Polygon, 2007, 276 p, plus 7 p Introduction by Alan Warner.

In an interpolated framing device we have here the story of an author trying to write a piece of fiction celebrating goodness, where the characters are happy because they deserve to be, surrounding that same story which he is writing to find out what becomes of them. The author’s wife tells him his desire is impossible since he has always been severe on his characters and she thinks he cannot change. Still less does she believe he can set such a story in Scotland because he thinks the Scots have lost faith in themselves. The novel he is writing is that story; or an attempt at it.

That novel features the Sempill family, already relatively comfortably off – the father was an architect – but at its beginning lately come into a large inheritance.  The Mama and Papa Sempill have five children, Diana, Jeanie, Effie, Rowena, Rebecca; all named after Walter Scott heroines. All but Diana are blonde, she is dark-haired and at their story’s beginning old enough to fancy herself guardian of them all, parents included. They are on holiday in Argyll when they come across an abandoned house whose proper name is Ardmore but is known to the locals as Poverty Castle. As a family they resolve to buy it and bring it back to its former glory. This involves irritating the Camptons, inhabitants of the “big” house, on an enclave of whose land Poverty Castle sits, but with access rights. An encounter with the children of the house exemplifies all that can be good or bad about aristocratic attitudes. Their sons Edwin and Nigel (Nigel; enough said) are opposites in their demeanours.

Mr Sempill is an easy-going soul, but his wife is racked by desire for a son though perhaps too old and lacking in vigour for the risk involved. The crisis of the tale is when she becomes pregnant again despite her husband’s stringent efforts to avoid that.

There are several time jumps in the narrative, Diana goes off to University, where she takes digs in a humble establishment, rooming with working class Peggy Gilchrist. Both the blurb and the Introduction describe Peggy as the Sempills’ nemesis but there is really nothing in the text which justifies that. What we do get is the middle- and upper-class perspective of Peggy being a member of “a class lacking culture, education, and money”. Her mother resents her not conforming to what she sees as her station in life (a job in a supermarket) but her father is keen for her to do as well as she can. Then again, as described, Peggy’s brain is her only asset.

The Sempills are, by and large, good, and happy enough, but, in novels as in life, there will always be something to disrupt contentment.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Jenkins’ (several times; Jenkins’s.) Otherwise: crème de menthes (crèmes de menthe?) “Mary Queen of Scots’ effeminate secretary” (x 2, Mary Queen of Scots’s.) “Mr Chambers’ tone” (Chambers’s,) “a plebian habit” (plebeian,) plus marks for “the Misses Sempill”, “none of the other girls were keen to have” (none … was keen to have,) “Keats’ room”, “Keats’ country”, “Keats’ poetry” (Keats’s,) Inverary (Inveraray,) “Roslin Chapel” (original spelling of Rosslyn Chapel,) “Burns’ Highland Mary” (Burns’s,) “Cortes’ burning of his boats” (Cortes’s,) “cooker irradiating warmth” (irradiating [to shine light upon] is the opposite of what was meant; radiating.) “The Monn could be seen though it was not yet shining” (if you can see it is shining,) “a racket” (racquet, the reference was to badminton.)

34 Scottish books this year, 17 by men, 17 by women. Five were fantasy or SF, one was non-fiction.

(For my reviews type the book title into my search box.)

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid

Greenmantle by John Buchan

Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid

Hex by Jenni Fagan

The Wind That Shakes the Barley by James Barke

The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid

Guy Mannering by Walter Scott

Olivia by O Douglas

Poor Angus by Robin Jenkins

Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett

Born Leader by J T McIntosh

Nothing Left to Fear From Hell by Alan Warner

The Hamlet by Joanna Corrance

Poor Tom by Edwin Muir

Rizzio by Denise Mina

Dark Crescent by Lyndsey Croal

The Hayburn Family by Guy McCrone

The Takeover by Muriel Spark

Columba’s Bones by David Greig

The Keelie Hawk by Kathleen Jamie

The Song in the Green Thorn Tree by James Barke

Now She Is Witch by Kirsty Logan

Black Sparta by Naomi Mitchison

Life for a Life by T F Muir

Out of Bounds by Val McDermid

Dead Catch by T F Muir

Some Kind of Grace by Robin Jenkins

The Ringed Castle by Dorothy Dunnett

The Green Isle of the Great Deep by Neil M Gunn

To See Ourselves by Alistair Moffat

The Setons by O Douglas

Auld Licht Idylls by J M Barrie

Gliff by Ali Smith

The Wonder of All the Gay World by James Barke  (review still to appear here.)

Polygon, 2021, 123 p.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales which re-examine Scotland’s history from a modern perspective.

David Rizzio, secretary to the heavily pregnant Mary, Queen of Scots, was famously murdered in her presence by courtiers – and especially her husband Lord Darnley – jealous of Rizzio’s supposed influence on her.

This recounting of that incident is necessarily told in the present tense in order to underscore the inevitability of the ongoing rush of events once the assassins’ plot had been set in motion – and the inability of Mary or Darnley to affect those events.

Mina manages to invoke the feelings of the various characters she focuses on but usually by telling not showing. Hers is an omniscient narration laden with the benefit of hindsight.

The novella is perhaps mistitled, though. It is not primarily about Rizzio (he is dead by a third of the way through) but instead charts the relationship of Mary with Darnley and with her Lords. It is also of course an indictment of the misogyny of the times. In that respect Mary never stood a chance. She had flaws enough of her own even without that to contend with.

I note that at the back the description of the Darkland Tales project has Alan Warner’s then forthcoming contribution titled as The Man Who Would Not Be King. It was eventually published as Nothing Left to Fear From Hell.

Pedant’s corner:- “Here the change of seasons are dramatic” (the changes of seasons are,) “and snakes his arm right around her waist until his hand on her swollen belly” (is missing a verb after ‘hand’; rests? lies? settles? is?) “Lady Huntley” (Huntly, as it is always spelled elsewhere in the text.)

A Surreal Chronicle, Polygon, 2023, 149 p, including 7 p Afterword.

Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is one of publisher Birlinn’s Darkland Tales which re-examine Scotland’s history from a modern perspective.

In it, a tall man, accompanied by several companions, is making hazardous journeys by small boat between the islands of the Outer Hebrides, mostly under the cover of darkness. They are on the run and at one point the man has to disguise himself as a serving girl, when he is given the name Betty Bourke.

We are of course following the flight of Charles Edward Louis John Sylvester Maria Casimir Stuart (to give him his full complement of names, never used in the text,) otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, down on his luck but ever hopeful fortune will favour him in the end.

Though the Young Pretender has featured as a character in many of them, most novelistic examinations of the Jacobite inheritance – a perennial subject of Scottish fiction – have focused on that cause’s adherents and their (mis)adventures. I certainly have not before read one in which the Prince is the protagonist. But my acquaintance with the subject is by no means exhaustive.

Warner inhabits the time and its susceptibilities very effectively, presenting a picture of Charles Stuart as a human being, with every necessity and function we all have, along with his convictions of divine right, plus the all but unthinking deference of his comrades. Not that the text confines itself to the viewpoint of the Prince. A particular highlight is a servant girl’s view of the kenspeckle and overly presumptuous Betty Burke

A quirk of this publication is that on even numbered pages between chapters – and before the Afterword – are depictions of that minute pest of the Scottish summer, the midge, with which the travelling party is plagued, starting with one and going up to ten.

In that Afterword Warner speculates on the conundrums of historical fiction, the difficulties of portrayal. As he says, “they were so like us, and they were so unlike us.”

But apart from the drier and necessarily more restricted approach of historical record and academe, fiction is the only way we can explore past times such as these.

This novella gives us Charles Edward Stuart as a believable, if misguided, human being. But he was trapped by his birth; as most of us are.

Pedant’s corner:- “was like a liquified putrescence” (liquefied,) “he crashed items akimbo” (he crashed items with his arms on his hips?) “the riding party were headed onwards making a cover of what might lay over the roads ahead” (the riding party was headed onwards making a cover of what might lie over the roads ahead,) “Robert Forbes’ remarkable” (Forbes’s,) “Winifred Dukes’ The Rash Adventurer” (Dukes’s.)

I don’t normally do this year summation thing before Christmas (it offends my sensibilities to do such a thing before the full time span has elapsed) but in this case I don’t think I’ll be adding to the total before New Year.

I seem to have read 26 Scottish books so far this year (the definition of Scottish is loose;) 13 by women and 13 by men. Four were Science Fiction, Fantasy or Fable, two collections of shorter fiction, one was poetry and one was a fictionalised memoir. The links below are to my reviews of those books.

World Out of Mind by J T McIntosh

News of the Dead by James Robertson 

The Little Snake by A L Kennedy 

Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides by Kevin MacNeil

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan

Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark

Dust on the Paw by Robin Jenkins

The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett

Queen of Clouds by Neil Williamson

Kitchenly 434 by Alan Warner

An Apple From a Tree by Margaret Elphinstone

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Squeaky Clean by Callum McSorley

The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark

The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell

To the Dogs by Louise Welsh

The Changeling by Robin Jenkins

Aunt Bel by Guy McCrone

Conquest by Nina Allan

Xstabeth by David Keenan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini  

The Silver Bough by Neil Gunn  (review to be posted here soon.)

White Rabbit, 2021, 363 p.   Illustrations by Mark Edward Geyer.

This tale of a hanger-on of a rock-star, general factotum of the (oddly named it has to be said) big house, Kitchenly Mill Race, whose telephone number provides the novel’s title, at times reminded me of the style of Iain Banks. Espedair Street obviously, but also Dead Air, yet is a different beast altogether from those and different, too, from David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, which also hymns the prog rock era.

Each chapter is preceded by an illustration of the house – or part of it – plus a few words, like those you might find in Victorian novels, indicating what said chapter will contain. The novel is markedly lighter in tone than Warner’s previous works. Reading those I could never have imagined myself laughing out loud while enjoying one of his books. But I did here at one particular scene.

Apart from first person narrator Crofton Clark, the house is in many ways the most prominent “character” in the book. It has an extensive set of connected buildings based on the Tudor original – mostly destroyed by a fire – with Elizabethan, Queen Anne, Georgian and Arts and Crafts extensions, different sections of which are connected by two air bridges. Here is where Marko Morrell, member of the band Fear Taker (and greatest guitarist in the world – according to Crofton,) lives with his Scandinavian wife Auralie and daughter Molly. Or at least where Marko stays when he is not touring or away seeing to his business interests. Crofton patrols the place every night, switching lights on or off depending on their location and shutting all the curtains. Through his eyes we are given an extensive depiction of the rambling pile. It is almost as if the house is taking the place of that delineation of landscape which is a feature of the Scottish novel. But that box is ticked by Crofton also extensively describing the house’s surroundings.

This attention to detail, and his obsessiveness about Fear Taker’s œuvre, indicate that Crofton may be in some way autistic. Though he believes himself to be essential to Marko and the house’s smooth running he only got the job after a stint as a roadie as he was a friend from way back. He has illusions of competence but he is not as close to Marko nor as privy to his employer’s intentions as he thinks. Then there is his belief that an intruder makes his or her way onto the property at night.

Minor mishaps begin to spin things out of Crofton’s control but his life really begins to unravel when two fifteen-year-old girls from the local village come to the gate to ask for a Fear Taker album to be signed for the brother of one of them. Crofton cannot resist showing off and invites them in for a tour of the house.

Kitchenly 434 is a portrait of a man who thinks he knows who and what he is and his station in life but who is deluded about almost everything – including Doris Boardman, the good time girl he had been seeing in his home town of Stafford before she found a better option.

(Though Warner clearly intended it as a signifier of different, less informed, times there was an unnecessary and therefore needlessly provocative aside about Jimmy Savile’s effectiveness as a presenter on Top of the Pops.)

Pedant’s corner:- “had strode” (had stridden,) “hide-and-go-seek” (USian, in the UK, Scotland certainly, it’s just ‘hide-and-seek’,) Whacky Races (this TV programme was titled Wacky Races,) Some Mother’s Do ’Ave ’Em (mothers plural, not ‘of mother’, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em,) “which would lay … on … her thighs” (which would lie on,) “prime ministers” (Prime Ministers.) “The Cream” (x 2, that band was called, merely, ‘Cream’, and in the text its chronology seems a bit askew,) Prestos (Presto’s,) “‘was if fact spent’” (was in fact spent,) sunk (x 2, sank.) “Rose looked and me and frowned” (Rose looked at me and… ,) “troop of horses had shit all down the road” (had shat,) “in any good chemists” (any good chemist’s,) imposters (I know it’s an alternative but it just doesn’t look right to me; impostors,) “turned towards to me” (‘turned towards me’ or ‘turned to me’,) “abit like” (a bit like,) “‘ hasn’t had his barbers open since’” (barber’s,) “‘I amn’t’” (nice to see this grammatical Scottish usage but it was said by an English girl so unlikely. They usually say ‘aren’t’,) “in a weave patterns” (in a weave pattern,) Herstmonceaux (that village is spelled Herstmonceux) “Quick as shot” (Quick as a shot.)

As usual these books are listed in order of my reading them. 18 this year; 17 fiction, one* not; 10 written by women, 8 by men; 4 could be described as SF or Fantasy; 6 were originally published in a foreign language.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
Light by Margaret Elphinstone
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
Snapshot* by Daniel Gray and Alan McCredie
The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Landscape Painted with Tea by Milorad Pavić
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Being Emily by Anne Donovan
The Ninth Child by Sally Magnusson
Their Lips Talk of Mischief by Alan Warner
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh
Scandal by Shūsaku Endō
Ru by Kim Thúy

(I normally make the “year’s best” post nearer Hogmanay but I doubt any of the books I ought to have finished by then will make the list.)

Faber & Faber, 2014, 349 p.

This book’s first page after the epigraph (which is from Proverbs 24:2 and also provides the novel with its title) simply gives us the date. 1984. While the Thatcher government and the miners’ strike are an intermittent background concern they never impinge directly on proceedings. Narrator Douglas Cunningham, a Scot, has been thrown out of his rented flat in London, plus his course in English Lit at University College, and is surfing hospital A&E departments as places to spend the night. In one of them he meets Welshman Llewellyn Smith (Lou) whose stitches following a heart operation have burst. Learning of Douglas’s predicament Lou invites him to stay at his flat in Acton where he lives with his girlfriend Aoife McCrissican and their very young daughter, Lily. Lou is also well versed in literature and wants to be a novelist. On entering the flat Lou quotes “‘that Cyril Connolly bastard. The enemy of promise is the pram in the hallway,’” then adds, “‘Is it now? Our hallway is too narrow to fit the bloody pram in.’” His generous offer seems to be taken in her stride by Aoife, who accepts Douglas readily into their lives (helped initially by the bribe of an Indian carry-out.) However, even as he settles down to live with them for a while we suspect where this will all be going when Douglas tells us she is menacingly beautiful.

Theirs is a curious tripartite relationship. Lou, like Douglas, is fond of drink and the odd bit of financial finagling as the trio’s existence is one long round of trying to find money to live on and secure enough alcohol to get by. All take turns at looking after Lily. (She seems uncannily placid for a pre-toddler, though.) Slight monetary relief is secured when a publisher engages both men to write one-line puffs for schlocky horror novels. Aoife is a former model and hankers to get back to that, an aspiration on which Lou is less keen. Aoife’s best friend, Abingdon Barbour, also a model, acts as occasional foil to the others. At Lou and Aoife’s Register Office wedding Douglas and Abby are best man and bridesmaid.

Lou is a (somewhat lapsed) Catholic and refers to Douglas as an atheist because of his assumed Presbyterianism. Douglas’s narrative comment that, “Summer was agony for the idle Scot. It was September, and I had a natural right to some driving sleet, or at least a blessed frost,” takes homesickness a little too far though. Lou also sometimes ends a sentence addressed to Douglas with the word boyo. I have never personally heard a Welsh person say this. Is it a reflection of Warner’s experience with Welsh people or merely a lazy attempt at characterisation? If the latter it is misguided. Lou’s behaviour and speech are comprehensible enough and need no prop to give them verisimilitude. All the main characters – and the minor ones too – live and breathe as people with their own motivations and habits.

Lou is the most pass-remarkable of them. He describes a bunch of squaddies who tried to chat Aoife up while they were on their way to her parents’ house for Christmas as, “‘king’s shilling fascists, restless since the Falklands, I should guess. Itching to poke their Armalites into another country’s business. The English are never happy unless they are.’” Of his father-in-law he says, “‘Never trust a Catholic who doesn’t drink. They’re either converted, poxed or psychotic.’”

I have said before that Warner’s early novels left me cold but as in The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven, The Deadman’s Pedal and The Stars in the Bright Sky Warner has captured here a slice of life in convincing detail. One more novel to chronicle the perennial fascination of love and sex. (Death does occur here but it is a natural one, of Lou’s grandmother, Myrtle, who brought him up. Her funeral recharges his Catholicism though, which more or less leads to the novel’s final crisis.)

Humans can be bewilderingly complex creatures. Novels such as this give us the vicarious experience of knowing others, feeling their loves, betrayals and, on occasion, nobility, without having to live with them and the consequences of their actions.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘Its affected, boyo.’” (‘It’s affected’,) shrunk (shrank,) a missing comma before – and after – a quoted piece of speech, ass (several times; is used annoyingly in that USian way to refer to the female posterior. The nearest – and more true to the narrator’s background – British equivalent is ‘bum’,) “the baby was laying in Aoife’s lap” (the baby was lying in Aoife’s lap,) “and immediately ascended stairs with banisters and blank walls on either side of you” (I got the imprsession this was a stairway flanked by walls, in which case there would be no need of banisters. Handrails maybe, but not banisters,) “gin and limes” (‘and lime’ here is an adjectival phrase to the noun ‘gin’, the plural is ‘gins’; so, ‘gins and lime’ or ‘gins with lime’”,) Wales’ (x 2, Wales’s,) “he was sat” (he was sitting,) “I was sat” (I was sitting,) “I turned to look and her” (to look at her,) “my zipper” (my zip,) maw (it’s a stomach, not a mouth.)

My contribution this week to the meme started by Judith Reader in the Wilderness is the lower portion of that bookcase which contains my collection of recent Scottish fiction.

The upper of these two shelves features Alan Spence, Alan Warner and Louise Welsh – plus to the right William Boyd whom I am never sure whether to count as Scottish or not. At the extreme right are two books on football, Jonathan Wilson’s The Outsider and A Season with Verona by Tim Parks.

On the bottom shelf is my collection of books by Joseph Conrad (the favourite writer of my grandfather, the original Jack Deighton.) These are beautiful Folio Editions, a matching set. To the right of them are various history books plus Periodic Tales and a couple of the good lady’s books.

This was my Scottish reading (including a Scottish setting) in 2019.

Those in bold were in that list of 100 best Scottish Books.

15 by women, 15 by men, one non-fiction,* two with fantastical elements.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
A Concussed History of Scotland by Frank Kuppner
Romanno Bridge by Andrew Greig
Winter by Ali Smith
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley
The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
Tunes of Glory by James Kennaway
Hy Brasil by Margaret Elphinstone
Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
The Land the Ravens Found by Naomi Mitchison
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
Independence by Alasdair Gray*
The Lantern Bearers by Ronald Frame
Gone Are the Leaves by Anne Donovan
Children of the Dead End by Patrick MacGill
A Pass in the Grampians by Nan Shepherd
Brond by Frederic Lindsay
The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh
The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams
Its Colours They Are Fine by Alan Spence
Reality, Reality by Jackie Kay
Salem Chapel by Mrs Oliphant
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Spring by Ali Smith
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
Jelly Roll by Luke Sutherland
The Citadel by A J Cronin
Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison
Where the Bodies Are Buried by Christopher Brookmyre