Unwin, 1989, 188 p.

This is apparently the third in Greenland’s Daybreak series but I wasn’t really aware of this when I bought it recently. I read The Hour of the Thin Ox many years ago and reviewed Daybreak on a Different Mountain on the blog in 2009.

Other Voices is a slightly unfocused tale set in the standardised pre- (or never-) industrial fantasy milieu. Greenland doesn’t fall into the clichés of the genre though, he’s too good a writer for that.

At the novel’s start Luscany is on the verge of being conquered by the Eschalan, a people to all intents human, but orange. The book promises to be the story of Serin, daughter of Tarven Guille, a medical experimenter.  It soon spreads out, though, to encompass the life of Luscany’s Princess Nette kept unwillingly in her palace by the victorious Eschalan as a figurehead.

Tarven and his wife Amber’s first two children either didn’t survive birth, or only barely did. Nevertheless, their bodies are kept in the house in a drawer in which Serin is forbidden to look. For Tarven is on the point of discovering how to bring the recently dead back to life.

The fantasy elements don’t overwhelm the story which is mainly one of accommodating to the occupying power and of resisting it.

Not one of Greenland’s major works but eminently readable.

Pedant’s corner:- “seemed to sooth her rage” (to soothe her rage.)

Penguin, 2019, 126 p. Translated from the Japanese 光の領分 (Hikari no ryōbun,) by Geraldine Harcourt. First published in 1978-1979 as a series in the literary monthly Gunzō.

The book outlines in first person narration the life of an unnamed woman recently separated from her husband, Fujino, in the year following his leaving. They have a two-year-old daughter, also unnamed, who begins to react badly to her new life after mother and daughter move into an apartment on the fourth floor of a building which has mostly offices below. Its large windows flood the interior with light, hence the book’s title.

Over the course of the year we see the daughter’s behaviour deteriorate; she throws objects out of the window onto a roof below and gets into trouble at her daycare centre.

This is paralleled by her mother’s increasingly difficulty to cope with her life, turning up late for her job in a library, having a one-night stand with the father of another child at daycare.

There are parallels here with the other of Tsushima’s novels I have read, Child of Fortune.  whose protagonist is also separated from her husband (but in her case divorced.) The absence of Fujino, like that of Hatanaka in Child of Fortune, is core to the narrator’s sense of drift. This is an indictment of the men involved, though, not of the women they have left.

The book’s origins as a series of twelve monthly instalments in the magazine Gunzō (群像) lead to some repetitions in later chapters of information the reader already knows and which would have been unnecessary to include in a novel per se.

I note as an aside that the living space in Japanese dwellings is described in terms of how many tatami mats the rooms can accommodate.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) a similar missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech embedded in a larger sentence.

American University of Cairo Press, 1987, 256 p, including vii p Introduction by Trevor le Gassick. Translated from the Arabic Zuqāq al-Midaq by Trevor le Gassick. First published in 1947.

The back cover blurb describes this as probably Mahfouz’s most popular work. Set during the Second World War – there are mentions of air-raids and the British Army – it depicts life in the titular alley, in a poor area of Cairo, and features a variety of colourful characters each with a distinctive trait and several of whom have chapters devoted to them, some several chapters. It occurred to me while reading it that this may have had an influence on Mahfouz’s fellow Egyptian Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.

Perhaps the main character is Hamida, an orphan who was adopted by Umm Hamida but suckled by the wife of café owner Kirsha, whose son Hussain she was nursing at the time. Kirsha himself has a taste for teenage boys. Umm Hamida arranges marriages and her landlady Saniya Afify makes use of her service in this regard. Dr Booshy isn’t (a doctor that is) but has parlayed his reputation into providing dentistry, sourcing the gold teeth he offers his clients (but unbeknownst to them) from the mouths of the recently buried dead. The unkempt and filthy Zaita makes his supplicants into cripples so that they can make a living through begging and thereafter exacts a toll from them. Retired teacher Sheikh Darwish is fond of quoting English words and spelling them out. Abbas, the young barber, wants to marry Hamida but doesn’t have the money so takes himself off to work for the British Army. Salim Alwan is a wealthy businessman getting on a bit who imbibes a special concoction to stimulate his sexual appetite. Tiring of his wife, he proposes marriage to Hamida but has a heart attack before any arrangement can be made

Then Hamida comes to the attention of one Ibrahim Faraj, who habitually gazes on her from a seat in the café. At once attracted and repelled, Hamida eventually falls under his spell but his intentions for her are far from honourable.

Midaq Alley is one of those books which represents the world in microcosm. If not all human life is depicted in its pages then certainly a good deal of it is.

Sensitivity note. A character uses the phrase “nigger-black face.”

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Mahfouz’ (x 5, Mahfouz’s.) Elsewhere; translated into USian, “piaster” (several times, piastre,) “reflexion” (reflection, used later,) “Tell-el-Kebir” (several times, usually spelled Tel-el-Kebir,) “struck a responsive cord in the boy” (responsive chord,) “Abbas’ face” (Abbas’s,) a missing comma after a piece of dialogue embedded in a larger sentence (x 2,) such a comma placed after the end quotation mark not immediately before, similar placing of a question mark – and of a full stop, “abcess” (abscess,) both “jewelry” and “jewellery” appear in the text, “and bid them welcome” (bade them welcome,) a missing opening quotation mark on a piece of dialogue, “by her sexuals instincts” (sexual,) “Hedjaz” (usually spelled ‘Hijaz’.)

Marion Boyars, 1983, 163 p.

A company called PAX has been developing various projects to improve crop types and yields over the world. This culminates in a product known as freefood, which promises to make human existence easier. It is widely welcomed nearly everywhere – a notable holdout is the indigenous Australian community of Murngin in Arnhem Land, North Australia, which has achieved a kind of independence.

Like in Mitchison’s other Science Fiction forays there is in the narration a high degree of telling not showing. Most of the story concerns itself with the scientists involved and interactions among the people running PAX and the reading experience is somewhat dry. Very little of what would be the social ramifications of such an innovation as freefood is explored. War has apparently ended because, as one character says, it was fought for food.

(Well, to a point: water too, and resources, but let’s not forget in these troubled times personal aggrandisement.)

The ‘future that never was’ that bedevils older Science Fiction stories is illustrated by Mitchison’s characters’ long distance communication methods (video calls) anticipating Skype or Zoom but not, of course, the internet or email.

There is an implicit racism – reflecting the times of 1983 but perhaps not Mitchison herself? – in one character referring to ‘Abos’ saying, “‘They could be a no-good mob,’” but admitting, “they got treated in a no-good way in Queensland,’” plus another use of ‘Abos’ in an unflattering context.

The promised paradise of hunger being banished from the world is disturbed when deaths start to occur among some of those using freefood. This is due to a compound called dioscorin which is found in yams and usually removed by the processes of preparing and cooking. Freefood production has omitted these steps.

Mitchison’s writing is usually perfectly agreeable. Her other (ie non-SF) fiction does not suffer from the flaws I have noted above and before here and here – even though some of it is set in such alien (to us) societies as Ancient Greece or Rome. That tendency to didacticism apparent here is missing from those.

Pedant’s corner:- In the inside cover blurb “polictical” (political,) skillfully (skilfully.) Elsewhere; a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded within a sentence (x 3, one without a capital letter at the beginning of the dialogue,) “fresh lime, nimbupani” (fresh lime nimbupani,) a switch into a different font size and back again (x 2,) an end quotation mark in the middle of a piece of dialogue, Bangla Desh (nowadays spelled Bangladesh,) Campuchea (nowadays spelled Kampuchea,) Quazulu (nowadays spelled Kwazulu,) grand-parents (nowadays spelled grandparents,) “none of them were any longer newsworthy” (none of them was …,) “nobody would be allowed to turn in into money” (to turn it into money,) Djuvalji (elsewhere always Djiuvalji,) “a dangerous precendent” (precedent,) peole (people.) “‘Still and on’” (isn’t the phrase ‘Still and all’?)

Little Brown, 2018, 428 p.

This is the fifth outing for Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, at the start here still trying to come to terms with the death of her romantic partner, Phil Parhatka, unable to sleep until she has walked herself to exhaustion in the streets of Edinburgh late at night.

She is juggling three cases, two hers, one not. The HCU is working on a series of brutal rapes from the 1980s whose perpetrator’s make of car they have a new lead on when a murder in Wester Ross, linked to the burial there of two Indian motorcycles left behind by the US Army after World War 2, turns up. Karen also has a peripheral involvement in a murder case she takes an interest in after a conversation between two women she overheard in a café twitched her police instincts.

Her hopes at the replacement of her old boss by the new one being a woman – female solidarity and all that – are swiftly extinguished. Assistant Chief Constable Ann Markie has saddled Karen with a new DS, Gerald McCartney, mostly in order to spy on her. My suspension of disbelief at this second boss in a row wanting rid of Karen was not quite assuaged by the reasons given for it, which seemed altogether too programmatic. But fiction is all about conflict. And Karen’s approach to her work is unconventional and occasionally confrontational, if not downright bolshie. Not qualities likely to endear you to a boss sensitive to public and political scrutiny.

There are ongoing updates on Karen’s background, the café Aleppo she helped Syrian refugees to establish in the previous book has been a success and her assistant DC Jason ‘the Mint’ Murray is growing into the job while the tedium of some police work is not ignored.

But the duty of the detectives in a novel is to set the world to rights by finding the perpetrators and calling them to account. So job done. Inasmuch as a murder can be set to rights.

Pedant’s corner:- “River’s voice was a clear as” (was as clear as.) “There were a handful of Lanarkshire towns” (There was a handful,) scoffed (various characters do this at various times; e g ‘Jason scoffed.’ Scoffing usually requires further elaboration,) “a pair of gin and tonics” (the main noun here is gin; it is that which should be plural: ‘a pair of gins and tonic’.)

A Journey to the Heart of Scottish Golf. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006, 289 p, including i p Acknowledgements and Thanks and ii p Contents.

This project was undertaken after Greig’s surgery for a serious condition involving pressure on his brain, surgery from which recovery was by no means guaranteed. Thankfully his brain and other functions remained unscathed but it prompted a look back on his life and the golfing experiences of his youth. His father had introduced him and his two brothers to the game when they lived in Anstruther and he had become proficient enough to be asked to represent his county in youth tournaments but he drifted away from the game quite early.

The book is divided into eighteen sections (naturally) each reflecting an outing to a particular course or courses and each with its own addendum musing on the nature of life and golf, especially as related to Scotland and the Scots. All are tinged with Greig’s customary humaneness.

The courses range from South Ronaldsay, whose greenkeeping is entrusted to the local sheep – a feature which leads to its own all but unique hazards which the sheep leave behind them – to Anstruther, St Andrews, Bathgate, North Berwick, Gigha and even Iona, among others.

Greig says about his Dad and his golfing cronies, “They share a very Scottish sense that good fortune must come with a penalty.”

An attitude which has rubbed off. After being congratulated on a good shot by a woman called Joan (who came from the US) Greig replied, “‘It doesn’t happen often,’” only to be asked ‘Have you never heard of positive thinking?’

“‘Sure,’ I laughed. ‘In Scotland we call it kidding yourself!’

‘I call it unhelpful pessimism.’

‘We call it realism.’”

Of that quintessentially Scottish weather phenomenon he elaborates, “Dreich is our word for it. Our climate has made the word necessary, and its persistent, clinging gloom accounts for a lot of the Scottish mindset.”

Apropos his round at Bathgate – a much spruced up course from the one Greig remembered and a development he does not quite approve – he quotes playing partner Alastair McLeish, “‘Aye, Scottish Protestants,’ Al remarked after struggling himself in the opening holes. ‘We’re perfectly able to torture ourselves without any assistance.’”

The course on Gigha invoked in Greig thoughts which are an enduring theme of Scottish literature, a sense of important things lost. “The sorrow and loss are part of the beauty, but that doesn’t make them good. One of the reasons I’ve never lived in the West, despite it being part of what I must call my soul, is it’s too damn sad.”

In the end golf can be seen – like most sports – as some sort of metaphor for life. “Mostly golf is about self-inflicted suffering, self-knowledge and hard-won (precious because hard-won) joy. Who but the Scots could evolve a game that offers such opportunities for humiliation and failure, and no-one but oneself to blame for it? And such transcendent moments?”

Pedant’s corner:- “but there no witnesses” (but there were no witnesses,) “the unspoken immanence of death wasn’t terrifying” (immanence does make a kind of sense; but imminence seems more to the point,) “boys and girls getting up to good in the open privacy of the this coastal strip” (of this coastal strip.) “Princes Sreet Gardens” (Princes |Street Gardens,) “before dying in Iona” (on Iona,) “Forres’ first tee” (Forres’s.) “”I wiled away my last Dollar hours” (whiled away,) “more like one those summer evenings” (one of those summer evenings.)

Penguin, 2013, 349 p.

When you start to read a book written by someone raised in a Muslim country and its title is Honour, you will most likely have a certain expectation of what will be in store. That expectation isn’t disappointed here. But this novel is written by Elif Shafak. Things are a bit more nuanced.

The novel does not have a linear structure. It starts in 1992, well after the main event it is concerned with exploring, before flipping back to a village near the River Euphrates in 1945, where the twin Kurdish girls Pink Destiny (Pembe) and Enough Beauty (Jamila) are born to a family already overburdened with daughters but still striving for a son. Its succeeding chapters stray unchronologically over the times in between those dates. Most of the scenes are rendered in third person past tense but there is a first-person account by Esma, Pembe’s daughter, and a journal written by her brother – “He a murderer” as Esma tells us in Chapter One, so not a spoiler – Iskender/Askander (the Kurdish and Turkish renderings of the name equivalent to Alexander) as he serves time in Shrewsbury Prison for that murder.

The plot gets in train when a man called Adem visits relatives in the Euphrates village and falls for Jamila. Unfortunately, she had been kidnapped in a dispute some while before and held hostage so her purity is in doubt. In such a place, “Men – even schoolboys – had honour. Women did not have honour. Instead they had shame.” Whether that is warranted or not.

Knowing his family would therefore not agree to a union with Jamila, Adem agrees to marry Pembe instead, eventually taking her to London while Jamila stays and becomes a sought-after midwife. Unsurprisingly Adem’s and Pembe’s marriage is not overly happy. When he leaves home to take up with an exotic dancer their eldest son Iskender takes on himself the mantle of protector of the family’s honour. However, Esma and younger brother Yunus are more liberal in their outlook. Pembe meanwhile muses on the way in which British people say of something minor, “It’s a shame.” To her, shame is a burning thing; not to be thought of as anything trivial.

Like Adem’s brother, Tafiq, Iskender is heavily under the influence of his traditional past. A Muslim known as the Orator tells a gathering Iskender has arranged that, “The two major industries in the West are the machine of war and the machine of beauty. With the machine of war they attack, imprison, torture and kill. But the machine of beauty is no less evil. All those glittery dresses, fashion magazines, androgynous men and butch women. Everything is blurred. The machine of beauty is controlling your minds.” Maybe so, but it illustrates the Orator’s blind spot. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the machine of religion also does that – usually far more effectively.

Tafiq reflects that, “Their honour was all some men had in this world.” For the rich it didn’t matter as they could buy influence. But; “the less means a man had, the higher was the worth of his honour.” His hint to Iskender that Pembe might be seeing another man (innocently enough, but Tafiq and Iskender don’t know that) sets the central tragedy in motion.

Honour is inflected with magic realism, but with a light touch. The twist towards the end which alters the perspective is signalled in the book’s first sentence and inherent in the plot, which is elegantly constructed with incidents and relationships which are seemingly peripheral turning out to be carefully inserted.

Shafak displays empathy with her characters, not condemnation. Despite the act of violence around which it revolves Honour is an intricate and ultimately humane read.

Pedant’s corner:- “The undeveloped baby had remained joined to her twin” (the undeveloped baby was previously described as a boy; so ‘had remained joined to his twin’.)

British Library, 2024, 203 p, plus i p Contents, ii p The 1920s, ii p about Catherine Carswell, ii p Preface by Helen Vincent, i p Publisher’s Note and vii p Afterword by Simon Thomas. First published 1922.

This is structured mainly as the journal entries of Ellen Carstairs, along with some letters – all addressed to her friend Ruby in Germany where Ellen spent some years studying music. Ellen lives with her brother and fiercely religious Aunt Harry in Glasgow. For income Ellen has taken pupils for piano lessons but she really wants to be a writer. Indeed, one of her schoolteachers is so disappointed that she has not so far pursued her true vocation that she refers to Ellen (publicly) as a prostitute for neglecting her talents. Not a description to be welcomed in the 1920s – or I suppose anytime.

In a prefiguring of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay Ellen is much delighted by renting a room where she can receive pupils and write. “I have a Room!” she tells Ruby. “A room all to myself and away from home.” Not that it is in any way salubrious. But she has the right to refuse any one entry. And it is an escape from Aunt Harry.

Ellen’s imagination is fired by meeting in the Mitchell Library an older man whom she calls Don John. His knowledge of literature and London publishers will provide her with a potential route into writing professionally.

It is he who recites to her the quote from Shakespeare that gives the book its title, “The camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows.” He is referring to Ellen’s writing but the sentence could also apply to Ellen herself.

Despite his learning and apparent gentility Don John turns out to be poor and prone to lapses into drink.

Ellen reflects on writing novels that, “It is hardly ever from likely touches, nearly always from unlikely ones, that the reader gets that sudden piercing sense of life in a good book. Yet at the same time it must never be an unlikeliness that is contrary to nature.”

The book is peppered with Ellen’s thoughts on women’s place in life and their likely prospects. She wonders about marriage and children but defers that expectation to the future. However, she betrays attitudes of the time – or perhaps in a preemptive strike against possible dismissal of her worth – with the thought, “when I’m reading anything serious, to know that the author is a woman who sat in her petticoats and her hairpins, leaving life aside to put words on paper, puts me off like anything.”

After returning from a trip to London, she tells Ruby (and us) she is engaged to a man named Duncan, home on a break from his civil service position in India. She toys with the idea of consummation but shies away from it despite thinking relations between the sexes ought to be freer. Duncan professes to admire her frame of mind but gradually it becomes clear that the conformities of life in India are uppermost in his thoughts, giving Ellen pause.

Though it starts falteringly, this reads like an accurate portrait of middle-class life in Scotland in the early part of the twentieth century.

Pedant’s corner:- “the Miss Clarks” (the Misses Clark,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “the Miss McFies” (the Misses McFie,) “the Trosachs” (Trossachs.)

Harvill Press, 2000, 268 p. Translated by Derek Coltman from the French Le Générale de l’armée mort, itself translated from the Albanian, Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur, first published in Albania in 1963.

Twenty years after the Second World War an Italian general is sent to Albania to retrieve for repatriation the bodies of soldiers who had been killed in the conflict there. He is accompanied by a priest. They are working with lists of the dead containing their particulars – height, dentition and so on, plus the probable location of the grave – provided by the Italian Government. The actual exhumations are largely carried out by local Albanians of course.

Prior to the expedition the general had been visited by various relatives of the deceased with specific requests and information about the individuals concerned. Foremost in his mind though, is finding the remains of Colonel Z of the infamous “Blue Battalion,” whose wife the general finds still attractive but suspects may have some sort of relationship with the priest.

The whole situation is awkward for the general; though their tradition is one of hospitality, the locals are in many ways suspicious, the expedition’s presence triggering unpleasant memories and resentments – and the task is arduous. The difficulties of working in such an environment, the sensibilities to be navigated are beyond him. The discovery of the particulars of Colonel Z’s fate (and of his bones) arise from this disparity.

This is the sort of novel – and subject matter – which I suspect no Anglophone writer would contemplate. I know the circumstances surrounding the undertakings would be less problematic but can you, for example, imagine an extended fictional narrative – or even a short story – about the work of the Commonweath War Graves Commission? A non-fiction book, yes; but never a novel.

That Kadare was working under the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha makes the fact that he could examine any aspect of Albanian society remarkable. It was subtle of him to choose such an oblique angle to do so.

There were occasional points at which the language of the text seemed a bit strained – possibly due to the fact that the book has undergone successive translations – but this did not impact on its readability.

Pedant’s corner:- “withlittle” (with little,) “the generalasked” (the general asked,) “even asemblance” (even a semblance,) “bothvery” (both very,) a missing full stop at the end of a piece of dialogue, a misplaced line break, “anylonger” (any longer.) “Those are the sort of things” (Those are the sorts of things,) “dark,gentle eyes” (dark, gentle eyes,) a missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech where the sentence it was embedded in continued, a missing comma in a list, “would all departin various directions” (would all depart in,) span (spun.) “Then,fighting free” (Then, fighting free.) “Six or seven oundsat the most” (Six or seven pounds at the most.) “There were a number of” (There was a number of.)  “‘You wantto be able’” (want to.)

47 North, 2013, 199 p, plus ii p Acknowledgements and i p about the Author.

Jayna has an affinity with numbers and is employed as a researcher into trends for a firm called Mayhew McCline. But she is also a simulant, a type of clone developed to carry out high grade tasks for the corporations who dominate this future society.

Most humans, known as organics, are immunised against violence, addiction and over-indulgence and – except for a few allowed to do more menial tasks – spend their time in enclaves. So-called bionics (humans deemed suitable) have been given implants to enhance their capabilities, are relatively freer and better employed.

Simulants spend their out of work hours in rest stations, where their food and even sleeping times are controlled. As a result, Jayna’s life tends to be repetitive. Normal human interactions, such as sexual liaisons and it seems empathy, have been edited out of their make-up. However, Jayna keeps stick insects as pets of a sort. Simulants who show themselves to be unsatisfactory in some way are subject to recall and reinitiation – taken back to the Constructor.

Jayna begins to doubt herself when some of her predictions turn out to be off the mark and begins to wonder if she needs more contact with organics. Earlier simulants have been withdrawn from use but Jayna’s cohort has been endowed with better olfactory senses which she believes are tied up with emotions and ability to empathise.

The novel is a slow unfolding of Jayna’s development and – as she mixes more with bionics and organics – of her questioning her role and treatment.

The prose in A Calculated Life is stilted at times but this is a reflection of Jayna’s thought processes as a simulant. In all, the novel is an understated examination of a dystopia. Let’s hope it’s treated as a warning and not a blueprint.

Pedant’s corner:- Published in USian. “‘Pigeons are not animals. They’re birds.’” (Birds are animals; like humans, they belong to the class of vertebrates,) “rinsed it and lay in gently on the wooden board” (and laid it gently.) “‘That’s funny we were chatting the other night’” (needs a comma after ‘funny’,) “asked a women” (woman,) luck-luster (lack-luster; or in British English ‘lack-lustre’.)