Pushkin Vertigo, 2024, 405 p.

Alison McCoist has been all but shunned in Glasgow’s police after she made a mistake in believing the confession of a man called Knightley to the murder of a young pregnant woman. The real culprit remains at large and DI McCoist – who has enough on her plate already what with her name being similar to a well-known former footballer (‘I’ve heard all the jokes already’) and only seeing her twin children under access conditions at weekends – is as a result widely thought to be on the take.

In parental terms Davey Burnet is in the same boat as Alison. His estranged wife Sarah is seeking an order to prevent him seeing his four-year-old daughter Annalee. His job at Sean’s carwash does not pay well and he has problems with booze.

When Paul McGuinn turns up in an expensive car asking for it to be cleaned – of evidence of his extra-marital exploits – Davey and would-be law student Tim do too good a job. McGuinn keeps returning.

Meanwhile DI McCoist is working away in the background trying to redeem her reputation. Her attention is drawn to the carwash by a complaint from a female customer who left her child in the back seat to go shopping while her car was being cleaned and was subjected to abuse and threats by Sean when she came back.

One day Davey mistakes the date of his child access hearing and when reminded of it by his mother panics into taking McGuinn’s car to try to make it on time. He is blocked in on the way, and kidnapped. People out to get McGuinn – a local crime boss into trafficking, prostitution, and with a yen for violence – have made a mistake. As a harmless innocent they let Davey go and burn the car. But Davey’s error has delivered both himself and the carwash business as a whole into McGuinn’s hands. Soon all sorts of clean-up jobs, most of them grisly, fall Davey’s way.

There is a sticker on the front cover saying this won the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. I thought it was all right, diverting enough but not especially notable in terms of crime fiction. It did have a strong sprinkling of Glaswegian dialect. For my taste there was too much violence but I suspect crime readers would not be displeased by that.

Oh, and despite the foregrounding of the detective in most of the commentary/reviews of Squeaky Clean I have seen this is actually Davey Burnet’s story not Alison McCoist’s.

Pedant’s corner:- on the back cover “half the Glasgow copshop think DI Alison McCoist is bent” (half the Glasgow copshop thinks ….,) bicky/bickies (biccy/biccies,) gyprock (several times. That building material’s proprietary name is Gyproc,) “next him” (next to him.) “Dannie’s Gibb’s body” (Dannie Gibbs’s,) sprung (sprang,) “dove in” (dived in,) “a twitching bag of ticks” (of tics,) epicentres (centres,) “pouring out a gash on her forehead” (pouring out of a gash,) staunch (stanch.)

Harper Perennial, 2005, 190 p. First published in 1989.

Father Angwin is a Roman Catholic priest in the remote parish of Fetherhoughton in 1956. There is a small convent affiliated to Angwin’s Church of St Thomas Aquinas. The convent and attached school is overseen by Mother Perpetua – called Purpit by just about everyone. She has a fierce grip both on the nuns and the children and a downer on just about everybody except the bishop. Her contempt is particularly strong for Irish people, which is bad news for Sister Philomena who as a consequence gets all the drudgerous jobs.

The bishop is a moderniser in favour of updating the mass by dropping Latin. Angwin, despite being a man who lost his faith years ago is against this, fearing his parishioners would stray. He tells the bishop his flock “aren’t Christians. These people are heathens and Catholics.” Without the statues and their superstitions they wouldn’t attend Church. The bishop, however, insists on the removal of most of the plaster statues of saints in the Church. Angwin’s only solution to this problem is to have the statues buried in the churchyard.

Soon after, a knock comes on the presbytery door. In walks Father Fludd, whom everyone assumes is the curate the bishop had promised/threatened. Fludd is a mysterious character who quickly manages to winkle out Angwin’s and Philomena’s reservations about their respective situations. In one of their conversations he tells Angwin, “‘Common sense has nothing to do with religion.’ It is on Philomena, though, that his influence is most profound.

Oddness and a hint of the supernatural accompany him. Though he drinks Angwin’s whisky, the level in the bottle does not seem to drop. He laments the congregation’s lack of appreciation of what they are saying in their responses – formaligh for foe malign, destrier for death’s dread. He is, he says, in the business of transformation. It is never spelled out as such, but the invitation is clearly there to see him as an incarnation of the Devil.

Fludd is a short novel, but says what it needs to – even if the treatment, a kind of distancing, an opacity (which reminded me a little of the writing of Muriel Spark,) renders it almost dream-like.

Aside: In a foreword, Mantel says the Catholic Church portrayed in this novel bears “some but not much resemblance” to the one in the real world.

Perhaps redolent of the times in which it is set it contains the dismissive phrase, “digging like an Irishman.”

Pedant’s corner:- medieval (mediæval, please, or at least mediaeval,) “the camphor smell of their Sunday clothes” (the smell of mothballs, presumably. Those were made of naphthalene, not camphor,) “alarum clock” (alarum is archaic,) “like genii let out of bottles” (like genies let out,) “Thomas à Beckett” (nowadays written ‘Thomas Becket’.) “‘I’m not afraid will they recognise me’” (I’m not afraid they will recognise me’.)

Doubleday, 1997, 347 p.

This was Atkinson’s second novel and it exhibits many of the traits which would come to dominate her fiction. The family dynamic here is reminiscent of the one in Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and of the Todds in Life After Life and A God in Ruins. In this one our heroine Isobel finds herself slipping backwards and forwards in time and there is here the first adumbration of the thought found in the Todd books that it would be a boon if somehow we could live our lives over again in order to get them right. There is a Scottish flavour; neighbour Mrs Baxter – I was irresistibly reminded of the old soup adverts, especially since her daughter is named Audrey – lards the text with Scots aphorisms, though the prominence here of trees and forests is more of a preoccupation of English fiction. The house Isobel lives in is even called Arden.

We begin with a literary allusion, “Call me Isobel.” Implicitly to compare herself to Herman Melville is quite a statement by Atkinson of confidence in her abilities. But the book as a whole is dense with allusion or references – and also repetition, but repetition with a purpose, not merely saying the same thing over again in slightly different ways. For example, “The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.” There is also a reversal of Tolstoy’s Karenina Principle in, “I suppose all unhappy families resemble one another (but all happy families are happy in their own way of course)” along with the addition of “But then, do happy families exist, or happy endings come to that, outside of fiction?”

After a starting chapter headlined ‘Beginning’ there are several sections each of ‘Present’ and ‘Past’ narratives outlining Isobel’s story, her family’s and Arden’s, before we end with ‘Future’. ‘Beginning’ is a history of the land on which Arden stands ‘Present’ is narrated by Isobel in first person; ‘Past’ is in the third person.

In the ‘Present,’ Isobel (Fairfax) is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl mooning after the desirable Malcolm Lovat who, to Isobel’s chagrin, sees her as a friend. Her father, Gordon, vanished for seven years after mother Elizabeth was said to have absconded ‘with a fancy man’ but the circumstances are barely ever mentioned by their grandmother, the Widow, and the getting on for elderly spinster aunt, Vinny, in both of whose care they have been left. Both Isobel and her brother Charles try to make the most of things. When Gordon returns it is with a new wife.

The three primal motivations in literature, love, sex and death are well to the fore here. Gordon met Elizabeth by rescuing her from a bombed house during the Blitz, “My hero,” and was thereafter besotted by her feminine dazzle (the widow and Vinny are not so easily taken in.) There are incidents of murder and reported incest and Isobel imagines her part in Malcolm’s death over and over again but is unable to prevent it each time. A rational gloss to these experiences and her apparent time travelling is provided as symptoms of possible fly agaric poisoning.

While Human Croquet is exceedingly well written and intricately plotted – as well as diverse – a tangled web of relationships is revealed during the novel, to not all of which is Isobel privy; possibly too many connections between the characters to be fully convincing. (This is a trait I also noticed recently in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea.)

The game of Human Croquet, rules and a picture of which act as a three page appendix, is one of the pastimes Isobel has read of from an illustrated book of Home Entertainments. It involves a blindfolded person being aurally guided through hoops formed by two people making an arch between them.

In Human Croquet, the novel, Isobel has no such guide and has to make it on her own. As we all do.

Pedant’s corner:- hot-bed (does it need that hyphen? – ‘hotbed’,) Charles’ (many times Charles’s,) “help me Boab” (at least twice. This Scottish phrase is actually not an invocation to someone called Bob to provide assistance but rather an expression of disbelief or disconcertment, and is written ‘help ma boab’,) Keats’ (Keats’s,) beseeched (an apparently acceptable alternative to ‘besought’.) “‘Who understand them?’” (understands,) “CO2  + 2H 2A + light energy – (CH 2) + H2O) + H2A” (supposedly the equation for photosynthesis. It isn’t. And in any case CO₂, H₂O and H₂A, OHOHO) Zeus’ (Zeus’s,) Ysggadril (Yggdrasil,) “the cries of the baby upsets my” (upset my,) “they bid their mother one last terrible farewell” (they bade their mother,) “less discretely” (not less separately [discretely,] but rather less inconspicuously, ‘less discreetly’,) aureoles (x 2, areolas; or areolae,) “to staunch the throbbing” (stanch,) “would he chose for a consort” (would he choose,) “smoothes the sheets” (smooths,) Glebelands’ (Glebelands’s,) de’el (usually spelled ‘de’il’, or deil,) “the amoeba and bacteria” (if it’s supposed to be plural then ‘amoebae’ – or even amœbae.)

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.)

The Women’s Press, 1991, 267 p.

This is a collection of Elphinstone’s short prose works. As usual with Elphinstone the writing is accomplished.

The Green Man. An Art teacher with some romantic disappointments and reasonably unsuccessful exhibitions behind her is walking the disused Dumfries to Stranraer railway line when she comes across an unusual dome-shaped green tent at the lochside near Lochskerrow Halt. Its occupant is a green man, possibly from an alien planet (his tent is not a spaceship, but his culture is other-worldly) who seems able to read her thoughts. Nevertheless their conversation is at cross purposes and frustrating. However, she does not feel threatened by him and agrees to return the next day. She finds herself attracted to him and the inevitable happens. Yet she doesn’t go back again. Her experience feeds into her artwork and her paintings become desirable. When the Loch Skerrow location is identified by one viewer she realises she has put the green man in danger.

Islands of Sheep. A middle-aged academic who has seemingly been unable to sustain relationships with the various women in his life has moved into a bungalow on the Cambridgeshire fens with an ancient mulberry tree in the garden and a view towards a low ridge that was once an island. He takes in as a tenant a young attractive woman psychologist, whom he has difficulty in understanding. As the tale comes towards its end he experiences hallucinations, symptoms of a nervous breakdown.

Conditions of Employment delves into the Matter of Britain. A relatively young jobless woman despairing at her lot in life throws rocks into a stream in her anguish. A few days later she sees a post as a Well Guardian advertised at her local Job Centre. She goes along to the unusual location for the interview. As Well Guardian she finds herself giving advice to people with minor skin complaints or other medical requirements. She also encounters the Watcher of the Sleepers who wants to know if it is the time of danger enough to wake those asleep under Cairnsmore Hill.

The Cold Well features the permanent Guardian of the Well, Oddny, who, at her antlered folkloric counterpart’s request, travels across a stretch of sea to try to undo the source of the sickness affecting the local deer. Reading between the lines, that source is Sellafield.

An Apple From a Tree. The events of this are narrated by a woman to her lover some months after they supposedly took place.  She was in a stand of beech trees in the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh when an apple fell on her. Biting into it she was suddenly transported to a grassy plain where stood a naked woman, who (later) gives her name as Nisola. Shortly her male companion arrived. Nisola was as discomfited by our narrator – especially her clothes – as she was herself. After some confused discussion Nisola bit the apple and they were transported to Edinburgh. Cue toing and froing trying to ameliorate Nisola’s nakedness, before they work out a solution that will serve both. There are irresistible echoes here of the tale of Adam and Eve.

A Life of Glory is narrated by a disembodied consciousness roaming the universe and looking down on the affair of a couple – one from Edinburgh the other from Colorado – with whom the narrator eventually becomes intimately entangled.

Pedant’s corner:- “Aren’t I allowed to have any secrets?” (She’s Scottish; she would say ‘Amn’t I?’) “would have been mowed smooth” (would have been mown smooth,) “with him arm around (with his arm around,) an unindented new paragraph, “supplicants” (previously the spelling suppliant had been used,) almanack (usually spelled ‘almanac’,) seelings (context suggests ‘seedlings’.) Plus points for die as the singular of dice.

In Four Great Cornish Novels, Gollancz, 1984, 185 p.  (First published in 1936.)

In its set-up this could almost be a children’s story. Protagonist Mary Yellan’s mother has died after seventeen years of widowhood stoically looking after both Mary and the family farm at Helford. With no parents Mary might be footloose and fancy free – as the protagonists of children’s stories tend to be – but her mother’s dying wish was for Mary to go to live with her Aunt Patience at Jamaica Inn. Her sojourn there makes for a deep, dark experience.

The foreboding starts with the driver of the coach taking her there warning of the inn’s ill reputation. She immediately finds Patience’s husband Joss Merlyn to be a boorish, overbearing drunkard and the Inn itself an inhospitable place, taking as it does no customers and having no visitors except those occasional ones Jess warns Mary not to pay any attention to, indeed to hide away from. Not so much “Watch the wall my darling” as cover your face. Mary wants to flee back to Helford and only her concern for Aunt Patience persuades her to stay.

Gradually, during which time Mary explores the countryside around, Jess’s true malevolence manifests itself through drunken confessions – not just a smuggler but a wrecker and murderer to boot.

du Maurier obviously had a love and an eye for the Cornish landscape, which is described in generous, admiring terms. These passages reminded me of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, especially when Mary got lost on the moors and was rescued by a clergyman, (here the vicar of Auchtarnun, Mr Davey.) du Maurier’s affection for that work is usually noted in relation to her later novel, Rebecca, a more obvious reworking of Jane Eyre, but the writing in Rebecca does not carry the same visual stimulus.

There is a coyness to Mary’s interactions with Jess’s brother Jem, and a scarcely believable reticence to the way in which she is treated by Jess’s smuggling associates; but the book was first published in the 1930s – which does make it a little surprising that the villain of the piece (who in truth from his first appearance was not difficult to decipher as such) tells Mary that he found “Christianity to be built upon hatred, and jealousy, and greed …. while the old pagan barbarism was naked and clean.”

Notwithstanding my observations on du Maurier’s treatment of landscape above there were times when I found the novel – for a so-called classic – to be a touch overwritten.

Pedant’s corner:- the text repeatedly refers to Jamaica Inn’s tall chimneys. The illustration at the story’s start has small chimneys. Otherwise; “when the first cock crew” (crowed,) waggons (many times. I know it’s an acceptable alternative but since the first time I saw the word it was spelled ‘wagons’ I have always persisted in the belief it should have only one ‘g’,) “‘for my husband sake’” (husband’s sake,) to-morrow (nowadays unhyphenated,) havered (not used in the Scottish sense of talking nonsense but more like ‘tarried’.)

In The New York Trilogy, 2004. [City of Glass, 1985, 133 p.]

Well this is an odd one. A writer called Daniel Quinn using the pen-name of William Wilson to publish detective novels about an investigator named Max Work (make of that moniker what you will) receives a telephone call asking if he is Paul Auster; of the Auster Detective Agency. At first he demurs saying there is no-one of that name at that address but on a second phone call agrees to meet the caller, who is a man calling himself Peter Stillman (though he says that is not his real name) looked after by his wife, a woman at pains to point out their relationship is not sexual. Stillman moves with a certain stuntedness, like a puppet.

His story is weird; raised by his father without being spoken to to try to discover, when he does speak, what the primordial language was. The elder Stillman is about to be released from prison and the younger is convinced that when he is, he will kill his son, or at least attempt to. Quinn’s task – as Auster – will be to try to prevent this.

Noting the movements down in a red notebook, Quinn follows the older “Stillman” around the city while imagining himself to be the detective Paul Auster in order to fit the part, over paths that, when graphed, seem to trace out the outlines of letters of the alphabet: letters which Quinn eventually realises spell out “Tower of Babel”. This is after a discussion of a book about the Tower written by one Henry Dark. City of Glass displays a fascination with language then. Quinn becomes obsessed with following Stillman while slowly being immersed in the character of “Paul Auster” who is, though, in effect a nullity. “To be Auster meant being a man with no interior, a man with no thoughts.”

Where are we meant to go with all this? A book written by a man called Paul Auster with an imagined Paul Auster who doesn’t actually exist?

But there’s more. Quinn eventually meets the “real” Paul Auster and they engage in a discussion about Henry Dark and what the initials HD might stand for. Which is when we come to Humpty Dumpty; a character whose best known philosophy relates to words as meaning what he wanted them to, as if he could force them into that meaning by will alone.

They then progress into a conversation about the origins of The Adventures of Don Quixote which Cervantes claimed to have translated from Arabic to Spanish but, according to the “real” Paul Auster of the book, was made up by his friends to illuminate his delusions, then translated into Arabic, the manuscript to be found by Cervantes, in order that this reflection would cure him of his madness. But this book’s “Auster” says Cervantes wasn’t mad, only pretended to be.

In his growing obsession with “Stillman” Quinn descends into a degraded state, staying up all night in order not to avoid seeing when “Stillman” will leave his apartment and eventually losing all sense of proportion and personal hygiene.

At the end of all this I’m still not sure whether there is something relevant about City of Glass or if, instead, it’s a pile of self-indulgent tosh.

Pedant’s corner:- “Quinn could not image himself addressing a word to this person” (could not imagine himself?)

Penguin, 2010, 366 p, including 2 p Glossary.

Here we have two novels in one. Or actually, it is more like a short story (actually perhaps a short novella) containing a novel within it. That novel has each chapter begin with a word which starts with the letter B as does The Forty Rules of Love as a whole.

The framing device is set in 2008 where Ella Rubinstein is a Jewish housewife in Pennsylvania, married to a philandering husband and, with her children more or less grown, beginning to wonder if she is wasting her life, but not really considering the nature of the experience of love. She has just secured a job reading manuscripts submitted to a publisher, the first of which is a novel titled Sweet Blasphemy written by an Aziz Z Zahara. When the oldest of her three children, Jeanette, suddenly announces she and her boyfriend Scott want to get married it precipitates a crisis in Ella’s life. The meat of The Forty Rules of Love, though, is in that submitted manuscript, which is the tale of the effect exerted on the life of the thirteenth century preacher Rumi by the Sufi mystic, Shams of Tabriz. So taken by Sweet Blasphemy is Ella that she emails its author (without letting him know she is reading it for the publisher.) Through the ensuing correspondence she and Aziz fall for each other.

Sweet Blasphemy is told with a variety of viewpoint characters, each of whose voices Shafak renders superbly: the Killer, Shams, Rumi, The Novice, the Master, the Zealot, Suleiman the Drunk, Desert Rose the Harlot, Hasan the Beggar, Aladdin (not the pantomime character,) Kerra – Rumi’s Christian wife, who sees little difference between Christians and Muslims as people – Kimya (who falls in love with Shams,) Baybars the Warrior, Sultan Walad and Husam the Student, all adding up to a convincing picture of life in thirteenth century Anatolia.

In his encounters with others Shams shows himself fond of illuminating his philosophy with either a parable or else one of his Forty Rules of Love. (Whether there are forty of Shams’s rules given to us in the book I didn’t bother to count.)

His preference for the loving aspects of religious teaching does not enamour him to adherents of a more fundamental bent.

For Shams, “It’s easy to love a perfect God. ….. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects.” Moreover, “Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.” He is also wise. “How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together.”

Of religious zealots he says, “Looking at the whole universe with fear-tinted eyes it is no wonder they see a plethora of things to be afraid of,” they pick and choose only those verses of their holy book which conform to their inclinations and so ignore its totality.

In a passage that speaks to the similarities between fundamental Muslims and Calvinists he says, “By and large, the narrow minded say that dancing is sacrilege.” But when you think about it that attitude could be taken to be blasphemy. “They think God gave us music … then forbade us to listen to it.”

It is possible this thought may allude to the background of ‘Aziz Z Zahara’. It turns out he was born as one Craig Richardson in Kinlochbervie! His own story is not without misfortune, though.

Love, along with sex and death, is of course one the three main preoccupations of the novel as a form. With Shams, Shafak’s focus on it here is more on the religious ideal but it is counterpoised with Ella’s relationship with ‘Aziz’. But Shams himself is incapable of extending his general love for humans with the more intense feelings a married man ought to have for his wife. Kimya reflects on her love for him that “Little did I know that I was making the most common mistake women have made throughout the ages: to naïvely think that with their love they can change the men they love.”

In his own way too, Shams is a fundamentalist.

Is there slight imbalance here, though? Would the novel succeed as well without the framing device? Possibly.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful, complex and compassionate book. As an author Shafak is certainly the real deal.

Pedant’s corner:- “on my doorsill” (usually it’s a doorstep,) strived (strove,) caravanseries (caravanserais,) “portabella mushrooms” (Portobello mushrooms,) bookstore (in an email from “Aziz”. As a Scot, he would surely say ‘bookshop’,) “like a broken faucet” (ditto; ‘like a broken tap’, but then, the book is written in USian,) “off of” (I know it’s USian but it annoys me. Just ‘off’, please,) “no other” (none other.)

Arcaia Books, 2014, 742 p, plus 9 p Dramatis Personae. Translated from the Catalan, Jo Confesso, (Raval Edicions SLU, Proa, 2011,) by Mara Faye Lethem.

How to describe a book that is so unlike anything else I have read yet at the same time has echoes of so much I have? Simultaneously a history, a biography, a love story and a tale of friendship; with moments of joy, moments of sadness, moments of betrayal, moments of horror. Twisting, shifting and refusing categorisation, it contains multitudes. Humanity in all its guises, many of them unappealing.

Confessions is a long, complex, but nevertheless still easy to read, novel, ostensibly the life story of Barcelona native Adrià Ardèvol, whose misfortune it was – as he tells us in the novel’s first sentence – to be born into the wrong family. He describes it as an unforgivable mistake. This is not quite a paraphrase of Tolstoy’s aphorism about families but it does prepare us for the frosty nature of his relationships with his parents, neither of whom he thinks ever loved him, or each other. Indeed, he wonders why they bothered to get married in the first place.

Possibly as a result of this coldness the young Adrià personifies his toys, Sheriff Carson of Rockland and the Valiant Arapaho Chief, Black Eagle, who act as a sounding board for his thoughts and conscience since they talk back to him – sometimes even initiating the conversation. This discourse diminishes through time but never entirely disappears.

Adrià’s father was a dealer in manuscripts, incunabula, antiquities, curios etc (given the unprincipled nature of his transactions I hesitate to call them objects of virtu – but of course the objects themselves would be blameless) and kept a shop in Barcelona. One of his gifts to Adrià was a Storioni violin, made in Cremona in 1674, whose sound is better than a Stradivarius. The novel is also the story of that violin, named Vial, of its creator and its ownership.

The narrative is frequently addressed to “you”, and at first this “you” might be assumed to be the reader but then it is found to be Sara, the love of Adrià’s life, to whom he is relating his life story – and his sins. The text contains repeated instances where the word confiteor is repeated as a single sentence.

That love is Sara Voltes-Epstein, an illustrator of artistic talent, who is a Jew and incurs the suspicions of Adrià’s mother, who think she is after the Ardèvol family’s money and hence scuppers any chance of Adrià marrying her. Here the familiar arc of boy meets girl boy loses girl takes shape and indeed the two do get together later – years later – but that strand, though the central tragedy of Adrià’s life, is only a small part of this voluminous book, one of whose historical scenes implicitly draws parallels between the mediæval treatment of Jews and its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. That Sara is Jewish is central to Adrià’s story and his ultimate anguish.

The narrative is not straightforward, slipping between first and third person (I and he/Adrià) seemingly at random, conversations switch from direct to reported speech then back again with no punctuational signals, descriptions within them of past events are presented as a historical account of what those speakers would have said (or did say.) The setting can change years, decades – or centuries – within a single paragraph or even sentence. Often someone’s speech is suddenly cut off midline by an interruption. We witness the same scene from several different viewpoints sometimes hundreds of pages apart. Yet this all seems organic, all natural. Everything flows.

It is the violin which ties the whole together, acquired by Adrià’s father for a knock-down price from a former SS officer who took it from its rightful owner inside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, given to Adrià to play – but he has no desire to have a career as a violinist. In contrast his friend Bernat does do so but in turn wants to write stories which Adrià tells him have uninspiring prose and he should stick to the violin. All interleaved with the unfolding of Adrià’s life, we see scenes of the violin’s construction from a cache of uniquely treated wood and its subsequent passing down through the generations, the shutdown of the monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal in the 15^th century, the significance of the number 615428, the resonance of the Urgell painting in Adrià’s childhood home of the Sant Maria de Gerri monastery receiving the light of the sun setting behind Trespui and much, much more. Occasional, highly intermittent, sections are rendered in italics, apparently written by Bernat which in the end cast an utterly different light on what we have been reading before.

This might all seem too elaborate a construction to balance but Cabré is entirely in control of what he is doing and is not afraid to show it. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad” is a straight quotation from Gabriel García Márquez though Adrià does not actually face a firing squad – except metaphorically. The nearest literary comparison to the effect Cabré creates that I can think of is Kurt Vonnegut, but Vonnegut is more off-beat, more fanciful. Confessions deals entirely in the human sphere. “Evil existed before the war and doesn’t depend on any entelechy, but rather on people.”

There is a comment on the changing of attitudes over time when a lecturer says, “‘In the eighteenth century, if you weren’t wearing a wig, makeup, stockings and high heels, they wouldn’t let you into the salons. Today, a man wearing makeup, a wig, stockings and heels would be locked up in prison without any questions being asked.’” This was in Franco’s time in Spain, which Adrià – and Cabré – experienced. That dictatorship is only lightly touched on in the text but adds an undertone of colour.

Adrià tells Sara through his memoire, “you will continue living in these lines every time someone reads these pages,” but it is his overall story of greed and hate, but also friendship and love, the enduring constants of human interactions, that will linger.

Confessions is a tour-de-force.

Pedant’s corner:- On the inside cover blurb “reaches a crescendo” (reaches a climax.) Otherwise; “which much hve been immense” (which must have been,) Mrs Canyameres’ (Canyameres’s.) “Even thought I was very young” (Even though,) “wile away my time” (while away,) “the only thing that kept him in Cremona were the attentions of the dark, passionate Carina” (the only thing … was the attentions,) “having caught me in fragranti” (in flagrante,) “but the silent was thick” (silence,) “off of” (x 2, no ‘of’, just ‘off’,) “inside of me” (no ‘of’, just ‘inside me’.) Obersturbahnführer (Obersturmbahnführer,) Fèlix Morlin (elsewhere always Félix Morlin,)  “inside out fatherland” (our fatherland.) “‘Who knows.’” (Who knows?) Planas (Plensa?) “worse for the wear” (no ‘the’, just ‘worse for wear’,) “you mouth dropped open” (your mouth,) the perfect place to sooth the torments” (to soothe; to sooth would be a different thing entirely,) “the strict silence that accompany the twenty four hours” (accompanies,) Complin (Compline,) insuring (ensuring,) Germany (German,) “his licence exam” (his driving test.) Strumbahnführer (x 4, Sturmbahnführer?) “‘Where’d you get that come from?’” (‘Where’d you get that from?’ Or ‘Where’d that come from?’,) “as if she had shook off a few years” (shaken off.) “Kamenek, with a smile, slide the microphone towards” (slid the microphone,) “to stab he who pauses” (to stab him who,) forrage (forage,) “for a several years” (no ‘a’,) “to be hear it for myself” (no ‘be’,) consierge (concierge,) an extraneous quotation mark. “I was wracked by my bad conscience” (I was racked by.)

Flamingo, 1988, 138 p.

This book won the Booker Prize in 1979. However, it didn’t chime with me at all. It’s set in the early 1960s in a community of houseboat dwellers on a part of the River Thames known as the middle Reach and roams between various characters who all display a curious level of detachment.

Nenna took on the tenancy of the boat Grace while her husband Edward was abroad but on coming back he refused to step foot on it. He now lives elsewhere in London. Their children, Martha and Tilda, spend their time thinking of Cliff Richard and Elvis and roaming the muddy tidelines avoiding school. The marriage of Richard Blake and his wife Laura of the Lord Jim is shaky. Maurice (who has named his boat Maurice,) lives a shadowy life and allows a dodgy mate to use space on his boat to store stolen goods. Willis is trying to sell Dreadnought despite the fact it has a bad leak and has asked the others to conceal that.

The main thread running through the book is Nenna’s desire to have Edward return to her but her attempt to secure this ends badly, yet then he suddenly blunders onto another of the boats.

There was though at least one good line; about the ability of men to do nothing at all in an unhurried manner being one of the things they can do better than women. (I couldn’t help wondering what the other things – if any – are?)

I suppose I couldn’t get on with this for the same reason I have difficulty with appreciating Muriel Spark. Most of the characters seem opaque and unconvincing.

Pedant’s corner:- I did have a pedant’s corner for this but due to not posting this review soon after reading I cut them for the posting I do on Goodreads and a private blog. It was from the latter I recovered the review to put it on here.