anyone else.

They’re falling like flies; Isaac Hayes, Richard Wright, Levi Stubbs. It’s scary.

Just look over your shoulder.

I tried to find Walk Away Renee (for Almax) but there isn’t a good version on You Tube, so here’s If I Were A Carpenter.

Montrose 1-2 Dumbarton

Links Park,  18/10/08

Another win, but still no clean sheet in a league match.

This is the third time I’ve seen us take a two goal lead this season but the first in which we’ve not been pegged back.

I got there ten minutes late due to hold-ups on the Kirkcaldy – Dundee road. We were okay first half but without creating anything were 1-0 up after the ball broke to Ross Clark in the box. It could have been two but Chisholm hit the post late on. For some reason the ref played about five minutes stoppage time before half-time.

Montrose have an artificial pitch. I thought the ball neither ran nor bounced properly a lot of the time. But it gives them a revenue stream midweek. And the tarmac surround is only a yard or so from the pitch. Might that not be dangerous?

Second half, Paul McLeod ran undisturbed through their defence to go one-on-one with their keeper and scored. From then on I was looking at my watch what seemed like every two minutes as I just knew we were going to concede. We had a couple more chances before the game settled down to not much happening at either end.

Then we switched off at the back and they scored with a minute or so to go. Mix-up on the left (Gary Wilson involved?) and the cross eluded all our defenders and keeper.

At least we saw the game out. And without our two best players. And Chappie’s subs were not defensively minded.

I met Big Rab for the first time, on the way out of the ground. He had an unfortunate experience with the bus home.  Mine was slightly different. I was on Montrose High Street after the game and I heard a woman say, “Cameron, don’t talk back to people like that.” I thought, “Parents telling off their kids? It doesn’t happen in Kirkcaldy.”  But then there’s Big Rab’s incident. I suppose everywhere has neds.

Barrington J Bayley

Barrington J Bayley has died.*

He wrote some bizarre and entertaining stuff, sometimes even at the same time. His story “Love In Backspace” in New Worlds 4, 1994, is a perfect example.

He was one of the most undeservedly unsung SF authors of the 20th century. I well remember Angus McAllister singing his praises on a panel at some convention or other. It might have been one of the Glasgow Eastercons.

The Locus obituary is here.

*Thanks to Jim Steel for the link.

The Oxymoron Where I Live

Reading “The Fanatic” recently caused me to reflect on the following question. How much Scottish history was I exposed to at school?

Answer?
Apart from the brochs at Skara Brae in Shetland, which were suitably far off in time as to be uncontentious, absolutely none. Rien. Nada. Zilch.

This is notwithstanding what Ronnie Ancona said on the TV programme, QI, about her experiences in a Scottish school which were apparently somewhat different from mine.

Instead of Scottish history I was taught European history from the Partitions of Poland* onwards through the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna etc and – nearer home – the Chartists, the Reform Acts, Disraeli and Gladstone; all good and worthwhile (shared) British history certainly, but a bit, distanced, shall we say.

This meant that all that Wars Of Independence/Bannockburn/Flodden/Civil Wars/Covenanting/Darien Disaster/Act of Union/Jacobite Rebellions stuff had to be picked up by osmosis from the surrounding culture, or by myself. There was really a kind of black hole where historical knowledge should have been.

I tried to fill in some of the gaps in my early twenties, sugaring the pill by reading the historical novels of Nigel Tranter (I know, I know, but he spun a good yarn while he was at it.)

I always put the original omission down to the fact that Scottishness was in some way considered second class or else had to be kept down by the establishment (it had not been long before this that pupils in Scotland were physically punished for speaking Scots or using Scots words after all.) That it was feared in some way.

But perhaps it was that I had “passed” my qualie (≡ “qualifying” exam; eleven plus) and so went to a Senior Secondary (≡ Grammar School) which was converted to a comprehensive in my last year there, and we were still somehow being trained for Empire – despite the winds of change.

Or maybe it was just the cultural cringe writ small.

Whatever; it didn’t work.

Growing up in a Scotland where the vast majority of broadcast media output was geared to the English audience it was just about impossible to be unaware of England and Englishness. But it was not impossible to feel somehow disregarded as a result of this.

Remember there were only 3 UK radio stations till ca 1967 when it became 4 – though there was also a BBC Scottish service (but I don’t think it was called Radio Scotland at that time.) The pirate stations were never UK-wide. TV had just the 3 channels – only 2 up until about 1962! – which had the occasional “regional” opt-outs.

My sense of Scottishness was only reinforced when visiting cousins on England’s south coast and also, after University, by working for two years in Hertford. My home then was in Essex and involved a long commute – by bus; those were different times.

I discovered then that the vast majority of English people knew nothing of Scotland – and cared less.

I came to the conclusion that for most of my life I had lived in an oxymoron – in a state called the United Kingdom that was neither united nor a kingdom.

It’s actually two kingdoms, England and Scotland; a principality, Wales; and a province, Northern Ireland. And that does not include those anomalies, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, which recognise the monarch as head of state but are not part of the United Kingdom proper as they don’t elect MPs to Westminster. A citizen (sorry, subject of the crown) could be forgiven for being confused.

Maybe that original omission to teach me Scottish history was simply the result of a curriculum choice by the History Dept at the school and pupils elsewhere did receive a grounding in Scottish History as Ronnie Ancona claimed she did; but it still seems bizarre even after all these years.

Was anyone else’s experience like this? Or was theirs more like Ronnie Ancona’s?

*My teacher – nicknamed Greensleeves (that may be another post) – wrote this on the board as the Partions of Poland. To much bewilderment at first, quickly followed by derision.

The Importance Of Being Sidney

I caught a phone-in on the US TV channel C-Span which was broadcast on BBC Parliament on Sunday.

In it a male caller claimed that in everyday discourse he was “not allowed” to use Barack Obama’s middle name.

Two questions occurred to me.

1. Who, precisely, is “not allowing” him to do this?
As far as I’m aware there is no law against it in the US.

2. Why should he want or need to use Obama’s middle name?
Does he for example always say John Sidney McCain when referring to the other candidate? And if not, why not, if he is so upset about “not being allowed” to say Hussein? Or is he “not allowed” to say Sidney either?

Btw it is so little used that I had to look up McCain’s middle name just for this post.

I personally think this last fact reveals more about the caller than he might realise.

PS If you see Sid, tell him.

Chris Iwelumo v Kris Boyd

Okay. It was a bad miss. But if Scotland have any pretensions at all to World Cup qualification it shouldn’t have mattered. Norway should have been put to bed long before.

It is possible people got carried away by the two results against France. Neither they nor Italy (who beat us twice) did anything at the Euros and France are still struggling. Scotland may be lucky to finish second bottom of this group now.

Kris Boyd’s decision to quit – while understandable – is a bit, “It’s ma ba’ and ah’m goin’ hame.”

From the way some pundits have been talking you’d think Kris Boyd has never missed a sitter in his life. As I recall he has, and in a crucially high profile game – against Villareal late on – where if he had scored Rangers would have got to the Champions League quarter final on away goals. There is no guarantee he would have scored if he had played on Saturday, though I would have probably put him on.

But I’m not on the inside. Arguably Boyd’s reaction proves George Burley’s point.

Chris Iwelumo is likely to bust a gut for Scotland now (if he gets another game.)

(Stands back and waits for brickbats.)

redRobe By Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Earthlight, 2000

redRobe cover

I first read Grimwood when reviewing Stamping Butterflies for Infinity Plus and I have since gone through his back catalogue starting with his Arabesk trilogy. redRobe completes the four novels he published before those three books and it is possible to identify certain aspects of his shtick – at least in these early works.

To illustrate hip up-to-the-minuteness we get short, breathy sentences. Jump-cuts. Sex. Hyphenations. unUsual capiTalisations (as in the titles reMix and redRobe.) Soldiery of varying degrees of experience – usually inexperience. General grittiness. Atrocity stories. And violence: lots of violence. Plus enough just-about-plausible hightechery to give the whole thing that SF sheen. Sensory overload alert?

This striving for terseness in redRobe also means we get several instances of “sat” instead of the more correct “sitting.” (And, sadly, there is a “span” count of 1. Sigh.)

As an aside, is it novels like this that Damien Walter and Jetse De Vries among others have bemoaned lately for being too pessimistic? The thesis seems to be that SF was once an optimistic literature (this was of course never entirely true) and now it very largely isn’t. For myself, I think this development is a reflection of the times. In the 50s and 60s, in the aftermath of two catastrophic world wars, it was possible to have optimism for the future. Now, with all the resource and possible climate problems besetting the world, it is much more difficult to sustain.

Whatever, Grimwood frequently sidesteps issues like this by setting his books in alternative futures (or even alternative presents) on Earths recognisable to ours but divergent at some time in the past.

As to what happens in redRobe: Habsburgs of the Maximilian stripe are still Emperors/Empresses of Mexico. As historical turning points go it has to be admitted this is pretty arcane, full marks for it. But this Earth has also just had a female Pope (Joan, of course) killed and the plot revolves around the fact her memories have been placed in a soulcatcher necklace of beads and her dreams embedded in the mind of a more or less kidnapped 14 year old prostitute, Mai. Plus there is a talking handheld gun.

The hero is Axl Borja who was once a child assassin on some sort of reality TV show but doesn’t really know his origins. That is, he was a child who was an assassin; he did not assassinate children. That, I suspect, would be going too far even for Grimwood.

As it is, Axl cannot possibly be a sympathetic character – there are few of these in redRobe – though it is mostly Axl’s point of view the novel follows. Early on, we also track the talking gun for a while. (I was disappointed when this strand tailed off as it was faintly amusing, but the gun does reappear later, metamorphosed into a silver monkey.) In chapter one, Axl kills again, and instead of suffering a death sentence, is sent by Cardinal Santo Ducque, the de facto acting Pope, to trace Pope Joan’s memories.

The latter action, and resolution, takes place on a wheel-shaped space habitat Joan had campaigned to have built to house refugees from all the grisly happenings taking place on Earth and it is here that Axl has to prevent Mai, and Joan’s memories, from falling into the hands of the aforementioned soldiery – and where Axl must make his moral choice.

Grimwood’s writing, as you would expect, developed during the course of his early books, becoming more assured, as is evidenced in redRobe, which is a superior example of its type. And I also unhesitatingly recommend his Arabesk trilogy, where his character building is much more to the fore.

Scotland 0-0 Norway

Hampden Park, 11/10/08

It’s not looking good again.

The Flying Finn

Hannu Rajaniemi, like me a member of the East Coast Writers’ Group, is a Writers’ Bloc stalwart. He has just landed a three book publishing deal with Gollancz – on the strength of a 24 page synopsis. I didn’t know that sort of thing happened any more.

Hannu is Finnish by birth and upbringing but has been living in Edinburgh for quite a while now. His English prose puts many writers born to the language to shame.

He also has a PhD in something to do with string theory but don’t ask me what. I’m an Organic Chemist – we don’t care what goes on inside nuclei.

I’ve no doubt Hannu will make it big in the SF world.

free hit counter script