Collins, 1953, 318p, including 2p Note, 2p Contents and 2p list of characters.

This is the fourth in Barke’s Immortal Memory novel sequence on the life of Robert Burns. This instalment mainly concentrates on his taking the lease at Ellisland Farm, some miles north of Dumfries, a town which he does not care for, and his angling (the Scots word would be ettling) for a job with the Excise. There is though, a brief journey to Edinburgh where he finally settles accounts with his publisher William Creech and also with Jenny Clow, the mother of one of his many children, on whom he makes a settlement.

When we start, the house at Ellisland where he is to live with Jean Armour and his family, is in the course of being built and he has to live in a small, bare room nearby while Jean et al stay in Mauchline (still spelled Machlin by Barke.) Even when his new house is built, after many delays by the Dumfries builders, the walls are too damp with plaster drying out to be healthy.

The breaking in of Ellisland is an arduous task and Burns recognises it will not provide enough of a living hence his seeking of the Excise job. This is also arduous, involving many long miles on horseback in all weathers – and Burns was always prone to chills and fevers.

There is still time, though, for him to fall in with Anna Park, niece of the wife of a Dumfries innkeeper. She is portrayed as equally, if not more, willing than he is to consummate their passion and the inevitable occurs. (Reading these books it sometimes feels as if Burns only had to look at a woman to get her pregnant.) Her lying-in more or less coincides with that of Jean Armour’s latest and Jean selflessly agrees to treat Anna’s child as her own.

Within the text we are treated to a full rendering of Burns’s draft of Tam O’Shanter, a first reading of the poem given to his family assembled by the fire one night.

In an exchange with his strait-laced brother, Gilbert, Burns says, “the Scotland o’ saints and scholars and country squires is nothing but hypocrisy. Not one o’ them can square their beliefs with their practice,” adding that his reading of history and the Bible tells him “morality has ever been a snare and a delusion.”

Jean is well aware of Burns’s tendencies, earlier telling Rab’s sister Nancy that being jealous would do no good, and that she couldn’t deny him other women, so long as he loved them.

In an observation that reads a little too much like an authorial projection of future knowledge onto the past, Francis Grose, an author-antiquarian from London, tells Rab he admires the Scots peasantry, “the best educated in the world,” but not the gentry, with their aping of English foppery, yet considers the Scots nation as defeated, and “‘the English will beat and tame half the world before they’re done – especially the coloured races…… And dang me if they won’t get the Scotch to do all their dirty work for them and fight all their bloodiest battles.’”

Off-stage, the pre-Terror French Revolution rumbles away in the distance, with Burns privately expressing support, something an Exciseman could not do explicitly.

Apart from that performance of Tam O’Shanter none of the poetry makes it to the page this time, though Burns’s efforts in collecting and publishing Scots songs – without payment, a point which disquiets Jean – earn a few mentions.

The book’s title refers to the peak of Burns’s achievements, which Barke considers to have occurred around this time.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘You wrang to judge him’” (You’re wrang.) “It was the Burns’ fate she feared” (Burns’s,) “urgent breasts” (of Anna Park. Urgent?) “But it was a pity that necessity had compelled his to allow” (compelled him to allow.)

In response to its 100 best novels list I posted about here, on Saturday last the Guardian published its readers’ list of their 100 best novels.

I must admit I did not send in my contribution so have no grounds for complaint but again I note the absence of Sunset Song.

I did better with these, 44 (47 if the Neapolitan Quartet counts as 4; or 43⅓ if the Tolkien is taken as a whole.)

Since I copied and pasted from the Guardian website the links are theirs.

93=  Animal Farm by George Orwell

Love in the Time of Cholera  by Gabriel García Márquez

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

80= Dune by Frank Herbert

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

75= Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brideshead Revisited  by Evelyn Waugh

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy  by John le Carré

73= The Unbearable Lightness of Being  by Milan Kundera

70= Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

To the Lighthouse  by Virginia Woolf

63= Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante  (Isn’t this actually four books?)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

62 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

60 Possession by AS Byatt

57 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

52= Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Emma  by Jane Austen

49 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

46  Watership Down  by Richard Adams

41 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

39= Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Stoner by John Williams

37 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

31 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

29 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens  (Also at 29 was Huckleberry Finn which I may have read when very young but can’t actually remember doing so.)

26 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

21 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

20 Beloved by Toni Morrison

19 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

16 Persuasion by Jane Austen

14= Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

8= Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (I’ve now started this.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

7 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

6 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

5 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

1 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (I’ve only read The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in the trilogy.)

Polygon, 2007, 265 p, plus 5 p Introduction by Frederic Lindsay.

Sandy Ross has retired from his life as a sailor to live out his time on a croft on his ancestral soil. An intrusion into his settled world comes when local policeman Nicol Menzies arrives to tell him a murder – of Menzies’s brother, Robert – has taken place and he needs to search the croft. The perpetrator is Allan Innes, one of a group of youths who used to frequent the croft.

A discomfited Sandy, all too aware Menzies is fired with an uncompromising zeal, pretends to unlock his barn and doesn’t mention the resistance he felt when pushing the door open. His more or less unconscious decision to try to help Innes lays out the novel’s path. When Menzies leaves, Sandy provides Innes with enough food to last a day or so.

Innes avoids the search for him by hiding on the Crannock (a crannog) in Loch Deoch, swimming across and back to keep in touch with Sandy, who plans to provide him with money and disguising clothing.

Fate intervenes when Sandy takes his cow to be served by the local bull. In her eagerness the cow pulls Sandy over and breaks his ribs, rendering him bed-bound. His everyday needs are looked after by the widow Macleay, a neighbour, who calls in the doctor and a redoubtable local nurse is also arranged. The widow Macleay is looked upon as a suitable husband for Sandy but he is wary of such a prospect.

A more surprising carer is Liz Murison, the woman over whom Innes and Robert Menzies had quarrelled, who turns up on Sandy’s doorstep saying she’d heard he needed help. In her pregnant state she has left the orbit of her father’s ire and his religious strictures.

The local minister drops in to try to persuade Sandy to return the girl to her family home. The minister – fond of a secret dram – says to him, “‘But if man does not take a stand on the great moral issues, woman never will. It’s not in her nature. There are times when a woman has no more moral sense than a fly on a windowpane.’”

Sandy isn’t swayed, Liz has no desire to go back and he sees no reason to ignore her wishes.

Things go on the way to their conclusion as the determined Nicol doggedly pursues his quarry to the bitter end.

Each of the characters (except perhaps for Nicol) is portrayed sympathetically. Sandy’s humanity in particular shines through.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; “Nicol Menzies’ brother” (Menzies’s,) “Allan Innes’ sweetheart” (Innes’s.) Otherwise: a missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech, one missing before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “It’s door was ajar” (Its door,) “finger prints” and, later, “finger-prints” (nowadays one word; ‘fingerprints’,) “fo’c’stle” (fo’c’sle – or fo’c’s’le.) “The pain, like the bruises, were on his left side” (The pain, …, was on his left side,) “tried to ease his shoulder out if its bandaging” (out of its bandaging,) a missing opening quotation mark before a piece of direct speech. “‘May be so’” (Maybe so.)

The Guardian has published a list of the 100 best novels of all time.

I was particuarly delighted to see Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness appear there but no 89 is really too low. Some of the others are on my tbr pile.

Shockingly – to me at least – Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is not there though I note Maggie O’Farrell did include James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (the quintessential Scottish novel) in her top ten.

The others I have read are:-

80 Rebecca

79 Go Tell It on the Mountain

75 The Bluest Eye

71 Kindred

66 The Master and Margarita

63 White Teeth

62 Half of a Yellow Sun

56 Mansfield Park

51 My Brilliant Friend

50 Wide Sargasso Sea

46 The Leopard

41 Heart of Darkness

36 The Handmaid’s Tale

35 Great Expectations

34 Wolf Hall

33 David Copperfield

31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

30 Frankenstein

29 Pale Fire

23 Midnight’s Children

22 Things Fall Apart

20  Wuthering Heights

18 Persuasion

17 One Hundred Years of Solitude

16 Nineteen Eighty-Four

14 Mrs Dalloway

13 Emma

09 Pride and Prejudice

08 Jane Eyre

07 War and Peace

04 To the Lighthouse

02 Beloved

Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1923?, 378 p. First published 1920.

Set in the fictional Tweedside town of Priorsford (whose model it is not difficult to infer given the author’s background) this is the story of the kind-hearted – to excess? – Jean Jardine, aged 23 and guardian to her two younger brothers David and Jock, but also to Gervase (nicknamed Mhor,) the son of Mr Jardine’s second wife and also left alone when both his mother and Mr Jardine died. The Jardines are poor and live in a quaint cottage called The Rigs, owned by an absentee landlord. Jean worries over the cost when David is to go to University in Cambridge, and how he will fit in.

The well-to-do Pamela Reston, sister to Lord Bidborough, was brought up in Priorsford, and returns there to visit her childhood haunts. She takes a room in the house next door to The Rigs run by the no-nonsense Bella Bathgate but soon takes a shine to Jean and her family.

Travelling on the same train north as Pamela was successful businessman Peter Reid, the Jardines’ landlord, told to take things easy by his doctor. He comes to The Riggs incognito and is charmed by Jean’s unquestioning acceptance of him as a stranger.

The Great Expectations and will they won’t they get together plot are almost superfluous though. Douglas’s focus is on domesticity, with lavish descriptions of interiors and meals, and Jean’s feelings for her fellow humans. Her depiction of middle-class life in the immediate aftermath of the Great War is also a kind of historical record.

For modern readers, though, it may be jarring to read a sentence like, “He was no Jew, and took small pleasure in the outward cleansing of the cup and platter.” (Are/were Jews more notable than others for cleanliness?) Then an old colonial warns Jock the Indian Civil Service was “hardly fit now for a white man” and a child is quoted as saying of the thought of being a minister, “No, it’s not a white man’s job.”

Douglas is easy to read and does have insight – albeit in a narrow sense – into the human condition. There is no high adventure here, no strong conflict, just quiet lives lived out quietly. Virtue rewarded, though, may have been a novelistic staple of those times but it’s less obviously apparent in the twenty-first century.

Pedant’s corner:- “the Miss Watsons” (several times, ‘the Misses Watson’.)

Hodder, 2023, 249 p.

Godley, who died in 2024, was better known as a comedian and had a viral success with her voice-overs of Nicola Sturgeon’s press briefings during the Covid lockdowns. (“Frank, get the door!”)

This, though, is a reasonably standard novel which appears to draw on aspects of Godley’s early life for its inspiration.

When Sharon learns her mother Senga has been taken into hospital about to die she comes back from Bristol (where her marriage has broken down) to Glasgow. There she finds her mother is anxious for her to read a sort of memoir of her experiences in the 1970s. Senga’s marriage too was a mistake and her husband had left the family home. Sharon had been a practical, studious and dependable daughter, able to hold the ring as an additional support to her younger brother. The memoir is mostly concerned with Senga’s friends, most of whom have also made unsuitable marriages but Sandra’s husband is particularly controlling and prone to violence. As a result Senga becomes increasingly worried about her welfare, encouraging her to leave. But in the 1970s that was not so easy.

The book’s structure is rather unconvincing, alternating as it does between Sharon’s present and the extracts from her mother’s diary. Godley does provide a rationale for this in Sharon’s expressed reluctance to rush reading her mother’s story but surely this is psychologically unlikely. Wouldn’t most people faced with this situation read through the diary as quickly as possible?

The depiction of female friendship rings true, though, and the spirit of Glasgow shines through, while the nostalgic mentions of 1970s staples evoke the era admirably.

The story itself, however, while not inconsequential, is a little thin.

Pedant’s corner:- “The Farrow and Ball grey frontage …. were like every other café” “The Farrow and Ball grey frontage …. was like.) “Clyde was stood over the table” Clyde was standing over.) “Stuart was stood in the hall” (Stuart was standing in the hall.)  “‘Mr Blue Skies by ELO’” (Mr Blue Sky.)

Hodder and Stoughton, 1891, 218 p plus iii p Contents.

Again, as in Auld Licht Idylls, our narrator is the local dominie in Thrums, who has a lodging at the home of the McQumpha family; father Hendry, mother Jess, daughter Leeby and son Jamie, who now lives in London. Jess, who is an invalid, has never got over the loss of her other son, Joey, is a fine embroiderer and sits at the window of their house at the top of the brae leading out of Thrums, looking out at the world and hoping to see Jamie coming up the road. Leeby, when younger, was excessively devoted to Jamie and that devotion has spilled over into her caring for Jess which leaves her little time for her own life. Hendry, thoug hard working and honest is more of a background figure.

Along the way Barrie gives us, through the minister, snippets of life in Thrums and of the various characters who lived there. The man who tried to get out of his engagement to one woman because he had taken fancy to another, the older man who came back to the village with a much younger wife and was shunned by his hitherto prospective heirs, the exploits of the town comic.

On Jamie’s last visit Jess is much disturbed by the fact that he has a handkerchief secreted in his clothing. This she takes as a sign that he has a woman friend in London and like many a mother of sons is displeased that another woman could replace her in his affections.

Incidents in the book have parallels with Barrie’s upbringing in Kirriemuir and are reflective of the small town Scots life of his youth which at time of writing would have all but disappeared.

Most of the dialogue is in very broad Scots. Occasionally a Scots word was followed in brackets by its (nearest) equivalent in English. This has the effect of breaking up the narrative. I agree that to readers in England – or elsewhere – these might be required but a glossary would surely suffice for any who are troubled by it. However, the practice did not occur with every Scots word, some of which I therefore had to look up for myself, my Scots vocabulary not being extensive.

Pedant’s corner:- mantlepiece (mantelpiece,) largess (largesse,) youre (you’re,) “therenever was in Thrums” (there never was.)

Marion Boyars, 1983, 163 p.

A company called PAX has been developing various projects to improve crop types and yields over the world. This culminates in a product known as freefood, which promises to make human existence easier. It is widely welcomed nearly everywhere – a notable holdout is the indigenous Australian community of Murngin in Arnhem Land, North Australia, which has achieved a kind of independence.

Like in Mitchison’s other Science Fiction forays there is in the narration a high degree of telling not showing. Most of the story concerns itself with the scientists involved and interactions among the people running PAX and the reading experience is somewhat dry. Very little of what would be the social ramifications of such an innovation as freefood is explored. War has apparently ended because, as one character says, it was fought for food.

(Well, to a point: water too, and resources, but let’s not forget in these troubled times personal aggrandisement.)

The ‘future that never was’ that bedevils older Science Fiction stories is illustrated by Mitchison’s characters’ long distance communication methods (video calls) anticipating Skype or Zoom but not, of course, the internet or email.

There is an implicit racism – reflecting the times of 1983 but perhaps not Mitchison herself? – in one character referring to ‘Abos’ saying, “‘They could be a no-good mob,’” but admitting, “they got treated in a no-good way in Queensland,’” plus another use of ‘Abos’ in an unflattering context.

The promised paradise of hunger being banished from the world is disturbed when deaths start to occur among some of those using freefood. This is due to a compound called dioscorin which is found in yams and usually removed by the processes of preparing and cooking. Freefood production has omitted these steps.

Mitchison’s writing is usually perfectly agreeable. Her other (ie non-SF) fiction does not suffer from the flaws I have noted above and before here and here – even though some of it is set in such alien (to us) societies as Ancient Greece or Rome. That tendency to didacticism apparent here is missing from those.

Pedant’s corner:- In the inside cover blurb “polictical” (political,) skillfully (skilfully.) Elsewhere; a missing comma before a piece of direct speech embedded within a sentence (x 3, one without a capital letter at the beginning of the dialogue,) “fresh lime, nimbupani” (fresh lime nimbupani,) a switch into a different font size and back again (x 2,) an end quotation mark in the middle of a piece of dialogue, Bangla Desh (nowadays spelled Bangladesh,) Campuchea (nowadays spelled Kampuchea,) Quazulu (nowadays spelled Kwazulu,) grand-parents (nowadays spelled grandparents,) “none of them were any longer newsworthy” (none of them was …,) “nobody would be allowed to turn in into money” (to turn it into money,) Djuvalji (elsewhere always Djiuvalji,) “a dangerous precendent” (precedent,) peole (people.) “‘Still and on’” (isn’t the phrase ‘Still and all’?)

Little Brown, 2018, 428 p.

This is the fifth outing for Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, at the start here still trying to come to terms with the death of her romantic partner, Phil Parhatka, unable to sleep until she has walked herself to exhaustion in the streets of Edinburgh late at night.

She is juggling three cases, two hers, one not. The HCU is working on a series of brutal rapes from the 1980s whose perpetrator’s make of car they have a new lead on when a murder in Wester Ross, linked to the burial there of two Indian motorcycles left behind by the US Army after World War 2, turns up. Karen also has a peripheral involvement in a murder case she takes an interest in after a conversation between two women she overheard in a café twitched her police instincts.

Her hopes at the replacement of her old boss by the new one being a woman – female solidarity and all that – are swiftly extinguished. Assistant Chief Constable Ann Markie has saddled Karen with a new DS, Gerald McCartney, mostly in order to spy on her. My suspension of disbelief at this second boss in a row wanting rid of Karen was not quite assuaged by the reasons given for it, which seemed altogether too programmatic. But fiction is all about conflict. And Karen’s approach to her work is unconventional and occasionally confrontational, if not downright bolshie. Not qualities likely to endear you to a boss sensitive to public and political scrutiny.

There are ongoing updates on Karen’s background, the café Aleppo she helped Syrian refugees to establish in the previous book has been a success and her assistant DC Jason ‘the Mint’ Murray is growing into the job while the tedium of some police work is not ignored.

But the duty of the detectives in a novel is to set the world to rights by finding the perpetrators and calling them to account. So job done. Inasmuch as a murder can be set to rights.

Pedant’s corner:- “River’s voice was a clear as” (was as clear as.) “There were a handful of Lanarkshire towns” (There was a handful,) scoffed (various characters do this at various times; e g ‘Jason scoffed.’ Scoffing usually requires further elaboration,) “a pair of gin and tonics” (the main noun here is gin; it is that which should be plural: ‘a pair of gins and tonic’.)

A Journey to the Heart of Scottish Golf. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006, 289 p, including i p Acknowledgements and Thanks and ii p Contents.

This project was undertaken after Greig’s surgery for a serious condition involving pressure on his brain, surgery from which recovery was by no means guaranteed. Thankfully his brain and other functions remained unscathed but it prompted a look back on his life and the golfing experiences of his youth. His father had introduced him and his two brothers to the game when they lived in Anstruther and he had become proficient enough to be asked to represent his county in youth tournaments but he drifted away from the game quite early.

The book is divided into eighteen sections (naturally) each reflecting an outing to a particular course or courses and each with its own addendum musing on the nature of life and golf, especially as related to Scotland and the Scots. All are tinged with Greig’s customary humaneness.

The courses range from South Ronaldsay, whose greenkeeping is entrusted to the local sheep – a feature which leads to its own all but unique hazards which the sheep leave behind them – to Anstruther, St Andrews, Bathgate, North Berwick, Gigha and even Iona, among others.

Greig says about his Dad and his golfing cronies, “They share a very Scottish sense that good fortune must come with a penalty.”

An attitude which has rubbed off. After being congratulated on a good shot by a woman called Joan (who came from the US) Greig replied, “‘It doesn’t happen often,’” only to be asked ‘Have you never heard of positive thinking?’

“‘Sure,’ I laughed. ‘In Scotland we call it kidding yourself!’

‘I call it unhelpful pessimism.’

‘We call it realism.’”

Of that quintessentially Scottish weather phenomenon he elaborates, “Dreich is our word for it. Our climate has made the word necessary, and its persistent, clinging gloom accounts for a lot of the Scottish mindset.”

Apropos his round at Bathgate – a much spruced up course from the one Greig remembered and a development he does not quite approve – he quotes playing partner Alastair McLeish, “‘Aye, Scottish Protestants,’ Al remarked after struggling himself in the opening holes. ‘We’re perfectly able to torture ourselves without any assistance.’”

The course on Gigha invoked in Greig thoughts which are an enduring theme of Scottish literature, a sense of important things lost. “The sorrow and loss are part of the beauty, but that doesn’t make them good. One of the reasons I’ve never lived in the West, despite it being part of what I must call my soul, is it’s too damn sad.”

In the end golf can be seen – like most sports – as some sort of metaphor for life. “Mostly golf is about self-inflicted suffering, self-knowledge and hard-won (precious because hard-won) joy. Who but the Scots could evolve a game that offers such opportunities for humiliation and failure, and no-one but oneself to blame for it? And such transcendent moments?”

Pedant’s corner:- “but there no witnesses” (but there were no witnesses,) “the unspoken immanence of death wasn’t terrifying” (immanence does make a kind of sense; but imminence seems more to the point,) “boys and girls getting up to good in the open privacy of the this coastal strip” (of this coastal strip.) “Princes Sreet Gardens” (Princes |Street Gardens,) “before dying in Iona” (on Iona,) “Forres’ first tee” (Forres’s.) “”I wiled away my last Dollar hours” (whiled away,) “more like one those summer evenings” (one of those summer evenings.)