British Library, 2024, 203 p, plus i p Contents, ii p The 1920s, ii p about Catherine Carswell, ii p Preface by Helen Vincent, i p Publisher’s Note and vii p Afterword by Simon Thomas. First published 1922.

This is structured mainly as the journal entries of Ellen Carstairs, along with some letters – all addressed to her friend Ruby in Germany where Ellen spent some years studying music. Ellen lives with her brother and fiercely religious Aunt Harry in Glasgow. For income Ellen has taken pupils for piano lessons but she really wants to be a writer. Indeed, one of her schoolteachers is so disappointed that she has not so far pursued her true vocation that she refers to Ellen (publicly) as a prostitute for neglecting her talents. Not a description to be welcomed in the 1920s – or I suppose anytime.

In a prefiguring of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay Ellen is much delighted by renting a room where she can receive pupils and write. “I have a Room!” she tells Ruby. “A room all to myself and away from home.” Not that it is in any way salubrious. But she has the right to refuse any one entry. And it is an escape from Aunt Harry.

Ellen’s imagination is fired by meeting in the Mitchell Library an older man whom she calls Don John. His knowledge of literature and London publishers will provide her with a potential route into writing professionally.

It is he who recites to her the quote from Shakespeare that gives the book its title, “The camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows.” He is referring to Ellen’s writing but the sentence could also apply to Ellen herself.

Despite his learning and apparent gentility Don John turns out to be poor and prone to lapses into drink.

Ellen reflects on writing novels that, “It is hardly ever from likely touches, nearly always from unlikely ones, that the reader gets that sudden piercing sense of life in a good book. Yet at the same time it must never be an unlikeliness that is contrary to nature.”

The book is peppered with Ellen’s thoughts on women’s place in life and their likely prospects. She wonders about marriage and children but defers that expectation to the future. However, she betrays attitudes of the time – or perhaps in a preemptive strike against possible dismissal of her worth – with the thought, “when I’m reading anything serious, to know that the author is a woman who sat in her petticoats and her hairpins, leaving life aside to put words on paper, puts me off like anything.”

After returning from a trip to London, she tells Ruby (and us) she is engaged to a man named Duncan, home on a break from his civil service position in India. She toys with the idea of consummation but shies away from it despite thinking relations between the sexes ought to be freer. Duncan professes to admire her frame of mind but gradually it becomes clear that the conformities of life in India are uppermost in his thoughts, giving Ellen pause.

Though it starts falteringly, this reads like an accurate portrait of middle-class life in Scotland in the early part of the twentieth century.

Pedant’s corner:- “the Miss Clarks” (the Misses Clark,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “the Miss McFies” (the Misses McFie,) “the Trosachs” (Trossachs.)

Flamingo, 1995, 219 p.

This is a chronicle of life in the Orcadian island of Norday in the years between the World Wars till just after the Second. But it is also a collection of short stories.

Thorfinn Ragnarson is a dreamer. His teacher, Mr Simon, says he can’t seem to teach the boy anything and his father says he’s not good at farm work either. At one point he seems to be channelling Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring when he refers to Thorfinn as, “You stupid boy.”

Not much gets past the islanders. Many of their conversations take place in the island’s shop and post office.

Thorfin has an imagination, though, letting it run wild through history, which is where the short story aspect of the novel comes in. We read his reminiscences of Vikings on the road to Byzantium, a dilapidated knight and his squire travelling to the battle of Bannockburn, the experience of the inhabitants of one of the then new-fangled brochs, an ancestor taking Mara, a selkie woman, as a wife.

Meanwhile, Mr Drummond, the new Minister, surprises the community by being unmarried and letting the Manse fall into grubbiness, scandalises some by, once, treating the men in the pub to a round before inviting them to church and having a young female arrive to stay with him at the Manse. She is taken to by the local ‘person of quality,’ Mr Harcourt-Smithers, riding his horse all over the island. It is not until she is leaving that her relationship to Drummond is revealed. She has nevertheless fired Thorfinn’s imagination again.

The outside world (and impending war) intrudes when government men arrive to survey the land for an aerodrome, whose impact will change the island forever.

The last chapter, Fisherman and Croftwoman, sees the return of Thorfin to the island after being in a POW camp for most of the war (where he began writing, using his earlier daydreams as source material) and of Sophie, a childhood acquaintance, to take the inheritance of a nearby croft.

Like most Scottish literature Beside the Ocean of Time is about loss and change; but it is also about what endures, what makes a community, and acceptance.

Pedant’s corner:- “less worries” (‘fewer worries’ but it was in reported speech so probably true to the speaker,) “Johnny Walker” (the whisky: it’s ‘Johnnie Walker’.)

Polygon, 2018, 206 p, including 9 p Introduction by Kapka Kassabova and 4 p Foreword (general to these Polygon retrospective editions.)

Art historian Robert Leaver is staying in the Pensione Sofia in Venice. His girlfriend, Lina Pancev, is Bulgarian, a defector from the communist regime there who is searching for the grave of her father, Victor. (It turns out he was murdered in the grounds of the Pensione but she never discovers this.)

One day two guests arrive at the Pensione; Robert’s father Arnold, in tow with Mary Tiller, a teacher at the school where Arnold is headmaster. Anthea, Mrs Leaver, remains at home, for now oblivious. To escape his embarrassment Arnold hies himself and Mary off to another – and better – hotel.

Suspicious she engages GESS (Global-Equip Security Services) to investigate. Their local agent is one Violet de Winter.

Grace Gregory, matron at Arnold’s school and who, to prevent his wanderings, had serviced him herself in the infirmary when there were no boys sick, warns Anthea off using the agency and travels to Venice to see what’s going on.

Robert’s friend Curran, (he answers only to his surname,) is also part of the proceedings as is a supposed kidnapping.

The above provides a flavour of the book, which in some quarters has been described as a farce. To me it is too heavy-handed for that.

I continue to find Spark an unacquired taste.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 3,) candelabras (candelabra is already plural,) “whether she longed to say and talk it over” (‘longed to stay and talk it over’ makes more sense.)

I saw in yesterday’s Guardian that Scottish writer Allan Massie has died.

Regular readers will know I have followed his fiction closely: indeed he is one of my sub-category entries under Scottish Fiction. I think I have read all of his fiction works.

You will find my reviews of most of his books on the blog if you search.

Massie was also a journalist and critic, especially for the Scotsman newspaper.

A sad loss.

Allan Johnstone Massie: 16/10/1938 – 3/2/2026. So it goes.

Polygon, 2010, 342 p, plus vi p Introduction by Hew Strachan. First published in 1919.

In this third of Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels our hero has been pulled from his General’s post on the Western Front to visit Fosse Manor in the Cotswolds where he is to pose as a pacifist. Among the mostly harmless people he meets there is, however, a Mr Moxon Ivery who will turn out to be more dangerous. Part of the party is Miss Mary Lamington with whom Hannay is very taken and who is the agent from whom he is to accept his further orders. Their mutual knowledge of the Pilgrim’s Progress is to be used as a kind of code book to convey and hide messages (the origin of Mr Standfast’s title.)

Mary’s instructions take Hannay to Glasgow to make himself known in the pacifist working men’s associations and then on to Skye. These northern regions of the country were apparently subject to strict travel restrictions which, as a pseudonymous agent, he has to circumvent. Several escapades among the heather later he has discovered a German spy ring working as the Wild Birds and heard the name Bommaerts.

He relays his information to the authorities in London before being returned to his battalion in Belgium.

Meanwhile his friend Peter Pienaar has joined the Royal Flying Corps and struck up a rivalry with the German air ace named Lensch, who Pienaar says is better than Richthofen. (This gives the excuse for the otherwise not too apposite cover picture.) Pienaar is eventually shot down and badly wounded. Hannay’s other companion in the Erzerum affair in Greenmantle the US citizen, Blenkiron, also makes an appearance. He makes the observation, “There’s something comic in the rough about all Germans, before you’ve civilized them.”

In Belgium Hannay has enough downtime from his front-line duties to go ferreting about a nearby chateau in search of the mysterious Bommaerts, who captures him and boasts of his superior abilities and the devastating blow the Germans will soon strike. Bommaerts, Ivery and a journalist called Clarence Donne who had managed to hoodwink Blenkiron turn out to be one and the same man, the Graf von Schwabing.

Hannay escapes in a very ‘with one bound he was free’ type of way and makes a foray into Switzerland to try to thwart von Schwabing’s designs, making an arduous passage on foot over the Swiss mountains in attempting this.

On his return once more to army duty we are given some fairly detailed descriptions of the German spring offensive of 1918 and, by Buchan’s account, how close it came to complete success. From the point of view of the British Tommy it must indeed have seemed a desperate situation.

Mr Standfast is  a Boys’ Own Adventure kind of enterprise. Plot here is everything, characterisation a secondary concern – if a concern at all. The most engaging character – Mary Lammington is inserted only to give Hannay a love interest but is barely memorable – is a true pacifist who has been inducted into the Labour corps and finds fulfillment there.

Sensitivity note. The book is of its time in its off-hand racist comments. “There are some things that no one has a right to ask of any white man,” “‘a great big buck nigger,’” “‘like a bankrupt Dago railway,’” “a droop like a Polish Jew’s,” “a face like a Portuguese Jew’s,” – this otherwise nameless character is referred to thereafter as the Portuguese Jew – “a Paris Jew-banker,” “he was an Austrian Jew,” “all breeds of Dago and Chinaman, and some of your own South African blacks.”  “‘He is a white man, that one,’” is said by Pienaar of his air adversary Lensch.

Pedant’s corner:- Afrikander (nowadays spelled Afrikaner,) “the Coolin” (several times; nowadays usually spelled, as in Gaelic, Cuillin.) “It seemed to more a stone and to replace it” (to move a stone makes more sense,) “shinning up a rain-pipe” (downpipe is more usual, and  the Scottish term is roan pipe; alternatively, rone,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “‘and most of my tactics. I had to invent myself.’” (no need for that full stop ‘and most of my tactics I had to invent myself.’) “In the press of a fight once scarcely realizes death” (In the press of a fight one scarcely realizes death.)

Collins, 1949, 669 p, including 2 p Note, 5 p Contents and 6 p List of Characters.

The title of this book is, these days, liable to a different interpretation to the one it would have received on first publication. It is, of course, the third in the author’s Immortal Memory sequence of novels about the life of Robert Burns.

Here, after the printing of the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems, Burns sets out for Edinburgh – the gay world referred to above – to seek a second edition, this one printed in the capital, and finds his fame has preceded him. He is lionised and feted as the ploughman poet and Scotland’s bard in most quarters but still largely looked down on because of his origins.

Most of the intrigue revolves around Edinburgh bookseller and publisher William Creech who is quite clearly intent on exploiting him, offering Burns what to the poet is a large sum – fifty pounds – for his copyright. Even the offer’s swift increase to one hundred pounds then one hundred and fifty guineas does not arouse any suspicion. Only the inordinate amount of time to pay him the sums he is due from the publishing does that, by which juncture Burns has travelled through Scotland, at one point scribbling anti-government sentiments on a pub window in Stirling using his diamond pen, a transgression he later removes.

Burns doesn’t take much time settling in to his womanising habits. Within about a week, it seems, he is disporting with Peggy Cameron, a serving-girl in the Cowgate, on a shakedown under a table in her workplace and he takes up with various others of the fair sex, entering into a relationship with the woman he will write to as “Clarinda” while bedding her servant girl, Jenny Clow, on the side.

Among other luminaries he meets the Duchess of Gordon, a woman of some reputation – it is said none of her various children were sired by her husband – but no intimacy between them is implied. (How likely is that, given both their reputations?)

Peggy Chalmers is  otherwise the only woman in the book who spurns Burns’s allures (though she is attracted to him and Barke conveys that his intentions were honourable.) She tells him, “Where a woman’s concerned men are never content with friendship – and you are no exception … which is a gey pity.”

On the after Sunday Service proclivities of the church-going, Barke ascribes to Burns’s thoughts the idea that, “never, since John Knox came thundering out of Geneva, had the Scots, as a race, been able to imbibe their Presbyterian theology without the aid of strong drink”

He also describes the securing of the then reasonably recent Union of the Parliaments as unparalleled bribery, which had “enraged the Scottish people at the time; and the stench had lingered in their nostrils ever since.”

Barke also takes the opportunity to delve into the political situation in Scotland at the time where Henry Dundas “ruled Scotland on behalf of William Pitt” and made sure his cronies were able to ensure there were no obstacles to his will being observed.

On those wanderings about Scotland, travelling first south – as far as Newcastle – before returning to Mauchline via Dumfries to look over the land he might rent for farming at Ellisland and later a journey north to Inverness and Moray, during which he enjoys the playing of Fiddler Niel Gow, and comes back to Edinburgh via Aberdeenshire, he conceives the idea of reviving the fortunes of Scottish song. “In the songs of Scotland do we not find enshrined in words and in melody something of this essential goodness, simplicity and harmony that is essential to the ordinary, unlettered folk of our country? Our national songs have not been written by the learned and mighty, but by the humble and the unpretentious – by simple men and simple women” – in them are to be found the old truths and the old satisfaction of living. He notes that after the defeat of the Jacobites – still an aching wound – “Deadness and defeatism ate into what vitals remained of the old Gaelic economy.”

Barke does not wear his research lightly. Almost every gathering Burns goes to is attended by an extensive list of those present and their standing in Edinburgh society. This makes for trying reading at times. The Edinburgh scenes – and even the travelling ones – do not have the same immediacy as the accounts of Burns’s life in Ayrshire in the previous two volumes. It is only when he returns there, to be among his old cronies and reconciled with Jean Armour that the same sense of authority prevails.

Pedant’s corner:- Barke still spells Mauchline as Machlin. Otherwise; the customary commas are missing between words that form lists, “the bench of judges were thrown into variance” (the bench … was thrown,) “since all men are not corrupt all the time” (since not all men are corrupt all the time,) “had been mowed down” (mown down,) “who had rode away” (ridden away,) staunch (stanch,) the text can be read as if it was Edward I, Hammer of the Scots, whom Bruce defeated at Bannockburn, as he was mentioned in the previous paragraph, but “the final utter rout of Edward” was of Edward II, Calgacius (usually spelled Calgacus,) Mons Grampius  (Mons Graupius,) sunk (sank,) “the ruins of Elgin abbey” (it’s actually a cathedral’s ruins in Elgin.) “He would liked to have spent more time” (He would have liked to have spent more time,) “the Ochills” (It’s Ochils,) Calvanistic (x 2, it’s Calvinistic – used a few pages later!) “since he had rode put of Edinburgh” (ridden out,) the Ahasuerus’ sceptre” (Ahasuerus’s.)

Only twelve works are on my best list this year; eight by women, four by men. Five were in translation – plus two more if you count Elif Shafak.

Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante

Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid

Hex by Jenni Fagan

Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

The Photograph by Penelope Lively

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

Shanghai Nights by Juan Marsé

The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

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.)

Hodder and Stoughton, (this Uniform Edition of Barrie’s works was published between 1928 and 1931,) 243 p. First published in 1888.

This is one of Barrie’s first books and it sits firmly within the Scottish literature tradition in that it looks back on times past and things lost.

Our (unnamed) narrator is the schoolmaster in Thrums, a small village in rural Scotland inhabited mainly by weavers. He describes many of the characters and legendary tales of Thrums and its surrounding area. Only one chapter is from another viewpoint, that of Davit Lunan, who relates his memories of the General Election of 1832.

As a picture of life in the Scotland of the early and mid-nineteenth century this is a valuable historical account. Incidents are varied and illustrative.

Most of the inhabitants of Thrums were Auld Licht adherents, those who preferred the old, extremely strict, church teachings and beliefs. (This is in contrast to the New Lichts, whose beliefs were merely very strict.) There were also some political differences between the two schools of thought. The narrator tells us Auld Lichts were “creatures of habit who never thought of smiling on a Monday.”  (Did they think of smiling at all?)

However, the tales are not without humour. A prospective Minister was giving a favourable impression with his preaching and hence likely to be appointed until a chance gust of wind blew a set of papers from the pulpit thus showing he had been committing the unpardonable affront of reading his sermon. His sin was compounded by the fact he had hidden the offending pages in his Bible.

One husband had lacked the knack of managing women. His wife left him for the house across the wynd but he then, as if she was dead, organised a last wake for her, setting out the customary tables in the street. This so put the wind up her she returned to him.

Another worthy, Bowie, was once heard to say, “‘I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but such is my opeenion.’”

Though I had visited the house in Kirriemuir where he grew up, and seen his grave in the town cemetery, hitherto all I had known of Barrie’s work was that he was the progenitor of Peter Pan, the royalties from which he left to Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Encouraged by reading this one there are two more books in the Thrums trilogy which I will get round to.

Pedant’s corner:- shrunk (shrank – used later,) sprung (sprang,) Shakspeare for Shakespeare (x 2.)

Hodder and Stoughton, 1917, 317 p.

The Setons are a family living in pre-Great War Glasgow. Mr Seton is a minister given to ex tempore sermons, especially good on St Paul.  The focus of the book is more on his daughter, Elizabeth, though, who has effectively been in charge of the household since her mother died.

Curiously, however, the book starts in the home of the Thomsons, who are having an at home to which Elizabeth has been invited. During the conversations we learn Mr Seton’s parish is in a poorer area of the city (later revealed to be the Gorbals) and his congregation is devoted to him, as he is to them. Thereafter we don’t see much of the Thomsons at all.

When not occupied with household matters Elizabeth makes house calls on parishioners in order to collect for the Zenana Mission.

Nothing much happens in the book apart from conversation. At one point Mr Seton says Scots are, “a mixture of hard-headedness and romance, common sense and sentiment, practicality and poetry, business and idealism.” Elizabeth adds, “We have a queer daftness in our blood. We pretend to be dour and cautious, but the fact is that at heart we are the most emotional and sentimental people on Earth.”

A man called John Jamieson opines that, of all Scotland’s historical figures, rather than Walter Scott it is Robert Burns whose words are most often in our memories, Burns whom Scots regard with most sympathy and affection. And why? Because of his humanity, his rich humour and riotous imagination. In a word, his daftness.

One character says Edinburgh’s suburbs comprise, “Rows and rows of smug, well-built houses, each with a front garden, each with a front gate, and each front gate remains closed, shut against the casual caller until you have rung a bell.” By contrast, “Glasgow doesn’t keep visitors at the gate. Glasgow is on the doorstep to welcome them in.”

Promise of plot comes when Elizabeth’s Aunt, Mr Seton’s sister, who lives in London, asks the Setons to put up her husband’s nephew, the monocled Mr Arthur Townshend, for a short visit. (The monocle is not an affectation but is required due to an eye condition.) He leaves on completion of his visit with nothing of substance having occurred.

It is then the book takes an unexpected swing into more serious areas, as it takes up again in 1917 (by which time Mr Seton has had to retire for health reasons) and of course the War is prominent in everyone’s lives, with Arthur Townshend in the Army. They are sustained by the religious sentiment, familiar from the metric version of the Twenty-third Psalm, that goodness and mercy shall follow their every step.

Pedant’s corner:- “pine-apple” (nowadays ‘pineapple’,) souffle (soufflé,) d’oyley (more commonly spelled ‘doily’,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “the two Miss Hendrys” (the two Misses Hendry. On the next page we had ‘the Misses Simpson’, so why the difference?) dropp d (dropped,) dryly (nowadays ‘drily’,) Sindbad (ie the sailor; nowadays spelled Sinbad,) “good heart d (good-hearted,) clo ing (closing,) sausage-roll (sausage roll,) “a criminal about to be hung” (OK it was in dialogue but it should still be ‘hanged’,) putties (puttees.)