Vintage, 2007, 202 p. Translated from the Spanish El embrujo de Shanghai (Plaza & Janés, 1993,) by Nick Caistor.

There is a certain quality to translated fiction – or at least to the best translated fiction – which marks it out. That sense of subtle strangeness, other ways of seeing, perhaps even other ways of being, and yet, reading it, the essential qualities of human interactions still shine through.

Shanghai Nights is set in Barcelona in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and both that conflict, and more importantly the then also recent Spanish Civil War, hang over the book, an understated but permeating presence.

Narrator Daniel is a young adolescent whose father never returned from that Civil War, and several of the characters are subsumed by it, most obviously Captain Blay – called the Invisible Man for the bandages he wears to conceal his wounds but also Nandu Forcat, on whose initial furtive appearances everyone expects to be arrested at any moment. How much more so for those characters who are, or have been, in exile in France, at least one of whom is exiled permanently.

Blay is obsessed by a smell he attributes to a gas leak underneath a local pavement and ropes Daniel in to help him canvas for signatures on appetition against the leak and a chimney which spouts noxious smoke. Blay’s ineffectiveness is such that only about 14 people ever sign up.

Daniel falls into the orbit of Señora Anita’s daughter Susana, a consumptive (Marsé makes frequent mention of the Koch bacillus) girl whom Blay wants Daniel to draw as a victim of the smoke from that chimney but whom Daniel sees in a different light. She is the daughter of Joaquim (Kim) Franch, one of those exiles.

Forcat worms his way into Señora Anita’s graces and apparently has some sort of healing/heating powers. He begins to tell Susanna and Daniel a tale of her father’s adventures in the Far East, sent to Shanghai by the exiles to kill a man suspected of being a German Colonel guilty of war crimes in France and to retrieve a book with yellow covers, a book with revealing secrets. This is a lurid tale of unlikely encounters and an attractive Chinese woman named Chen Jing. It is sometimes couched in racial terms, (lousy chink, slant-eyed, a blackamoor) and clichés (dresses slit to the waist.)

Doubt is cast on this story by the appearance of Luis Deniso Mascaró (‘Denis’) a returned exile who has a grievance against Kim and whose revelations and influence alter Susana’s life.

This is a fraction of the contents of a book full of vivid characters such as the above as well as Blay’s wife, Doña Conxa, and the Chacón brothers, and which builds to a climax which is at once sordid but touched with nobility, and entirely true to its essence.

In it we read “everything passes, and it is all exactly the same, masks and the faces beneath, sleep and waking” and “however much we grow and look towards the future, in fact we are reaching back towards our past, in search perhaps of our first moment of awareness.”

Pedant’s corner:- “vocal chords” (vocal cords,) focused (focused,) “‘Denis’s’ parents’ home” (several times the possessive of ‘Denis’ appeared as ‘Denis’s’, surely it must be ‘Denis’’s,) “the waitress’ skirt” (waitress’s skirt,) “to smoothe down” (x 2, smooth down,) “fo’castle” (either ‘forecastle’ or ‘fo’c’sle’, not fo’castle,) “you’ll know you seen so much” (you’ve seen so much,) (Captain Tu Szu’s words” (elsewhere the Captain is always Su Tzu,) “to traffick arms” (to traffic arms,) “shammy leather” (technically it’s chamois leather.) “He was in the Peace Hotel can remember” (He was in the Peace Hotel and can remember.) “It is true then that …….. betrayal?) (Is it true then that …….?) “Contrary my mother’s expectations” (Contrary to my mother’s expectations.)

Little Brown, 2016, 440 p.

In this (fourth) instalment of the cases of DCI Karen Pirie she is still trying to get over the death of her romantic (and former professional) partner Phil Paratka, murdered in the line of duty in The Skeleton Road. Unable to sleep properly she strolls the backways of Edinburgh at night, particularly the Restalrig railway path.

We start, though, with Ross Garvie, a joyriding teenager, whose exploits lead to him killing his three passengers in a crash and only surviving himself in a deep coma.

Then we meet (briefly) Gabriel Abbott, an obsessive about exploitation in the third world unburdening his worries about a Thai correspondent of his to a friend in a pub in Kinross.

Garvie’s DNA provides a familial hit to the murder of Tina MacDonald in Glasgow years before, thus giving Pirie’s cold case unit a lead, but complicated by the fact Garvie was adopted and accessing the original birth certificate is all but legally forbidden.

Then Abbott is found murdered on the path by Loch Leven from Kinross. It turns out his mother was killed by a bomb on a light aircraft years before – an atrocity blamed at the time on the IRA despite the crude MO not being a fit. Pirie does not believe in such coincidences but the local officer has dismissed Abbott’s death as a suicide.

Cue much treading on toes as Pirie sets out to solve both cases and the aircraft bombing, ignoring protocol as is her wont.

A sub-plot involving Syrian refugees she meets on the railway path who have nowhere they can meet up manages to entwine with the main one near the end.

I suppose this is pretty standard police procedural (or in Pirie’s case non-procedural) fare but McDermid keeps the pages turning.

Pedant’s corner:-  “none of them were worried” (none of them was worried,) “Lees’ reward” (Lees’s reward,) “macaroon bars made traditionally with icing sugar and mashed potatoes” (McDermid is here misrepresenting for comic effect, macaroon bars are not made from mashed potato,) congratulations for the subscripts in H₂O and H₂SO₄, “where the leak sprung from” (sprang from.) “Noble shook head” (shook his head,) snuck (horrible USianism; ‘sneaked’, please.)

Arcadia, 2024, 380 p. Reviewed for ParSec 13.

It is a usually unspoken assumption that it is the duty of a reviewer not to imbue a review with spoilers. Yet what to do if to give some flavour of the contents (something necessary to any review,) makes that all but impossible? Not that in this case any comments would really be much of a spoiler. The manner in which the story is told along with the structure of the book manage to do that without requiring any assistance. The main narrative is told in four Parts but its title (The Queen) is a hefty pointer to the contents, and the title page itself, plus those introducing the Prologue, each Part, the three separate sections of Part IV, plus the Epilogue, are blazoned with pale drawings of wasps. The Queen? Wasps? Some sort of vespine nightmare, pheromone driven, is surely being not merely hinted at, but promised. Moreover, the Prologue pretty much embodies the climactic scene, so anyone reading that already knows what the spoilers are. The rest of the text describes how the scenario got to that point.

The main action unfolds over a period of around twenty-four hours in June 2018 in the town of Saint Catharines, Ontario. Margaret June Carpenter (Cherry) has closeted herself at home since the disappearance of four students from her school, Northfield, several weeks before: three boys, Chad Dearborn, Will Stinson, Allan Teller, who are remembered fondly and worriedly, and Margaret’s best friend Charity Atwater (Plum,) who isn’t.

Margaret’s isolation is ended when a surprise package arrives containing a mobile phone. The texts on it appear to be from Charity as they mention things that only she would know. They insist Margaret follow the instructions she is given. These lead her to the school where in Margaret’s absence a mysterious girl called Serena – about whom the only thing anyone can remember is that she is ‘hot’ – has been instigating confusion. So far so High School story but there follows a very well written scene where a teacher, Mr Foster, is clearly under mental coercion while revealing to a shocked class avidly filming his confession on their phones an act of inappropriate conduct towards Serena. Here, too, Margaret is joined by Harry Cook, her boyfriend of sorts, and there is talk of a gathering remembered as Burning Van from the burnt-out vehicle where its events, the trigger for the plot, centred.

Another strand relates the back story of an Elon Musk-like billionaire called Rudyard Crate, who as a child witnessed his elder sister eaten alive by a swarm of dorylus, or siafu, ants while barely escaping himself, which has naturally haunted him ever since but given him an unhealthy fixation. He has instigated Project Athena, designed to introduce insect phenotypes (mostly of wasps, but also of other genera) into human DNA to produce a hybrid creature. The most successful of these is Subject Six, indistinguishable from a human child until triggered by a “time of dynamic bodily or neurological change like human teenage-hood.” Subject Six: a wasp in the nest of Northfield.

When she meets Crate, Margaret notes his Businessman’s laugh, a phenomenon her father warned her of. “‘It’s as fake as a three-dollar bill, Margaret. Never trust a man who’s perfected his Businessman’s laugh.’”

The June 2018 setting is, perhaps, an authorial mis-step given that in the book the climactic events are well publicised and discussed but of course readers in 2024 have never heard of them. In all, though, The Queen is a well written but curiously unconvincing tale from the area where Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror overlap – at least unconvincing to those like me who normally don’t read horror stories – until we reach Part IV, Ever After, and a section where in an article reprinted from a magazine, Chris Packer, a journalist born and brought up in St Catharines, compares and contrasts the post-happening world-wide reactions to Margaret and Charity and so the novel begins to comment on itself and take on wider concerns.

Packer remembers from a case of abduction and killing years earlier that not all missing girls were treated equally. The one from the better-off families was spoken of with adoration: the one from the wrong side of town dismissed. It was ever thus.

Two more shorter bits of Part IV provide further perspective and reflections on the story’s events – even a touch of hope.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian. Otherwise; “He had no other companions other than” (has one ‘other’ too many,) sunk (x 5, sank, which did appear once,) “hung myself” (hanged myself.)  “Plum and me had been” (Plum and I had been,) “left raw wheals on its ankles and wrists” (raw weals.) “Queens force-feed it to her drones and attendants” (force-feed it to their drones and attendants.) “The larvae hatches” (The larvae hatch – larva was used correctly as the singular a few lines later,) “Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on Bald Mountain’” (usually translated as ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’,) sprung (sprang,) “their DNA helixes” (helices?) sanitarium (sanatorium,) staunch (stanch,) “she shrunk in the swing” (shrank.) “The song rose to its glittering crescendo” (the crescendo is the rise, not the end of the rise.) “Outside of” (no ‘of’ please, just ‘outside’.)

Penguin, 1995, 541 p.

I bought this because Piercy normally writes SF (or what can be interpreted as SF) but this is a contemporary mainstream novel – for 1998 values of contemporary.

This is the intertwined tale of three women living in Boston, Massachusetts; Leila Landsman, Mary Burke and Becky Burgess. Leila is a professional woman, a college teacher whose theatre director husband has an ongoing philandering streak, serially having affairs with his – always younger – leading ladies.  Mary is Leila’s cleaner but had lived a reasonably comfortable existence until her marriage broke down: she is now homeless but conceals this from her cleaning agency employers and the clients whose houses she cleans. Becky is a working-class woman who has pulled herself up from her origins by getting an education, for which her family made sacrifices, a desk job at a media company and a marriage to Terry, a man of rather better off means but who is lazy as a result and suffers from an unjustified sense of entitlement.

Leila’s and Becky’s lives intersect when Leila is asked to write a book about the court case in which Becky is accused of murdering her husband with the assistance of her teenage lover, Sam Solomon. Becky’s treatment by the press has been unrelentingly critical.

Leila’s and Mary’s stories are unfolded in the present of the novel (with flashbacks memories of their origin stories,) Becky’s is given to us in chronological order as it occurred. This has the effect of presenting us with different pictures of Becky from the two time streams. At first Mary’s story also seems to be divorced from that of Leila but does give us an alternative perspective on her life.

Mary’s is a salutary tale, about how easy it is to fall from security, how necessary it is not to appear homeless – especially when you are. She sleeps where she can – airport lounges, empty buildings – but preferably in her client’s houses when they are away from home and is eternally grateful to the (black) woman who showed her the ropes of homelessness, the ways to avoid danger, when she first arrived on the streets.

There is a degree of character development to Leila as her marriage disintegrates slowly then precipitously. Mary, perhaps hardened by the streets, undergoes less change. Becky’s descent into murderousness is not quite so convincing, though.

This is a decent enough novel which doesn’t reach the heights of Piercy’s earlier books Body of Glass and Woman on the Edge of Time.

Pedant’s corner:- thier (their,) “less alternatives (fewer alternatives,) “Mrs Coreogio” (elsewhere always ‘Coreggio’,) “they dozed of to” (dozed off to,) blond (blonde.) “‘I’m wondering if Sam will remind me of him in person is much as he does when’” (in person as much as he does when,) “cole slaw” (coleslaw,) rendez-vous (this was in the middle of a line, no need for a hyphen; rendezvous,) “Sorts Illustrated” (Sports Illustrated?) “had interviewed murderers and battered woman” (battered women.) “‘I’ll never seen you again’” (never see you again,) “happy to be notied” (noticed.) “They’d hadn’t an ambition among them” (either ‘They’d hadn’t had an ambition’ or ‘They’d hadn’t an ambition’,) “none of the three families were communicating” (none of the three families was communicating,) “in her own behalf” (on her own behalf,) ambiance (ambience.)

Penguin Essentials, 2019, 365 p. First published 2007.

Addressing as it does the Armenian genocide of 1916 (though only in a historical sense,) this was the book that saw the author put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness,” but the charges were eventually dropped.

The novel’s main focus is on the Kazancı family, one with an unfortunate history of its male members dying at a young age. There is a hint of magical realism here, the more sweeping kind of narrative more or less alien to the Anglophone tradition, in any case a nod to the supernatural elements which often appear in fiction from other literary backgrounds. The Kazancıs have a cat named Sultan. (They’re now on Sultan the Fifth. This naming system though, did remind me of Mad Jack’s burro in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.)

The chapter titles all relate to foodstuffs – or at least substances which can be ingested; cinnamon, pine nuts, orange peels, etc, though one is water and the last potassium cyanide. For the Kazancıs are a family for which food occupies a central nurturing role. Many Turkish dishes are named or described during the course of the novel.

In the first chapter the then nineteen-year-old Zeliha Kazancı strides the streets of Istanbul wearing her trademark short skirt – which she will not relinquish even in later years. Under harassment she recites to herself “The Golden Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite woman: When harassed on the street never respond” as that only fires up the enthusiasm of the harasser. (There are also Silver and Copper Rules of Prudence.)

Zeliha is on her way to a clinic to seek an abortion but, perhaps due to hallucinations brought on by anæsthetic or else a subliminal wish to carry the child – though the latter seems unlikely – becomes over-agitated and makes it impossible for the procedure to continue. The bastard of the title (though there is one other metaphorical candidate) could thus be Zeliha’s daughter, Asya, who is brought up among her aunts Banu, Feride and Cevriye, their mother, Grandmother Gülsüm, and the matriarch Petite-Ma. Acknowledging the unusual circumstances of Asya’s origins (in her late teens of the novel’s main timeline her father’s identity has still not been disclosed,) Zeliha is also known as aunty. The only son of the family, Mustafa, long ago left Istanbul for the US and has never returned. The aunts’ father had of course when still young succumbed to the curse on the family males. Even so, by the age of sixteen Asya had discovered that “other families weren’t like hers and some families could be normal,” a twist to that quote from Tolstoy. [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7142-all-happy-families-are-alike-each-unhappy-family-is-unhappy]

Asya is fixated on Johnny Cash and spends time in Café Kundera, associating with characters identified only by their attributes, the Non-Nationalist Scenarist of Ultranational Movies, the Closeted-Gay Communist, the Exceptionally Untalented Poet and the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, who says the real civilization gap is not between East and West but between Turks and the Turks. “‘We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hillbillies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city.’” The Exceptionally Untalented Poet says, “‘We are stuck between East and West …. the past and the future … the secular modernists … and the conventional traditionalists.’” In its own way this is a signal that the book could be read as a ‘condition of Turkey’ novel.* When one of them brings along a new girlfriend we are told of Asya that “When she met a new female she could do one of two things: either wait to see when she would start hating her or take the shortcut and hate her right away.”

Mustafa, in the US, has taken up with Rose, who was divorced from Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, a first generation Armenian American. Barsam and Rose’s daughter Armanoush (Amy,) is the second pivot of the plot, brought up as she was with her father’s family’s constant reinforcement of Armenian memories and attitudes vis-à-vis the Turks. Shafak has some fun depicting Amy’s date with a man she soon finds unsuitable, where they both contemplate plates of food whose arrangements are based on expressionist paintings. To resolve the conflict she feels between her US and Armenian heritages Amy decides to travel to Istanbul to visit her stepfather’s family, where her revelations about the treatment of her ancestors creates at first bewilderment.

“She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames.” For Armenians “time was a cycle, the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.” Even Aunt Cerviye, as a history teacher, was unaware of the details or extent of the Armenians’ tribulations. For the aunts, the history of Turkey only began in 1923, with Atatürk’s reforms. (Such historical forgettings, or forgettings of history, are by no means confined to Turkey, though.)

In another expression of literary apartness, that rebuff to Western fiction’s conventional realism, Aunty Banu has – or claims to have – control of two invisible djinn, one on each shoulder; the good one, whom she calls Mrs Sweet, on the right, the bad one, Mr Bitter, on the left. It is from Mr Bitter she learns the truth about the Armenians’ sufferings. And about Asya’s father, news which she keeps to herself, though his identity is revealed later.

Shafak has her characters make more general observations too. Asya tells Amy, “When women survive an awful marriage or love affair … they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however … the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.”

Curiously, Shafak at least twice used the word wee in the Scottish sense of small, as in “a wee bit.”

Some reviews I have seen online of The Bastard of Istanbul have been a bit sniffy, one even going so far as to say that on this evidence Shafak isn’t a good novelist. I suspect this means that reader had not had a wide experience of fiction from outwith the Anglosphere. Shafak’s writing has a brio, an exuberance, too often missing from that more staid inheritance.

Pedant’s corner:- *Turkey is now officially known as Türkiye; “wrack your nerves” (rack your nerves,) “and her cheeks sunk in” (sank in. There were other examples of ‘sunk’ for ‘sank’,) “as she laid still on a table” (as she lay still,) “phyllo pastry” (filo pastry,) “always on demand” (always in demand,) no introductory quotation mark when one chapter began with a piece of dialogue but there was with other chapters.

Constable, 2013, 394 p. First published 2007.

There is a certain sameness to modern crime fiction; which is to say modern detective fiction. Gone are the days of the gentleman sleuth such as Poirot or Wimsey, and the even more gentle woman, Miss Marple, solving crimes almost at leisure and in relatively salubrious surroundings. Now we have the hard-bitten, hardened police detective dealing with contemporary (well, in this case twelve years old) psychopathic criminality in all its grisly detail.

I would not normally have read this but it is set almost exclusively in Fife, where I live, (with such familiar locations as Boarhills, Kingsbarns, Crail and St Andrews,) and was recommended by our nearest local librarian as an introduction to the author prior to his visit to the library this November. Suitably enough it was published by Constable.

The short Chapter One features a young woman fleeing from a brutal captivity along a Fife coastal path on a freezing night. That is the last time we are given her point of view. It is her body DCI Andy Gilchrist, a widower, and his new DS Jessica (Jessie) Janes, are called to investigate a few days later, dead from a blow to the head, possibly after a fall from the path, and subsequent exposure. They trace her back to a cottage in Kingsbarns where they find two more young women dead, decapitated, and evidence of enslavement into prostitution.

Janes has a sideline in stand-up comedy which she undertakes to try out jokes written by her deaf son, Robert. Her mother has a criminal record but is a constant thorn in her side trying to gain legal access to Robert.  Gilchrist and the forensic pathologist Dr Rebecca Cooper have a mutual attraction complicated by the fact that she is married to someone else (albeit not happily). One of the other female detectives has a problematic relationship with a man who turns out to be unknowingly involved in the case, another has a booze problem.

I thought Janes’s background as teased out by Gilchrist in their conversations and his investigations into her mother’s origins would have made it unlikely for her ever to have been accepted into the police but maybe their standards aren’t too high these days.

This is pretty much the standard police procedural offering but some of the details were perhaps unnecessarily gruesome (of course this may be what the crime fiction market now demands) and there was a cliffhanger scene which stretched credulity by being kept going too long.

On putting this book onto my Library Thing account I found this was actually DC Gilchrist’s fourth appearance in print. I may try one more to confirm my thoughts that it’s not really my thing.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Acknowledgements “whne” (when.) Otherwise; “change in tack” (x 3, the phrase is usually ‘change of tack’,) “chaffed and reddened by a cold Scottish wind” (chafed and reddened,) “all was not as it seemed” (not all was as it seemed,) “oblivious of his presence” (it’s ‘oblivious to’ not ‘oblivious of’,) “as his drove on” (as he drove on,) “the Kingsbarns’ killings” (Kingsbarns here is adjectival, not possessive; ‘the Kingsbarns killings’,) two police acronyms used and immediately explained within two lines (both could have been avoided or worked around without loss of clarity,) “not to help him breath” (help him breathe,) facia (fascia,) “and looked at Gilchrist’s way” (and looked Gilchrist’s way,) “seemed to be order of the day” (to be the order of the day) “toodle-do” (the formulation is usually ‘toodle-oo’.)

Hodderscape, 2024, 374 p. Reviewed for ParSec 12.

In September 1903 Samantha Harker is a librarian at The Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena, an organisation which investigates mysteries and monsters and whose field agents hunt them. Since her grandfather suddenly disappeared, leaving only an enigmatic message in Morse code – a series of numbers, probably a book cipher – Sam has been anxious to find out what happened to him and if he is still alive. A report from Paris of incidents being called the Beast murders excites her because an illustrating photograph shows the same series of dots and dashes as in her grandfather’s note. She petitions the Society’s Mr Wright to be assigned the case only to be told it has already been allotted to Dr Helena Moriarty (daughter of the “infamous” Professor who had “snuffed out” Sherlock Holmes.) Hel is one of the Society’s best agents but her last three assistants were all killed in various ways. Only if she assents can Sam accompany her. Despite misgivings, she does.

Another of the Society’s field agents is Jakob Van Helsing, son of the Professor who helped trace and kill Count Dracula. Sam has known him since childhood as her parents were Mina and Jonathan Harker who had also been enmeshed in Dracula’s activities. Indeed, Sam was apparently conceived while Mina was under Dracula’s influence. Van Helsing is wary of Sam as he believes, rightly, that she can channel, is able to feel the influence of spirits, a fact Sam needs to keep from the world for fear of being put in an asylum.

What we have here, then, is a riff on two of the nineteenth century’s most well-known fictional creations; only set a couple of decades later. As a result of that and its mostly Parisian mise en scène the book has a fin de siècle feel (though – given it’s 1903 – perhaps début du siècle would be a better description.)

Morris does not pastiche Stoker nor Conan Doyle, though. She has her own approach and intentions, with her book also a vehicle for the deployment of a thesaurus of beasties and things that go bump – or worse – in the night. As well as vampires, there are mentions of a glaistig, trolls, duendes, a cockatrice, a grindylow, barghests, kelpies, drudes, wolpertingers, rusalkas, a carcolh, boggarts, a basilisk, púcai and werewolves – though the werewolves have all been exterminated decades ago.

The grisly Beast murders, the victims’ bodies eviscerated, their hearts torn out and likely eaten – and perhaps meant to invoke the real-life Whitechapel killings by Jack the Ripper (but with the sex of the victims changed) – have all been of well-off men who had mistresses. A banner reading The Wages of Sin is Death has been left at each murder scene. Sam’s facility to detect odours leads her to the pre-eminent perfumier in Paris, Arsène Courbet, to see who might have commissioned the scent she identifies the deaths have in common.

Along the way to the denouement we have encounters with an entirely human quasi-revolutionary underground organisation called The Wolves of God whose logo is also displayed beside each victim, an odyssey into the voluminous catacombs which underly Paris, and a night at the opera where Sam tries to prevent another murder.

This is incident packed stuff but still finds plenty of time to explain Hel’s extremely estranged relationships with her father and her brother Ruari, who are both manipulating the circumstances of Hel’s life and of others around her. Through it all Hel and Sam are very engaging company.

That we have two strong female characters at the book’s focus and occasional anachronistic uses of language, like an invocation to “Get it together” and the phrase “I’m in recovery,” signal that this is indeed a modern novel, not an hommage. The murders are of course solved but enough in the scenario is left unresolved to provide scope for a sequel or two. Which readers are likely to welcome.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- written in USian, “not one of which has returned” (the ‘which’ were people so ‘not one of whom has returned’,) imposter (impostor,) “magnum opuses” (fine in English I suppose, but the Latin plural is ‘magna opera’,) professionality (professionalism – used later,) rarified (rarefied,) “none of the victims were religious” (none of the victims was religious,) parliament (Parliament,) craniums (crania?) “an pain aux raisins” (a pain aux raisins,) “the chimes rung out” (rang out.) “To think, Sam had regaled Hel with” (no comma required after think,) “like a black and shipwrecked sea” (can a sea be shipwrecked?) “mortar and pestles” (mortars and pestles,) “row houses” (that would be “terraced houses” – they were in Wales, not the US,) “she seemed like to make” (an odd usage; ‘she seemed likely to make’ is more natural,) “trapping púca in her backyard” (the plural is púcai.)

Plus points for ‘wills’-o’-the-wisp’.

Tandem, 1971, 187 p. Originally published in 1966.

The story starts on the annual ship carrying the latest deportees to a penal colony on Mars. They have been given false names to hide their identities and their food has been drugged to calm them. Nevertheless, there is still room for conflict on board, as exemplified when “Jacob,” (sensitivity warning) is called a nigger. The text also uses the word negro about him and later he is even addressed in dialogue as “Sambo.”

On arrival they are treated summarily by the previous deportees. Their remaining food is confiscated supposedly to be redistributed to the colony. Even though all on Mars are criminals (whether actual or perhaps political) this is a strict system run by the Governor, assisted by his henchmen. There is too an emphasis on religious observance, with partly misremembered prayers/texts since few books are ever brought on the one way trip.

The Mars presented here is not quite as we know it these days. There is an atmosphere of sorts (but still deadly if exposed to it,) there is an indigenous wild life food source, dubbed rabbits, and a moss which they eat and which is also edible by though not really palatable to humans.

The newcomers are in effect on probation in their new environment, having to fit into the customs which have evolved in the colony with any transgressions being treated harshly.

Jacob is taken on by the “rabbit” hunting group who one day witness what could be interpreted as a miracle like the burning bush, but which one of them rationalises as an escape of natural gas.

The governor is keen to exploit this phenomenon but at one point has an odd thought about his secret lover’s “female lack of the ability to let things ride. The lack that was her greatest strength.”

The attitudes depicted here are homophobic as well as being racist. I suppose for a book published in 1966 that’s not too surprising.

Compton was reasonably well regarded in his time. This isn’t one of his best, though.

Pedant’s corner:-  “had been found inacceptable” (inacceptable is archaic; modern usage is ‘unacceptable’,) a missing full stop at the end of a sentence. “On earth” (On Earth,) ditto “‘But we aren’t on earth.’” A missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “photo-synthetiser” (nowadays this would be ‘photo-synthesiser’,) “hread-like” (thread-like,) “ a ryme of red dust”(rime,) Phobus (Phobos,) “‘Shadrak, Meshak, Abednego’” (Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.) “‘That a euphemism’” (That’s a euphemism’,) “insistant hunger” (insistent,) Daimos (Deimos,) “‘The though. makes me’” (The thought makes me,) “illegally horded” (hoarded,) “could never have born the skin against his skin” (never have borne.) “Three of Dickens’ novels” (Dickens’s,) “‘it dosn’t mean’” (it doesn’t mean,) fidgetted (fidgeted.)

Travellers’ Library, 1931, 315 p

This is a collection of poems and short stories set in Ancient Greece among the wars between Athens and Sparta. The stories range in date from 500 BC, to 498 BC, 461 BC, 456 BC, 446 BC, 427 BC, 415 BC, 412 BC, 399 BC, 396 BC, 374 BC and finally 373 BC. A few of the poems directly relate to those times but a couple are not so specific.

We start things off with two poems and then each story is followed by a single poem until the last, designated as a song.

Mitchison’s usual facility as a writer is in evidence. There is nothing particularly startling in the contents and she seems to know these times well though bearing her research lightly, but then she did cover similar ground in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and set other books in ancient times: The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Travel Light, Blood of the Martyrs.

She is perhaps strongest when focusing on relationships involving women – the one where one man deceives an ingenuous young girl for his own ends could resonate still, women’s care for each other is displayed but not overly stressed – though those between men are also given weight, in the title story an act of kindness which could be seen as treason being neatly resolved.

While the Ancient Greeks reverence for poetry is not mirrored nowadays there is no reason to suppose human nature two and a half thousand years ago was any different to today. These stories could underline that perfectly.

Pedant’s corner:- shrunk (shrank,) “Hippokleas’ shoulder” (Hippokleas’s: all names ending in s are given s’ as their possessive rather than s’s,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “by and bye” (‘by and by’ as it was rendered later,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of dialogue (x 2.)

Granada, 1980, 138 p

In an unspecified Central American country, a group of men are planning a revolution to restore General Jorge Alvarez to the Presidency. He had been allowed back in to the country after his successor, a mathematics professor named Ospina, decided to curry favour with the US and so promised elections.

The main conspirators are the General, his son José, his friend Peter Nelson, not long ago court-martialled from the US Army (a fact he doesn’t wish to conceal but also doesn’t advertise,) a Frenchman called Charles de Cluny, Colonel Aranha, and priest Father Miguel. They have the backing of the Company of Mr Green, a US citizen whose son George is engaged to the General’s daughter, Elena. Without that support and the implicit promise of US approval the revolution would not be possible.

Elena attracts Nelson’s interest. She decries his description of her father as a former dictator, saying he did good things for the country and the people. She in turn takes a fancy to Nelson, who contemplates sex with Elena thus, “The beast with two backs had still two brains and two identities and it was neither possible nor desirable to fuse them, to lose identity. The act made a momentary union, an instant of sharing, of identification, but this passed in a single second to be recalled later as pleasure and little more. The religion of union was a female doctrine, a false dream, possible only at the risk of sanity: a hypnotic state where reality was replaced for a time by a destructive vision.” (I did wonder if this line of thought was occasioned by the author’s homosexuality.)

Nelson is charged with the training of General Alavarez’s army (rudimentary training at best.) The revolution goes ahead in the country’s second city and Nelson is involved in the fighting. While that goes well enough news from the capital is not so good, with betrayal on top of betrayal and the influence of the Company not what the conspirators had hoped.

Vidal is here explicitly critiquing the US Government’s tendency to interfere in other countries’ affairs; not necessarily to their benefit.

Pedant’s corner:- “General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’ house (General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’s house; or maybe even ‘General Jorge Alvarez’s Asturias house’,) “‘You can see if from the street’” (‘see it from’,) a missing comma – or full stop – before a piece of direct speech, gulley (gully; as it was spelled later,) “(I’d even been in school with them, danced with some of them!).” (an exclamation mark doesn’t need a full stop following it,) a gap between a colon and the preceding word (x 2.) “José unbuttoned his shirt and lay in the sun, eyes shut. A small scapula glittered on the dark pink chest” (how can a shoulder blade lie on a chest?) “Aristophanes’ The Birds” (Aristophanes’s,) an end quotation mark follows a paragraph of speech which is carried on on the next line. The convention is no such mark is required in those circumstances.) “‘Then what do you think about our chances.’” (is a question and so requires a question mark,) two lines of the text were transposed. “‘They wanted to get back him’” (wanted to get him back.) “She shut here eyes” (her eyes,) de rigeur (de rigueur,) “sounded strange on his own ears” (in his own ears.)