47 North, 2015, 227 p, plus 3p Author’s Historical Note, 2 p Acknowledgements and 3 p Bibliography.

This, Charnock’s second novel, (after A Calculated Life, chapter one of which is appended here following the Bibliography,) has a tripartite structure. Succeeding chapters tell the stories of Toniah, a woman from a parthenogenetic family living in 2113, adolescent Toni from the book’s publication’s present in 2015, and budding female artist Antonia Uccello in 1469 Florence.

Toniah lives with her sister and niece in London – all born parthogenetically, as was Toniah’s mother. She has recently been employed to reassess the work of Gauguin by a firm which specialises in historical revisionism – usually from a feminist perspective. In particular she finds antecedents to Gauguin in the paintings of Émile Bernard, but which also reflect back to Italian renaissance art.

Toni and her father are still trying to recover from the death of Toni’s mother in a car crash. Her father is an artistic copyist, working legitimately. A commission from a Chinese client leads them to spend some time in Shanghai.

Antonia’s artistic talent has been recognised by her father Paolo Uccello, a pioneer of linear perspective in the Italy of the time, who is teaching her both to read paintings and to paint herself. Her mother does not keep well and is haunted by the necessity to find a husband for her daughter. Antonia’s aunt’s life in a convent bears implications for her future.

All three lives are connected by the painting Antonia executes of her ill mother.

The speculative content – cloning of females – is presented as an unremarkable aspect of life one hundred years hence. The lack of recognition of female artists through history is not laboured but rendered subtly.

Pedant’s corner:- “she wishes her father were stood by her side” (wishes her father were standing,) “her father is stood at” (her father is standing at,) “she looks through a grill (a grille.)

A Jessie Kesson Companion, Black and White, 2000, 204 p, including 13 p Commentary; plus ii p Contents and xii p Introduction.

This is a collection of Kesson’s shorter works, encompassing stories, poems and radio plays, though a lot of her work for radio has, it seems, been lost. While most pieces are in fairly standard English with some Scots phrases the second story here, Ferm Deen, is written fully in an uncompromising Scots – and all the better for it.

Editor Isobel Murray has chosen to emphasise Kesson’s troubled upbringing (born to a single mother who engaged in prostitution to try to make ends meet and found solace in drink; taken off to an orphanage for being “neglected”; denied the fuller education she desired and later literally farmed out to smallholders as a kitchen helper before spending a year in a mental hospital.)

This is not a perverse choice, Kesson’s work (especially her early work) reflects those childhood experiences, the loss she felt, the longing for what she had considered a loving home and the compensations she managed to find. But, despite her writing successes, she never lost regret for the life she could have had had she attended University.

All the pieces are well written and poignant with a sharp eye for character and ear for phraseology.

Pedant’s corner:- swop (swap.)

Cassell & Co Ltd, 1898, p, with nine illustrations by W Hole.

This is the third of Barrie’s Thrums trilogy, all narrated by the dominie (schoolmaster) in Glen Quharity, which lies four miles from Thrums. Unlike in the first two instalments, though, here the narrator is finally named as a Mr Ogilvy.

The meat of the story is in the early incumbency in Thrums of new Auld Licht Minister, Mr Dishart, young, keen, well regarded by his congregation, and a joy to his mother Margaret since he has fulfilled her wishes for him. Mr Ogilvy takes more than a normal interest in the little minister since he knew Margaret in his own youth. It is apparent from his remembrances that he has carried a torch for her ever since but he takes care not to let her know of his presence nearby since he feels she would not be happy to be reminded of him.

Plot kicks off when a detachment of soldiers is sent to the town to round up weavers who had taken part in a recent riot against changes in their conditions. Forewarning of the soldiers’ mission is brought to the town by a young woman they call the Egyptian (their name for a gipsy) whose intervention allows the suspects to evade capture. Dishart tries to stop any violence and in doing so encounters the woman. He cannot understand why her influence makes him do things he would not have otherwise; things such as not denounce her to the authorities or throwing a ‘divit’ at one of the soldiers. The word divit here is an example of many Scots usages sprinkled through the book, especially in dialogue. This very strong Scottish flavour may be a barrier for some. The Egyptian’s facility both with Scots and standard English is another source of confusion for Dishart as in many respects she behaves and sounds like a member of the monied class.

It is readily apparent that this will be a story of star-cross’d lovers whose circumstances present seemingly insurmountable difficulties to their relationship. Dishart’s parishioners will not countenance a union between their minister and a gipsy; the Egyptian (we later find she is named Babbie) is betrothed to the elderly Lord Rintoul, for whose benevolence towards her she feels an obligation, and the wedding is imminent.

That dour Scottish strain of Calvinism is illustrated by Ogilvy’s reflection that “A minister with a smile on his face would never have been called to the Auld Licht kirk, for life is a wrestle with the devil and only the frivolous think to throw him without taking off their coats.”

However, the dominie’s own outlook is somewhat brighter, “Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover’s privilege,” if also nuanced, “Not to attempt a gallant deed for which one has the impulse may be braver than the doing of it.”

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “A detachment of the soldiers were marching down the Roods from the north” (a detachment was marching,) a missing full stop.

Doubleday, 2026, 193 p. Translated from the Japanese 木曜日にはココアを (Mokuyōbi ni wa kokoa, literally Thursday Cocoa,) Takarijamasha Inc, Tokyo, 2017, by E Madison Shimoda.

This is not so much a novel as a series of linked short pieces (calling them stories is not quite accurate) each with some sort of connection to the Marble Café in Tokyo.

The server in the café, who one day simply asked the owner for a job, has a yen for the woman who comes in on Thursday and always has a hot chocolate. The owner is known as Maestro, has a mole in the centre of his forehead and another business selling/promoting art.

After the first, each chapter then proceeds with one of the characters from the previous one carrying on with their own story. Every chapter has its own title and a (different) colour designation.

The scenes range as far as Sydney in Australia, though. In one of these a character tastes Vegemite and reflects it “looks sweet but is actually salty – isn’t that what life is like?”

Another character thinks “We’re all intertwined in each other’s lives without even knowing it” which corresponds a bit too much to what the structure of Hot Chocolate on Thursday is like.

An unusual feature of the publication is that at the top right-hand corner of each odd-numbered page is an illustration of a cup and what looks like a teapot (but may be supposed to contain hot chocolate) at first poised to pour but, as the chapters progress, pouring liquid into the cup until it is full and giving off condensed vapour. (I refuse to call this steam. Steam, pure steam, is a colourless gas, not white.)

The book has an addendum titled Matcha on Monday (月曜日の抹茶カフェ, Getsuyōbi no matcha kafe, literally Monday Matcha Café) on which the café, normally closed on a Monday, is open – but only to sell matcha.

Aoyama’s writing is fine enough but overall Hot Chocolate on Thursday feels a little inconsequential.

Pedant’s corner:- octopi (the English plural is ‘octopuses’, the Greek ‘octopodes’.)

Vintage, 2003, 301 p. Translated from the Japanese 羊をめぐる冒険 (Hitsuji o meguru bōken, literally An Adventure Concerning Sheep,) Kodansha Ltd, Tokyo, 1982, by Alfred Birnbaum.

This is a strange concoction. It starts off as a kind of boy (okay man) meets girl (ie woman) story where our unnamed divorced narrator notices a model’s ears in a photograph his advertising agency has used and develops a penchant for them. When they meet he discovers she habitually keeps her ears hidden except when modelling (or having sex.)

Then it morphs into a quasi-noir type tale when the agency publishes a pamphlet for a life insurance company containing a photograph of grazing sheep against a mountain background which attracts the attention of a representative of “The Boss,” a power in Japan’s political and economic circles. Our narrator is tasked with withdrawing the publication and then finding a distinctive sheep shown in the photograph on pain of his business being dissolved. A turn to the unusual occurs when the chauffeur taking him to a meeting with the Boss says he has a telephone hotline to God given him by his employer.

Along with his now girlfriend, whose ears have a semi-supernatural sensitivity, our narrator travels to Hokkaido to try to find the sheep. Hence the book’s title in English.

All this is linked in with his acquaintance with a character called the Rat whose whereabouts are unknown but with whom the narrator has held an intermittent correspondence. (I note from Murakami’s Wiki page that A Wild Sheep Chase is in fact the third in a trilogy featuring the Rat. Unfortunately, I have not read the previous two books.)

The novel becomes a travelogue, a part history of the area of Hokkaido where the distinctive sheep is to be found, and a fantasy of possession whereby sheep take up residence inside a person. (This once happened to the Boss.)

Along the way the narrator muses, “Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

A crucial encounter with a hotel owner’s father known as the Sheep Professor, who once also had the sheep inside him, leads them to an isolated house in a backwater beyond even remote, where the narrator assumes the Rat has been living. Then there is the Sheep Man dressed in a sheep costume (an illustration of whom appears on its own page) who may or may not be the Rat.

If all this sounds as if it might be confusing it actually isn’t when reading. On the page it all makes sense – of a sort.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. Otherwise; “which may have been reason why” (been the reason why,) “the herringbone lay of the oak floorboards” (the herringbone lie of.) Chapters starting with dialogue are missing the opening quotation mark (this may be publishing convention but I hate it,) “why she treated me special” (‘why she treated me as special’,) snowslide(s) (x 4. Has the translator never heard the word ‘avalanche’? Is ‘snowslide’ a USian usage?) “if worse comes to worse” (if the worst comes to the worst,) “the lay of the grass” (the lie of the grass.) “‘It is special sheep’” (a special sheep.) “Only the the cicadas” (has one ‘the’ too many,) pull-ring (x 4. USian for ring-pull I assume,) “the overture to the The Magnificent Seven” (the overture to The Magnificent Seven.) “October laid heavy on the town” (October lay heavy,) buildiing (building,) “the lay of the land” (it was not a song: ‘the lie of the land’,) “the rotary” (I assume USian. To me ‘rotary’ is an adjective, not a noun. The appropriate word for this piece of road architecture is ‘roundabout’,) “corrogated iron” (corrugated,) “the rest the wine” (the rest of the wine,) “the lay of the house” (the lie,) “the word ‘free will’” (‘free will’ is two words; the one word would be ‘freewill’.) “The cords come out of four holes” (the rest of the passage is in past tense; ‘the cords came out of’.)

Jonathan Cape, 1971, 249 p. Illustrated from drawings by Pat Marriott.

Sixth in “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” sequence, (though seventh if counting The Whispering Mountain which acts as a prequel to the series,) The Cuckoo Tree sees Dido Twite returned to England with Captain Hughes of HMS Thrush, carrying a warning to the Admiralty of a Hanoverian plot to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral during the planned coronation of Stuart King Richard IV.

Their carriage is wrecked and Captain Hughes badly injured. Did has to solicit help from a group of men she meets on the road, who point her towards Tegleaze Manor. (The men are smugglers, using canals to ferry their wares to London, a route later used by Dido.)

At the manor Dido is treated with some disdain by Lady Tegleaze but befriends her mollycoddled grandson, Sir Tobit. Lady Tegleaze allows Captain Hughes to be housed and nursed in a tenant cottage by the unlikeable and hostile Mrs Lubbage.

Dido wants to send the Captain’s dispatches to London but mistrusts the post and goes to the smugglers’ rendezvous at The Cuckoo Tree to enlist their help. There she meets orphan Cris, a slightly uncanny child who plays a part in thwarting a plan to swindle Sir Tobit out of his heritage. Mixed up in all the shenanigans is Dido’s Pa, but Dido’s presence gives him some pause.

This is all good adolescent fun, featuring adventure and mishap, locals with malapropistic speech, mind altering sweetmeats called Joobie nuts, long lost siblings etc, with authorial touches to appeal to adults; a firm of solicitors named Pickwick, FitzPickwick and Wily, the valuable family heirloom, The Tegleaze Luck-piece, a painting by P Breughel stolen in order to be sold to the Margrave of Bad Fallingoff.

However, why King Richard is portrayed as Scottish, with a Scottish accent and speech patterns is beyond me. He would certainly have been brought up as an English gentleman. (I noted this about his father here.) That his coronation takes place in St Paul’s Cathedral rather than Westminster Abbey is excused by the fact it’s an Altered History.

Pedant’s corner:- Bruegel (Brueghel, [used later],) “nobody could take if from him” (take it from him.)

Polygon, 2025, 145 p, plus 25 p Afterword and 1 p Acknowledgements.

The sixth in Birlinn’s Darkland Tales series, this is the story of the murder in Liniclate on Benbecula of three members of his family by Angus McPhee. as told in retrospect by his brother, Malcolm who, with his sister Marion, was out gathering seaweed when the fatal events took place.

Angus had always been a reluctant worker on the family croft but had spent time on a neighbouring island and on return shown signs of mental problems. The local community had thereafter had such concerns at his behaviour that they had him examined for possible confinement in a lunatic asylum but family pride and a reluctance to pay for such provision precluded this.

Life in Liniclate, as in much of rural Scotland in 1857, was harsh, more or less hand-to-mouth. It provokes in Malcolm that dour attitude to life exemplified by Calvinism’s Scottish expression. “Hope serves only as a buttress to misery. It is better all round to accept one’s lot in life and not entertain notions of a less onerous existence.”

Malcolm also has a cynical view of human nature. “I do not suppose that many among you would have the least interest in the incidents I have thus far related were it not for the fact that they serve as a prelude to violence. When a tale promises bloodshed no one leaves their seat.”

The murders blighted Malcolm’s life. The remaining family was all but ostracised by the locals and Marion and youngest brother John left the island (though Marion wasn’t seen to board the ferry,) while Malcolm withdrew into himself. He harbours dark thoughts about the Mrs MacLeod who comes in weekly to see to his welfare and ensure he bathes every month or so. Such is the tone of his reflections that the reader wonders if Malcolm has not succumbed to madness himself and, indeed, if his account is reliable in any sense.

This is another well written addition to the Darklands series but its resemblances to Burnet’s earlier novel His Bloody Project make it seem less original than the others.

Pedant’s corner:- in the Afterword; “none of whom were married” (none of whom was married.)

Penguin, 1996, 254 p.

This evocation of the late 1960s and early 1970s is narrated from the perspective of her later life by Carmel McBain and charts the relationships between herself, her childhood companion Karina, and later school and college friend Julia(nne) Lipcott over those years.

Every weekday Carmel accompanied to school her close neighbour Karina, the kind of good girl other mothers held up as an example, but whose parents had a tragic background in the then relatively recent Second World War in Europe. Karina may not be quite what they think, though, as Carmel observed her hanging round with rough boys at the bus station.

Carmel’s mother, prompted by a teacher at Carmel’s school, became fixated on her daughter gaining a place at the Holy Redeemer, a school no-one from her neighbourhood has yet attended. However, Karina also sits the entrance exam – and sails through.

Carmel’s Catholic background is always a nagging influence. At the Holy Redeemer she imbibes the thought that “bodies are encumbrance, a necessary evil.” Of Bonfire Night, she tells us, “If you’re a Catholic you don’t burn Guy Fawkes; the Pope says you mustn’t.”

Most of the story, however, is set at Tonbridge Hall, the college the three girls attend after leaving the Holy Redeemer, and an institution plagued with dire, unappetising food. This is an intense environment where the young women converse about who is engaged, who is on the pill, or pregnant, or thinks they might be pregnant, or has just discovered that she isn’t pregnant. This aspect of the novel did remind me of the May of Teck Club in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. The climax of An Experiment in Love also bears some comparison with that book. Mantel is a much more lucid writer than Spark, though.

However, being of their time, most of the students are preparing for life with a husband.

Partway through the novel Carmel says this is a story about appetite – “in its many aspects and dimensions” and that women carry the faculty for love into later life. “Men will never understand it until till they stop confusing love with sex, which will be never.” Carmel tells us she loves multiple women, but not in a sexual sense.

The whole is infused with a forthright feminism. “There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.”

“When men decided women could be educated, they educated them on the male plan” (schools with mottoes and school songs, muddy team games, collars, ties) but always inferior. “Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it…… Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.”

The Secretary of State for Education visits the college – and the food suddenly becomes palatable. The lady “leant forward and smiled, and her hair moved with her, as if it were not just hair but a hat made of hair,” a feature not uncommon among women politicians at the time. But, “She turned her head in my direction; she opened her lips to speak, and shards of glass fell out.” No need to mention the Secretary’s name.

Carmel’s reaction to a southerner’s comment is waspish. “I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realize the reaction may be excessive.”

Mantel’s literary skill, which was manifested so magnificently in her Wolf Hall trilogy, is in evidence here, fully formed.

Pedant’s corner:- “thorn in Jesus’ crown” (Jesus’s,) “was now sewed with a name-tape” (was now sewn,) sunk (x 2, sank,) swum (swam.)

Dolphin, 2000, 121 p.

After her father died in an accident Roshana Kemal’s family – mother and younger brother Jino – lives in a caravan in the grounds of the factory where her mother works. At night Roshana has strange dreams involving The Shadowman and a jackal named Shivalu.

All too soon, in Roshana’s eyes, her mother remarries; to a plump businessman called Rajah, making good in the India of the twenty-first century. Even though the family is now much more comfortably off – all Rajah’s business friends show signs of enjoying life – Roshana resents the disruption to her life and the betrayal of her father it represents.

Her friend at school, Jeevamani Anjumbandare, frequently regales Roshana with tales of her sister Smita’s latest boyfriends. This seemingly inconsequential detail has plot ramifications.

There is a slight disconnect between the resolute realism of the depiction of Roshana’s everyday existence and interactions with her friends and the undercurrent of menace in her dreams, aspects of which can pop into her daily life. Menace appears soon enough, though, when Jino is abducted from outside a shop into which Roshana had gone to make a purchase.

Partly it is her dreams which lead Roshana to the discovery of where Jino has been taken.

True to its YA milieu the jeopardy in Spiritfeather is not over the top. A solid, straightforward read through which Greenland’s professionalism as a writer shines.

Pedant’s corner:- hiccough (it isn’t a cough; ‘hiccup’,) “in Roshana’ picture” (Roshana’s picture,) Anjumbandane (Anjumbandare.)

Cassell, 1975, 589 p, including 2p Map of mediæval Northern France and the Low Countries.

This is the sixth and last of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, following on from The Ringed Castle. Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph in French and there are copious quotations/song lyrics in French throughout.

Among other incidental historical goings-on such as the French capture of Calais from the English, the French war against the Spanish (in both of which Lymond has a guiding role,) and the wedding of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin, the main plot concerns the unravelling of Lymond’s seemingly uncertain parentage, an unravelling performed in the main by Philippa Somerville, whom Lymond married in The Ringed Castle to protect her honour, a union which remains unconsummated and from which Lymond is desirous of an annulment (as, to be fair, is Philippa.) The reasons for this desire are complicated and not entirely voluntary and obstacles continue to put in its way but both contract promises to future marriage, in Lymond’s case to Catherine d’Albon, daughter of the Maréchale de St André, in Philippa’s to Austin Grey.

Lymond is neither ashamed nor guarded about his past amours – he has a son, Kuzum, by the deceased Oonagh O’Dwyer; a former lover, Guzel, left behind in Russia, and in this book he beds the Maréchale (or, rather, she beds him) before the proposal to her daughter. When Catherine asks if she’s agreed to marry a libertine she gets the reply, “‘Everyone marries libertines,’ Lymond said. ‘But not everyone knows it beforehand.’”

A minor sub-episode reveals the young Scottish Queen, under the influence of her de Guise uncles and prospective father-in-law, King Henri II, secretly agreeing that if she died childless the throne of Scotland should pass to France. This does not go down well with delegation of Scottish nobles sent to witness Mary’s wedding, who are obliged to keep their knowledge of the pact secret but Lymond goes so far as to warn Mary that such an outcome would meet with all but universal opposition back home.

Also contributing to the proceedings, helpful in relieving Lymond of a burden of sickness as well as in the resolution of the parenting issue, is one Nostradamus.

While the level of research and historical detail are impressive and incident is never far away once again Dunnett’s writing and dialogue lacks clarity.

Pedant’s corner:- hiccoughing/hiccough (it’s not a cough; hiccuping/hiccup,) “Daedalus’ honeycomb” (Daedalus’s,) palinquin (palanquin.) “After Russia, campaigning in France, would be like” (that second comma is needless,) “the aesthetic figure one would have thought from his reputation” (‘ascetic’ makes more sense in context,) Luxembourg (sometimes here spelled Luxemburg, which may have been a rendering of the usage of the viewpoint character of the moment,) “the Vidame de Chartres’ voice” (the final ‘s’ in Chartres is not voiced so its possessive is certainly Chartres’s,) “like Crassus’ lamprey” (Crassus’s,) “staunch the bleeding” (stanch,) alambic (usually spelled ‘alembic’,) “his language than had not been moderate” (his language then had not,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “there had been nothing demanded of Philippa which needed intrude on this relationship” (which need intrude; or, which needed to intrude.) “The pavilion of the Duke de Guise and that of his brother d’Aumale were empty” (The pavilions,) “was tinging the cloth” (tingeing; tinging is something bells do.) “One of the Count of Egmont’s foraging parties had acquired half a dozen wagons of grain and were occupying the village”  (One … was occupying,) “tell the prayers” (they were musicians, not supplicants: ‘tell the players’,) “a Brazilian dancer” (I wondered if Brazil was known as such in 1558 but the term is apparently from around 1506,) a missing full stop.