Cassell, 1971, 525 p.

The fifth of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, featuring the life and exploits of Francis Crawford of Lymond, Duc de Sevigny.

Having killed his adversary Graham Reid Malett in the last instalment, Pawn in Frankincense, while Ambassador of France to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in Ottoman Turkey, Lymond, with the aid of his mistress Güzel, has now travelled to Moscow to find employment for his company of mercenaries under Prince Ivan Vasilievich, the Tsar of All Russia (known in English as Ivan the Terrible, but never named as such in the text.)

There is first, though, a focus on the activities of young Philippa Somerville, who had travelled to Turkey to help retrieve Lymond’s illegitimate son from Mallet’s clutches and who, after spending time in the Sultan’s seraglio (somewhat improbably without suffering any undue attentions) had, at his insistence, contracted a paper – and unconsummated – marriage with Lymond in order to protect her reputation. Philippa brought the child, known as Kuzum, to Lymond’s home of Culter in Scotland but now has a position as a lady in waiting to Queen Mary in England. Intrigued by Lymond’s family’s reticence about his origins she has been inquiring into his background and obtained two differing accounts of his actual parentage.

In Moscow, Lymond soon becomes the Tsar’s right-hand man, the Voevoda Bolshoia, and sets about modernising the army. All this is put in jeopardy when the Tsar decides to send an envoy, Osep Nepeja, to England to purchase modern armaments and supplies, tasking Lymond with securing these.

Behind the scenes machinations of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, (a granddaughter of Henry VIII and mother of Lord Darnley) are a threat to Lymond through all this.

When Lymond states his firm intention of returning to Russia, Guthrie, a member of his company says of the Russians, “They are a nation accustomed to violent, unreasoning rule, and when it yokes them again, they have no instinct to withstand it, to beat it down and to replace it with sanity.” To which Lymond replies that given time that change could be achieved. We’re still waiting.

It’s all very well researched and incident packed but there is an opacity to proceedings. Dunnett withholds certain information from the reader somewhat unfairly and there is often a lack of clarity to the dialogue.

However, only one instalment, Checkmate, remains unread by me.

Pedant’s corner:-  mortised (morticed,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “The crowd were already pressing into the warehouse” (The crowd was already pressing…,) reindeers (the plural of reindeer is  reindeer,) gutteral (guttural,) complajnts (complaints,) Kholgomory (elsewhere always Kholmogory,) “Turkey will not always remain the power; that she has been the secular power of the Pope is also in question” (the semicolon is misplaced ‘Turkey will not always remain the power that she has been;  the secular power of the Pope is also in question’.) “‘Right?’ said Lymon .” (‘“Right?” said Lymond.’) cracklure (craquelure.) “‘I thought we could surrounded the Tsar with’” (could surround the Tsar.)

Travellers’ Library, 1931, 315 p

This is a collection of poems and short stories set in Ancient Greece among the wars between Athens and Sparta. The stories range in date from 500 BC, to 498 BC, 461 BC, 456 BC, 446 BC, 427 BC, 415 BC, 412 BC, 399 BC, 396 BC, 374 BC and finally 373 BC. A few of the poems directly relate to those times but a couple are not so specific.

We start things off with two poems and then each story is followed by a single poem until the last, designated as a song.

Mitchison’s usual facility as a writer is in evidence. There is nothing particularly startling in the contents and she seems to know these times well though bearing her research lightly, but then she did cover similar ground in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and set other books in ancient times: The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Travel Light, Blood of the Martyrs.

She is perhaps strongest when focusing on relationships involving women – the one where one man deceives an ingenuous young girl for his own ends could resonate still, women’s care for each other is displayed but not overly stressed – though those between men are also given weight, in the title story an act of kindness which could be seen as treason being neatly resolved.

While the Ancient Greeks reverence for poetry is not mirrored nowadays there is no reason to suppose human nature two and a half thousand years ago was any different to today. These stories could underline that perfectly.

Pedant’s corner:- shrunk (shrank,) “Hippokleas’ shoulder” (Hippokleas’s: all names ending in s are given s’ as their possessive rather than s’s,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “by and bye” (‘by and by’ as it was rendered later,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of dialogue (x 2.)

Collins, 1950, 510 p, including 2 p Note, 3 p Contents and 4p list of Characters.

This is the second of Barke’s Immortal Memory sequence chronicling the life of Robert Burns. He is now in young adulthood and has moved to the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, with brother Gilbert and the rest of his family. We meet Jean Armour before Burns does, and she is presented as an obedient, dutiful daughter.

Burns is in trouble with the local minister, known as Daddy Auld. He has already fathered a child to Betty Paton, but his penance for this, on the cutty stool, takes place in the nearby parish of Tarbolton since that is where the offence occurred. He was fined one guinea and his sin considered absolved. (This strikes me as akin to those indulgences of the Catholic Church which so enraged the early Protestant reformers.) It is his poems and intellect which most worry Auld, however, who realizes that the best way to undermine Burns will be through his sexual misdemeanours. To that end he enjoins two of his elders, Willie Fisher and James Lamie, to collect evidence against Burns. Fisher is that hypocritical individual about whom Burns would write Holy Willie’s Prayer. (Another long poem, about Mauchline’s Holy Fair, also excites Auld’s ire.)

Burns and his cronies disparage these prurient creatures as the houghmagandie pack, and the fascination of the Church with controlling sexuality (which seems to be the goal of all religions) is noted. “Auld had long been made aware of the peculiar fact that when any of the congregation had to appear on the sessional carpet for a sexual offence, he could count on a full attendance from his lay-shepherds. No other sin so excited their holy zeal for probing into the mystery of the passionate relationship between man and woman and the theological relationship between both and the Presbyterian conception of God.”

When Burns meets Jean he is immediately smitten (though he does have a weakness for imagining himself in love.) Jean’s father dislikes him on reputation alone and has already forbidden her to have anything to do with him. But the attraction is too strong for both of them and she and Burns sign a paper to the effect that they have married. This is without benefit of clergy but would apparently have been recognised legally. He is too poor to support a wife though. The song in the green thorn tree of the book’s title is the one Jean sings at their trysting site.

The inevitable happens and Jean’s father and mother prevail on her to disown him, paper or no. Incensed, Burns turns to Highland Mary (Campbell) for solace and resolves to leave for the Caribbean, arranging a passage for himself and Mary whom he dispatches to Greenock to hide her pregnancy. Some boy, as they say.

In the meantime his poem some of which Barke has Burns conjure up on the spot, have been gaining a reputation and it is arranged for a book of his poetry (Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect) to be published by subscription, or at least promise of payment. He wrestles over which verses to publish as some may be considered too controversial, publishers then, as now, reluctant to take too much of a risk.

Barke’s writing is workmanlike, with occasional veerings into purple prose when describing landscape. Several of the quoted poems have their verses written as speech which detracts from the ability to read them as poems but since Burns was reciting them to others I suppose that’s fair enough. The characterisation is broad brush.

I note that the Church’s strictures against houghmagandie seem to have been spectacularly unsuccessful as several instances of compearing are mentioned in the book – including that of a couple who married before the evidence blossomed, though their marriage did not in any way mitigate the offence. When Burns has to stand for his “fornication” with Jean Armour there is no room on the cutty stool. He is one of five people, including Jean, arraigned on the same day.

Pedant’s corner:- Barke still spells the town Machlin rather than Mauchline, “womankind were crowding in” (womankind is singular; ‘womankind was crowding in’.) Surgeoners! (it was possessive not plural; ‘Surgeoner’s!’,) “knit his brows” (knitted.) “The company were soon in a grand mood” (The company was soon in a grand mood,) staunched (stanched.)

Polygon, 2021, 123 p.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales which re-examine Scotland’s history from a modern perspective.

David Rizzio, secretary to the heavily pregnant Mary, Queen of Scots, was famously murdered in her presence by courtiers – and especially her husband Lord Darnley – jealous of Rizzio’s supposed influence on her.

This recounting of that incident is necessarily told in the present tense in order to underscore the inevitability of the ongoing rush of events once the assassins’ plot had been set in motion – and the inability of Mary or Darnley to affect those events.

Mina manages to invoke the feelings of the various characters she focuses on but usually by telling not showing. Hers is an omniscient narration laden with the benefit of hindsight.

The novella is perhaps mistitled, though. It is not primarily about Rizzio (he is dead by a third of the way through) but instead charts the relationship of Mary with Darnley and with her Lords. It is also of course an indictment of the misogyny of the times. In that respect Mary never stood a chance. She had flaws enough of her own even without that to contend with.

I note that at the back the description of the Darkland Tales project has Alan Warner’s then forthcoming contribution titled as The Man Who Would Not Be King. It was eventually published as Nothing Left to Fear From Hell.

Pedant’s corner:- “Here the change of seasons are dramatic” (the changes of seasons are,) “and snakes his arm right around her waist until his hand on her swollen belly” (is missing a verb after ‘hand’; rests? lies? settles? is?) “Lady Huntley” (Huntly, as it is always spelled elsewhere in the text.)

A Surreal Chronicle, Polygon, 2023, 149 p, including 7 p Afterword.

Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is one of publisher Birlinn’s Darkland Tales which re-examine Scotland’s history from a modern perspective.

In it, a tall man, accompanied by several companions, is making hazardous journeys by small boat between the islands of the Outer Hebrides, mostly under the cover of darkness. They are on the run and at one point the man has to disguise himself as a serving girl, when he is given the name Betty Bourke.

We are of course following the flight of Charles Edward Louis John Sylvester Maria Casimir Stuart (to give him his full complement of names, never used in the text,) otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, down on his luck but ever hopeful fortune will favour him in the end.

Though the Young Pretender has featured as a character in many of them, most novelistic examinations of the Jacobite inheritance – a perennial subject of Scottish fiction – have focused on that cause’s adherents and their (mis)adventures. I certainly have not before read one in which the Prince is the protagonist. But my acquaintance with the subject is by no means exhaustive.

Warner inhabits the time and its susceptibilities very effectively, presenting a picture of Charles Stuart as a human being, with every necessity and function we all have, along with his convictions of divine right, plus the all but unthinking deference of his comrades. Not that the text confines itself to the viewpoint of the Prince. A particular highlight is a servant girl’s view of the kenspeckle and overly presumptuous Betty Burke

A quirk of this publication is that on even numbered pages between chapters – and before the Afterword – are depictions of that minute pest of the Scottish summer, the midge, with which the travelling party is plagued, starting with one and going up to ten.

In that Afterword Warner speculates on the conundrums of historical fiction, the difficulties of portrayal. As he says, “they were so like us, and they were so unlike us.”

But apart from the drier and necessarily more restricted approach of historical record and academe, fiction is the only way we can explore past times such as these.

This novella gives us Charles Edward Stuart as a believable, if misguided, human being. But he was trapped by his birth; as most of us are.

Pedant’s corner:- “was like a liquified putrescence” (liquefied,) “he crashed items akimbo” (he crashed items with his arms on his hips?) “the riding party were headed onwards making a cover of what might lay over the roads ahead” (the riding party was headed onwards making a cover of what might lie over the roads ahead,) “Robert Forbes’ remarkable” (Forbes’s,) “Winifred Dukes’ The Rash Adventurer” (Dukes’s.)

Century,1983, 494 p. First published 1969.

This is the fourth in Dunnett’s series of novels featuring Francis Crawford of Lymond, Comte de Sevigny. See here, here and here. After the revelation in book three that Lymond had fathered a son on Oonagh O’Dwyer and Graham Reid Malett’s escape from the cathedral of St Giles, Crawford is faced with a dilemma. If he kills Malett then the child will be killed.

Taking advantage of the commission of Henri II of France to transport an elaborate spinet to the Grand Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and be French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Crawford travels the Mediterranean accompanied by former Grand Knight of Malta and one of Lymond’s mercenary company, Jerott Blyth, and sixteen year-old Philippa Somerville, daughter of friends of the Lymond family whose intention is to protect Lymond’s child Khaireddin from further harm. Also in the party are the spinet’s constructor Georges Gaultier, his niece Marthe, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crawford, and a Swiss cook, Onophrion Zitwitz.

Things are complicated by the fact that there are two fair-haired children of the correct age knocking about, Khaireddin and Kuzucuyum, one of them the child of Malett and his deceased sister Joleta. Both may have to be rescued.

False trails, betrayals and incident abound, including a set piece among the ancient cisterns below what was once Constantinople but is now – and has been for a hundred years – Stamboul, the atmosphere of Suleiman’s court is evoked admirably, Crawford’s trials grow. The climax comes with a chess game using live pieces instigated by Suleiman’s second wife Hürrem Sultan, known as Roxelana, to resolve the competing claims of Malett and Lymond as to the truth, a game which involves a pawn sacrifice.

There is something about the writing which lends the tale opacity, however. Perhaps Dunnett, like Lymond, is being too clever for her own good. Not that it affected her sales.

Possibly reflecting attitudes when the book was written a minor character, Pierre Gilles D’Albi, says of Marthe, “‘She has too many ideas. Women with ideas are a threat to the civilized world.’”

The series as a whole may be the Lymond Chronicles but as written this one is more the tales of Philippa Somerville and Jerott Blyth than of Lymond.

Sensitivity note: uses the word ‘nigger’.

Pedant’s corner:- bouillotte (is an 18^th century card game, not a 16^th century one,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of dialogue. At one point Blyth is trapped in a small building which is on fire and giving off hydrocyanic gas, and survives. (Exposure to small amounts of HCN is usually fatal,) “since Odysseus’ time” (Odysseus’s time – I note Zakynthos’s appeared later so usage of the apostrophe wasn’t consistent,) Scandaroon (x 1, elsewhere Scanderoon,) “a English girl” (an English girl,) rauccous (raucous,) hoopoo (hoopoe.)

Or: The Astrologer. Edited by P D Garside.

The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 356 p plus 53 p Essay on the Text, 50 p Emendation list, 2 p list of end-of-line “hard” hyphens, 16 p Historical Note, 67 p Explanatory Notes, 20 p Glossary, i p Foreword, i p Contents vi p General Introduction to the Edinburgh Edition, and iii p Acknowledgements. Guy Mannering first published 1815.

Reading Scott these days is an exercise in completion or in acknowledging roots. The roots of long-form fiction, of Scottish story-telling, of the historical novel as a genre.

For time has not been good to novels like this. First there is the author’s prolixity, words thrown about with abandon, then there is the long outmoded practice of addresses to the reader, not to mention direct statements of what will come next, all of which are now passé. More problematically, from very early on the reader has no doubt in which direction this is going, since the plot here is that of the long-lost heir (with a touch of Romeo and Juliet thrown in.) When Scott wrote it, most likely such a story was fresh and new, but in the intervening 210 years it has become all too familiar. And story-telling itself has changed.

The Guy Mannering of the title comes to the estate and house of Ellangowan in Galloway on the night the lady of the house is to give birth to her first child. Mannering casts a horoscope for the boy which predicts misfortunes when he will be aged five and ten plus a further significant event at twenty-two. As well as the laird, Godfrey Bertram, Mannering meets the taciturn dominie Abel Sampson (who however is prone to uttering the word pro-dig-i-ous, in that elongated fashion, when over-excited) and the – kenspeckle, since she is very tall for a woman – gipsy Meg Merrilies. At this point Scott digresses into a discourse on the history in Scotland of what some at the time termed Egyptians, who had been rendered by law to be common and habitual thieves. His sympathies are with Meg however as she is to some extent the heroine (if one there be) of his tale. Five years later, as Mrs Bertram is in labour with a daughter, a murder occurs on the estate, blamed on smugglers, and the son of the house is kidnapped. Bertram, meanwhile, is not a good guardian of the estate’s fortunes and by seventeen further years’ time the estate, in the absence of a male heir, is to be sold by roup.

Mannering, who has been soldiering in India, where his own daughter Julia formed an attachment to one of his subordinates whom Mannering thought unsuitable and whose death he thinks he caused, has now returned and attempts to buy Ellangowan but is too late due to dealing with a concern of the friend with whom Julia is staying, and so takes another house nearby. That subordinate, of the name Vanbeest Brown from a sojourn in Holland, is still alive and in communication with Mannering’s daughter Julia.

On his way to Galloway, Brown saves a local farmer, Andrew (known as Dandie) Dinmont, who breeds terriers, from robbery by two ruffians. Dinmont becomes a fast friend and is instrumental in aiding Brown when he meets difficulties later on.

Even from this short summary it is perhaps obvious who is the lost heir and what part of the resolution will be.

The novel is not without its moments, though, and there are incidents aplenty, as how could there not be in a tale involving smugglers, gipsies, a murder, abduction and thwarted inheritances? Gilbert Glossin, who actually bought Ellangowan, is as slippery a character as you might wish, and the lawyer Pleydell – along with Dinmont – larger than life, but the women, Meg Merrilies apart, tend to be ciphers. In the end the tale is more Brown’s than Guy Mannering’s though and the astrology aspect falls by the wayside. Perhaps as his plot developed Scott lost (fore?)sight of it.

Pedant’s corner:- early nineteenth century spellings, chuse, exstacy, eve’sdropper, paralytick, etc, etc; “the place from whence he came” (since whence means ‘from where’ then ‘from whence’ incorporates a repetition; ‘the place whence he came’.) “None …. were present” (None … was present. Several more examples of ‘none’ with a plural verb,) whiskey (whisky,) a full stop at the end of a question, “from thence” (again repetitious, thence = ‘from where’,) “Meg Merrilies’ wound” (Merrilies’s.) In the essay on the text; miniscule (minuscule.)

Hamish Hamilton, 2007, 253 p

This is the first book of Barker’s trilogy about alumni of the Slade Art School in the run-up to the Great War. I read the second one, Toby’s Room, before I realised it had this predecessor.

This book is more concerned with Paul Tarrant than Barker’s other two main protagonists, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville. Paul used a small inheritance from his aunt to enrol at the Slade but the tutor, Henry Tonks, finds his work insipid and Paul begins to doubt his own talent. The slightly older Kit Neville has already had some success as an artist though. Elinor meanwhile has enough trouble dealing with being a woman in a traditionally male enterprise without both the men being attracted to her. She is initially not interested and Paul temporarily takes up with Teresa Halliday, one of the life models, who is escaping from a violent husband.

It is not until the Great War breaks out though, and its scope widens, that the book gets fully into its stride. Barker is clearly comfortable with that war as her subject (as witness her Regeneration trilogy.) Kit and Paul, turned down for war service, sign up to be ambulance drivers with the Belgian Army but are initially used as medical orderlies in field hospitals. Barker’s immersion in the minutiae of the war stands her in good stead here.

In this latter part of the novel a lot of the communication between Paul and Elinor consists of reproductions of their letters to each other. In one of these Elinor notes that the women in her circle keep quiet when men talk about the war (although they’ve not been in it) and compares that to the Iliad, where the girls whom Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over “say nothing, not a word,” adding, “I don’t suppose men ever hear that silence.” This is a thought Barker would develop in her later Women of Troy books.

Barker’s writing is smooth, almost imperceptible. Accomplished as always.

Pedant’s corner:- Elinor’s hair style is inconsistently described as cropped, bell shaped, or tied back with a ribbon. The knee wound Paul sustains in a bombardment is also seemingly forgotten at times in later passages.

Polygon, 2022, 112 p

On a cold December night in Edinburgh in 1591 Geillis Duncan awaits execution in the morning for the crime of witchcraft. She is visited in spirit by Iris, a woman from our own time, who calls herself a time traveller and a modern-day witch.

Historically 1591 was the height of the hysteria against witches encapsulated by James VI’s Daemonologie and Geillis Duncan was one of the victims of the North Berwick witch trials.

The scenario gives Fagan the platform to outline the misogyny behind the witch hunts and its prevalence today.

In the conversations between Geillis and Iris the question arises, “How does he” (the King) “fight the Devil?” The answer? “Via teenage girls. Doesn’t everyone?” The rationale back then being, “We go after the Devil via womb-bearers – they are weak for him.” So the targets were women. Women who were alone, or tall, or ugly, or smart; women who inherited, sassy women, women who were healers. If a woman doesn’t exalt men always she is a threat, “a Demon whore, a witch.”

Despite all her efforts to be polite, docile and unthreatening, not to draw attention to herself, still Geillis was picked on: primarily since she was handy, a servant in the household of a man called Seaton but also suspect because, “I helped women birth, I helped calves, I knew the right herbs to cure a headache.” Seaton was jealous of the fact that his sister-in-law, Euphame, had inherited her father’s estate and wanted a legal reason to eliminate her so Geillis was tortured and abused to implicate Euphame and others.

Fagan has her characters try to explain misogyny. Geillis says, “We bring life from our bodies where before there was nothing,” – that being a kind of magic – and Iris tells her, “Men want to know how they got trapped on Earth,” but the real crime is that, “There is no man on this Earth who didn’t get here except by a woman parting her thighs.”

Apart from the conceit of Iris time travelling Fagan’s tendency to indulge the fantastical sees Iris during the night begin to grow feathers and eventually turn into a crow.

Though Geillis’s prior suffering is never in doubt the set up allows Fagan to treat the witch trials almost indirectly but nevertheless underline that misogyny is ever with us.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales (see here) and again was borrowed from the local library by the good lady.

Pedant’s corner:- lightening (lightning,) “filed into a tea-room” (in 1591?) “the thing I had that shined” (shone,) a priest comes to hear her confess at the last (a priest? In Reformation Scotland?) the priest uses a pencil to sign in to the jail (suitable graphite for this purpose was discovered in 1560 so it’s possible; but pencils as such would not, I suspect, have been widely available, a scratchy pen is more likely,) smoothes (smooths,) okay (in 1591?) ditto teenage.

Farewell to old Ireland. Vintage, 2003, 419 p, plus xiv p Preface.

The Star of the Sea of the title is a clapped-out paddle steamer making a crossing from Cobh (Cove) in Ireland to New York. It is 1847, the Famine is at its height and the steerage compartments of the ship are crammed with hundreds of refugees, mostly starving. These desperate lives and the Famine itself are essentially background, though, as the narrative does not mention most of them except in passing when extracts from the log of the ship’s Master, Josias Lockwood, notes which of them have died in the night and been consigned to the deep, as well as instances of disease and quarantine, or incidents requiring incarceration of the perpetrators.

Is this a general aversion? I am personally not aware of many works of fiction dealing with the Irish Famine (or the Great Hunger as it is also known.) Perhaps the subject is just too overwhelming, too raw, or even too daunting for the novelist to approach, except obliquely as here. Though Irish writers appear prominently in British literary life the subject itself tends to be shied away from in Britain and perhaps British publishers may be wary of it.

In the book Star of the Sea, each chapter (plus the prologue and epilogue) is prefaced by an illustration from the time it is set along with the usual Victorian novel practice of the short chapter precis. Some of these illustrations depict Irish life or scenes of the famine but many show the grotesque stereotypes of so-called Irish characteristics prevalent in the nineteenth century.

The book as a whole is supposedly drawn together in retrospect by passenger G Grantley Dixon, a US journalist, from letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, conversations of his with the characters and his own writings. In the prologue he describes the only clergyman on board, a Methodist minister as conducting, “the adamant hymns of his denomination.”

The story is woven around the well-to-do passengers David Merridith (Lord Kingscourt,) his wife Laura, their children’s nanny, Mary Duane from Carna, and one Pius Mulvey, initially a shadowy presence on the ship – referred to as a ‘Ghost’ – though not entirely inconspicuous as he has one wooden foot. While following the ship’s voyage and the ever-mounting toll of dead passengers the narrative skips back to cover incidents in the principal characters’ pasts.

In her youth Mary Duane lived on Merridith’s estate (then in the hands of his father) and they formed a friendship. He greeted the Duane household with “God Bless” about which her father would say, “‘And as for God-bless, he’s a God-blasted Protestant. He doesn’t even believe in God.’” The relationship was developing into something deeper when Merridith went off to boarding school, where he learned ‘rules’. Neither his nor her father thought that their liaison could or should progress and he broke it off. In the aftermath she was betrayed by another man and only many years later did she and Merridith come across each other again.

Merridith himself displeased his father by his later marriage to Laura and by the time he inherited, the estate was in a poor condition, hence the journey to the US. Merridith and Dixon are at odds since Dixon berates him with the conditions of the Irish poor. Merridith responds with the fact of slavery in the US. That Dixon is having an affair with Laura (the Merridith marriage had long been on shaky ground) is added reason for dislike.

Mulvey has reasons to keep himself to himself on the ship. On pain of death he has been tasked by the ‘Liable’ men of Galway to kill Merridith for his many perceived sins against his tenants or for passing them on to those who treat them even more badly. The Liable men represent one of those many clandestine Irish associations desiring overthrow of English rule and gained their name because they signed off their warning missives with “Els-be-lible.” Mulvey (whose father once said to him that when you were talking about God you couldn’t expect bloody miracles,) has a chequered and violent past, once escaping from Newgate Jail thereby engendering the term Monster of Newgate, and has gone through many pseudonyms. Later Dixon tells us that the Monster led to an evolution in the representation of the Irish. Previously shown as foolish and drunken, now they more frequently shown as murderers. Ape-like, fiendish, bestial, untamed. There are also quotations from various sources exemplifying the prejudices of the ‘superior’ classes against the non-landed Irish.

In his time in London Mulvey had met Charles Dickens and spun that voraciously avid author a tale about a Jew who ran a school for young thieves – adding in details from Connemara ballads. Prompted by Dickens for the name of the Jew, Mulvey remembers that of an unpleasant priest who had hated Jews and also inveigled Mulvey’s brother (albeit temporarily) into the priesthood. The impeccably Irish-named Fagan.

In the Epilogue we find Dixon latterly wrote a book with a short section on the Monster of Newgate, which beguiled the public’s imagination. People attended fancy-dress evenings costumed as the Monster or one of his victims. Plays were performed. Grantley adds, “Soon the monster was to be subjected to the final indignity. That horror among horrors. A musical.”

Dixon has other observations to make, that among those of certain religious persuasions “Dancing was ‘back-legs fornication,’” that “Any assemblage comprising human beings … will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is so often so much greater.” Most powerfully that “The dead do not die in that tormented country, that heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds; so abused down the centuries by the powerful of the neighbouring island, so much as by the powerful of its native own. And the poor of both islands died in their multitudes. … The flags flutter and the pulpits resound. At Ypres. In Dublin. At Gallipoli. In Belfast…. Yet they walk, the dead, and will always walk: not as ghosts, but as press-ganged soldiers, conscripted into a battle that is not of their making.…They do not even have names. They are simply: The Dead. You can make them mean anything you want them to mean.” As people do to this day.

Though the connections between all the main characters are perhaps a little too close and strain credibility somewhat, Star of the Sea is still a superb piece of work. And it has to be said that a book whose plot turns on a first edition of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell has to be saluted.

Pedant’s corner:- “staunch the bleeding” (stanch,) termagents (termagants,) “Verazano narrows” (Verazzano narrows,) Engels’ (Engels’s.)