Macmillan and Company, 1955, 316 p.

While this is a very well written account of the life of the narrator, Arthur’s, lifelong friend, Antony Scaw, the years have not been kind to its culmination.

Antony was one of those types who are, if not entirely self-absorbed, at least disinterested in the wider world. In Antony’s case even to the extent of not noting the sensitivities of the rest of his family in not speaking of their brother Jack, killed in the Great War.

The early chapters relate life in Antony’s home Ripstead, where his mother finds him difficult to understand. But Arthur is accepted as almost part of the family in part due to his friendship with Antony. The pair endured Wincaster, a minor public school, together before entering adult life after the war

Antony married a woman named Olivia, but they soon grew apart and she began going around with one Reggie Duggan. The group in whose circles he moved could not comprehend his attitude in allowing Olivia to behave as she wished but Antony was of the belief that it was not his business to dictate how other people lived. Later, long after the catastrophic end of his wife’s affair, Antony mentions to Arthur their “‘predecessors who refused to take the omnipotent “They” of life quite seriously’” and had suffered for it.

By this time Antony’s painting had made him moderately successful and after the Second World War he had moved to Long Baddeley, where he lived with a housekeeper Mrs Potter – who gets squiffy now and again – and a ten-year-old girl, Pippa, whose parents had abandoned her.

Local widow Sally Greenway takes a fancy to Antony but he is not interested and Sally’s attachment sours to disillusion and suspicion, suspicion which she fosters with the authorities and bolsters with her questioning of Pippa on taking her out for the day.

It is, of course, the paintings of Pippa which Antony has made, of Pippa unclothed, which become the most damning evidence against him.

Narrator Arthur is convinced of Antony’s innocent intent and the reader has to take that, Pippa’s attitude to him and Antony’s denials of impropriety at face value but at the same time must think a line has not only been crossed but been travelled far beyond. The tragedy unfolds as it must, all the circumstances of Antony’s home life and the prurience of police and court officials pointing only one way.

Despite Fall of Man being at heart a plea for the understanding, even tolerance, of non-conformity (Antony’s actions in the book did not harm anyone, least of all Pippa, it was the initial court proceedings which did that to her) it is more than likely that had Croft-Cooke been around to consider such a plot in the present day he would not have written it nor, if he had, found a publisher for it.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2,) “a character in a wideawake hat with a tawny beard” (a little clumsy. How can a hat have a beard?) hu-ha (nowadays spelled ‘hoo-hah’,) wistaria (wisteria,) “for politeness’ sake” (to avoid that annoying apostrophe use ‘for the sake of politeness’.)

Canongate, 2000, 237 p.

After a sojourn in Basah in the far East, painter Angus McAllister has returned to his Hebridean roots on the island of Flodday, whose only drawback is that the local women refuse to pose for him.

Janet Maxwell has temporarily left her philandering husband and sought refuge with her brother, the owner of Flodday’s hotel. She is pulling pints in the bar when she and McAllister meet. Eager to incite her husband’s jealousy, she conceives the idea of living at McAllister’s house Ardnave, as his housekeeper. Janet is originally from Skye and has second sight. When she enters McAllister’s living room she immediately feels a tragedy will occur there. This, combined with McAllister’s possession of a blowpipe spear, means Chekhov’s dictum about the gun on the wall will most likely come into play. Brought up a Wee Free, Janet has particular ideas on sex as being a sacrament; an attitude her husband finds both ridiculous and irritating.

Janet also foresees the arrival at Ardnave of a woman and her daughter. This will turn out to be Fidelia Gomez, one of McAllister’s former lovers in Basah, a devout Catholic who could not contemplate divorce from her husband, and her child Letitia. However, she is preceded at Ardnave by the Australian Nell Ballantyne, another of McAllister’s lovers. Such goings-on with three married women eventually occupying the same household, none of them the wife of the owner, set many tongues wagging.

These complications to Angus’s life all take place in Part One. Part Two sees the entry of Janet’s and Nell’s husbands, both golf nuts, and the demand by Fidelia’s to have custody of Letitia which precipitates the novel’s rather sudden climax.

This examination of Hebridean life, the locals’ gossip, the minister’s censure, the frustration and delay incurred by everything being shut on a Sunday reads as being somewhat traditional. Nevertheless, the hotel owner’s daughters are amused by the minister’s reference to God knowing everything since, “It didn’t matter if God knew your secrets. He could be trusted not to clype.”

The novel was first published in 2000 but has the feel of having been written earlier. Yet I suppose it was 25 years ago now.

Poor Angus is not quite perhaps as serious a book as some that Jenkins has written but I still accomplished.

Pedant’s corner:- “looked in stony copulation” (context suggests ‘locked in’,) “‘he’s got to be made understand’” (made to understand,) delf (it was pottery, Delft,) “when it ought to have been growing stranger” (growing stronger makes more sense.) “‘What’s your, then?’” (What’s yours, then?’”) “But what man McAllister’s predicament would not be” (what man in McAllister’s predicament,) clifs (cliffs.) “‘Keep your eyes off her books’” (‘off her looks’? Perhaps even ‘off her boobs’?) a missing end quotation mark, “while he was an his studio” (in his studio,) a missing opening quotation mark, “‘Why do like painting ladies with no clothes on?’” (Why do you like.)

Zaffre, 2024, 391 p.

The author is of course the doyenne of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner and the title of this, her first novel, plays on that connection. As do the book’s contents. It is set in Oxford among the lexicographers of the Clarendon English Dictionary (presumably a thinly-disguised OED,) and each chapter is prefaced by a word – some obscure, others not – along with its definition, which encapsulates the events depicted. In addition most of the characters at one time or another think of the derivation of a word that comes into their thoughts. In this respect Guilty by Definition has similarities with Eley Williams’s The Liar’s Dictionary though here the insertion of such definitions seemed more intrusive. It is however likely to be exactly what readers might expect from a novel by Dent.

The plot relates to the sudden disappearance ten or so years earlier of Charlotte Thornhill, sister of this story’s main character Martha. After a long sojourn in Berlin Martha was appointed senior editor at the CED six months before the novel’s events, to the chagrin of her colleague Simon who had coveted the job.

The action kicks off when mysterious letters written in a cryptic style from someone calling themselves Chorus begin to arrive at the CED and at the homes of various people connected to it. They seem to point at a mystery involving Charlotte’s disappearance and hint that she was murdered.

The rest of the novel consists in the team trying to unravel the clues the letters from Chorus contain in order to discover what Charlotte had been doing in the months before her disappearance, what became of her and, finally, just who Chorus is. This involves a dealer in antiquarian books for whom Charlotte did some work before branching out on her own and the existence of a commonplace book compiled by Shakespeare’s sister Joan Hart for whom Guilty by Definition may be an attempt to reclaim for history.

Dent’s writing is efficient enough but nothing out of the ordinary. I suppose the book might be classified as cosy crime since any nefarious activities occur offstage

Note. One character uses the Scots term whisht – used in the imperative as an injunction to stop talking (though it’s more often pronounced and spelled as wheesht.)

Pedant’s corner:- whiskey (many times; whisky,) half-silouetted (silhouetted,) “casting a prism that danced and flickered on the wall” (prisms aren’t cast. Light is cast through them and is thereby refracted,) “lying prostate on the ground” (prostrate, surely,) “Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (Douglas Adams’s,) “‘perhaps that’s one of reasons’” (one of the reasons,) the digit ‘8’ appears several times, sometimes within a larger number; in each case it looks upside down – with the larger piece of its hour-glass shape to the top, not the bottom,) “a slip … bearing the name of the lender” (this being a system for allowing books in the Bodleian Library to be consulted, ‘of the borrower’ makes more sense.)

Penguin, 2015, 446 p. Translated from the Turkish Bit Palas (Meris Yayinlari, 2002) by Müge Göçek.

This, Shafak’s debut novel, has similarities with Aala Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building – both are concerned with the inhabitants of a block of flats – but was originally published in the same year so these will be coincidental.

From the outset it is clear that things will not be entirely straightforward: the narrator – accused of having a fanciful mind; ie talking nonsense – riffs on the differences between truth (conceived of as a horizontal line,) deception (a vertical one,) and nonsense (a circle.) This is as a way to approaching story, a circle can be entered anywhere; but it isn’t a beginning, nor is it an end.

We are then given the history of the building, Bonbon Palace, from ‘Before’ and even ‘Before Before,’ it was built on the site of an old Christian (Armenian) cemetery.

The inhabitants of the various flats within the building are Musa, Meryem and Muhammet; Sidar and Gaba; hairdresser Cemal and Celal, twins who were not actually brought up together; The Firenaturedsons family; Hadji adji Hadji, his Son, Daughter and Grandchildren; Metin Chetinceviz and HisWifeNadia; Me; The Blue Mistress; Hygiene Tijen and Su; Madam Auntie.

Already that running together of words in Firenaturedsons and HisWifeNadia signal the otherness of the narration, that heightened sense which comes from a slightly surreal take on fiction and can be a signature of non-Anglophone literature. The whole thing would seem to be narrated by the ‘Me’ occupying Flat 7 as his are the only sections written in the first person. Chapters of the book focus on and return to the flat-dwellers’ various lives in no particular order. The circumstances under which he wrote this account are not revealed  until the end.

Another surreal touch is that Bonbon Palace has an accumulation of rubbish around it which keeps being added to despite the attentions of bug fumigator Injustice Pureturk. This forms the core of the plot as, in an attempt to prevent people adding to the rubbish piles, ‘Me’ paints on the enclosing wall a sentence declaring a saint is buried inside the premises.

All serious novels are attempts to sum up the world in microcosm. Limiting the story to such a small part of the world highlights this. Not all of human life is here but a good portion of it certainly is.

An initial surprise to me was the use in the translation of the word wee in the Scottish sense (‘a wee bit of clarification,’ ‘one wee bit,’ ‘a wee bit of sadness’) – and the fine British term nutter (‘a good-for-nothing nutter’.)

Peppered throughout are some adages such as, “Men committing adultery find quality significant: they enjoy receiving from another woman love that is in essence different from what they receive from their wives. Yet women committing adultery find quantity significant: they enjoy receiving from another man love that is more than that which they receive from their husbands.”

The narrator’s assertion that “Life is absurd, at its core lies nonsense” is as good a justification for the deployment of magic realism – or exaggerated reality – in a novel as you could get.

Then again he says, “Deception turns truth inside out. As for nonsense, it solders deception and truth to each other so much so as to make them indistinguishable.”

So does fiction.

The Flea Palace is as accomplished a debut novel as anyone could wish to write – or read.

Pedant’s corner:- the print looks  as if was photocopied and on some pages is slanted, quantative (quantitative,) “raise to the ground” (raze to the ground,) sprung (several times, sprang,) “café chantants” (cafés chantants,) “she had suddenly ran screaming” (she had suddenly run screaming,) sunk (sank,) “the gage of their nature” (gauge. ‘Gage’ for ‘gauge’ appeared once more,) a missing full stop, “you might may well start to believe” (has a ‘might’ or a ‘may’ too many?) “where he had laid down” (lain down,) “in spite of our eating in hoards” (in hordes,) “as they silently drunk” (drank,) “of the ‘The Oleander of Passion’” (that first ‘the’ is not needed,) “had all ended up in flop” (ended up as flops,) “a unfussy end” (an unfussy end,) “raised to the ground” (razed to the ground,) shrunk (x 2, shrank,) tealeaf (tea leaf,) dopey (dopy,) “he would lay in the corner” (he would lie in ….,) “as if hadn’t been him” (as if it hadn’t been him,) “they always go through their houses as if they had never gone through it before” (‘houses’ therefore ‘them’ not ‘it’,) “chaise long” (chaise longue,) “and before you it, know” (before you know it,) gamma-amino-butiric-acid (it’s not spelled butiric, it’s gamma-amino-butyric acid,) “no sooner had they given their consent that an objection was voiced” (than an objection,) “the saints existence” (the saint’s existence,) “he fished from the thrash” (from the trash,) “the end of last the century” (end of the last century,) “I laid next to her” (I lay next to her.) “All though this period” (All through.)

Gollancz, 2024, 312 p, plus 2p Author’s Note.    Reviewed for ParSec 12.

In the future universe this novel describes people live in kinds of utopias where they don’t bother to learn many languages or even to read and write, delegating translation to AIs and work to machines, an existence which in effect renders the typical specimen of humanity, to a degree, infantile. Nevertheless, two different modes of faster than light travel dubbed α and β have been developed. The first utilises simultaneous time and space dilation and is (fractionally) slower than the second, which deploys extremely rapid spacetime bubbling. (Not that this is important. Any putative FTL technology is only ever a handy device for getting characters from A to B.) The α and β spacecraft types in which their passengers travel are called startships (note that second ‘t’,) which are essentially hospitals; space travel, of any sort, is dangerous, a spaceship’s passengers require protection. And the ships themselves, contrary to some earlier imaginings, are not transplanted marine vessels since a spaceship doesn’t need a rigid framework nor corridors. Here, instead, they consist of woven clusters of moveable Meissner tetrahedra linked together by smartcable. Utopias, though, need to be escapable or conflict will arise. And escape from a spaceship is difficult.

As to the story, we begin with two startships, Sα-Niro and Sβ-Oubliette, sent to monitor the black hole HD 167128, aka QV Tel. Niro’s Captain Alpha Raine comes to believe there is an intelligence communicating with him from inside the black hole. The other members of both ships’ crews of course dismiss this out of hand. After all nothing can escape a black hole. Raine then sets about murdering them all.

The focus then switches to a historian named Saccade on the Masqueworld. She specialises in twentieth century serial killers in fact and fiction and so seems perfect to interview the since captured Raine. Rather than in person she meets Raine in a sim where his appearance shows all sorts of disfigurements even though he ought to have no control over it.

Raine calls the black hole dweller the Gentleman; a personage who alludes to himself with references to Sympathy for the Devil. Prior to this our narrator has addressed the reader of our century directly and the text is littered with (apparently misremembered from our time) mangled lyrics to popular songs (“we all live in a yellow sunny scene”) and film titles such as Two Thousand and One Odysseys or Surfing Private Ryan, along with references to the empire of Ancient Room and a description of nightmares as angsttraum. Roberts is clearly enjoying himself throughout here by dropping these nuggets. SF buffs will also recognise allusions such as, “‘My God,’ said Li, ‘It’s full of tears!’”

Raine says the Gentleman was imprisoned in QV Tel, presumably by the universe’s creator. We are, then, delving into the realms of religion and philosophy.

After this encounter Saccade, too, develops murderous tendencies but is nevertheless allowed, under observation, to travel to the planet Boa Memória where a flamboyant adventurer called Berd is planning to be the first human to walk on the metal core of a planet. This requires not only a heat-insulating suit but also a device to bend the angle of gravity and so obviate the crushing pressures to be encountered.

This device is really the core of the novel. Its construction may have been necessary to the universe in order to preserve information that would otherwise be lost when black holes evaporate. It is conjectured that the reason for the evolution of intelligent life was so that Berd’s device could be invented. But if deployed at the event horizon of a black hole…. What might occur? What might escape?

The rest of the novel is taken up with a race to QV Tel to prevent Saccade reaching there with the device and the various arguments among the characters as to whether the Gentleman exists and how or if to deal with him and Saccade both.

This is a fairly dense though intermittently playful novel brimming with ideas, enough to fill many a novel, but none of its scenes really evoke SF’s famed sense of wonder. And, though Matr Guunarsonsdottir, a self-centred physicist with a Trumpian attitude to reality – whatever she says she instantly believes even if it contradicts something she said before – is a recognisable type, nor do the characters really convince. (Except the Gentleman of course. The Devil always has the best tunes.) There is something perfunctory about many of their interactions. But Roberts has given himself a get-out clause here, these humans have been cosseted throughout their lives, they are immature.

The ideas are what make the book though.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- 10^20 (10²⁰. Is superscription some sort of lost art in typesetting? It can’t be. The ^ appears to be superscripted,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 3,) “Choe Eggs’ suggestion” (Choe Eggs’s,) coliseum (in our world, Colosseum, but this future universe has forgotten our spellings,) grotesquenesses (grotesqueries.) “She turned to face him four-squarer” (four-square?) siriusphis tree (I have no idea what that meant,) focussed (x 2, elsewhere – and correctly – focused,) annex (annexe,) crafts (craft,) “the milky way” (the Milky Way,) “in visible spectrums” (the plural of spectrum is spectra: but, in any case, there is only one visible spectrum,) profondimetre (it was a depth-measuring device; so, profondimeter,) miniscule (minuscule,) Joyns’ (several times; Joyns’s – which appeared once,) span (spun,) “believe rather than it emanates from” (that it emanates,) “on behalf of” (context demands ‘on the part of’,) hiccough (hiccup,) “effecting her emotions” (again context demands ‘affecting’,) shuggled (usually – certainly in Scotland – ‘shoogled’,) neurones (neurons,) “she was laying in the darkness” (lying,) sprung (sprang,) “the only thing that really mattered were …” (the only thing that really mattered was…,) shrunk (shrank.)

Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951, 279 p. First published as Olivia in India in 1913.

O Douglas was the pen name of Anna Buchan, sister of John. She published ten or so popularly successful novels over her career.

Olivia, her first novel, is the tale of the eponymous narrator’s trip to India to visit a brother called Boggley. It is written, initially in a self-deprecating tone, in the form of letters to a male friend, Arthur, back home.

It is at least semi auto-biographical. “Douglas” visited India herself in 1907 and in Olivia she mentions a brother, John, whose writing has been well-received and asks, “Other members of the family can write, why not I?” (In the novel, Olivia conceives the idea of writing a book about the Mutiny. I don’t think “Douglas” ever did write that though.)

On the boat over, Olivia meets a young woman, Geraldine, swiftly dubbed G, and they become firm friends, their paths criss-crossing through the text from time to time.

There is little plot here – Olivia is not concerned about the time-honoured custom of women going to India to find themselves a husband. It is more an account of experiences with a few insights thrown in. Of the characters of the mem-sahibs she says, “the women who are pure gold grow more charming, but the pinchbeck wears off pretty soon” and finds the desire for one-upmanship of the colonialists unseemly.

There is also a slight dig to Arthur about the urge to explore. “Men at times hear the Red Gods call them (women hear them too, you know, only they have more self-control.)”

As is to be expected of a novel now 110 years old it does display the attitudes of its time.

Pedant’s corner:- wakened (x 2, woken.)

Vintage, 2005, 242 p, plus xii p Introduction by Susan Sontag. Translated from the Icelandic Kristnihald Undir Jökli (Helgafell, Reykjavík, 1968) by Magnus Magnusson. First published in English as Christianity at Glacier (Helgafell, Reykjavík, 1972.)

In her introduction – which, as is usually the best approach with them, ought to be left until after reading the text – Susan Sontag states that novels that proceed largely through dialogue, or are relentlessly jocular or didactic, those whose characters do little but muse to themselves or debate with someone else, or are initiated into secret knowledge, those with characters having supernatural qualities or contain imaginary geography are – despite the long history of the picaresque tale and the many classic stories which exemplify these things – considered innovative, ultra-literary or bizarre, and are given labels to signify their outlier status

Science fiction

Tale, fable, allegory

Philosophical novel

Dream novel

Visionary novel

Literature of fantasy

Wisdom lit

Spoof

Sexual turn-on

and that “convention dictates we slot many of the last centuries’ perdurable literary achievements into one or another of them.” She concludes that thought with, “The only novel I know that fits into all of them is Under the Glacier.”

Our unnamed narrator has been tasked by the Bishop of Reykjavík to journey to the Snæfells glacier to investigate the situation there, where the local pastor Jón Jónsson, known as Prímus (he fixes stoves,) has taken no salary for twenty years. There are rumours the church has been boarded up, the pastor is living with a woman not his wife and he has allowed a corpse to be interred in the glacier.

This is the same glacier to which Jules Verne sent his adventurers under the influence of Árni Saknússemm and the leadership of Professor Lidenbrock to start their journey to the centre of the Earth. Laxness implicitly critiques Verne’s piece of cultural appropriation. The locals at Snæfells do consider the spot to be the world’s centre and have little consideration for the outside world.

The text is in the form of the emissary’s report and during it he only ever refers to himself as the undersigned or the Emissary of the Bishop, soon shortened to Embi. Dialogue is laid out as if in the text of a play and without punctuation otherwise.

Embi, the undersigned, is confused by life at Snæfells. None of his interlocutors seems to give him a straight answer, they talk to him as if he is the bishop and generally are only obliquely forthcoming.

His attitude is that, “‘I was just sent here like any other ass to make inquiries about things that don’t concern me at all and that I don’t care about at all.’”

There is a fair amount of philosophising. A shepherd called Saknússemm II tells Embi, “Of all the creatures that man kills for his amusement there is only one that he kills out of hatred – other men. Man hates nothing so much as himself.”

Pastor Jón says, “‘History is always entirely different to what has happened….. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish out of the chaos….. The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth.’”

Dr Godman Sýngmann has a robust take on religion, “‘The Christians without ceremony stole from the Jews their national literature and added to it a piece of Greek overtime work they call the New Testament, which is mostly a distortion of the Old Testament, and, what’s more, an anti-Semitic book. My motto is, leave the Jews alone. Those who deck themselves out in stolen gods are not viable.’”

Embi is particularly baffled by the information that Sýngmann (when he dies) has four widows but was not a bigamist.

In a diversion on skuas the narrator indulges in a little meta-textual teasing. “All birds fly better than aeroplanes if they can fly at all. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.”

At one point we are told that Prince Polo biscuits are the only gastronomical delicacy that Icelanders have allowed themselves since they became a wealthy nation.

A woman named Úa, who may be the pastor’s wife (or may not,) turns up. She has travelled the world and is of the opinion that “‘Americans are children. Children believe in guns and gunmen. One hundred forty-seven gunshots in children’s television a week. In children’s films there have to be child murders.’” She spends her time knitting sea-mittens as she thinks the world requires them.

She also says, “‘In our society the rules about love are made either by castrated men or impotent greybeards who lived in caves and ate moss-campion roots.’”

Under the Glacier has no plot as such, the concepts discussed within it are sometimes abstruse, the conclusion is illusory.

It is utterly memorable.

Pedant’s corner:- In her Introduction Susan Sontag slightly mischaracterises Science Fiction as always featuring a male protagonist. That is certainly no longer true and wasn’t in 2004 when she wrote it. Dr Godman Syngmann (in the text it’s Sýngmann,) La Vie de Henry Brulard (it’s La Vie de Henri Brulard.) Otherwise; “All birds are perhaps a little wrong” (All birds is perhaps a little wrong?)

Or: The Astrologer. Edited by P D Garside.

The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 356 p plus 53 p Essay on the Text, 50 p Emendation list, 2 p list of end-of-line “hard” hyphens, 16 p Historical Note, 67 p Explanatory Notes, 20 p Glossary, i p Foreword, i p Contents vi p General Introduction to the Edinburgh Edition, and iii p Acknowledgements. Guy Mannering first published 1815.

Reading Scott these days is an exercise in completion or in acknowledging roots. The roots of long-form fiction, of Scottish story-telling, of the historical novel as a genre.

For time has not been good to novels like this. First there is the author’s prolixity, words thrown about with abandon, then there is the long outmoded practice of addresses to the reader, not to mention direct statements of what will come next, all of which are now passé. More problematically, from very early on the reader has no doubt in which direction this is going, since the plot here is that of the long-lost heir (with a touch of Romeo and Juliet thrown in.) When Scott wrote it, most likely such a story was fresh and new, but in the intervening 210 years it has become all too familiar. And story-telling itself has changed.

The Guy Mannering of the title comes to the estate and house of Ellangowan in Galloway on the night the lady of the house is to give birth to her first child. Mannering casts a horoscope for the boy which predicts misfortunes when he will be aged five and ten plus a further significant event at twenty-two. As well as the laird, Godfrey Bertram, Mannering meets the taciturn dominie Abel Sampson (who however is prone to uttering the word pro-dig-i-ous, in that elongated fashion, when over-excited) and the – kenspeckle, since she is very tall for a woman – gipsy Meg Merrilies. At this point Scott digresses into a discourse on the history in Scotland of what some at the time termed Egyptians, who had been rendered by law to be common and habitual thieves. His sympathies are with Meg however as she is to some extent the heroine (if one there be) of his tale. Five years later, as Mrs Bertram is in labour with a daughter, a murder occurs on the estate, blamed on smugglers, and the son of the house is kidnapped. Bertram, meanwhile, is not a good guardian of the estate’s fortunes and by seventeen further years’ time the estate, in the absence of a male heir, is to be sold by roup.

Mannering, who has been soldiering in India, where his own daughter Julia formed an attachment to one of his subordinates whom Mannering thought unsuitable and whose death he thinks he caused, has now returned and attempts to buy Ellangowan but is too late due to dealing with a concern of the friend with whom Julia is staying, and so takes another house nearby. That subordinate, of the name Vanbeest Brown from a sojourn in Holland, is still alive and in communication with Mannering’s daughter Julia.

On his way to Galloway, Brown saves a local farmer, Andrew (known as Dandie) Dinmont, who breeds terriers, from robbery by two ruffians. Dinmont becomes a fast friend and is instrumental in aiding Brown when he meets difficulties later on.

Even from this short summary it is perhaps obvious who is the lost heir and what part of the resolution will be.

The novel is not without its moments, though, and there are incidents aplenty, as how could there not be in a tale involving smugglers, gipsies, a murder, abduction and thwarted inheritances? Gilbert Glossin, who actually bought Ellangowan, is as slippery a character as you might wish, and the lawyer Pleydell – along with Dinmont – larger than life, but the women, Meg Merrilies apart, tend to be ciphers. In the end the tale is more Brown’s than Guy Mannering’s though and the astrology aspect falls by the wayside. Perhaps as his plot developed Scott lost (fore?)sight of it.

Pedant’s corner:- early nineteenth century spellings, chuse, exstacy, eve’sdropper, paralytick, etc, etc; “the place from whence he came” (since whence means ‘from where’ then ‘from whence’ incorporates a repetition; ‘the place whence he came’.) “None …. were present” (None … was present. Several more examples of ‘none’ with a plural verb,) whiskey (whisky,) a full stop at the end of a question, “from thence” (again repetitious, thence = ‘from where’,) “Meg Merrilies’ wound” (Merrilies’s.) In the essay on the text; miniscule (minuscule.)

Chatto & Windus, 1990, 517 p

Insecure academic Roland Michell finds in a pile of unsifted-through papers relating to Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash unfinished drafts of a letter from Ash to a hitherto unknown possible female lover, a relationship which would overturn the prevailing view of Ash’s life.  For reasons obscure even to himself Michell removes the drafts from the pile and resolves to investigate further. He begins to suspect the intended recipient was the female poet Christabel LaMotte and enlists the help of LaMotte expert Dr Maud Bailey to delve into the mystery. With her help he comes across a complete set of letters between the two poets which reveal the extent of their affair.

There are several other academics interested in Ash – Fergus Wolff, Mortimer Cropper, James Blackadder – one of whom has obsessively obtained items belonging to Ash for his Stant Collection and would pay a large sum for such letters.

All this is set against a background of the present-day circumstances of Michell and Bailey.

This set up allows Byatt to deliver to us examples of the poetry of both Ash and LaMotte as well as a frankly tedious laying out of their letters to each other in their entirety. While these are all accomplished pieces of literary ventriloquy on Byatt’s part (and of which some would arguably be necessary) they do not help to advance the plot by much. I note that in Babel Tower she did something analogous with an internal story written by one of the characters in the main narrative.

Among all this there is an explanation in dialogue of the arcana of copyright law as regards letters between the writer and the recipient – or their descendants.

Byatt is here playing games with the reader and with literary critics. At one point, “Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others.” It strikes me that having a character think that s/he is being manipulated by an external force is laying it on a bit thick and also tends to haul the reader out of the narrative, destroying suspension of disbelief.

Byatt’s intentions with the sentences contained in, “He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously ….. a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another,” are more forgiveable, being more general.

In an example of the pathetic fallacy writ large there is a scene taking place during the so-called Great Storm of 1988 where Blackadder and Cropper attempt to remove illicitly from Ash’s grave a box containing further correspondence between the poets. (This is also an explicit reference to an incident in the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites.)

What the book is really about though is the impossibility of knowing the full intricacies of people’s lives from their letters or artistic works, no matter how comprehensive their scholars’ knowledge of them might be.

Illustrating this, and divorced from the rest of the text, are several passages with straightforward narrative depictions of Ash and LaMotte either together or at significant moments of their connected lives. Crucially, these feel real, felt experiences.

Fiction gets to the nub; biography does not.

Pedant’s corner:- woud (would,) an extraneous end quote mark, focussed (focused,) gas-mantels (gas mantles.) “Roderick Random, an English work,” (Roderick Random may have been written in English but its writer, Tobias Smollett, was a Scot,) “as though she was liquid” (should that not be ‘as though she were liquid’?) wistaria (wisteria,) “snuck off” (USian, the British phrase is ‘sneaked off’,) “the sound of the Mercedes’ angry purr” (Mercedes’s,) scarey (scary.)

Head of Zeus, 2022, 558 p

The author has previously displayed his middle Eastern background in a couple of books, Central Station and Neom, and his Jewish heritage in A Man Lies Dreaming but as far as I know he has not up till now examined the state of Israel. As I was typing it I intended that that last sentence contains a pun. Because here we have a kind of history of Israel from 1974 to 2008 – of its existence as an entity and of its situation as a nation. For as much as it is anything this is a “condition of Israel” novel, or at least the condition of Israel between those dates. Then again, it seems from the outside that its circumstances as depicted here have only been exaggerated in the times since.

In a series of incidents taking in a set of beachside rapes and murders, forced confessions, observations on venal or predatory (or both) politicians and army high-ups, kidnappings, extortions, drug running from Lebanon’s Bekaa valley with the apparent connivance of the Israeli Defence Force, networks extending to Colombia and the US, accompanied by a host of murders/executions, a varied cast of flawed characters, Chief Inspector Cohen, who talks in quotations – usually biblical but sometimes Shakespearean – fellow cop Eddie Raphael, small-time crook Benny, budding journalist Sylvie Gold, cop’s son Avi Sagi plus Nir Yarom, navigate their ways through an underworld of violence, mayhem and exploitation of the surrounding land. All is interspersed with details of prevailing styles of music on the radio or TV and underpinned by the overwhelming presence of drug dealing and gangsterism.

As it says on the backcover, Maror is a Jewish ceremonial dish of bitter herbs which is eaten during the Passover, symbolizing the bitterness of the Israelites’ enslavement by the Egyptians. The long history of the Jews since has emphasised that they have little need of a ceremonial dish to remind them of persecutions through the ages; engendering a natural desire to return to their roots and have a homeland of their own – with all that that means.

At one point Benny thinks of the quote from Ben Gurion, “We shall only have a true state when we have our own Hebrew thief, our own Hebrew whore, our own Hebrew murderer.” Maror indicates Israel has those in spades, a bitter harvest indeed.

Towards the end of the book Avi hallucinates a man saying, ‘In every time and in every place there must be someone to speak for the soul of their nation.’ The overall narrative here might imply that the utterly compromised character of Cohen is actually that man. (Or is it Tidhar who in this book is trying to fulfil that role?)

The epigraph to the last chapter, as if said by Cohen, is, “Fashioning a new nation demands sacrifice.” Here there are sacrifices aplenty. Maror, the novel, could be read as a warning to be careful what you wish for.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian. “‘What this?’” (‘What’s this?’,) “‘Did you use to do that, too?’” (‘Did you used to …’,) non-descript (one word; nondescript.) “He felt hands envelope him” (envelop him,) “Esther Landes’ private diaries” (Landes’s.) “‘What did you do with?’” (‘What did you do with them?’.) “The clock on the well” (on the wall,) Yitzak (Yitzhak,) Offer (elsewhere it’s spelled Ofer,) Genghis’ (x 2, Genghis’s,) “attached to it was brand new Brutalist building” (attached to it was a brand new…) “I’ve had gun pointed at me before’” (‘I’ve had a gun pointed at me before’,) “the sound of mortar” (of a mortar, or, of mortars.) “Then then car slowed down” (Then the car slowed down,) “laughing at though the idea was absurd” (laughing as though,) “official stationary” (stationery,) “plate of humous” (x 2, plate of hummus,) Yosef (elsewhere always Yossef,) Pincohet (Pinochet,) “in a dark clouds” (in a dark cloud.) “She folder her notebook” (folded.) “Even in in the Soviet Union” (has one ‘in’ too many,) “back in Israel had had detested that time between two and four when the shops closed” (has one ‘had’ too many.)