Chatto and Windus, 1996, 622 p.

I noted when Byatt died that I had only read one book by her and perhaps ought to remedy that so when I saw this in a second-hand bookshop (in Ulverston as it happens) I snapped it up. However only after I started reading it did I check her back catalogue and found this is the third novel in a sequence featuring Frederica Potter as the main character. Not that it matters because the book stands alone.

In this one, set in the nineteen sixties, Frederica is regretting marrying Nigel Reiver as she finds life in his grand home – dominated by his two sisters and his housekeeper – even with her son Leo, less than fulfilling. She had thought she might be allowed to work (she had met Nigel when she was at Cambridge – though he wasn’t – and still hankers after the intellectual life.) But Nigel is a traditional husband and though his work often takes him away for extended periods (with corresponding sexual encounters which Frederica only finds about later) thinks she should stay at home and resents any contact with her former University friends, all of them male of course. Her unhappiness turns into despair when he becomes violent towards her. He is a former soldier trained in violence and throws an axe at her when she tries to run away.

Some of the passages deal with members of Frederica’s extended family one of whom fields phone calls in a Samaritan-like service. They chat amongst themselves as they wait for calls and when questioned why the Church seems obsessed by sex a bishop says, “‘The Church has always been about sex, dear, that’s what the problem is. Religion has always been about sex. Mostly about denying sex and rooting it out.’” Apart from the odd visit later in the book to Frederica’s parental home this is a very minor strand.

Interleaved with Frederica’s story in the early stages here are extracts from a book called Babbletower, where an aristocrat leads a group of people away from their home land to a place named La Tour Bruyarde, to found a culture in which its inhabitants will be free to do as they wish without hindrance. This connects with Frederica after she finally escapes Nigel (her son Leo insisting on coming with her though he loves his father) when she gets a job – nepotistically through her old friends – as a publisher’s reader then teacher of English in the Samuel Palmer School of Art and Craft. Babbletower is one of the books she recommends for publication and its author, Jude Mason, an ill-dressed, ill-kempt and smelly individual, turns out to be a model for the life class at the School.

Byatt uses this and Frederica’s peripheral involvement with the Steerforth Committee on the teaching of English (and specifically whether grammar ought to be taught in schools) to have discussions about literature, especially E M Forster and D H Lawrence, as well as the usefulness of cut-ups in condensing meaning.

George Murphy, one of Frederica’s students, says novels are obsessed with sex and love and God and food (which he agrees most people are) but they are also obsessed by work, commodities, machines and property on which they do not lavish the contempt and loathing which novelists tend to. At one point a character realises that it is possible for human beings to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense.

From time to time the ferment of the sixties is noted parenthetically. The Lady Chatterley trial, the 1964 General Election, the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the Moors murders, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the beginning of colour TV transmission all get a nod.

There are two main set pieces in the novel, both describing court cases, Frederica’s divorce and Babbletower’s trial for indecency. Byatt uses these to demonstrate how the legal system distorts the truth.

In entering various liaisons after leaving Nigel, Frederica seems to be very naive in her conduct as it never once occurs to her that her husband will be having her watched.

A nice touch comes when Jude Mason opines in court – “‘The English vice is not what is said to be but, precisely, indignation. We get furiously upset about everything ….. It is indignation that has put my book on trial.’”

At 622 pages Babel Tower is something of a marathon read but it has its moments.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing end quote mark after a piece of dialogue, staunch(es) (x 2, stanch(es),) genii (the plural of genie is genies,) aureoles (areolae,) (behalves?) “Moor Murders” (Moors Murders which is used elsewhere,) “which neither of them quite understand” (neither of them understands,) “he has not read Babbletower, as a teacher, she is now” (he has not read Babbletower. As a teacher,) “marmelade skies” (marmalade.)

Vintage, 2010, 330 p, plus 5p Foreword.

124, the house where Sethe lives with her daughter Denver, is haunted, by her unnamed baby and by the slavery which caused the child’s death. That other daughter, who was unnamed but whose gravestone bears the description ‘Beloved’ – Sethe could not afford the extra money to have ‘Dearly’ inscribed as well – was killed by Sethe herself to prevent her being taken back to Sweet Home, the plantation from where she had escaped enslavement. Perhaps an extreme reaction but also an expression of the horrors of slavery. Sethe has the image of a tree on her back from the whippings she received in that part of her life.

The ghost is banished after Paul D, another former slave from Sweet Home, arrives at the house and takes up with Sethe. Denver resents this as she had considered the ghost as a kind of companion.

Later, a child who calls herself Beloved arrives at 124 and draws close to Sethe who comes to see her as a reincarnation of the child she killed.

There is a surreal quality to the writing here, verging on but not quite corresponding to magical realism. It is as if the fact of slavery, though not evaded, is too consuming to be confronted head on and must be approached obliquely, its legacy equally as terrible as its existence. Sethe’s act of violence is an extremity in response to an enormity, with its own repercussions on the lives of herself and her children.

Sensitivity note: a book like this, and a subject like this, cannot avoid use of the word ‘nigger’ as when the posse seeking to recapture Sethe discusses their slaves or Paul D asks Stamp Paid, “‘How much is a nigger supposed to take? Tell me. How much?’”

‘All he can,’ said Stamp Paid. ‘All he can.’

To which Paul D says, ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?’”

“Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” is as good a question to ask of slavery as there can be. Indeed, it’s the only one.

Beloved is not an easy novel to read: but it is perhaps a necessary one.

Pedant’s corner:- “the repellant landscape” (repellent,) “Baby Suggs’ place” (Baby Suggs’s,) “had shook the house” (‘had shaken’; but ‘had shook’ may have been slave usage,) “Lady Jones’ house-school” (Jones’s.)

Heinemann, 1988, 158 p.

The setting is Northern Ireland during the troubles. Cal spends his days lazing about as he is unemployed, having not been able to stand the job he had in the slaughterhouse where his father works. They are the only remaining Catholics in an otherwise Protestant street and subject to threats as a result. He is plagued by Crilly and Skeffington, Provisional IRA members wanting him to go on more jobs but is haunted by the memory of his part in the killing of a police officer where he drove the car they used. A new woman assistant at the local library begins to consume his attention. She is Marcella, and happens to be the wife of the man that was killed.

Being burned out of his house gives him the chance both to evade Crilly and Skeffington and to take a job at the farm where Marcella lives. He is a man living, if not a life of lies, at least one of omissions. A situation like his cannot end well.

Quite how psychologically perceptive all of this is is perhaps questionable. Not Cal’s reluctance to be drawn deeper into acts of violence but his attraction to a woman he feels he has wronged. The atmosphere of constraint though, of circumscription, is entirely credible.

Note: Mac Laverty is how the author’s surname is spelled on the book’s cover and title page but it is more usually rendered MacLaverty

Pedant’s corner:- “and how he would kiss her and touched her” (and touch her.) “‘You’re a boy without?ELSomebody might’” (I have no idea what that ‘?EL’ is about.)

19 this year; 12 by men 7 by women, 4 with an SF/fantasy tinge (5 if you count Beloved,) 1 non-fiction, 1 fictionalised memoir. Not in any order; apart from of reading.

News of the Dead by James Robertson

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Tomorrow by Chris Beckett

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Landmarks by Robert McFarlane

Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

Confessions by Jaume Cabré

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé

Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé

Xstabeth by David Keenan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini

Beloved by Toni Morrison (review to appear here soon.)

In Four Great Cornish Novels, Gollancz, 1984, 185 p.  (Frenchman’s Creek first published in 1941.)

Tired of life in London, and perhaps of the reputation she had acquired after accompanying her husband Sir Harry to insalubrious hostelries, Dona, Lady St Columb, has repaired post-haste to Navron, their house in Cornwall, with the couple’s two children. There, the enigmatic servant William tries to make her life comfortable but there is something odd about the contents of her dressing table.

We sense plot afoot when the local bigwig, Lord Godolphin, calls to warn her of a French pirate ship which has been raiding ships in the area, that its crew takes liberties with women of the district and that she might be advised to be wary. Dona’s response to this information, hinting to Godolphin that those women might not take amiss to such attentions, seems a little forward for her times but it is already established that she is of an independent mind.

Naturally she soon stumbles upon that French ship in a creek on her land, is captured and taken aboard. Its captain, when she is brought to him, is more preoccupied with making a drawing of a bird. When their conversation starts he treats her with courtesy and a friendship begins to burgeon between them. He is – or was till he took up piracy – Jean-Benoit Aubéry, and the ship is La Mouette. He had also slept in her bed at Navron (William is in reality his servant) and gazed on the portrait of her that hung on the wall.

Frenchman’s Creek is a peculiar mixture of the period novel and the swashbuckler. Dona pretends to take to her bed in order to undertake a voyage with La Mouette, and on board dresses as a cabin boy. It is a freedom she relishes.

In one of her conversations with the pirate (the name Aubéry is not utilized at all much) he contrasts their abilities, “‘Women make babies. That is a greater achievement than the making of a drawing, or the planning of an action.’”

It is not to last, the idyll is brought to an end when Sir Harry returns from London unexpectedly. There is still plot to be had though, and dangerous stratagems to deploy. This entertaining novel isn’t what you might call great literature but neither is it a potboiler.

After reading three of du Maurier’s “four great Cornish novels” of this volume I discern a pattern. In each, someone, a young(ish) woman comes from elsewhere to a house – or inn – in Cornwall and comes upon a secret. In this one the woman is not quite so young and not so naïve and exerts agency to a greater degree.

Pedant’s corner:- Naxron (elsewhere Navron,) “in expressibly shocked” (inexpressibly,) “because he had bid them to do so” (bade them – bade was used later – or, bidden them,) “closed the grill” (the grille.)

Mariner Books, 1998, 187 p

Here, we are in Moscow in 1913. Though educated in England, printer Frank Reid has spent most of his life in Russia, inheriting the business from his father, but that life is thrown into disarray when his wife Nellie ups and leaves leaving him with three children to cope with, Dolly, Ben and Annushka, and so he engages a young woman, Lisa Ivanovna, as a sort of nanny.

The details of life in pre-revolutionary Russia seem convincing, the sealing up of houses windows’ for the winter, the casual bribery (connected with a mention of the venality of Grigory Rasputin,) the petty regulations, the restrictions placed on the movement and employment of Russian citizens, the necessity to assuage the police and other relevant authorities. Some incidents are at times reminiscent of Doctor Zhivago, particularly the association between Lisa Ivanovna and Volodya Vasilich, the man who breaks into the printing shop one night and fires a gun at Frank, though the dynamic is reversed.

Reid’s interactions with others, his deputy Selwyn Osipych, whose main interest is in having his volume of poems published but who may have been involved with Nellie’s decision to flee, the print shop supervisor, Tvyordov, are both friendly and distanced. His daughter Dolly seems remarkably composed in the face of the situation – but adolescent girls often are.

However, Reid’s burgeoning attraction to Lisa Ivanovna is told to us rather than shown and so does not contain as much force as it might have.

Pedant’s corner:- “Jeyes’ fluid” (Jeyes’s?) “‘I don’t think so. She certainly didn’t say so?’” (isn’t a question,) “there was still barrel organs playing in the streets” (there were still,) benzine (a word used in other languages certainly but the British one is ‘petrol’. Petrol was used later in the phrase “This Russian petrol is very low on benzine.” Make of that what you will.) “Their breaths rose together as steam into the bitterly cold lamplit air” (I know people refer to it this way but steam is actually invisible, the misty you can see emanating from people’s outbreaths is actually water droplets, condensed steam/water vapour.)

Viking, 1998, 220 p.

Stella Brentwood has retired to Somerset after her career as a social anthropologist which took her all around the world – Cardiff’s Tiger Bay interviewing Lascar seamen, the Nile Delta, Malta, Orkney.

She had a lifetime friendship with her fellow Oxford graduate Nadine. They were at University in the fifties when women students were still rare and in a sense exotic. They always had different attitudes to marriage. Nadine was keen on the idea but at the time opined, “‘Marriage is for later. The thing right now is simply – men. Here we are, surrounded by them. Spoiled for choice. The point is to make the most of it – we’re never going to have it so good again.’” To which Stella as narrator adds, “She’s right about that, at least,” though she seems never to have been short of opportunities herself. Though she later reflects, “Extraordinary process, pair bonding. Quite as arbitrary, really, among humans as among animals.” It’s mostly a question of who’s there when the time is ripe. It certainly was for Nadine whose outlook on the subject is entirely practical, saying marriage isn’t about grand passion. Looking back, Stella writes – using the past continuous tense – that, “Divorce is entirely familiar to the children of the fifties, but marriage is still viewed with disconcerting sobriety. It is seen as a permanent arrangement,” adding, “Well, they will find out.”

But Nadine is now dead and her widower Richard has surprisingly got in contact and offers help with first the move to Somerset, recommending a property in Kingston Florey, and then with lawn mowing and such.

Down the road from Stella’s cottage are the premises of T G Hiscox, Agricultural Engineers, where live Mr and Mrs Hiscox and their two sons. Mrs Hiscox is fiercely protective and controlling of her family. The boys in turn feel suffocated by her strictures and take any opportunities for petty acts of vandalism out of her sight.

Over time Stella has realised that “Most people require a support base … the ‘us’ that supplies common cause and provides opportunity for altruism and reciprocal favours and also for prejudice, insularity, racialism, xenophobia and a great deal else.” She has never had that; by choice.

Nadine had described her as detached – which is perhaps a good thing for a novelist to be – and, except perhaps for the local shopkeeper, she is disconnected from the inhabitants of Kingston Florey. An incident involving her dog makes her appreciate she is quite as alienated as the rest of them, on the outside looking in. (Richard reminds her that that was what she was trained for.)

She reflects that emotion recollected in tranquillity is more like it is recollected in clarity, without the helter-skelter feelings which accompanied that emotion in the past and feels that “It is not true that people diminish with age – it is those earlier remembered selves who are in some way pared down, depleted, like those who look out all unaware from old photographs.”

In fact Stella has had a complex of different relationships, some ongoing others not, none of which defines her. Spiderweb is in effect the tale of someone who refuses to be trapped.

Pedant’s corner:- “were able to buy honey and candles made by his bees” (candle-making bees would be an interesting sight,) “none of the army bases were nearby” (none … was nearby,) medieval (mediæval would be nice but I’d settle for mediaeval,) “what looks like the foundations” (what look like the foundations,) “to see from whence” (whence = ‘from where’ so from whence = ‘from from where’,) racialism (nowadays the word is shortened to racism,) “to hove into view” (hove is past tense; ‘to heave into view’.)

Hodder, 2010 , 437p.

The novel charts the course of the on-off, but mostly off, relationship of two people, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, who hook up on the night of their graduation party, 15^th July 1988, St Swithin’s Day as it happens, on what, for him, was meant to be a one-off but for her a long-desired outcome.

The particular conceit of the book is that it returns to view the pair on the same day in the following years as their lives go on different trajectories, so we see their friendship evolve in snapshots, their comings together and driftings apart in the interstices looked back on.

Emma gained a double first at University but Dexter only a 2:2. She is the much more competent of the two mainly because he is a bit of an idiot but it is his career which takes off as he rapidly becomes a success on late Friday night television as co-presenter of a vapid TV show. His rising without trace is emblematic of the unfairness of life. She struggles to get by with writing before finding work in a Tex-Mex restaurant and eventual success when she takes up teaching English. With his life spent in drinking and womanising, quite what she continues to see in him is a mystery.

Their friendship endures in a sporadic way, she an emotional crutch for him, he usually taking her for granted. They have relationships with other people, unsatisfactory for the most part though his short marriage to Sylvie brings a daughter Jasmine, a bright spot in his life, but he is not really mature enough to be a father.

Only the odd unfelicitous phrase mars the writing and there are some nice authorial touches. In a restaurant on a mutual holiday, “The waiter arrived with complimentary Greek brandies, the kind of drink that can only be given away.” In her early thirties “She owns a cafetiere and for the first time in her life she is considering investing in some pot-pourri.” At a restaurant there is a mild critique of culinary pretension – a tower of jenga-cut chips – all but raw – with the dish’s fish component balanced precariously on top.

Really though this is the same old often told story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, they continue to hold a torch for each other. There seems to be an infinite number of ways to chart the vagaries of human attraction.

Pedant’s corner:- “gin and tonics” (gins and tonic,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “‘Someone I can rely onto stick around’” (rely on to stick,) “took a bit an upturn” (a bit of an upturn,) “as if were an” (as if it were an,) “his palette cleansed with a pail of iced Lilt” (the only stuff you can cleanse a palette with is paint-stripper, a palate though could be cleansed with Lilt. Palate was used correctly later,) “‘from the teets of cows’” (teats,) “ ‘not to go the premiere’” (not to go to the premiere,) focussed (x 2, focused,) “as the band play” (as the band plays) “‘That’s that what I meant’” (that ‘that’ isn’t needed,) “laying down again” (lying down again,) smoothes (smooths,) “aqualine features” (aquiline,) “a ball-peen hammer” (ball-pein,) “Suki Meadows’ face” (Meadows’s,) snuck (sneaked,) “a pair of booties” (bootees,) soccer (Grrrr, it’s football,) “a funeral directors” (a funeral director’s,) podiums (the Latin plural is podia.)

Vintage, 2000, 235 p. Translated by Nick Caistor from the Spanish Rabos de lagartija.

This is a striking novel. It is told from the viewpoint of an unborn child (though as if being remembered from enough years later for that child to be able to write.) Any objections to such an unlikely story teller are forestalled by the sentence, “It’s precisely because I didn’t see it that I can imagine it much better than you.” (Imagining it is, after all, what novelists do all the time.) Scenes and times shift abruptly but always comprehensibly. Later events (even those subsequent to the narrative) are treated proleptically, but then again, to the narrator they will already have taken place. There are conversations – envisioned or hallucinated – between characters who have not met, the contents of which are not given quotation marks.

The present tense of the book is set in an area of Barcelona just after the Hiroshima bomb. The main protagonist is David Bartra, the brother of our child narrator, but the plot centres round his pregnant mother, Rosa, whose hair colour means she is most often referred to as the red-head.

David’s peculiar pastime is cutting off the tails of lizards to present to his friend Paulino Bartolet. The lizards’ diminished bodies keep on going, (which reads as a metaphor for Franco’s Spain.) David is plagued by a continual hissing noise in his ears and has conversations in his head with not only his father and our unnamed narrator but also an RAF pilot, Flight Lieutenant Bryan O’Flynn – of Irish descent via Australia – depicted surrendering (but in David’s mind maybe about to be shot) in a page from a German propaganda magazine, a photo displayed on David’s wall. O’Flynn spent a lot of time in the Bartra household and, by implication, as it is never fully spelled out, he and Rosa became close. The reader is left to conclude of this situation whatever he or she wishes.

The Bartras live in the abandoned surgery of Doctor P J Rosón-Ansio, one of whose rooms has a giant poster of an ear, which David thinks of as always eavesdropping on his conversations; an entirely understandable belief in an authoritarian state. (Big Brother is not only watching you but also listening.)

Rosa has been left behind by her husband, Victor, most likely because he was an opponent of Franco. Victor had to make his escape by sliding down a gully near the Bartra house; an escapade in which he ripped his trousers and buttocks on a piece of broken glass. In David’s (and our narrator’s) imagination he always appears with a bloodied handkerchief attempting to bandage the cut. As a result of his activities – which included helping smuggle Allied POWs out of France during the war, one of whom was that same RAF pilot who later returned to duty only to be shot down and captured again (hence the photo) the Bartra household has received the attentions of Police Inspector Galván.

The Inspector begins to ply Rosa with gifts either because he is trying to suborn her for information about Victor’s whereabouts or has really formed an affection for her. But he is a nasty piece of work as two incidents reveal. In his conversations with him, David, under the influence of films he has seen, usually calls the Inspector bwana or sahib.

David resents Galván’s attentions to his mother and his adoption of an old dog provides another source of conflict with the Inspector, who maintains the dog should be put down.

Added to all this is Paulino’s relationship with his abusive uncle and an illustration of police immunity from redress when an officer takes advantage of a girl who is trying to help David get Galván into trouble.

Lizard Tails is an example of a certain sort of literature which emanates from totalitarian societies, stories in which everything seems to be said obliquely but is all the more powerful for it.

Pedant’s corner:- smoothe/smoothes (several times; ‘smooth/smooths’,) an unnecessary line break after ‘hand’ in ‘with a hand on my backside’. There was space left on the line for ‘on my’,) atomical (just ‘atomic’,) Morris’ (Morris’s,) “Captain Vickers’ sure shot” (Vickers’s,) “‘A 12-cylinder Rolls Royce Marlin 61 engine’” (Spitfire engines were Rolls Royce Merlin ones,) “as the suns starts to set” (sun,) lungeing (lunging,) “the clothes line” (clothes’ line?) staunch (stanch,) “Señora Vergés’ backside” (Vergés’s.)

Penguin, 1993, 637 p

Richard Papen was brought up in Plano in California, a place he regards as a backwater. Nevertheless, he has made it to an elite college at Hampden in Vermont. His parents were not well off and he feels the contrast between himself and other students there. At first he tries not to be found out, but such things are hard to disguise. After originally being turned down as student of Greek by its professor Julian, Richard comes into the orbit of his rather small and close-knit class cohort, Francis, Henry, Edmond (known as Bunny,) and twins Charles and Camilla. (Those last two names perhaps now have more of a frisson than they would have had when Tartt wrote the book.) Richard overhears the five arguing about a Greek translation and provides them with a neat solution which encourages them to petition Julian to accept him.

Though Julian is perhaps unorthodox as a teacher – certainly in his attitude to assessments -his reputation as being charismatic is not actually reflected in the text, where he almost seems a nebulous presence, though he is instrumental in the plot unfolding.

Only a few instances are given where Julian’s personality comes through. When struck with the thought that Bunny, due to his girlfriend Marion being Presbyterian, might be about to turn to religion Julian opines, “‘Well whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.’”

So far, so campus novel; but an exchange in one of Julian’s classes foreshadows later events.

Julian says, “‘We think we have many desires but in fact we only have one. What is it?’”

‘To live,’ said Camilla.

‘To live forever,’ said Bunny.”

A sentiment like that is always a hostage to fortune, whoever utters it.

Richard is not yet fully part of the group when the incident upon which the whole structure rests takes place; a Dionysian Bacchanal at which neither Richard nor Bunny was present where the invocation of the god actually happened – or the other four believed it did, which is the same thing. During their drug induced stravaiging a neighbouring farmer was accidentally killed. Richard learns this only later but Bunny saw the blood-soaked aftermath and did not quite believe their story of running over a deer.

Bunny is a bit of a loose cannon, leaching off anyone he can but most often Henry, of whom he says to Richard, “‘I think he’s got a little bit of Jew blood.’” The incident makes his behaviour worse. At one point Henry’s refusal to indulge him provokes the outburst, “‘You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew.’” How representative this is of the attitudes of attendees of elite US colleges in the time portrayed I don’t know but perhaps they may still be common.

The group’s growing fear of Bunny’s possible betrayal of their secret, complicated by the convoluted relationships between Francis and Charles, Charles and Camilla and Camilla and Henry, and Richard’s unrequited feelings for Camilla is drastic, irrevocable and only creates further tensions between them.

The book received a lot of praise and became a best seller. While being well enough written it is also about one third as long as it needs to be. The author might argue she was providing space to develop character but that could still have been done more economically. Moreover, nearly all of the characters are unsympathetic and morally bankrupt to a greater or lesser degree. Though maybe this is true of elite US college alumni/alumnae in general. Even viewpoint character Richard is weak and easily swayed.

It’s not encouraged me to read anything else by Tartt.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of dialogue (x 2,) – and at its end (x 1.) “‘If I’d of been’” (‘If I’d have been’; or, ‘If I’d’ve been’ – but it was in dialogue,) “it was the epicenter” [sic] – despite this being a British publication the text is in USian – (not ‘it was off centre’, just ‘it was the centre’,) “littered like a fairgrounds” (like a fairground. Is “fairgrounds” USian?) Gladiola (Gladioli.) “None of his things were gone” (None of his things was gone,) organdy (organdie,) a cat is first referred to as she but later as he.