Hutchinson Heineman, 2026, 364 p including 2 p Author’s Note.

“‘We see the world once only,’ she said. ‘In childhood. The rest is remembering.’” So says Mrs Graveney, the headteacher of Witchelm, the school in which Philip Deval, having recently left the army after service in the Second World War and in the dying days of the Palestine Mandate, is to take up teaching. Farewell to Eden is the novelistic expression of protagonist Deval’s life, which before the war was a kind of aimless drifting through University and a relationship with Alice Western which is to end in tragedy and leave him reticent to expose himself to further possible grief.

At Witchelm he strikes up a companionable friendship with music teacher Frances Darwood, a woman with haunted memories of her own from recent times. In their conversations they eventually come to tell each other about their previous lives. The main body of the book, though, is concerned with Deval’s experiences in Palestine and its ramifications for his later life.

During the exercise of his duties Deval comes upon the aftermath of the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun and Faulks does not flinch from describing its gruesome detail. There are episodes of cloak and dagger in a kind of colloquy with the militants and a pervading sense of imminent danger. One of Deval’s army colleagues habitually refers to the Jewish activists as Bagels. I suspect – and indeed Faulks makes reference to it in his Author’s Note – any such word used would have been much more offensive.

Deval’s encounters with Arab Palestinians portray them – despite the pre-war Arab revolt – as unprepared for the adversity which would shortly befall them.

In one of his conversations Deval’s company chaplain reflects on the Jewish origins of Christianity. “‘Life would have been easier, certainly,’ said Matthew. ‘If He had come from nowhere. If He’d been untouched by previous gods and tribal wars. If He’d been less … specific. But we can’t question it.’

‘Can’t we?’ said Philip.

‘No. It’s too late.’”

That last sentence may also be a comment on the present situation in those troubled lands. Faulks has here examined the turbulence amid which the state of Israel was founded; the genesis of what is an enduring tragedy.

Pedant’s corner:- “in Hebrew Gethsemane meant ‘oil press’.” (Well, no. It means ‘oil press’ in English. In Hebrew it means Gethsemane,) “the lowest point on the earth’s crust” (in the text this is the Dead Sea, but there are many lower points in the earth’s crust than that. The Dead Sea is merely the lowest point on a continental surface.)

John Murray, 2023, 329 p, including 3 p Contents, 5 p Historical Notes and 1 p Acknowledgements.

In 1883 former emigré Niall Munro returns from the US to Scotland to practice his new trade of shoemaking with a firm in Rutherglen. He is told by someone on the bus to the town that the widow Bain may have a place for a lodger. Mrs Bain hesitates slightly before taking him in, setting strict ground rules for his stay.

She was once Jamesina Ross, from Glencalvie in Strathcarron, with a musical bent and hopes of fulfilment but has had a hard life since and bears the literal scars to prove it. In her youth the local Minister, Reverend Aird, had taken her under his wing, and taught her Latin, which in her later years she still used to examine the words and phrases with which people spoke to her. But life in Glencalvie was about to change, evictions were in hand. Reverend Aird says in answer to Jamesina’s questioning, “‘People have always had to leave the places they love because of the folly of others. They get by in the end, most of them, and some may even flourish, but no one should imagine on that account that dispossession is right.’” He tells her the evictions are about race and shows her a newspaper column sanguine about such clearances since, “This exodus might allow for settlement of racially superior people of Teutonic stock in districts from which the Gaels have been removed.” (The main replacement, of course, was by sheep.)

Music in the Dark, however, is also a story of love in later years. In interspersed chapters, all beautifully written, some set in the kitchen bed where the two reflect on their lives and relationships, others as a relaying of Jamesina’s experiences of growing up, we see, because of Mrs Bain’s singing her songs of remembrance, Munro realise that, as a boy, he knew her, and, despite themselves, their closeness grows.

In a fairly restrained manner, matter of fact but not gratuitously, in Music in the Dark Magnusson has placed the forced removal of Gaelic people from their ancestral homes at its focus, and, moreover, highlighted the resistance of local women to those evictions and the brutality meted out to them. It by no means a chronicle of doom, though. As Reverend Aird said, most people get by in the end. Take solace where you find it.

Harper Perennial, 2003, 301 p.

Presented as a memoir (of sorts,) this tells of the relationship in the early 1960s between Christa (Kit) Malone, a nascent US poet, and Russian refugee poet Innokenti Isayevich Falin.

Kit’s life has been peripatetic as her father flits from job to job (or post to post: there are hints he works for the government in some sort of secret capacity.) As a result, she is very close to her brother Ben, so much so that when he leaves home to join the army she is all but devastated. This leads her to an unwise decision to lose her virginity. Her resulting pregnancy would have been bad enough at the time for any young woman but her family is Catholic. The child though, when born, is severely incapacitated and dies. Hence Kit is enabled to go to college where she meets Falin and enrols in his class. Their rapport through poetry soon builds. She learns Russian and they begin to collaborate on translations of his work. She later makes her name as a translator of Falin’s poetry.

Part of this story is told as a kind of retrospective when she travels to post-communist Russia to a celebration of the 75^th anniversary of Falin’s birth, and of his life and poetry, in St Petersburg, 1993, where her main interlocutor is Gavriil Viktorovic Semyonov. Through him she gleans even more of the conditions under which Falin had lived before his exile.

Living in the Soviet Union taught you to be invisible, not to bring attention to yourself. Falin had begun life (or at least his memories began) as one of the besprizornye – ragamuffins/urchins, lost or orphaned children – which throughout its history Russia has thrown up in profusion. Gavriil Viktorovich tells her, “We were all besprizornye. The whole society. We were all torn away from common bonds that we had been born into. All had to rely on others, on those we found around us, yet never trust them.” Not, then, examples of New Man as Soviet doctrine had it, but self-preserving individuals. “All against all.” Falin had said something similar to her.

Semyonov reflects on the post-Soviet era. “In her dark time Russia was kept alive by the poets. Perhaps now in the new time” of biznesmeny and konsultante “they will pass …. cease to be souls, or persons, and become only books.”

The campus scenes here reminded me of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and, because of the Russian and poetry connections, there were resemblances to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

The background to them is the Kennedy Presidency and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kit has a sort of friendship with Jackie Young of the People’s Socialist League. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee march with their Hands off Cuba banners and encounter discontent.

On an occasion when Falin is away and Kit is looking after his house a man called Milton Bluhdorn intrudes on it. Falin it seems is suspected of being a plant (they didn’t let Pasternak out so why him?) and Kit is invited to spy on him. Instead, she tells Falin of the approach.

But most of their talk is of poetry. Falin says of poems, “You cannot translate. You can only make other poems.” He also contends that countries have greater and lesser angels. The lesser angel is all that the greater angel isn’t but sometimes prevails. It is left open to the reader to decide whether or not Falin and Kit are lesser angels of their countries.

While leaning into the ramifications of the Kennedy assassination and its associated conspiracy theories, The Translator is a work about the moral responsibilities of the individual and the operations of the agents of the state. But most of all about the importance of poetry, words, and personal relationships.

Pedant’s corner:- occasionally questions in dialogue are not followed by a question mark, “the Ukraine, the Crimea” (nowadays just Ukraine, Crimea.) “Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov” (in British transliteration, Viktorovic.)

47 North, 2015, 227 p, plus 3p Author’s Historical Note, 2 p Acknowledgements and 3 p Bibliography.

This, Charnock’s second novel, (after A Calculated Life, chapter one of which is appended here following the Bibliography,) has a tripartite structure. Succeeding chapters tell the stories of Toniah, a woman from a parthenogenetic family living in 2113, adolescent Toni from the book’s publication’s present in 2015, and budding female artist Antonia Uccello in 1469 Florence.

Toniah lives with her sister and niece in London – all born parthogenetically, as was Toniah’s mother. She has recently been employed to reassess the work of Gauguin by a firm which specialises in historical revisionism – usually from a feminist perspective. In particular she finds antecedents to Gauguin in the paintings of Émile Bernard, but which also reflect back to Italian renaissance art.

Toni and her father are still trying to recover from the death of Toni’s mother in a car crash. Her father is an artistic copyist, working legitimately. A commission from a Chinese client leads them to spend some time in Shanghai.

Antonia’s artistic talent has been recognised by her father Paolo Uccello, a pioneer of linear perspective in the Italy of the time, who is teaching her both to read paintings and to paint herself. Her mother does not keep well and is haunted by the necessity to find a husband for her daughter. Antonia’s aunt’s life in a convent bears implications for her future.

All three lives are connected by the painting Antonia executes of her ill mother.

The speculative content – cloning of females – is presented as an unremarkable aspect of life one hundred years hence. The lack of recognition of female artists through history is not laboured but rendered subtly.

Pedant’s corner:- “she wishes her father were stood by her side” (wishes her father were standing,) “her father is stood at” (her father is standing at,) “she looks through a grill (a grille.)

Cassell, 1971, 525 p.

The fifth of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, featuring the life and exploits of Francis Crawford of Lymond, Comte de Sevigny.

Having killed his adversary Graham Reid Malett in the last instalment, Pawn in Frankincense, while Ambassador of France to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in Ottoman Turkey, Lymond, with the aid of his mistress Güzel, has now travelled to Moscow to find employment for his company of mercenaries under Prince Ivan Vasilievich, the Tsar of All Russia (known in English as Ivan the Terrible, but never named as such in the text.)

There is first, though, a focus on the activities of young Philippa Somerville, who had travelled to Turkey to help retrieve Lymond’s illegitimate son from Mallet’s clutches and who, after spending time in the Sultan’s seraglio (somewhat improbably without suffering any undue attentions) had, at his insistence, contracted a paper – and unconsummated – marriage with Lymond in order to protect her reputation. Philippa brought the child, known as Kuzum, to Lymond’s home of Culter in Scotland but now has a position as a lady in waiting to Queen Mary in England. Intrigued by Lymond’s family’s reticence about his origins she has been inquiring into his background and obtained two differing accounts of his actual parentage.

In Moscow, Lymond soon becomes the Tsar’s right-hand man, the Voevoda Bolshoia, and sets about modernising the army. All this is put in jeopardy when the Tsar decides to send an envoy, Osep Nepeja, to England to purchase modern armaments and supplies, tasking Lymond with securing these.

Behind the scenes machinations of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, (a granddaughter of Henry VII and mother of Lord Darnley) are a threat to Lymond through all this.

When Lymond states his firm intention of returning to Russia, Guthrie, a member of his company says of the Russians, “They are a nation accustomed to violent, unreasoning rule, and when it yokes them again, they have no instinct to withstand it, to beat it down and to replace it with sanity.” To which Lymond replies that given time that change could be achieved. We’re still waiting.

It’s all very well researched and incident packed but there is an opacity to proceedings. Dunnett withholds certain information from the reader somewhat unfairly and there is often a lack of clarity to the dialogue.

However, only one instalment, Checkmate, remains unread by me.

Pedant’s corner:-  mortised (morticed,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “The crowd were already pressing into the warehouse” (The crowd was already pressing…,) reindeers (the plural of reindeer is  reindeer,) gutteral (guttural,) complajnts (complaints,) Kholgomory (elsewhere always Kholmogory,) “Turkey will not always remain the power; that she has been the secular power of the Pope is also in question” (the semicolon is misplaced ‘Turkey will not always remain the power that she has been;  the secular power of the Pope is also in question’.) “‘Right?’ said Lymon .” (‘“Right?” said Lymond.’) cracklure (craquelure.) “‘I thought we could surrounded the Tsar with’” (could surround the Tsar.)

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.)

Collins, 1950, 510 p, including 2 p Note, 3 p Contents and 4p list of Characters.

This is the second of Barke’s Immortal Memory sequence chronicling the life of Robert Burns. He is now in young adulthood and has moved to the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, with brother Gilbert and the rest of his family. We meet Jean Armour before Burns does, and she is presented as an obedient, dutiful daughter.

Burns is in trouble with the local minister, known as Daddy Auld. He has already fathered a child to Betty Paton, but his penance for this, on the cutty stool, takes place in the nearby parish of Tarbolton since that is where the offence occurred. He was fined one guinea and his sin considered absolved. (This strikes me as akin to those indulgences of the Catholic Church which so enraged the early Protestant reformers.) It is his poems and intellect which most worry Auld, however, who realizes that the best way to undermine Burns will be through his sexual misdemeanours. To that end he enjoins two of his elders, Willie Fisher and James Lamie, to collect evidence against Burns. Fisher is that hypocritical individual about whom Burns would write Holy Willie’s Prayer. (Another long poem, about Mauchline’s Holy Fair, also excites Auld’s ire.)

Burns and his cronies disparage these prurient creatures as the houghmagandie pack, and the fascination of the Church with controlling sexuality (which seems to be the goal of all religions) is noted. “Auld had long been made aware of the peculiar fact that when any of the congregation had to appear on the sessional carpet for a sexual offence, he could count on a full attendance from his lay-shepherds. No other sin so excited their holy zeal for probing into the mystery of the passionate relationship between man and woman and the theological relationship between both and the Presbyterian conception of God.”

When Burns meets Jean he is immediately smitten (though he does have a weakness for imagining himself in love.) Jean’s father dislikes him on reputation alone and has already forbidden her to have anything to do with him. But the attraction is too strong for both of them and she and Burns sign a paper to the effect that they have married. This is without benefit of clergy but would apparently have been recognised legally. He is too poor to support a wife though. The song in the green thorn tree of the book’s title is the one Jean sings at their trysting site.

The inevitable happens and Jean’s father and mother prevail on her to disown him, paper or no. Incensed, Burns turns to Highland Mary (Campbell) for solace and resolves to leave for the Caribbean, arranging a passage for himself and Mary whom he dispatches to Greenock to hide her pregnancy. Some boy, as they say.

In the meantime his poem some of which Barke has Burns conjure up on the spot, have been gaining a reputation and it is arranged for a book of his poetry (Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect) to be published by subscription, or at least promise of payment. He wrestles over which verses to publish as some may be considered too controversial, publishers then, as now, reluctant to take too much of a risk.

Barke’s writing is workmanlike, with occasional veerings into purple prose when describing landscape. Several of the quoted poems have their verses written as speech which detracts from the ability to read them as poems but since Burns was reciting them to others I suppose that’s fair enough. The characterisation is broad brush.

I note that the Church’s strictures against houghmagandie seem to have been spectacularly unsuccessful as several instances of compearing are mentioned in the book – including that of a couple who married before the evidence blossomed, though their marriage did not in any way mitigate the offence. When Burns has to stand for his “fornication” with Jean Armour there is no room on the cutty stool. He is one of five people, including Jean, arraigned on the same day.

Pedant’s corner:- Barke still spells the town Machlin rather than Mauchline, “womankind were crowding in” (womankind is singular; ‘womankind was crowding in’.) Surgeoners! (it was possessive not plural; ‘Surgeoner’s!’,) “knit his brows” (knitted.) “The company were soon in a grand mood” (The company was soon in a grand mood,) staunched (stanched.)

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.)

Century,1983, 494 p. First published 1969.

This is the fourth in Dunnett’s series of novels featuring Francis Crawford of Lymond, Comte de Sevigny. See here, here and here. After the revelation in book three that Lymond had fathered a son on Oonagh O’Dwyer and Graham Reid Malett’s escape from the cathedral of St Giles, Crawford is faced with a dilemma. If he kills Malett then the child will be killed.

Taking advantage of the commission of Henri II of France to transport an elaborate spinet to the Grand Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and be French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Crawford travels the Mediterranean accompanied by former Grand Knight of Malta and one of Lymond’s mercenary company, Jerott Blyth, and sixteen year-old Philippa Somerville, daughter of friends of the Lymond family whose intention is to protect Lymond’s child Khaireddin from further harm. Also in the party are the spinet’s constructor Georges Gaultier, his niece Marthe, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crawford, and a Swiss cook, Onophrion Zitwitz.

Things are complicated by the fact that there are two fair-haired children of the correct age knocking about, Khaireddin and Kuzucuyum, one of them the child of Malett and his deceased sister Joleta. Both may have to be rescued.

False trails, betrayals and incident abound, including a set piece among the ancient cisterns below what was once Constantinople but is now – and has been for a hundred years – Stamboul, the atmosphere of Suleiman’s court is evoked admirably, Crawford’s trials grow. The climax comes with a chess game using live pieces instigated by Suleiman’s second wife Hürrem Sultan, known as Roxelana, to resolve the competing claims of Malett and Lymond as to the truth, a game which involves a pawn sacrifice.

There is something about the writing which lends the tale opacity, however. Perhaps Dunnett, like Lymond, is being too clever for her own good. Not that it affected her sales.

Possibly reflecting attitudes when the book was written a minor character, Pierre Gilles D’Albi, says of Marthe, “‘She has too many ideas. Women with ideas are a threat to the civilized world.’”

The series as a whole may be the Lymond Chronicles but as written this one is more the tales of Philippa Somerville and Jerott Blyth than of Lymond.

Sensitivity note: uses the word ‘nigger’.

Pedant’s corner:- bouillotte (is an 18^th century card game, not a 16^th century one,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of dialogue. At one point Blyth is trapped in a small building which is on fire and giving off hydrocyanic gas, and survives. (Exposure to small amounts of HCN is usually fatal,) “since Odysseus’ time” (Odysseus’s time – I note Zakynthos’s appeared later so usage of the apostrophe wasn’t consistent,) Scandaroon (x 1, elsewhere Scanderoon,) “a English girl” (an English girl,) rauccous (raucous,) hoopoo (hoopoe.)