In The Sea of Fertility, Penguin, 1987, 196 p. Translated from the Japanese 曉の寺 (Akatsuki no Tera) by E Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle.  First published 1970.

This instalment of Mishima’s tetralogy starts in 1940 and follows on from Runaway Horses by featuring now retired judge Shikeguni Honda, still convinced that Isao Iinuma was a reincarnation of Kiyaoki Matsugae, the doomed lover in Spring Snow; a belief mainly due to the presence of three moles on their left sides.

As part of his legal consultancy work protecting Japanese exporters’ interests Honda travels to India via Thailand. He meets a six-year-old Thai princess, Ying Chan, who is convinced she is Japanese but her assertions are, of course, treated by her family and attendants as mental aberrations. Honda believes her and tries unsuccessfully to see if she also has three moles.

On to Benares in India where Honda has an epiphany while Mishima takes the opportunity to impart to us a lengthy treatise on various ideas of reincarnation from around the world. At a waterfall in the Antaji caves Honda also recognises a scene which Matsugae had predicted he would encounter.

The Second World War comes and goes off-stage and the story undergoes a shift in tone when it restarts in occupied Japan where Ying Chan has come to study. Honda becomes obsessed by the idea of seeing her naked to confirm his reincarnation belief. He invites her to his house (but several times she does not turn up on time.) He tries to get the nephew of his neighbour to seduce Ying Chan, on whose intended room he can spy via a peephole, but this plan fails. (I note the recurrence of this peephole scenario in Mishima’s later novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea.)

Honda becomes even more of a voyeur before the novel’s climax during one of his houseparties and there is an odd, almost detached, final chapter set in 1967 where he discovers Ying Chan’s destiny.

Mishima’s unease at Japan’s loss of identity under Western influence is less to the fore here than in the previous two volumes. It is almost as if this instalment is from a different story sequence, despite the reincarnation connection.

Pedant’s corner:- “voices chanting a sutra rose rapidly to a crescendo” (No. The crescendo is the rise, not its culmination,) “plusses and minuses” (pluses and minuses?) “the aureoles around the nipples” (the areolae.)

Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1923?, 378 p. First published 1920.

Set in the fictional Tweedside town of Priorsford (whose model it is not difficult to infer given the author’s background) this is the story of the kind-hearted – to excess? – Jean Jardine, aged 23 and guardian to her two younger brothers David and Jock, but also to Gervase (nicknamed Mhor,) the son of Mr Jardine’s second wife and also left alone when both his mother and Mr Jardine died. The Jardines are poor and live in a quaint cottage called The Rigs, owned by an absentee landlord. Jean worries over the cost when David is to go to University in Cambridge, and how he will fit in.

The well-to-do Pamela Reston, sister to Lord Bidborough, was brought up in Priorsford, and returns there to visit her childhood haunts. She takes a room in the house next door to The Rigs run by the no-nonsense Bella Bathgate but soon takes a shine to Jean and her family.

Travelling on the same train north as Pamela was successful businessman Peter Reid, the Jardines’ landlord, told to take things easy by his doctor. He comes to The Riggs incognito and is charmed by Jean’s unquestioning acceptance of him as a stranger.

The Great Expectations and will they won’t they get together plot are almost superfluous though. Douglas’s focus is on domesticity, with lavish descriptions of interiors and meals, and Jean’s feelings for her fellow humans. Her depiction of middle-class life in the immediate aftermath of the Great War is also a kind of historical record.

For modern readers, though, it may be jarring to read a sentence like, “He was no Jew, and took small pleasure in the outward cleansing of the cup and platter.” (Are/were Jews more notable than others for cleanliness?) Then an old colonial warns Jock the Indian Civil Service was “hardly fit now for a white man” and a child is quoted as saying of the thought of being a minister, “No, it’s not a white man’s job.”

Douglas is easy to read and does have insight – albeit in a narrow sense – into the human condition. There is no high adventure here, no strong conflict, just quiet lives lived out quietly. Virtue rewarded, though, may have been a novelistic staple of those times but it’s less obviously apparent in the twenty-first century.

Pedant’s corner:- “the Miss Watsons” (several times, ‘the Misses Watson’.)

Hodder, 2023, 249 p.

Godley, who died in 2024, was better known as a comedian and had a viral success with her voice-overs of Nicola Sturgeon’s press briefings during the Covid lockdowns. (“Frank, get the door!”)

This, though, is a reasonably standard novel which appears to draw on aspects of Godley’s early life for its inspiration.

When Sharon learns her mother Senga has been taken into hospital about to die she comes back from Bristol (where her marriage has broken down) to Glasgow. There she finds her mother is anxious for her to read a sort of memoir of her experiences in the 1970s. Senga’s marriage too was a mistake and her husband had left the family home. Sharon had been a practical, studious and dependable daughter, able to hold the ring as an additional support to her younger brother. The memoir is mostly concerned with Senga’s friends, most of whom have also made unsuitable marriages but Sandra’s husband is particularly controlling and prone to violence. As a result Senga becomes increasingly worried about her welfare, encouraging her to leave. But in the 1970s that was not so easy.

The book’s structure is rather unconvincing, alternating as it does between Sharon’s present and the extracts from her mother’s diary. Godley does provide a rationale for this in Sharon’s expressed reluctance to rush reading her mother’s story but surely this is psychologically unlikely. Wouldn’t most people faced with this situation read through the diary as quickly as possible?

The depiction of female friendship rings true, though, and the spirit of Glasgow shines through, while the nostalgic mentions of 1970s staples evoke the era admirably.

The story itself, however, while not inconsequential, is a little thin.

Pedant’s corner:- “The Farrow and Ball grey frontage …. were like every other café” “The Farrow and Ball grey frontage …. was like.) “Clyde was stood over the table” Clyde was standing over.) “Stuart was stood in the hall” (Stuart was standing in the hall.)  “‘Mr Blue Skies by ELO’” (Mr Blue Sky.)

Phoenix, 2010, 508 p. Translated from the Spanish El Juego del Angél (Editorial Planeta SA 2008) by Lucia Graves.

In this (sort of) prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, David Martín is a struggling writer just about scraping by, writing potboilers set in his home city of Barcelona in the 1920s. A hint of fantasy intrudes when he has a sexually charged encounter with a woman called Chloe – the name of his heroine – in a seedy establishment which he later finds has been abandoned for years. He comes under the influence of better-known writer Pedro Vidal to whose chauffeur’s daughter Cristina he is attracted and in the guise of editing Vidal’s manuscript rewrites his latest novel much for the better.

The proprietor of Sempere and Sons booksellers gives him a copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations, a book with which Martín is much taken, and introduces him to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books (familiar from The Shadow of the Wind, where Sempere’s son Daniel has a prominent part.) Great Expectations seems to be a kind of template here for Zafón but the parallels are by no means exact.

Out of the blue a French publisher Andreas Corelli asks Martín to write a book inventing a new religion. In return for one hundred thousand francs.

Corelli describes religion as “a moral code expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device, in order to establish a system of beliefs, values and rules with which to regulate a culture or society.”

He also has a jaundiced view of humanity, saying, “‘The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as excessively devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant and the feeble-minded as intellectual.’”

His thoughts on what motivates people to act badly have resonance. “‘When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimised, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbours, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we are acting in self-defence. Evil, menace, those are always the preserve of the other. The first step towards believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status or our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient, is only a lighted match.’”

After his researches into religion Martín opines, “‘The main pillar of every organized religion, with few exceptions, is the subjugation, repression, even the annulment of women in the group.  Woman must accept the role of an ethereal, passive and maternal presence, never of authority or independence, or she will have to take the consequences. She might have a place of honour in the symbolism, but not in the hierarchy.’”

Martín moves into an old mansion which once belonged to Diego Marlasca – a man with a mysterious death whose ramifications will dog Martín’s future. (There are echoes here of a similar building in The Shadow of the Wind.)

In the meantime Martín has become plagued by Isabella, a fan of his writing, and come to the attention of Police Inspector Grandes as suspect in a mysterious fire at his former publisher not to mention the disappearance of Cristina.

He is saddened by Sempere’s decline in health and vigour. The bookseller complains that, “‘At my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows’ necks.’”

What could have been an insight into the importance of books in the lives of bibliophiles, however, degenerates in its latter stages into an overdose of unlikely happenings more akin to a thriller. Again, as in The Shadow of the Wind, Zafón flatters to deceive.

Pedant’s corner:-  “my father took me El Indio” (took me to El Indio,) shrunk (shrank.) “‘You don’t looked convinced’” (You don’t look convinced.)

A Story of Interplanetary Exploration

Hodder and Stoughton, 1954, 181 p, plus 6 p colour illustrations, 1 p Contents, 1 p List of Illustrations (by Stead) and 6 p Foreword.

The author was, of course, the creator of Biggles, Great War fighter pilot and thereafter general man of action. In the 1950s he took to writing science fiction for younger readers and it was in the children’s section housed in the basement of Dumbarton Library where, after I had consumed all their Biggles books, I started on those. It is due to Johns, then – along with the similarly aimed books written by Patrick Moore – that I developed an abiding interest in science fiction as a genre.

The foreword here sets out Johns’s purpose in writing such books, to inspire young people with the sense of adventure, while also pre-empting possible criticism of inaccuracies by emphasizing there was much not known about even the Solar System those 70 years ago. (He specifically mentions Jupiter’s eleven moons. At last count there are 115 of those.)

Now to the story.

Retired Group Captain Timothy Clinton and his son Rex have been stalking deer on a Highland mountain when the mist comes down towards the end of the day. Eventually they spot five red lights in the form of a cross and stumble across a house whose door contains an immobiliser. This is where a Professor Brane stays along with his butler (and factotum) Judkins.

The Professor is partial to coffee and caramels (which he took up since smoking represented too great a danger among the flammable materials he was surrounded by in his lab) and accepts flying saucers are real. He has also invented a spaceship he calls the Spacemaster, which is powered by cosmic rays. The red cross is a navigational aid to finding his way back home. Naturally he invites Clinton and Timothy to join him – and Judkins – on exploratory expeditions beyond Earth.

Various trips see them have a close encounter with a flying saucer, find life on the Moon, dinosaurs on Venus – a planet on which the Professor wants to take the opportunity to empty Spacemaster’s rubbish bins! – a Mars with no mountains but signs of humans; the last of whom are entombed on Phobos, before returning to Earth where they get the better of some foreign spies alerted to the possible existence of a spaceship by newspaper reports of strange apparitions in the Highland skies.

The whole thing is firmly of its time and ineluctably male but for what was back then called a juvenile (nowadays YA) spends very little time focusing on Rex.

Pedant’s corner:- “the stars would be overheard again long before they could reach their lodge” (overhead again,) “before a rough, overgrown track, guided them” (doesn’t need that second comma,) the word ‘professor’ appears within sentences both capitalised and uncapitalised seemingly randomly, “poor Judkins’ great anxiety” (Judkins’s,) “‘water, which is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen’” (Er, no. A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would simply be that, a mixture of two gases. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Compounds have totally different properties from the elements needed to make them,) “the rudder, insert vertically in the exhaust thrust just below the nozzles” (inserted,) diaphram (diaphragm,) “level with he top of the gorge ” (with the top,) “everywhere there where little flecks” (everywhere there were little flecks.) “The affect of this on the human body” (The effect of this,)  “for the most part outlines were spoiled” (for the most part its outlines were spoiled,) the Professor says stray particles of hydrogen might have been caused to ignite by the ship’s velocity (for hydrogen to burn oxygen is also required,) gasses (gases – which appeared later,) the Professor says petroleum is a mixture of carbon and hydrogen (see above for water. Petroleum is a mixture, yes, but of differing compounds of carbon and hydrogen,) acclerated (accelerated,) “the same state of nuclear fission as the Sun” (nuclear fusion that would be,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech.

Headline, 2022, 287 p. First published 1987.

When originally published the trilogy of which this is the first instalment was titled Xenogenesis. It now seems to be called Lilith’s Brood.

Lilith Iyapo wakes up in what appears to be a prison cell, provided with bland food. She has memories of this happening previously and also of her life on Earth when her husband and child had died in a traffic accident. This was shortly before a nuclear war left the planet uninhabitable (to humans at least.) She soon learns that a few humans were rescued from the apocalypse by an alien race, the Oankali; a species for which genetic engineering is essential.

The first appearance to her of an Oankali shocks her: they are covered in small tentacles acting as sensory organs, and which are attracted by movement. The Oankali have three sexes; male, female and ooloi. All have the ability to sense the biochemistry of genetics but the ooloi can manipulate it and build offspring from their mates’ genes.

Lilith is told a cancer has been removed from inside her and that the spaceship she is being held on is alive. The Oankali find cancer to be an attractive trait for their genetic manipulation purposes. They want to blend their own and human genetics, in part as their biological imperative but also to eradicate hierarchical tendencies from humans. They envisage Lilith’s part in this as to Awaken other humans and prepare them for this gene trade and a return to Earth. Lilith and the subsequent Awakened find the prospect repugnant.

When a sufficient number of people have been Awakened there are problems within the group. Specifically, some are wary of Lilith not only as a black woman but of her closeness to the Oankali and of the capabilities to manipulate the structure of the ship with which the they have endowed her, abilities naturally seen as suspicious by those not so treated.

In Dawn there are early similarities to other works of SF where people have been kept in captivity. The whole, though, depends on the credibility of the aliens and their motivations. I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Pedant’s corner:- “Where had all this been, Lilith wondered” (needs a question mark,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of direct speech, “gasses” (gases,) “had come on to the bed with her and lay down” (and lain down,) “clean shaved” (clean shaven,) “Paul Titus’ wall” (Titus’s. Titus’ appeared again later,) “their own betrayal: No trip to Earth” (colons are not usually followed by a capital letter; ‘betrayal: no trip…’) A paragraph beginning with a piece of direct speech without having an opening quotation mark (I know this is a publishing convention but to me it feels wrong,) repellant (repellent.) “She froze where she stood and had all she could to keep from turning and running away” (is expressed awkwardly.) “It said nothing more, made no sound of its own pain” (ditto,) “she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate as the owner” (she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate, as the owner.) “She waited almost eager for the darkness” (needs a comma after waited,) Ahajas’ (Ahajas’s.)

Hodder and Stoughton, 1891, 218 p plus iii p Contents.

Again, as in Auld Licht Idylls, our narrator is the local dominie in Thrums, who has a lodging at the home of the McQumpha family; father Hendry, mother Jess, daughter Leeby and son Jamie, who now lives in London. Jess, who is an invalid, has never got over the loss of her other son, Joey, is a fine embroiderer and sits at the window of their house at the top of the brae leading out of Thrums, looking out at the world and hoping to see Jamie coming up the road. Leeby, when younger, was excessively devoted to Jamie and that devotion has spilled over into her caring for Jess which leaves her little time for her own life. Hendry, thoug hard working and honest is more of a background figure.

Along the way Barrie gives us, through the minister, snippets of life in Thrums and of the various characters who lived there. The man who tried to get out of his engagement to one woman because he had taken fancy to another, the older man who came back to the village with a much younger wife and was shunned by his hitherto prospective heirs, the exploits of the town comic.

On Jamie’s last visit Jess is much disturbed by the fact that he has a handkerchief secreted in his clothing. This she takes as a sign that he has a woman friend in London and like many a mother of sons is displeased that another woman could replace her in his affections.

Incidents in the book have parallels with Barrie’s upbringing in Kirriemuir and are reflective of the small town Scots life of his youth which at time of writing would have all but disappeared.

Most of the dialogue is in very broad Scots. Occasionally a Scots word was followed in brackets by its (nearest) equivalent in English. This has the effect of breaking up the narrative. I agree that to readers in England – or elsewhere – these might be required but a glossary would surely suffice for any who are troubled by it. However, the practice did not occur with every Scots word, some of which I therefore had to look up for myself, my Scots vocabulary not being extensive.

Pedant’s corner:- mantlepiece (mantelpiece,) largess (largesse,) youre (you’re,) “therenever was in Thrums” (there never was.)

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’.)