Vintage, 1992, 236 p.

I suspect that Carter actually enjoyed writing this book, which fizzes with energy and sly humour and at times tips into magical realism. Its title is based on the old saw that a wise child knows its father. Narrated by Dora, one of the twin sister dance act known as the Chance Girls. She and twin (Leo)Nora are daughters, on the wrong side of the blanket, of theatrical great Melchior Hazard, who unfortunately did not acknowledge them as his. That burden was taken on, though, by his nomadic brother Peregrine.

The convoluted nature of the family relationships here – the girls were brought up by the woman they know as Grandma (even though she wasn’t) and told their mother died shortly after their birth in Grandma’s house – is further complicated by the fact that living with them is the disabled former wife of Melchior, Lady (in her own right) Atalanta Hazard, known to the now 75 year-old twins as Wheelchair.

There is a measure of smoke and mirrors to proceedings, reflecting theatrical illusion. The novel is steeped in theatrical and stage lore, with Shakespearian references abounding. A trip to Hollywood illustrates the excess of the early film industry with a climactic scene perhaps owing a little something to slapstick comedy. The contrast between Melchior’s status as a grand old man of legitimate theatre and the lower brow nature of the sisters’ dance career highlights the disparity between their own legal status and that of their half-sisters,  acknowledged by Melchior, born in wedlock, though possibly not sired by him.

At its core, though, is Dora’s longing to belong, her search for a figure to fill in for the father who disowned her.

Dora’s vice may be irritating to some what with all the theatrical allusions, irreverent asides and references to lost cultural staples.

But along the way she has some more serious thoughts. “Let’s not call it a tragedy. A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy. And war.”

Much later we have this exchange with her sister.

“‘It’s every woman’s tragedy,’ said Nora, ‘that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.’”

‘What’s every man’s tragedy, then?’ I wanted to know.

‘That he doesn’t, Oscar,’ she said.”

She also tells us that, in story telling, “If you get little details right, people will believe anything,” (true in life as well perhaps?) and vouchsafes that, “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

This was Carter’s last novel, written after her diagnosis of lung cancer. In the circumstances it is something to be wondered at that, while touching on seriousness, overall it has such a consistent lightness of tone.

Pedant’s corner:- “she’s showed her all” (intended I’ve no doubt – the book’s background is show business after all – but it ought to be ‘shown’,) “to whit” (it’s ‘to wit’,) forbad (forbade,) “Nora said, he was young enough” (that comma alters the sense,) “Epps’ cocoa” (was that a proprietary brand. Whatever it ought to be ‘Epps’s’,) a musical revue called What You Will, later rendered variously as “What? You Will?”, “What! You Will?”, “What! You Will!” and “What You Will!”, “than sang” (then sang,) “oblivious of” (it’s oblivious to,) “legs akimbo” (how you can put your feet on your hips is beyond me,) slax (slacks, spelled so to indicate lack of care or attention,) “never forgave a grudge” (a malapropism for forgot?) “Peter Jones’ store” (Jones’s.) “Nora sunk in thought” (sank.)

Polygon, 2007, 276 p, plus 7 p Introduction by Alan Warner.

In an interpolated framing device we have here the story of an author trying to write a piece of fiction celebrating goodness, where the characters are happy because they deserve to be, surrounding that same story which he is writing to find out what becomes of them. The author’s wife tells him his desire is impossible since he has always been severe on his characters and she thinks he cannot change. Still less does she believe he can set such a story in Scotland because he thinks the Scots have lost faith in themselves. The novel he is writing is that story; or an attempt at it.

That novel features the Sempill family, already relatively comfortably off – the father was an architect – but at its beginning lately come into a large inheritance.  The Mama and Papa Sempill have five children, Diana, Jeanie, Effie, Rowena, Rebecca; all named after Walter Scott heroines. All but Diana are blonde, she is dark-haired and at their story’s beginning old enough to fancy herself guardian of them all, parents included. They are on holiday in Argyll when they come across an abandoned house whose proper name is Ardmore but is known to the locals as Poverty Castle. As a family they resolve to buy it and bring it back to its former glory. This involves irritating the Camptons, inhabitants of the “big” house, on an enclave of whose land Poverty Castle sits, but with access rights. An encounter with the children of the house exemplifies all that can be good or bad about aristocratic attitudes. Their sons Edwin and Nigel (Nigel; enough said) are opposites in their demeanours.

Mr Sempill is an easy-going soul, but his wife is racked by desire for a son though perhaps too old and lacking in vigour for the risk involved. The crisis of the tale is when she becomes pregnant again despite her husband’s stringent efforts to avoid that.

There are several time jumps in the narrative, Diana goes off to University, where she takes digs in a humble establishment, rooming with working class Peggy Gilchrist. Both the blurb and the Introduction describe Peggy as the Sempills’ nemesis but there is really nothing in the text which justifies that. What we do get is the middle- and upper-class perspective of Peggy being a member of “a class lacking culture, education, and money”. Her mother resents her not conforming to what she sees as her station in life (a job in a supermarket) but her father is keen for her to do as well as she can. Then again, as described, Peggy’s brain is her only asset.

The Sempills are, by and large, good, and happy enough, but, in novels as in life, there will always be something to disrupt contentment.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Jenkins’ (several times; Jenkins’s.) Otherwise: crème de menthes (crèmes de menthe?) “Mary Queen of Scots’ effeminate secretary” (x 2, Mary Queen of Scots’s.) “Mr Chambers’ tone” (Chambers’s,) “a plebian habit” (plebeian,) plus marks for “the Misses Sempill”, “none of the other girls were keen to have” (none … was keen to have,) “Keats’ room”, “Keats’ country”, “Keats’ poetry” (Keats’s,) Inverary (Inveraray,) “Roslin Chapel” (original spelling of Rosslyn Chapel,) “Burns’ Highland Mary” (Burns’s,) “Cortes’ burning of his boats” (Cortes’s,) “cooker irradiating warmth” (irradiating [to shine light upon] is the opposite of what was meant; radiating.) “The Moon could be seen though it was not yet shining” (if you can see it is shining,) “a racket” (racquet, the reference was to badminton.)

Tor, 2014, 264 p.

This is a strange concoction, part SF (with more than a touch of Altered History,) part history of the author’s family – including the mystical implications of being born in a caul – part disquisition on the art of fiction.

The first section seems to be from the viewpoint of a child living in a post US Civil War era where the North is ruled by a queen and there are Martians apparently threatening Earth. (Or is that bit an extract from the SF novel being discussed?) The second revolves around a Second World War secret endeavour. The third is less clear cut, with the narrator (or Park himself) looking into an incident in his family’s past that may, or may not, have involved aliens.

The later sections refer to and turn back on the earlier ones, with characters appearing again in different guises, or are the same but in a different situation, all mixed in with the author’s family’s convoluted history. This metafictional aspect of the book does make it slightly less than a straightforward read. And hence difficult to sum up succinctly.

At one point we read, “It’s all metafiction, all the time.” Being told this doesn’t make it any easier on the reader, who, in any case, has already worked out this is metafiction.

A recurring theme is the Battle of the Crater at the Siege of Petersburg, about which I had some previous knowledge but Park subverts that when at one point, in an Altered History twist, instead of a mine exploding, the crater is said to have been created by the explosion of a locomotive on lines dug under the entrenchments to provide swift access to the city when the projected attack is to take place. (Or is this some sort of joke about the Underground Railroad?)

Park does present some aperçus. “One of the interesting things about autistic people is the insight they provide into ourselves. We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear.”

In his capacity as a tutor of writing, our narrator – we are again perhaps intended to assume this is Park himself – says, “I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.” Park is poking fun at himself here, I suppose, for All Those Vanished Engines is very far from a simple story, simply told.

Pedant’s corner:-  “The tiny incised pattern on the plates …. were not identical” (The tiny patterns….,) “I went upstairs and smote for a while, trying to get Captain Lukas to finally make a stand” (‘smote’ here does not seem to be the past tense of smite,) “the kaiser’s government” (the Kaiser’s,) “a font of the kind of wisdom” (the phrase is ‘a fount of wisdom’,) “Burnsides’s Corps” (the general was called Burnside; so ‘Burnside’s Corps’.) “I shined the light” (shone, please.)

Mantle, 2019, 348 p plus 5 p List of characters, 5p Afterword and 2 p Acknowledgements.

This novel’s title is not particularly apposite – though it does allude to its subject, those Greek tales of the Trojan War – as it barely mentions the legendary ships at all. Instead, its focus is on the women caught up in that conflict and more or less sidelined in all the years since they were first written about. And not simply, like Pat Barker’s Women of Troy sequence, on the Trojan women, but also on the those the Greeks left behind and the Muses and Goddesses said to have influenced affairs.

Thus we have the muse Calliope irritated by the importunings of “the poet” for her to sing for him of the events he wishes to describe (Haynes thereby echoing the usual translation of the Iliad’s opening line, “Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.”) Creusa, woken by the tumult of the city’s fall, fearing for her five-year-old son and wondering where her husband Aeneas has got to. The captured Trojan women on the shore by the Greek camp, their travails only beginning but intermittently returned to through the narrative. Penthesilea the Amazon, fighting for Troy against the Greeks to atone for being responsible for the death of her sister. Penelope, writing increasingly tetchy letters to her husband Odysseus as his long absence is exacerbated by failure to return promptly on the war’s end and then prolonged on – and on and on – (the poet’s missives suggesting he will use any excuse not to come home.) Chryseis, the daughter of Apollo’s priest, who is befriended by Briseis in shared adversity. The sea-nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, bemoaning her forced marriage to a mortal and her son’s own mortality. Laodamia begging her husband Protesilaus not to be the first onto the beach at Troy, though she knew he would be. Iphigenia, tricked by her father Agamemnon’s promise of marriage to Achilles into being sacrificed for a favourable wind to set sail for Troy. Aphrodite, Hera and Athene using wiles and false promises to trick Paris into his famous judgement. Oenone, who rescued Paris as a baby after he was abandoned due to the prophecy that he would cause Troy’s downfall. Eris, goddess of strife, setting up the business with the golden apple. Hecabe, Queen of Troy, struggling to accept her new diminished status but still able to revenge at least one of her dead sons. Her daughter Polyxena, accepting her fate with stoic dignity. Cassandra, cursed to see the future as the present and not to have her visions believed. The goddess Gaia resenting the ravages humans wreak on the Earth. Clytemnestra nursing her fury at Iphigenia’s death and preparing her vengeance for it for ten long years. The three Fates spinning the threads of mortals’ lives. Andromache slowly coming to terms with her new life as a slave.

Not a straightforward linear narrative, then, and the many viewpoints and scenes mean the whole thing comes across as fractured and a bit scattershot. This stands in contrast to Haynes’s previous novel The Children of Jocasta which was more tightly focused. The lack of linearity of the storyline works, though, and Haynes clearly has a deep knowledge of her source material.

Her main point, that the sufferings and endurance of the women of these wars (and by extension the women of any war) are as – or even more – heroic than any acts carried out by warriors is certainly worth considering.

Pedant’s corner:- “Odysseus’ nurse” (Odysseus’s,) “Aeneas’ heart” (Aeneas’s,) Briseis’ back” (Briseis’s,) Chryses’ character (Chryses’s,) all names ending in ‘s’ are given s’ rather than s’s for their possessives, “to staunch your bleeding” (stanch,) “each head will open its gaping maw” (stomachs are not usually located on heads,) “‘that Hector deserved to die.’ she said” (‘that Hector deserved to die,’ she said’,) “not known to have expressed regret for any cruelty he had perpetuated against anyone” (he had perpetrated against anyone.)

Little, Brown, 2020, 442 p.

The sixth Karen Pirie book and again she is juggling two cases.

The first is when a skeleton is discovered in a campervan stored in a house’s garage for years. Suspicion falls on the deceased owner’s former lover, who abandoned her for a life as an artist. The second is a live case of a body hauled up along with a creel by a fishing boat off Elie. Since the dead man is one James Auld, whose brother Ian, a high-up civil servant in the Scottish Office, disappeared ten years before, and Karen had recently reviewed his case, she is given the remit.

James had fallen under suspicion of murdering his brother and to escape that had made a new life for himself by joining the Foreign Legion and then settling in France as one Paul Allard. Since the initial investigation was carried out in Fife DS Daisy Mortimer out of the Kirkcaldy Police office ends up seconded to Karen’s Historic Cases Unit. (This becomes semi-permanent when Karen’s assistant DC Jason Murray – aka the Mint – suffers a broken leg during the investigation.)

Connections in both cases are soon made – though not between them – but take time to tease out. In the meantime Karen is still grieving over the death of her former lover Phil Parhatka and worried about the direction her new relationship with Hamish, owner of a small chain of coffee shops in Edinburgh and a cottage up north. He does perform a useful function here though by identifying a mysterious male in a photograph of Ian Auld found in James’s French apartment. This is David Greig, once an enfant terrible artist, who committed suicide not long after Ian Auld’s disappearance. When Karen learns six well-known Scottish paintings were stolen from the Scottish Office and replaced by forgeries in the years immediately prior to the Toy/Lib Dem coalition government she begins to join the dots.

Pedant’s corner:- Plus points for “amn’t I?” “There were a handful” (there was a handful,)  “James’ message” (James’s.)

Vintage, 2000? 568 p. First published 1961. (The publishing information page gave this edition’s date as 1994, but the author information page states he died in 1999 so it must have been some time later.)

How to approach a novel whose title has contributed a concept to the world’s lexicon of phrases? Indeed, a novel whose cover describes it as “One of the great novels of the century” and was no 99 in the recent Guardian list of 100 greatest novels ever, thus spurring me on to retrieve it from my tbr pile. That makes it 34 of those 100 I have now read. (It made no 8 in the readers’ list.)

And how will it conform to the great novelistic concerns of love, sex and death?

Well, Catch-22 is a war novel, so that’s death ticked off – though not often directly. Fear of death, yes, (the background to the eponymous catch,) but not death itself. Sex is certainly alluded to, but in a perfunctory way, and there is precious little love displayed in its pages. Some of the characters say they’re in love but the reader may beg to doubt it.

War novels have a head start in the importance stakes. They do tend to be taken seriously, as Kate Atkinson noted.

War is, of course, a deadly serious business; but it is also at its root utterly absurd and non-sensical. In Catch-22, Heller has chosen to lean into that absurdity. Heavily. At times so heavily it tips over into farce.

The text is full of digressions, repetitions and conversations which circle back on themselves or have characters repeating to each other what each has just said. It is decidedly non-linear with the narrative sometimes jumping from one scene to another mid-sentence. Scenes from main character Yossarian’s training and the island of Pianosa where he is based in the ‘now’ of the novel slide into each other without demarcation. Character descriptions tend to the grotesque and few of them impress as real people. The treatment of women is perfunctory and off-hand. The overall impression is of a surrealistic collage which goes thoroughly overboard at times with such character names such as Major Major and A Fortiori.

But it is not really so much a novel of war as of the US military mindset. Colonel Cathcart’s desire for promotion (or publicity,) the rivalries between senior officers more important to them than the war itself. Cathcart’s continual raising of the number of missions his charges must fly before their tour ends and they can be sent home is the proximate cause of bomb-aimer Yossarian’s refusal to fly any more, his natural fear of being killed not then being evidence of the insanity which would ensure his withdrawal from combat. Quartermaster Milo Minderbinder’s black market activities – supposedly to benefit all the soldiers on the base – with his fingers in every pie imaginable plus a few more, extend even to dealing with the Germans and undermine the war effort in other ways.

The novel does undergo a mood change halfway through chapter 39 (out of 42) when the narrative becomes more sombre and it is from here on that Cathcart and Colonel Korn suddenly show more perspicacity and cunning than up to that point.

I can’t decide whether this is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (a phrase I have purloined in a bid for comic effect) or the most annoying novel I’ve ever read.

I think I lean towards the latter.

Sensitivity note: the word ‘nigger’ appears – as do ‘kike’, ‘wop’ and ‘spic’.

Pedant’s corner:- “the educate Texan from Texas” (that’s where Texans usually come from,) “a bus depot blazing with red and yellow lights” (wouldn’t they have a blackout?) “clefted chin” (cleft chin,) receptable (receptacle,) german (x 1, elsewhere, as is proper, German,) “threw this arms about” (his arms,) “and order him” (and ordered him.) “Now She sat” (she,)  “how many times she’s packed his bags” (he’s packed his bags,) “like most of all” (Liked most of all,) mispronounciations (mispronunciations,) “Dr Stubbs’ fault” (Stubbs’s.) “‘Another country heard from’”  (elsewhere this phrase is rendered as another county heard from.)

Tor, 2025, 123 p.

Rose House was deceased architect Basit Deniau’s greatest creation, “curled like the petals of a gypsum crystal in the shadow of a dune” in the Mojave desert. Rose House is the house where he died – and his mausoleum, his compressed remains fashioned into a diamond displayed on a plinth. It was left in his will to Deniau’s one-time student turned critic Dr Selene Gisil. Only she can have access – and only for seven days a year.

Rose House is a haunt, embedded with artificial intelligence. Selene hates it so much she left after only three of those days and fled to Turkey to pursue her career there.

Rose House has just telephoned China Lake Police Precinct to inform its officers there is a dead body inside it, as it was legally required to do.

The novella Rose/House is a locked room mystery, whose subject matter lies at the intersection of Science Fiction, horror and crime. A locked room (or locked house) to which the police cannot gain access.

A neat premise, certainly, and a book densely, even philosophically, written.

So, how did someone gain entry to Rose House only to be killed? And how can the police solve a crime or even assess the scene in such a restricted building?

To Detective Maritza Smith – forced to identify as the inanimate China Lake Police Precinct in order to gain entry along with Selene, recalled from Turkey – the house has a pervading sense of menace. To the reader it comes across like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Martine handles all this well. But the novella’s setting in the late 22^nd century seems much too far off.

Pedant’s corner:- “which oughtn’t have surprised her” (oughtn’t to have surprised her,) “Torres’ offer” (Torres’s,) “amongst Los Angeles’ most distinguished” (Los Angeles’s,) “sat in the back seat” (seated; or sitting,) a sentence ending in ‘did they’ but without a question mark, “chile enchilada” (chili enchilada,) putrescene (putrescine – used later.)

Collins, 1953, 318p, including 2p Note, 2p Contents and 2p list of characters.

This is the fourth in Barke’s Immortal Memory novel sequence on the life of Robert Burns. This instalment mainly concentrates on his taking the lease at Ellisland Farm, some miles north of Dumfries, a town which he does not care for, and his angling (the Scots word would be ettling) for a job with the Excise. There is though, a brief journey to Edinburgh where he finally settles accounts with his publisher William Creech and also with Jenny Clow, the mother of one of his many children, on whom he makes a settlement.

When we start, the house at Ellisland where he is to live with Jean Armour and his family, is in the course of being built and he has to live in a small, bare room nearby while Jean et al stay in Mauchline (still spelled Machlin by Barke.) Even when his new house is built, after many delays by the Dumfries builders, the walls are too damp with plaster drying out to be healthy.

The breaking in of Ellisland is an arduous task and Burns recognises it will not provide enough of a living hence his seeking of the Excise job. This is also arduous, involving many long miles on horseback in all weathers – and Burns was always prone to chills and fevers.

There is still time, though, for him to fall in with Anna Park, niece of the wife of a Dumfries innkeeper. She is portrayed as equally, if not more, willing than he is to consummate their passion and the inevitable occurs. (Reading these books it sometimes feels as if Burns only had to look at a woman to get her pregnant.) Her lying-in more or less coincides with that of Jean Armour’s latest and Jean selflessly agrees to treat Anna’s child as her own.

Within the text we are treated to a full rendering of Burns’s draft of Tam O’Shanter, a first reading of the poem given to his family assembled by the fire one night.

In an exchange with his strait-laced brother, Gilbert, Burns says, “the Scotland o’ saints and scholars and country squires is nothing but hypocrisy. Not one o’ them can square their beliefs with their practice,” adding that his reading of history and the Bible tells him “morality has ever been a snare and a delusion.”

Jean is well aware of Burns’s tendencies, earlier telling Rab’s sister Nancy that being jealous would do no good, and that she couldn’t deny him other women, so long as he loved them.

In an observation that reads a little too much like an authorial projection of future knowledge onto the past, Francis Grose, an author-antiquarian from London, tells Rab he admires the Scots peasantry, “the best educated in the world,” but not the gentry, with their aping of English foppery, yet considers the Scots nation as defeated, and “‘the English will beat and tame half the world before they’re done – especially the coloured races…… And dang me if they won’t get the Scotch to do all their dirty work for them and fight all their bloodiest battles.’”

Off-stage, the pre-Terror French Revolution rumbles away in the distance, with Burns privately expressing support, something an Exciseman could not do explicitly.

Apart from that performance of Tam O’Shanter none of the poetry makes it to the page this time, though Burns’s efforts in collecting and publishing Scots songs – without payment, a point which disquiets Jean – earn a few mentions.

The book’s title refers to the peak of Burns’s achievements, which Barke considers to have occurred around this time.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘You wrang to judge him’” (You’re wrang.) “It was the Burns’ fate she feared” (Burns’s,) “urgent breasts” (of Anna Park. Urgent?) “But it was a pity that necessity had compelled his to allow” (compelled him to allow.)

Picador, 2019, 41 p. lllustrated by David De Las Heras.

This, like The Christmas Truce, is one of Duffy’s Christmas poems. It is inspired by the frost fairs that took place on the River Thames in London during the Little Ice Age when people erected tents, stalls and even set fires on the frozen river during winter.

Duffy’s female narrator disguises herself as a man and wanders through the town describing the scenes she sees and eventually ventures onto the ice (not without initial mishap) to immerse herself in the goings-on, before spending the night sleeping on the river.

Usually the three lines at the end of the irregularly sized stanzas are rhymed.

David De Las Heras’s illustrations could be described as cartoonish, consisting as they do of blocks of colour, but they are effective in conveying the atmosphere and their crowd scenes in particular are reminiscent of Brueghel.

Pocket Books, 2005, 661 p, plus vi p Dramatis Personae.

The usual fare from Turtledove as his mirroring of the Second World War in a world where magic/sorcery is a prevalent feature and fantasy creatures abound comes to an end. The episodic structure, returning to its viewpoint characters every so often, continues to frustrate with its repetitions of things the reader already knows about the people portrayed and their circumstances. So, too, does the misogyny of many of the characters. But this is an unenlightened world, and while it has good people in it there are not enough of them to make a material difference. They are only operating at the margins.

The equivalences with our world are not exact. For example there are no republics here, King Mezentio, the leader of the racist aggressors, does not die by his own hand but asks a soldier to do it and the magical counterpart to the Manhattan Project achieves its goal only unlike in our world is demonstrated to citizens of its proposed victims before its final deployment – on the capital city rather than provincial ones. It is interesting, though, that the developed magic/sorcery has been throughout the seven Darkness books subject to theoretical calculation. (Not quite magic then?) Though apart from drawing energy from the not always handy ley-lines it still needs life force to power it.

As Turtledove’s Derlavaian War winds down several of those we have come to know (very few of whom have experienced character development) meet their ends, others have happy endings – of sorts. The parallels with our world extend to an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials. The book doesn’t end so much as stop, but as far as its survivors were concerned this was also true of our Second World War. Life goes on, if in different circumstances. Not all of them congenial.

Pedant’s corner:- “Tsavellas’ small kingdom” (Tsavellas’s,) “Iskakis’ wife” (Iskakis’s,) “not as if he’d take a step” (context suggests ‘not as if he’d taken a step’,) “floating fortress’ stick” (fortress’s,) “the marquis’ air” (marquis’s,) “but we liked to come into Priekule to listen to him” (not Priekule; Pavilosta,) “‘I should have won Algarve should have won’” (is missing a punctuation mark after that first ‘won’,) “Captain Frigyes’ bloodthirsty magic” (Frigyes’s,) “‘Assuming what you say about Mezentio is true, will will grant your soldiers their lives’” (… is true, we will grant …,) “Balazs’ smile” (Balazs’s. Balazs’ appeared again once,) “the ballocks” (I assume Turtledove, being USian, has only heard this word and doesn’t realise it’s spelled ‘bollocks’,) “Gyongos’ skirmishes” (Gyongyos’s,) Kunhegyes’ battered old palisade” (Kunhegyes’s.)