In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [Ghosts, 1986, 64 p.]

I read Ghosts, the second part of Auster’s New York trilogy, in September and thought I had published my review here but I was seeking to link to it in my review of the third in his sequence and couldn’t find it when I searched the blog; so it seems I didn’t. So here it is, four months late.

In 1947 New York a man called Blue is employed by a man named White to spy on a man called Black, and write regular reports on him. Blue cancels his date with the future Mrs Blue to undertake the commission – a commission which will keep him going for months. (To the understandable frustration of his intended who when they next meet on the street berates him for the lack of contact. But by then she has moved on. Not that Blue can, though he had pondered getting in touch but decided against it on the grounds that “The man must always be the stronger one.”)

Everything has been set up for Blue with an apartment across the street from which he can monitor Black’s activities. All Black appears to do though is write. And read.

It is a curious and distancing feature of the book that except for the real life people mentioned, such as Washington Roebling and Jackie Robinson, every character’s name is a colour. As well as Blue, White and Black we also have Gray, a bartender named Red, another called Green. The only woman who is given a name here (the future Mrs Blue isn’t) is called Violet. I note that that is a first name whereas the men’s in this story are not.

Blue becomes so bogged down in his task that he wonders if White and Black are one and the same and if he himself is being followed. The paranoia of a man who is so focused on what he is doing that he loses touch with reality? This has echoes of the previous book in Auster’s trilogy, City of Glass. Eventually Blue goes beyond his remit, contacts Black and tries to find out who White is.

In a discussion of Hawthorne, Black says to Blue, “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.” Blue replies, “Another ghost.”

The narrative is peppered with references to magazine stories, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially where a man took off on a whim and only years later (after being presumed dead) returned to his house and wife and knocked on the door. Whereupon the story ends. In that sense Ghosts reflects it. It doesn’t end so much as stop, albeit with being seen from a perspective of thirty years later.

What is Auster trying to do here? Is he subverting the detective story? Demonstrating the inexplicability of existence?

Ghosts is easy enough to read, and short at only 64 pages, but it all seems a bit pointless.

Orbit, 2023, 424 p.

Like her previous novel, Provenance, this is set in the author’s Imperial Radch universe but well away from the ongoing internal Radch conflict set out in her first three books.

This one has three viewpoint characters with their relevant chapters following in a strict order. Enae is a woman who spent most of her life in thrall to her grandmother but found her expected inheritance did not exist. As a make work job she is given an assignment to find a refugee from LoveHate Station who fled from there two hundred years ago. She could have paid this token attention but decides she may as well do a proper job.

Reet is a misfit, an orphan brought up by kind adoptive parents but who became aware early on that his thoughts and tendencies were unacceptable to society.

Qven is brought up very strangely indeed, in a group of similar juveniles whose status varies from stage to stage as they grow collectively older but whose interactions can be cannibalistic.

Both Enae and Reet’s chapters are in the third person but Qven’s is in first.

It does not take the reader long to work out what Reet’s origins are and their relationship to Enae’s quest. Qven is facing the necessity to “match” with someone else to become a functioning adult. Failure to do so will result in an unpleasant death. His intended match is someone not to his taste.

All comes to a head on a habitat of the Presger Translators, the group who mediate the treaty between humans and the dangerous aliens the Presger. Translators are bred for this purpose and are not considered fully human. Indeed any human who ventures into Presger – or even Translator – areas forfeits human status.

Prior to his arrival there Reet had been inveigled into an association with the Hikipi, a group who believe that, since no human has seen them, the Presger are illusory. This is used against him at the crux of the novel, a committee meeting to decide whether Reet is actually human, a question which by then also encompasses Qven.

Leckie has an unusual way with personal pronouns, Enae thinks of hirself as sie and uses hir as a possessive. Other pronouns to be found here include e and em as well as the more common ones. There is also an inordinate amount of conversation and consideration of tea and coffee drinking.

All in all though, an above average space opera.

Pedant’s corner:- “there were a ridiculous number of shops” (there was a ridiculous number of shops.) “Shaking hir head at her foolishness” (Leckie’s control of her pronouns failed her here. ‘Shaking hir head at hir foolishness’ would be truer to her text.)

Hodder and Stoughton, 1918, 309 p.

This is Buchan’s second book to feature Richard Hannay as its protagonist (the first being The Thirty-Nine Steps) and it is very much of its time, displaying all the attitudes we might expect of a novel written when the British Empire was at its height – before the Imperial overstretch resulting from the treaties ending the Great War – and more especially of a man (Hannay) whose formative experiences took place in South Africa.

It is what must be called an adventure novel, ranging over Europe from Britain through Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Balkans and finally Turkey, within which Hannay gets into all sorts of scrapes and situations and somehow manages to come through them all barely scathed.

It starts when he is convalescing after the Battle of Loos and is tasked by his old acquaintance Walter Bullivant with trying to prevent the Germans from using a prophecy of a Muslim religious leader who will bring prominence back to Islam to overthrow British control of Egypt, a point at which Buchan has Bullivant say presciently “‘I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.’” Intelligence of this plan – conveyed to Britain via Bullivant’s son who died in the effort – has only three clues; the words Kasredin, cancer, and the cryptic v I.

A team composed of Hannay’s friend Sandy, a US citizen called John Blenkiron, an old Boer Pieter Pienaar and Hannay himself make their separate ways to Constantinople, as it then was. Hannay’s lies through Germany, posing as a discontented Boer. There he meets the almost cartoonish German Colonel Ulrich von Stumm so stereotypical a German it’s possible he was the prototype.

The text has several observations about such men. The German “has no gift for laying himself alongside different types of men …. He may have plenty of brains … but he has the poorest notion of psychology of any of God’s creatures.” This is followed by “In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises,” a notion that is strikingly misguided in the light of latter events.

By the time they get to Constantinople the group has between them unravelled the clues. Kasredin refers to an old Islamic story of a leader called Greenmantle, whose modern avatar it turns out has cancer. v I is a woman called Hilda von Einem. Ater more adventures they finally end up in eastern Turkey in time to play a crucial part in the Erzurum offensive.

As well as unthinking references to Jews as if that designation told us anything about the person referred to, the text has some now antiquated spellings; Moslems, Jehad, Bosporus, Bedowin, Bagdad, Windhuk, uses ‘England’ for Great Britain, plus the phrase ‘a white man’ as a term of approbation, the casual aside that a ‘negro’ brought coffee, not to mention Hannay as narrator saying he had been a nigger-driver.

File in “of its time.”

Pedant’s corner:- motnhs (months,) General Smuts’ (Smuts’s; which appeared a few pages later,) “terribly honest in some   ings”  (some things,) a missing full stop (x 4,) “I wondered if I had woke up his suspicions” (woken up,) nicknacks (knick-knacks,) “for people to disappear in ;” (‘to disappear in;’) “scarcley begun” (scarcely,) “uncommon like inspiration” (uncommonlike?) “more rot to the second that any man ever achieved” (than any man,) “must have woke the dead” (woken.)

Europa Editions, 2022, 135 p. Translated from the Italian L’Amore molesto (Edizioni e/o 1999) by Ann Goldstein.

Troubling Love was Ferrante’s first novel. It is narrated by Delia, whose parents’ marriage had always been troubled by her father’s jealousy of her mother Amalia’s attractiveness to men, in particular to a man named Caserta who acted as selling agent for the cheap pictures, mainly of gypsies, which Delia’s father painted for a living.

The events of the novel range over decades taking in Delia’s memories of her life growing up but mainly describe the aftermath of Amalia’s death by drowning – apparently suicide – clad in only a new bra. This aspect puzzles Delia since her mother had not been one for indulging in new clothing; make do and mend was one of her characteristics.

A cache of new clothes (possibly bought for her by Caserta) in her mother’s apartment is all the more puzzling because they seem to have been intended for Delia to wear but show signs of Amalia having at least tried them on.

All this sends Delia off on a quest to find Caserta; and the truth about her mother and father’s life. There are foreshadowings here of Ferrante’s later and more famous Neapolitan Quartet (see reviews, here, here, here and here.) A certain claustrophobia in the setting, dark goings on in normally deserted parts of buildings, an interest in older men but in this one Ferrante displays more of a lack of squeamishness about bodily secretions. There are visceral details about Delia’s unusual bodily reactions to stress.

Unlike in the Quartet though, Troubling Love is about the difficulties of shaking off the influence – and inheritance – of parents. For a first novel it is very accomplished indeed.

Pedant’s corner:-  Translated into USian, “sawed off” (sawn off.) “I let each stitch become unsewed” (unsewn.)

Corvus, 2021, 283 p.

Two Tribes is narrated as if by a historian called Zoe from 250 years in the future. She lives in a post-Catastrophe England now under the rule of something known as The Guiding Body which consists of “qualified, able and scientifically minded people the Liberals now regard as the correct way to run the country.” The world is globally warmed, with parts barely habitable. What were roads are now underwater, with boardwalks at first floor level to allow access to buildings’ upper floors. Praying mantises are a common sight. Culture is heavily Chinese influenced after a Protectorate which helped the Guiding Body into power. The currency is the yuan. Militiamen patrol the streets, their goggles giving them information about everybody. The poor work on flood defences and in one scene are patronised by an official.

As well as having access to twenty-first century social media records Zoe has come across the diaries of two people from our time, before the Warring Factions era. These are Harry, an architect, and Michelle, a hairdresser, but who actually met and whose differing attitudes she sees as a precursor to the times now in her past. Despite her friend Cally’s reservations Zoe conceives of writing Harry and Michelle’s history in the form of a novel to illustrate the beginnings of how her society came to pass saying that the past’s remoteness makes it comforting.

The bulk of Two Tribes is made up of that novel and describes the evolution of the relationship between its two protagonists, one from either side of the Brexit debate, each impatient of the other and each embarrassed by their families and friends but each beginning to accommodate the other’s viewpoint.

This is a subtle but risky piece of writing by Beckett. Subtle because it captures the slightly off note that manuscripts by inexperienced writers tend to have; but risky since it may fail to provide the richer satisfactions readers find from more accomplished practitioners.

Beckett renders that unpolished type of writing (the kind of story treatment that we’re often told authors who are later successful have consigned to a drawer in the deepest part of their desk, never to be resurrected) well; the unnecessary repetition of information, the going over the same ground in a slightly different context, some characters who are little more than mouthpieces and others who at times lean over into the cartoonish, the somewhat stark oppositions between those with contrasting attitudes, the necessity for Zoe to explain things to her putative readership which do not need explanations to Beckett’s readers. (For example, the derivation of the term Brexit.)

The sections set in the future of course do not suffer from any of that and read as assuredly as any “normal” novel. Whether that is enough in this case to offset the infelicities of the part supposedly written by Zoe is debatable.

Pedant’s corner:- “He had no other marketable skills other than designing buildings” (has one ‘other’ too many,) “men and woman pole shallow punts” (women,) reindeers (the plural of reindeer is reindeer,) “as a way booting nuisances upstairs” (as a way of booting.) “The rest of the party were already there” (the rest … was already there,) “counts out the points out with gusto” (has one ‘out’ too many.)

Harper Collins, 2008, 377 p.

This is the second of McDermid’s Karen Pirie books. I read the first in 2017/8. In this one she is now a DI in charge of the Cold Case Review Team at Glenrothes Police headquarters. A woman, Misha Gibson, has walked into the station and reported her father missing. He was Mick Prentice, a former miner who painted in his spare time, who left during the coal strike of the 1980s and wasn’t heard from again, assumed to have joined the scabs who decamped for jobs in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. Misha’s son has leukaemia, needs a close relative tissue match for him and this is her only hope.

Meantime, freelance investigative reporter Bel Richmond, on holiday in Italy, has stumbled on what looks like a crime scene in an apparently hastily abandoned villa and recognises a poster there as resembling a ransom note from a kidnapping gone wrong years ago. In a proposed money handover, Catriona, only daughter of successful Scottish businessman Brodie Maclennan Grant, was shot and Grant’s grandson, Adam, spirited away by the kidnappers.

How the two cases interlap is what is revealed as the book progresses, with a couple of twists thrown in along the way.

The scenario allows McDermid to illustrate how the legacy of the bitter mining strike of the 1980s endures and poisoned relations between mining communities and the Police. Various locations such as the Wemyss caves are very familiar to anyone who lives in the area, as I do, though some are invented (Grant’s home of Rotheswell Castle) or slightly renamed conflations of real places (the village of Newtown of Wemyss.)

The way the book was structured, with each section preceded by an italicised heading giving its location and date, was slightly intrusive though it did give McDermid the opportunity to present the relevant scene novelistically rather than as being related to Pirie or Richmond as in an interview.

As a character Pirie is engaging but we perhaps don’t see enough of her here.

Pedant’s corner:- “The women who entered” (The woman,) “In his Wham period” (the band was named Wham!) “in Simon Lees’ gut” (Lees’s; there was another Lees’ later,) fit (fitted,) “the big Tesco down by the bus station” (when spoken, yes, but when spoken of, that big Tesco was still a William Low’s supermarket,) sprung (sprang,) “‘not a Raith Rovers shirt’” (I know this was for the benefit of readers furth of Scotland but a Raith fan would have said simply ‘a Rovers shirt’,) “a smile that reminded him of Julia Roberts’.” (Julia Roberts’s,) “her Harvey Nicks’ sundress” (her Harvey Nicks sundress. You don’t say ‘an Armani’s suit’,) Certifcato de Morte (Certificato de Morte,) “scribbling the details down on.” (down on what?) “Toby Inglis’ name” (Inglis’s,) staunch (stanch.)

Chatto and Windus, 1996, 622 p.

I noted when Byatt died that I had only read one book by her and perhaps ought to remedy that so when I saw this in a second-hand bookshop (in Ulverston as it happens) I snapped it up. However only after I started reading it did I check her back catalogue and found this is the third novel in a sequence featuring Frederica Potter as the main character. Not that it matters because the book stands alone.

In this one, set in the nineteen sixties, Frederica is regretting marrying Nigel Reiver as she finds life in his grand home – dominated by his two sisters and his housekeeper – even with her son Leo, less than fulfilling. She had thought she might be allowed to work (she had met Nigel when she was at Cambridge – though he wasn’t – and still hankers after the intellectual life.) But Nigel is a traditional husband and though his work often takes him away for extended periods (with corresponding sexual encounters which Frederica only finds about later) thinks she should stay at home and resents any contact with her former University friends, all of them male of course. Her unhappiness turns into despair when he becomes violent towards her. He is a former soldier trained in violence and throws an axe at her when she tries to run away.

Some of the passages deal with members of Frederica’s extended family one of whom fields phone calls in a Samaritan-like service. They chat amongst themselves as they wait for calls and when questioned why the Church seems obsessed by sex a bishop says, “‘The Church has always been about sex, dear, that’s what the problem is. Religion has always been about sex. Mostly about denying sex and rooting it out.’” Apart from the odd visit later in the book to Frederica’s parental home this is a very minor strand.

Interleaved with Frederica’s story in the early stages here are extracts from a book called Babbletower, where an aristocrat leads a group of people away from their home land to a place named La Tour Bruyarde, to found a culture in which its inhabitants will be free to do as they wish without hindrance. This connects with Frederica after she finally escapes Nigel (her son Leo insisting on coming with her though he loves his father) when she gets a job – nepotistically through her old friends – as a publisher’s reader then teacher of English in the Samuel Palmer School of Art and Craft. Babbletower is one of the books she recommends for publication and its author, Jude Mason, an ill-dressed, ill-kempt and smelly individual, turns out to be a model for the life class at the School.

Byatt uses this and Frederica’s peripheral involvement with the Steerforth Committee on the teaching of English (and specifically whether grammar ought to be taught in schools) to have discussions about literature, especially E M Forster and D H Lawrence, as well as the usefulness of cut-ups in condensing meaning.

George Murphy, one of Frederica’s students, says novels are obsessed with sex and love and God and food (which he agrees most people are) but they are also obsessed by work, commodities, machines and property on which they do not lavish the contempt and loathing which novelists tend to. At one point a character realises that it is possible for human beings to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense.

From time to time the ferment of the sixties is noted parenthetically. The Lady Chatterley trial, the 1964 General Election, the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the Moors murders, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the beginning of colour TV transmission all get a nod.

There are two main set pieces in the novel, both describing court cases, Frederica’s divorce and Babbletower’s trial for indecency. Byatt uses these to demonstrate how the legal system distorts the truth.

In entering various liaisons after leaving Nigel, Frederica seems to be very naive in her conduct as it never once occurs to her that her husband will be having her watched.

A nice touch comes when Jude Mason opines in court – “‘The English vice is not what is said to be but, precisely, indignation. We get furiously upset about everything ….. It is indignation that has put my book on trial.’”

At 622 pages Babel Tower is something of a marathon read but it has its moments.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing end quote mark after a piece of dialogue, staunch(es) (x 2, stanch(es),) genii (the plural of genie is genies,) aureoles (areolae,) (behalves?) “Moor Murders” (Moors Murders which is used elsewhere,) “which neither of them quite understand” (neither of them understands,) “he has not read Babbletower, as a teacher, she is now” (he has not read Babbletower. As a teacher,) “marmelade skies” (marmalade.)

Vintage, 2010, 330 p, plus 5p Foreword.

124, the house where Sethe lives with her daughter Denver, is haunted, by her unnamed baby and by the slavery which caused the child’s death. That other daughter, who was unnamed but whose gravestone bears the description ‘Beloved’ – Sethe could not afford the extra money to have ‘Dearly’ inscribed as well – was killed by Sethe herself to prevent her being taken back to Sweet Home, the plantation from where she had escaped enslavement. Perhaps an extreme reaction but also an expression of the horrors of slavery. Sethe has the image of a tree on her back from the whippings she received in that part of her life.

The ghost is banished after Paul D, another former slave from Sweet Home, arrives at the house and takes up with Sethe. Denver resents this as she had considered the ghost as a kind of companion.

Later, a child who calls herself Beloved arrives at 124 and draws close to Sethe who comes to see her as a reincarnation of the child she killed.

There is a surreal quality to the writing here, verging on but not quite corresponding to magical realism. It is as if the fact of slavery, though not evaded, is too consuming to be confronted head on and must be approached obliquely, its legacy equally as terrible as its existence. Sethe’s act of violence is an extremity in response to an enormity, with its own repercussions on the lives of herself and her children.

Sensitivity note: a book like this, and a subject like this, cannot avoid use of the word ‘nigger’ as when the posse seeking to recapture Sethe discusses their slaves or Paul D asks Stamp Paid, “‘How much is a nigger supposed to take? Tell me. How much?’”

‘All he can,’ said Stamp Paid. ‘All he can.’

To which Paul D says, ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?’”

“Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” is as good a question to ask of slavery as there can be. Indeed, it’s the only one.

Beloved is not an easy novel to read: but it is perhaps a necessary one.

Pedant’s corner:- “the repellant landscape” (repellent,) “Baby Suggs’ place” (Baby Suggs’s,) “had shook the house” (‘had shaken’; but ‘had shook’ may have been slave usage,) “Lady Jones’ house-school” (Jones’s.)

Heinemann, 1988, 158 p.

The setting is Northern Ireland during the troubles. Cal spends his days lazing about as he is unemployed, having not been able to stand the job he had in the slaughterhouse where his father works. They are the only remaining Catholics in an otherwise Protestant street and subject to threats as a result. He is plagued by Crilly and Skeffington, Provisional IRA members wanting him to go on more jobs but is haunted by the memory of his part in the killing of a police officer where he drove the car they used. A new woman assistant at the local library begins to consume his attention. She is Marcella, and happens to be the wife of the man that was killed.

Being burned out of his house gives him the chance both to evade Crilly and Skeffington and to take a job at the farm where Marcella lives. He is a man living, if not a life of lies, at least one of omissions. A situation like his cannot end well.

Quite how psychologically perceptive all of this is is perhaps questionable. Not Cal’s reluctance to be drawn deeper into acts of violence but his attraction to a woman he feels he has wronged. The atmosphere of constraint though, of circumscription, is entirely credible.

Note: Mac Laverty is how the author’s surname is spelled on the book’s cover and title page but it is more usually rendered MacLaverty

Pedant’s corner:- “and how he would kiss her and touched her” (and touch her.) “‘You’re a boy without?ELSomebody might’” (I have no idea what that ‘?EL’ is about.)

Tor, 2021, 492, including 12 p Glossary of persons, places and objects, 2 p On the pronunciation and writing system of the Teixcalaanli language and 2p Acknowledgements.

After her part in the transition of the Teixcalaan Empire from the indiction of Emperor Six Direction to that of Nineteen Adze, ambassador Mahit Dzmare has returned to Lsel Station. There she finds herself under threat from Councillor Aknel Amnardbat who suspects her of treason – or at least being too sympathetic to the Empire. There is also the illegal nature of her imago (a copy of the memories and personality of her predecessor as ambassador, Yskandr Aghavn, and previous personalities of his line – none of which seem to impinge on Mahit’s consciousness, though) of which she has two versions, the deliberately damaged one implanted by Amnardbat’s operatives, plus the one illicitly salvaged from Aghavn’s body on Teixcalaan.

In the meantime a group of apparently ruthlessly implacable aliens has been invading the boundaries of Teixcalaanli space just beyond the Lsel Station area and the local Teixcalaan commander, Imperial yaotlek Nine Hibiscus, has sent back to Teixcaalan a request for a translator, to which Ministry of Information officer, Three Seagrass, Mahit’s former liaison on Teixcalaan, has responded in person, with the intention of enlisting Mahit’s help.

Also, on Teixcalaan, in the imperial capital, The Jewel of the World, the former Emperor’s clone sibling Eight Antidote, eleven years old, is being trained in statecraft and the military arts while also being enlisted by Nineteen Adze to spy for her. (Imperial politics is never an easy situation.)

The aliens have devastated the planet of Peloa-2, leaving little but eviscerated bodies behind them. The only form of communication the Teixcalaan forces can decipher is a hideous sound that causes humans to retch.

Martine’s book’s title here invokes the words which the Roman writer Tacitus placed in the mouth of the Caledonian chief Calgacus, and indeed the full quote (of which “They make a desert and they call it peace” is a part) is given as one of the book’s epigraphs. Its relevance is that Peloa-2 is now a desert and is the place where Three Seagrass and Mahit meet with the aliens’ representatives to attempt to broker a peace.

The aliens are vaguely humanoid in form, bipedal, heads on top of their bodies etc but seem to be able to communicate with each other without speaking; as if they were telepathic. Despite their nausea-inducing noises, Three Seagrass and Mahit manage to achieve a sort of communication back by singing to them.

[Aside. The aliens (one of whose bodies is taken from a destroyed space ship for examination) are said by several of the characters to be mammals. Creatures which are true mammals could only originate from Earth. There is no suggestion in the book that the aliens are derived from terrestrial creatures. Evolution elsewhere may produce a similar kind of animal which feeds its young from secretions from a parent’s body but they could not properly be described as mammals.]

The nearest description of the nature of the aliens is that they have a kind of hive mind and are seemingly incapable of understanding that humans have not. But the Teixcalaanli military employs single seat spacecraft known as Shards who are connected in an instantaneous network which means they experience everything the other Shard pilots do. This so-called Shard Trick provides a key to conflict resolution.

Teixcalaanli politics is as full of intrigue and personal manœuvring as any reader could wish. Add in the external conflict and the interpersonal relationships and the whole is a diverting read.

Pedant’s corner:- “open-mawed hangar” (a hangar does not have a stomach,) “who would rather bleed into a bowl for propriety rather than give up” (has one ‘rather’ too many.) “None of them were trying” (None of them was trying. There was another instance of ‘None … were.’) “She was going to have to live with it, wasn’t she.” (Is a question, so needs a question mark at its end,) “sharp-toothed maws” (and stomachs don’t have teeth,) “an insolvable political problem” (either ‘unsolvable’ or ‘insoluble’ but not ‘insolvable’.) “‘Did he now,’ said Nineteen Adze.” (‘Did he now?’ said Nineteen Adze.) “There was no hesitance in it” (no hesitancy.)