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.)

Little Brown, 2014, 412 p

I noticed early on while reading this book how different the style was compared to the same author’s Queen Macbeth, which I read only a week or so before. The prose is much less literary, more utilitarian, with more intrusive information dropping. (Once again I only read this because the good lady had borrowed it from the local library.)

The present-day events of The Skeleton Road are set in the run-up to the Independence Referendum of 2014. (Which seems ancient History now and has no actual relevance to the plot.) Karen Pirie – now a DCI in the newly merged Police Scotland – is still in charge of cold cases but due to the reorganisation her office is now in Edinburgh, not Kirkcaldy, necessitating a commute across the Forth Road Bridge.

When an eight-year-old skeleton is discovered hidden in a roof turret on the crumbling John Drummond building in Edinburgh a hole in its head makes it obvious it was murder.

In the meantime the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is shaken up by its new boss’s determination to find the identity of the person going around killing the perpetrators of atrocities not yet – and not now (in the 2014 of the book) likely to be – brought to justice. Suspicion falls on former Croatian General Dimitar Petrovic who disappeared around the times these murders started. His wife, Oxford Professor Maggie Blake, in the absence of any other explanation, always assumed he had returned to his former existence in Croatia.

Thus DCI Pirie is launched into an investigation which will reveal to her more horrors about the Balkan Wars of the late twentieth century than she might have wished.

This is not really a surprising subject for McDermid to take on. After all, the first shot of those most recent Balkan Wars was fired in her home town of Kirkcaldy.

It is not hard for the reader to join the dots about the victim. The murderer is initially more of a mystery but a reference about three fifths of the way in rather jumped out.

Crime fiction is how McDermid made her name – and it is what pays her bills – but the contrast between this and Queen Macbeth demonstrates how undemanding the genre can be for a reader (and for its author?) but its consumers can’t seem to get enough of it. And there’s something disturbing about people seeing murder as entertainment.

If the purpose of the fictional detective is to set the world right again after the transgression of the crime, cases such as this give the lie to that assumption of cosiness.

Pedant’s corner:- confectionary (confectionery,) a missing start quotation mark at the beginning of a piece of dialogue, “Dorothy L Sayers’ description” (Dorothy L Sayers’s.) “‘He was as a much a butcher as …’” (He was as much a butcher as …)

Michael Joseph, 2017, 75 p; including 3 p “A few words before the rest of the words.”  Translated from the Swedish Ditt livs affär (Helsingborgs Dagblad, 2016,) by Alice Menzies.

This is a short, but powerful, illustrated tale of a very successful business man’s attempt to make sense of his life; and amends to his neglected son.

He has terminal cancer and in the hospital room next to his is a young girl who tries to make friends with him and has coloured one of the chairs red using a crayon, “‘You’re allowed to draw on the furniture when you have cancer,’ the girl suddenly exclaimed with a shrug. ‘No one says anything.’”

His plight has caused the unnamed narrator to reflect on his life, and his story, as written, is an apology of sorts to his son. “But the vast majority of successful people don’t become bastards, we were bastards long before. That’s why we’ve been successful.” Also, “Weak people always look at people like me and say, ‘He’s rich, but is he happy?’ As though that was a relevant measure of anything. …..  Happy people don’t create anything …. All leaders, all of your heroes, they’ve been obsessed. Happy people don’t get obsessed.”

All his life he seems to have been followed around by a greyly dressed woman with a folder, even from when he was born as the only survivor of a set of twins. When he finally intercepts her and calls her Death she demurs. “I’m not Death. It’s the job.” And the job has rules. You cannot just exchange one life for another; yours must be erased. He cannot save both the girl and himself; or, rather, he cannot save the girl and his life as he lived it.

This is an all but perfect meditation on home and family and the things that, in the end, are important.

Pedant’s corner:- No entries.

A Novel of the Life and Loves of Robert Burns.

Collins, 1946, 382 p including 2 p Note.

This is the first in Barke’s series of books covering the life of Robert Burns, known collectively as The Immortal Memory. I gather Burns scholars did not look kindly upon them.

This one is a strange concoction, seemingly well researched – in a foreword Barke says he did not want to get anything wrong – yet in parts it does not read like a novel. But it is also not a biography, containing scenes that must be imagined, with dialogue certainly so, and larded with a wheen of Scots words and usages that might be off-putting to those furth of Scotland.

I assume Barke has evidence for his family calling their eldest child Robin unofficially – as do some of his intimates – but it was an odd decision to render throughout the town of Mauchline as Machlin.

The young Robert very early in his life becomes aware that the well-off have it their way and there is little to no justice in the world. This is particularly so in the case of his father, William Burns, a staunch Presbyterian – of the Auld Licht persuasion – passionately opposed to fornication, whose position as tenant farmer on successive poor soils which he did much to improve is taken advantage of by unfeeling (or downright criminal) lessors. William recognizes in Robert an innate potential to make a mark but a tendency to passion which he fears will undo him but strives mightily to ensure his two elder sons, Robert and Gilbert, both gain a good education for themselves.

There is a divagation to Irvine where Robert is set to learn heckling as a prelude to growing linen and entering that trade. It is here he gains his first sexual experience with one of the many Jeans – not to mention other lasses – with whom he will be associated but his sojourn is cut short when the linen shop burns down and it is back to the plough and the land. Robert of course imagines himself in love with all the girls with whom he dallies but does not consider any of them marriageable. Not that he has much to offer them anyway beyond a glad eye and the odd verse.

This first instalment goes up to the point of William Burns’s vindication in the eyes of the law, and final death, worn out by a life of toil; toil which has already taken its toll on Robert.

Barke is not a fine novelist. His prose gets the job done but lacks sparkle and there are occasional passages of purple prose. And at the end I did not feel the text had inhabited Robert as a person. Then again, rendering a fictional account of a real person is the hardest job in writing.

Pedant’s corner:- “Jock Richards’ back room” (x 4, Richards’s,) riccochetted (ricocheted,) “vocal chords” (vocal cords.)

Hamish Hamilton, 2007, 253 p

This is the first book of Barker’s trilogy about alumni of the Slade Art School in the run-up to the Great War. I read the second one, Toby’s Room, before I realised it had this predecessor.

This book is more concerned with Paul Tarrant than Barker’s other two main protagonists, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville. Paul used a small inheritance from his aunt to enrol at the Slade but the tutor, Henry Tonks, finds his work insipid and Paul begins to doubt his own talent. The slightly older Kit Neville has already had some success as an artist though. Elinor meanwhile has enough trouble dealing with being a woman in a traditionally male enterprise without both the men being attracted to her. She is initially not interested and Paul temporarily takes up with Teresa Halliday, one of the life models, who is escaping from a violent husband.

It is not until the Great War breaks out though, and its scope widens, that the book gets fully into its stride. Barker is clearly comfortable with that war as her subject (as witness her Regeneration trilogy.) Kit and Paul, turned down for war service, sign up to be ambulance drivers with the Belgian Army but are initially used as medical orderlies in field hospitals. Barker’s immersion in the minutiae of the war stands her in good stead here.

In this latter part of the novel a lot of the communication between Paul and Elinor consists of reproductions of their letters to each other. In one of these Elinor notes that the women in her circle keep quiet when men talk about the war (although they’ve not been in it) and compares that to the Iliad, where the girls whom Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over “say nothing, not a word,” adding, “I don’t suppose men ever hear that silence.” This is a thought Barker would develop in her later Women of Troy books.

Barker’s writing is smooth, almost imperceptible. Accomplished as always.

Pedant’s corner:- Elinor’s hair style is inconsistently described as cropped, bell shaped, or tied back with a ribbon. The knee wound Paul sustains in a bombardment is also seemingly forgotten at times in later passages.

Polygon, 2022, 112 p

On a cold December night in Edinburgh in 1591 Geillis Duncan awaits execution in the morning for the crime of witchcraft. She is visited in spirit by Iris, a woman from our own time, who calls herself a time traveller and a modern-day witch.

Historically 1591 was the height of the hysteria against witches encapsulated by James VI’s Daemonologie and Geillis Duncan was one of the victims of the North Berwick witch trials.

The scenario gives Fagan the platform to outline the misogyny behind the witch hunts and its prevalence today.

In the conversations between Geillis and Iris the question arises, “How does he” (the King) “fight the Devil?” The answer? “Via teenage girls. Doesn’t everyone?” The rationale back then being, “We go after the Devil via womb-bearers – they are weak for him.” So the targets were women. Women who were alone, or tall, or ugly, or smart; women who inherited, sassy women, women who were healers. If a woman doesn’t exalt men always she is a threat, “a Demon whore, a witch.”

Despite all her efforts to be polite, docile and unthreatening, not to draw attention to herself, still Geillis was picked on: primarily since she was handy, a servant in the household of a man called Seaton but also suspect because, “I helped women birth, I helped calves, I knew the right herbs to cure a headache.” Seaton was jealous of the fact that his sister-in-law, Euphame, had inherited her father’s estate and wanted a legal reason to eliminate her so Geillis was tortured and abused to implicate Euphame and others.

Fagan has her characters try to explain misogyny. Geillis says, “We bring life from our bodies where before there was nothing,” – that being a kind of magic – and Iris tells her, “Men want to know how they got trapped on Earth,” but the real crime is that, “There is no man on this Earth who didn’t get here except by a woman parting her thighs.”

Apart from the conceit of Iris time travelling Fagan’s tendency to indulge the fantastical sees Iris during the night begin to grow feathers and eventually turn into a crow.

Though Geillis’s prior suffering is never in doubt the set up allows Fagan to treat the witch trials almost indirectly but nevertheless underline that misogyny is ever with us.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales (see here) and again was borrowed from the local library by the good lady.

Pedant’s corner:- lightening (lightning,) “filed into a tea-room” (in 1591?) “the thing I had that shined” (shone,) a priest comes to hear her confess at the last (a priest? In Reformation Scotland?) the priest uses a pencil to sign in to the jail (suitable graphite for this purpose was discovered in 1560 so it’s possible; but pencils as such would not, I suspect, have been widely available, a scratchy pen is more likely,) smoothes (smooths,) okay (in 1591?) ditto teenage.

Earthlight, 2001, 516 p plus 2p Map and 6 p Dramatis Personae.

The third instalment in Turtledove’s Darkness sequence (see here and here) where a version of the European campaigns of the Second World War is carried out in a world where magic is real and used as weapons of war, with unicorns, behemoths, dragons and leviathans taking the places of the mechanical devices of our world, sticks fire beams of sorcerous energy and similarly charged eggs are fired as projectiles or dropped from the sky.

Comparisons are easy to identify. In this book the Kingdom of Algarve’s soldiers’ advance on the city of Sulingen on the Wolter river only to get bogged down in a battle of attrition mirrors the Battle of Stalingrad, various behind the lines activities correspond to those of partisans, the mathematical and practical experiments of the mages of Lagoas and Kuusamo ape the Manhattan project. The Holocaust is not yet quite paralleled, but the Kaunians (hated by Algarvians and other nationalities here – though not by all concerned) are corralled into ghettos (or at least one such) but as yet not extermination camps, though some are being killed en masse to provide sorcerous energy for military advantage.

This has the same weaknesses as previous instalments; characters tend to the two dimensional, there is repetition of information and of characters’ thoughts, the prose is resolutely pedestrian and the misogyny of nearly all the male characters remains stark.

But it’s Turtledove. No point in expecting more.

Pedant’s corner:- “by Colonel Broumidis’ beasts” (Broumidis’s,) “King Tsavellas’ men” (Tsavellas’s,) “showing Lagoas’ jack” (Lagoas’s; all names here ending in s were not given an apostrophe s) “Merovec’s men” (Mezentio’s men,) “lèse majesty” (lèse majesté.)  “‘I hadn’t know that’” (known that,) “centered on camels and all the ways it could be cooked” (centred on camel (meat) and all the ways.) “A gust of wing sprang up” (gust of wind.) “As a matter of face, he wasn’t sure …” (As a matter of fact,) “‘who haven’t got the ballocks for that’” (bollocks,) “land crawling up over the edge of the world to mar the smooth horizon between land and sea” (between sea and sky,) “the marchioness’ friend” (marchioness’s.) “The women gave back her garments” (there was only one woman.)

Polygon, 2024, 140 p, including iii p Glossary and i p Acknowledgements.

This is one of a series of short novels Birlinn (Polygon’s owner) has commissioned from modern Scottish authors under the rubric Darkland Tales: “dramatic retellings of stories from the nation’s history, myth and legend.” The good lady picked it up from the local library and I thought I might as well read it too.

An author’s note prefaces the tale with a note saying that Shakespeare – like people today – knew little about life in Scotland just over a thousand years ago now and his “Scottish play” about two power-crazed tyrants was an invention (actually taken from Hollinshed’s Chronicles.)

McDermid’s book – like Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter – is an attempt to restore the balance and has two strands; one in the present of Macbeth’s wife Gruoch as she tries to evade capture by Malcolm’s followers (specifically MacDuff) some time after Macbeth’s defeat at Lumphanen by sheltering in a monastery on an island in Loch Leven and the other (printed in italic) her memories of her life when she met and fell in love with Macbeth while in a dynastic – and on her part loveless – marriage to the Mormaer of Moray, Gille Coemgáin, the man who had killed Macbeth’s father Findlaidh. The whole is a love story in which McDermid conjures up late tenth century Scotland admirably.

Macbeth here is not the Earl of Orkney of Dunnett’s imagination but has a power base on the isle of Mull and a prickly relationship with Gille Coemgáin until he takes revenge for his father and establishes his rule by adopting Gruoch’s son Lulach, whom this account asserts is his son anyway.

Within the text there are several sly references to Shakespeare’s play – the handle toward my hand, to the sticking place, untimely ripped etc – but McDermid gives it her own spin.

On the whole I found Queen Macbeth more interesting and writerly than McDermid’s crime fiction. This is Gruoch as a living, breathing – feeling – human being.

Pedant’s corner:- “quantities of ginger and peppermint tea” ( I wondered when ginger came to Britain. It was known in the 11th century so that’s fine. Peppermint was apparently only identified in 1696 but its use will certainly predate this.)

In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [The Locked Room, 1987, 116 p.]

The third in Auster’s New York trilogy, this is as awkward a read as the previous two. There is something distanced about the narration; too much is told and little is shown. It is the tale of a man effectively haunted by his childhood friend Fanshawe, who suddenly left his wife but also left behind several manuscripts and instructions to have the narrator sift through them to see if they were worth publishing, and, if so, to try to accomplish this.

That word Fanshawe is a problem, embodying the sense that what we are reading is a construct. Surely nobody ever refers to their childhood best friend by their surname? (Outside the bounds of fiction it would be unusual in any situation where referring to an acquaintance is required.) We readers know perfectly well that any short story or novel is a construct – but we don’t need our faces rubbed in it.

Though the connection seems tenuous – apart from the fact that I was reading these between the same covers – characters from the previous two books in the trilogy like Quinn and Stillman, reappear here. And the narrator mentions City of Glass and Ghosts as if he is the same as the person who wrote those. (Of course he is. He’s Paul Auster. And we know that. But to be reminded of it is annoying.)

There are some sentences where Auster’s writing climbs into wider relevance, “No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself” explores the impossibility of ever truly knowing anyone else – or even oneself. We are told “The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle” (to say goodbye to something.) If the story isn’t in the words why are we wasting our time? More problematically, one encounter leads the narrator to the thought that “Sexual desire can also be the desire to kill.”

Sensitivity note; Fanshawe’s manuscripts are said to contain “an instance of nigger-baiting.”

Pedant’s corner:- kudos, though, for no entries here.