Penguin, 1993, 637 p

Richard Papen was brought up in Plano in California, a place he regards as a backwater. Nevertheless, he has made it to an elite college at Hampden in Vermont. His parents were not well off and he feels the contrast between himself and other students there. At first he tries not to be found out, but such things are hard to disguise. After originally being turned down as student of Greek by its professor Julian, Richard comes into the orbit of his rather small and close-knit class cohort, Francis, Henry, Edmond (known as Bunny,) and twins Charles and Camilla. (Those last two names perhaps now have more of a frisson than they would have had when Tartt wrote the book.) Richard overhears the five arguing about a Greek translation and provides them with a neat solution which encourages them to petition Julian to accept him.

Though Julian is perhaps unorthodox as a teacher – certainly in his attitude to assessments -his reputation as being charismatic is not actually reflected in the text, where he almost seems a nebulous presence, though he is instrumental in the plot unfolding.

Only a few instances are given where Julian’s personality comes through. When struck with the thought that Bunny, due to his girlfriend Marion being Presbyterian, might be about to turn to religion Julian opines, “‘Well whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.’”

So far, so campus novel; but an exchange in one of Julian’s classes foreshadows later events.

Julian says, “‘We think we have many desires but in fact we only have one. What is it?’”

‘To live,’ said Camilla.

‘To live forever,’ said Bunny.”

A sentiment like that is always a hostage to fortune, whoever utters it.

Richard is not yet fully part of the group when the incident upon which the whole structure rests takes place; a Dionysian Bacchanal at which neither Richard nor Bunny was present where the invocation of the god actually happened – or the other four believed it did, which is the same thing. During their drug induced stravaiging a neighbouring farmer was accidentally killed. Richard learns this only later but Bunny saw the blood-soaked aftermath and did not quite believe their story of running over a deer.

Bunny is a bit of a loose cannon, leaching off anyone he can but most often Henry, of whom he says to Richard, “‘I think he’s got a little bit of Jew blood.’” The incident makes his behaviour worse. At one point Henry’s refusal to indulge him provokes the outburst, “‘You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew.’” How representative this is of the attitudes of attendees of elite US colleges in the time portrayed I don’t know but perhaps they may still be common.

The group’s growing fear of Bunny’s possible betrayal of their secret, complicated by the convoluted relationships between Francis and Charles, Charles and Camilla and Camilla and Henry, and Richard’s unrequited feelings for Camilla is drastic, irrevocable and only creates further tensions between them.

The book received a lot of praise and became a best seller. While being well enough written it is also about one third as long as it needs to be. The author might argue she was providing space to develop character but that could still have been done more economically. Moreover, nearly all of the characters are unsympathetic and morally bankrupt to a greater or lesser degree. Though maybe this is true of elite US college alumni/alumnae in general. Even viewpoint character Richard is weak and easily swayed.

It’s not encouraged me to to read anything else by Tartt.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of dialogue (x 2,) – and at its end (x 1.) “‘If I’d of been’” (‘If I’d have been’; or, ‘If I’d’ve been’ – but it was in dialogue,) “it was the epicenter” [sic] – despite this being a British publication the text is in USian – (not ‘it was off centre’, just ‘it was the centre’,) “littered like a fairgrounds” (like a fairground. Is “fairgrounds” USian?) Gladiola (Gladioli.) “None of his things were gone” (None of his things was gone,) organdy (organdie,) a cat is first referred to as she but later as he.

Harper Perennial, 2005, 190 p. First published in 1989.

Father Angwin is a Roman Catholic priest in the remote parish of Fetherhoughton in 1956. There is a small convent affiliated to Angwin’s Church of St Thomas Aquinas. The convent and attached school is overseen by Mother Perpetua – called Purpit by just about everyone. She has a fierce grip both on the nuns and the children and a downer on just about everybody except the bishop. Her contempt is particularly strong for Irish people, which is bad news for Sister Philomena who as a consequence gets all the drudgerous jobs.

The bishop is a moderniser in favour of updating the mass by dropping Latin. Angwin, despite being a man who lost his faith years ago is against this, fearing his parishioners would stray. He tells the bishop his flock “aren’t Christians. These people are heathens and Catholics.” Without the statues and their superstitions they wouldn’t attend Church. The bishop, however, insists on the removal of most of the plaster statues of saints in the Church. Angwin’s only solution to this problem is to have the statues buried in the churchyard.

Soon after, a knock comes on the presbytery door. In walks Father Fludd, whom everyone assumes is the curate the bishop had promised/threatened. Fludd is a mysterious character who quickly manages to winkle out Angwin’s and Philomena’s reservations about their respective situations. In one of their conversations he tells Angwin, “‘Common sense has nothing to do with religion.’ It is on Philomena, though, that his influence is most profound.

Oddness and a hint of the supernatural accompany him. Though he drinks Angwin’s whisky, the level in the bottle does not seem to drop. He laments the congregation’s lack of appreciation of what they are saying in their responses – formaligh for foe malign, destrier for death’s dread. He is, he says, in the business of transformation. It is never spelled out as such, but the invitation is clearly there to see him as an incarnation of the Devil.

Fludd is a short novel, but says what it needs to – even if the treatment, a kind of distancing, an opacity (which reminded me a little of the writing of Muriel Spark,) renders it almost dream-like.

Aside: In a foreword, Mantel says the Catholic Church portrayed in this novel bears “some but not much resemblance” to the one in the real world.

Perhaps redolent of the times in which it is set it contains the dismissive phrase, “digging like an Irishman.”

Pedant’s corner:- medieval (mediæval, please, or at least mediaeval,) “the camphor smell of their Sunday clothes” (the smell of mothballs, presumably. Those were made of naphthalene, not camphor,) “alarum clock” (alarum is archaic,) “like genii let out of bottles” (like genies let out,) “Thomas à Beckett” (nowadays written ‘Thomas Becket’.) “‘I’m not afraid will they recognise me’” (I’m not afraid they will recognise me’.)

Doubleday, 1997, 347 p.

This was Atkinson’s second novel and it exhibits many of the traits which would come to dominate her fiction. The family dynamic here is reminiscent of the one in Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and of the Todds in Life After Life and A God in Ruins. In this one our heroine Isobel finds herself slipping backwards and forwards in time and there is here the first adumbration of the thought found in the Todd books that it would be a boon if somehow we could live our lives over again in order to get them right. There is a Scottish flavour; neighbour Mrs Baxter – I was irresistibly reminded of the old soup adverts, especially since her daughter is named Audrey – lards the text with Scots aphorisms, though the prominence here of trees and forests is more of a preoccupation of English fiction. The house Isobel lives in is even called Arden.

We begin with a literary allusion, “Call me Isobel.” Implicitly to compare herself to Herman Melville is quite a statement by Atkinson of confidence in her abilities. But the book as a whole is dense with allusion or references – and also repetition, but repetition with a purpose, not merely saying the same thing over again in slightly different ways. For example, “The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.” There is also a reversal of Tolstoy’s Karenina Principle in, “I suppose all unhappy families resemble one another (but all happy families are happy in their own way of course)” along with the addition of “But then, do happy families exist, or happy endings come to that, outside of fiction?”

After a starting chapter headlined ‘Beginning’ there are several sections each of ‘Present’ and ‘Past’ narratives outlining Isobel’s story, her family’s and Arden’s, before we end with ‘Future’. ‘Beginning’ is a history of the land on which Arden stands ‘Present’ is narrated by Isobel in first person; ‘Past’ is in the third person.

In the ‘Present,’ Isobel (Fairfax) is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl mooning after the desirable Malcolm Lovat who, to Isobel’s chagrin, sees her as a friend. Her father, Gordon, vanished for seven years after mother Elizabeth was said to have absconded ‘with a fancy man’ but the circumstances are barely ever mentioned by their grandmother, the Widow, and the getting on for elderly spinster aunt, Vinny, in both of whose care they have been left. Both Isobel and her brother Charles try to make the most of things. When Gordon returns it is with a new wife.

The three primal motivations in literature, love, sex and death are well to the fore here. Gordon met Elizabeth by rescuing her from a bombed house during the Blitz, “My hero,” and was thereafter besotted by her feminine dazzle (the widow and Vinny are not so easily taken in.) There are incidents of murder and reported incest and Isobel imagines her part in Malcolm’s death over and over again but is unable to prevent it each time. A rational gloss to these experiences and her apparent time travelling is provided as symptoms of possible fly agaric poisoning.

While Human Croquet is exceedingly well written and intricately plotted – as well as diverse – a tangled web of relationships is revealed during the novel, to not all of which is Isobel privy; possibly too many connections between the characters to be fully convincing. (This is a trait I also noticed recently in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea.)

The game of Human Croquet, rules and a picture of which act as a three page appendix, is one of the pastimes Isobel has read of from an illustrated book of Home Entertainments. It involves a blindfolded person being aurally guided through hoops formed by two people making an arch between them.

In Human Croquet, the novel, Isobel has no such guide and has to make it on her own. As we all do.

Pedant’s corner:- hot-bed (does it need that hyphen? – ‘hotbed’,) Charles’ (many times Charles’s,) “help me Boab” (at least twice. This Scottish phrase is actually not an invocation to someone called Bob to provide assistance but rather an expression of disbelief or disconcertment, and is written ‘help ma boab’,) Keats’ (Keats’s,) beseeched (an apparently acceptable alternative to ‘besought’.) “‘Who understand them?’” (understands,) “CO2  + 2H 2A + light energy – (CH 2) + H2O) + H2A” (supposedly the equation for photosynthesis. It isn’t. And in any case CO₂, H₂O and H₂A, OHOHO) Zeus’ (Zeus’s,) Ysggadril (Yggdrasil,) “the cries of the baby upsets my” (upset my,) “they bid their mother one last terrible farewell” (they bade their mother,) “less discretely” (not less separately [discretely,] but rather less inconspicuously, ‘less discreetly’,) aureoles (x 2, areolas; or areolae,) “to staunch the throbbing” (stanch,) “would he chose for a consort” (would he choose,) “smoothes the sheets” (smooths,) Glebelands’ (Glebelands’s,) de’el (usually spelled ‘de’il’, or deil,) “the amoeba and bacteria” (if it’s supposed to be plural then ‘amoebae’ – or even amœbae.)

Farewell to old Ireland. Vintage, 2003, 419 p, plus xiv p Preface.

The Star of the Sea of the title is a clapped-out paddle steamer making a crossing from Cobh (Cove) in Ireland to New York. It is 1847, the Famine is at its height and the steerage compartments of the ship are crammed with hundreds of refugees, mostly starving. These desperate lives and the Famine itself are essentially background, though, as the narrative does not mention most of them except in passing when extracts from the log of the ship’s Master, Josias Lockwood, notes which of them have died in the night and been consigned to the deep, as well as instances of disease and quarantine, or incidents requiring incarceration of the perpetrators.

Is this a general aversion? I am personally not aware of many works of fiction dealing with the Irish Famine (or the Great Hunger as it is also known.) Perhaps the subject is just too overwhelming, too raw, or even too daunting for the novelist to approach, except obliquely as here. Though Irish writers appear prominently in British literary life the subject itself tends to be shied away from in Britain and perhaps British publishers may be wary of it.

In the book Star of the Sea, each chapter (plus the prologue and epilogue) is prefaced by an illustration from the time it is set along with the usual Victorian novel practice of the short chapter precis. Some of these illustrations depict Irish life or scenes of the famine but many show the grotesque stereotypes of so-called Irish characteristics prevalent in the nineteenth century.

The book as a whole is supposedly drawn together in retrospect by passenger G Grantley Dixon, a US journalist, from letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, conversations of his with the characters and his own writings. In the prologue he describes the only clergyman on board, a Methodist minister as conducting, “the adamant hymns of his denomination.”

The story is woven around the well-to-do passengers David Merridith (Lord Kingscourt,) his wife Laura, their children’s nanny, Mary Duane from Carna, and one Pius Mulvey, initially a shadowy presence on the ship – referred to as a ‘Ghost’ – though not entirely inconspicuous as he has one wooden foot. While following the ship’s voyage and the ever-mounting toll of dead passengers the narrative skips back to cover incidents in the principal characters’ pasts.

In her youth Mary Duane lived on Merridith’s estate (then in the hands of his father) and they formed a friendship. He greeted the Duane household with “God Bless” about which her father would say, “‘And as for God-bless, he’s a God-blasted Protestant. He doesn’t even believe in God.’” The relationship was developing into something deeper when Merridith went off to boarding school, where he learned ‘rules’. Neither his nor her father thought that their liaison could or should progress and he broke it off. In the aftermath she was betrayed by another man and only many years later did she and Merridith come across each other again.

Merridith himself displeased his father by his later marriage to Laura and by the time he inherited, the estate was in a poor condition, hence the journey to the US. Merridith and Dixon are at odds since Dixon berates him with the conditions of the Irish poor. Merridith responds with the fact of slavery in the US. That Dixon is having an affair with Laura (the Merridith marriage had long been on shaky ground) is added reason for dislike.

Mulvey has reasons to keep himself to himself on the ship. On pain of death he has been tasked by the ‘Liable’ men of Galway to kill Merridith for his many perceived sins against his tenants or for passing them on to those who treat them even more badly. The Liable men represent one of those many clandestine Irish associations desiring overthrow of English rule and gained their name because they signed off their warning missives with “Els-be-lible.” Mulvey (whose father once said to him that when you were talking about God you couldn’t expect bloody miracles,) has a chequered and violent past, once escaping from Newgate Jail thereby engendering the term Monster of Newgate, and has gone through many pseudonyms. Later Dixon tells us that the Monster led to an evolution in the representation of the Irish. Previously shown as foolish and drunken, now they more frequently shown as murderers. Ape-like, fiendish, bestial, untamed. There are also quotations from various sources exemplifying the prejudices of the ‘superior’ classes against the non-landed Irish.

In his time in London Mulvey had met Charles Dickens and spun that voraciously avid author a tale about a Jew who ran a school for young thieves – adding in details from Connemara ballads. Prompted by Dickens for the name of the Jew, Mulvey remembers that of an unpleasant priest who had hated Jews and also inveigled Mulvey’s brother (albeit temporarily) into the priesthood. The impeccably Irish-named Fagan.

In the Epilogue we find Dixon latterly wrote a book with a short section on the Monster of Newgate, which beguiled the public’s imagination. People attended fancy-dress evenings costumed as the Monster or one of his victims. Plays were performed. Grantley adds, “Soon the monster was to be subjected to the final indignity. That horror among horrors. A musical.”

Dixon has other observations to make, that among those of certain religious persuasions “Dancing was ‘back-legs fornication,’” that “Any assemblage comprising human beings … will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is so often so much greater.” Most powerfully that “The dead do not die in that tormented country, that heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds; so abused down the centuries by the powerful of the neighbouring island, so much as by the powerful of its native own. And the poor of both islands died in their multitudes. … The flags flutter and the pulpits resound. At Ypres. In Dublin. At Gallipoli. In Belfast…. Yet they walk, the dead, and will always walk: not as ghosts, but as press-ganged soldiers, conscripted into a battle that is not of their making.…They do not even have names. They are simply: The Dead. You can make them mean anything you want them to mean.” As people do to this day.

Though the connections between all the main characters are perhaps a little too close and strain credibility somewhat, Star of the Sea is still a superb piece of work. And it has to be said that a book whose plot turns on a first edition of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell has to be saluted.

Pedant’s corner:- “staunch the bleeding” (stanch,) termagents (termagants,) “Verazano narrows” (Verazzano narrows,) Engels’ (Engels’s.)

Sadly, Irish writer Edna O’Brien has passed away.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, made her something of a bête noire among traditionalists in her homeland, a reputation only added to with its successors Girl with Green Eyes and Girls in Their Married Bliss. As well as those – very short – novels I have also read the equally short novel Night and her first collection of short stories The Love Object.

All concise and to the point.

Josephine Edna O’Brien: 15/12/1930 – 27/7/2024. So it goes.

In Four Great Cornish Novels, Gollancz, 1984, 185 p.  (First published in 1936.)

In its set-up this could almost be a children’s story. Protagonist Mary Yellan’s mother has died after seventeen years of widowhood stoically looking after both Mary and the family farm at Helford. With no parents Mary might be footloose and fancy free – as the protagonists of children’s stories tend to be – but her mother’s dying wish was for Mary to go to live with her Aunt Patience at Jamaica Inn. Her sojourn there makes for a deep, dark experience.

The foreboding starts with the driver of the coach taking her there warning of the inn’s ill reputation. She immediately finds Patience’s husband Joss Merlyn to be a boorish, overbearing drunkard and the Inn itself an inhospitable place, taking as it does no customers and having no visitors except those occasional ones Jess warns Mary not to pay any attention to, indeed to hide away from. Not so much “Watch the wall my darling” as cover your face. Mary wants to flee back to Helford and only her concern for Aunt Patience persuades her to stay.

Gradually, during which time Mary explores the countryside around, Jess’s true malevolence manifests itself through drunken confessions – not just a smuggler but a wrecker and murderer to boot.

du Maurier obviously had a love and an eye for the Cornish landscape, which is described in generous, admiring terms. These passages reminded me of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, especially when Mary got lost on the moors and was rescued by a clergyman, (here the vicar of Auchtarnun, Mr Davey.) du Maurier’s affection for that work is usually noted in relation to her later novel, Rebecca, a more obvious reworking of Jane Eyre, but the writing in Rebecca does not carry the same visual stimulus.

There is a coyness to Mary’s interactions with Jess’s brother Jem, and a scarcely believable reticence to the way in which she is treated by Jess’s smuggling associates; but the book was first published in the 1930s – which does make it a little surprising that the villain of the piece (who in truth from his first appearance was not difficult to decipher as such) tells Mary that he found “Christianity to be built upon hatred, and jealousy, and greed …. while the old pagan barbarism was naked and clean.”

Notwithstanding my observations on du Maurier’s treatment of landscape above there were times when I found the novel – for a so-called classic – to be a touch overwritten.

Pedant’s corner:- the text repeatedly refers to Jamaica Inn’s tall chimneys. The illustration at the story’s start has small chimneys. Otherwise; “when the first cock crew” (crowed,) waggons (many times. I know it’s an acceptable alternative but since the first time I saw the word it was spelled ‘wagons’ I have always persisted in the belief it should have only one ‘g’,) “‘for my husband sake’” (husband’s sake,) to-morrow (nowadays unhyphenated,) havered (not used in the Scottish sense of talking nonsense but more like ‘tarried’.)

Polygon, 2006, 458 p, plus iv p Introduction by David Pratt. First published in 1961.

The novels by Jenkins I have read so far have always been situated in Scotland so this one, set among the British diplomatic community in Kabul in the late 50s, marks a digression. (Jenkins did spend some in Afghanistan himself in the mid to late 50s and on the evidence here had a good insight into the country as he displays some sympathy for Afghans and their customs.)

The meat of the story is in the flurry caused by the intended marriage between local Abdul Wahab and Briton Laura Johnstone who met while he was studying in Manchester and apparently fell in love. The British set in Kabul is disturbed since the precedents for such marriages have not been happy ones. (They do mostly though seem to have been between relatively naïve young Englishwomen and Afghans who have misrepresented themselves as rich before the marriage.) One such, Mrs Mohebzada, is in despair due to her husband’s family’s insistence on her conforming to Afghan customs. She is trapped as she loves her children but they are deemed by Afghan law to be Afghani citizens and so not allowed to exit the country. Laura however is over thirty and a teacher so liable to be more level headed than most. And perhaps more strong-willed.

The universal consensus among the ex-pats is that the marriage must be prevented and steps are taken to dissuade Laura and also to lean on the headteacher of the school where she has applied to teach to turn her down and on the Afghan authorities not to give her a visa. Nevertheless, Laura persists and embarks on her visit (at first intended to be only for six months to see if she takes to the place.)

On the Aghan side Prince Naim sees the marriage as a way to symbolise a union between East and West as a step to modernising Afghanistan. All this has the potential to feed into debate about whether the women’s full body covering, here called a shaddry, enforced for locals but not for Westerners, ought to be abolished. An Islamic cleric, Mojedaji, at one point voices the opinion that, if it is, there will as a consequence be an increase in rape. (Aside. Surely this attitude speaks more about men’s behaviour than of women.) A shadowy but potentially menacing organisation called the Brotherhood attempts to recruit Wahab to its ranks – an opportunity for advancement he grabs eagerly.

Meanwhile in the background, and by no means the novel’s focus, the influence on the country of the Soviet Union is growing. A diplomatic visit by Minister Voroshilov is intermittently referenced through the book.

Racism explicit and implicit runs through the tale. Englishwoman Mrs Massaour is married to a Lebanese man and feels betrayed by the fact that both her children are deeper black than her husband. The loving marriage of journalist and poet Harold Moffatt and Lan, a woman of Chinese origin, is threatened by his reluctance to have children because of the prejudice they will suffer as ‘half-castes’.

Jenkins has Mrs Massaour venture the thought of the characteristic British failing – obtuseness, the centuries-old irremovable unawareness that other people in other countries ordered some things better. (In some British people the obtuseness was aggravated by conceit.) This is an attitude that still prevails in certain quarters.

Moffat says to his wife in relation to racism, “birds and animals join together to mob to death one that’s different from the rest. Human beings are civilized; their killing’s more subtly done, and it takes longer. It may take a lifetime, but, Christ, how much crueller it is”

The complicated relation between the British in Kabul and the local population is illustrated by the extravagant celebration of the anniversary (complete with captured guns) of an Afghan victory over the British. Such entanglements are hard to shake off especially if they keep recurring. The seeds of Afghanistan’s current situation are already present in the book.

Dust on the Paw (the title is a quote which means small people are of no significance to the wielders of power) is a book of its time – for example it employs the words Negroes, Dagos and wog along with the racist attitudes of some of its characters – but still of interest.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction – “wracked by the war” (racked,) Jenkins’ (x 4, Jenkins’s,) “ex-patriot community” (ex-patriate, an ex-patriot would have foresworn their country, not clung to its ways,) iIt (It.) In the text itself: Mossaour (the spelling seems to be interchangeable with Massaour.) “‘Didn’t you use to have contempt for’” (Didn’t you used to have,) repuslive (repulsive,) “the lioness’ instinct” (x 2, lioness instinct, it doesn’t need the apostrophe – which would require an s after it in any case,) woe-begone (woebegone,) sanitorium (sanatorium; sanatoria was on the next page,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech,) “stanchly borne loneliness” (staunchly borne,) Moffett (elsewhere Moffatt,) insect (it was a scorpion, they are arachnids,) solider (soldier.)

Penguin, 2010, 366 p, including 2 p Glossary.

Here we have two novels in one. Or actually, it is more like a short story (actually perhaps a short novella) containing a novel within it. That novel has each chapter begin with a word which starts with the letter B as does The Forty Rules of Love as a whole.

The framing device is set in 2008 where Ella Rubinstein is a Jewish housewife in Pennsylvania, married to a philandering husband and, with her children more or less grown, beginning to wonder if she is wasting her life, but not really considering the nature of the experience of love. She has just secured a job reading manuscripts submitted to a publisher, the first of which is a novel titled Sweet Blasphemy written by an Aziz Z Zahara. When the oldest of her three children, Jeanette, suddenly announces she and her boyfriend Scott want to get married it precipitates a crisis in Ella’s life. The meat of The Forty Rules of Love, though, is in that submitted manuscript, which is the tale of the effect exerted on the life of the thirteenth century preacher Rumi by the Sufi mystic, Shams of Tabriz. So taken by Sweet Blasphemy is Ella that she emails its author (without letting him know she is reading it for the publisher.) Through the ensuing correspondence she and Aziz fall for each other.

Sweet Blasphemy is told with a variety of viewpoint characters, each of whose voices Shafak renders superbly: the Killer, Shams, Rumi, The Novice, the Master, the Zealot, Suleiman the Drunk, Desert Rose the Harlot, Hasan the Beggar, Aladdin (not the pantomime character,) Kerra – Rumi’s Christian wife, who sees little difference between Christians and Muslims as people – Kimya (who falls in love with Shams,) Baybars the Warrior, Sultan Walad and Husam the Student, all adding up to a convincing picture of life in thirteenth century Anatolia.

In his encounters with others Shams shows himself fond of illuminating his philosophy with either a parable or else one of his Forty Rules of Love. (Whether there are forty of Shams’s rules given to us in the book I didn’t bother to count.)

His preference for the loving aspects of religious teaching does not enamour him to adherents of a more fundamental bent.

For Shams, “It’s easy to love a perfect God. ….. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects.” Moreover, “Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.” He is also wise. “How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together.”

Of religious zealots he says, “Looking at the whole universe with fear-tinted eyes it is no wonder they see a plethora of things to be afraid of,” they pick and choose only those verses of their holy book which conform to their inclinations and so ignore its totality.

In a passage that speaks to the similarities between fundamental Muslims and Calvinists he says, “By and large, the narrow minded say that dancing is sacrilege.” But when you think about it that attitude could be taken to be blasphemy. “They think God gave us music … then forbade us to listen to it.”

It is possible this thought may allude to the background of ‘Aziz Z Zahara’. It turns out he was born as one Craig Richardson in Kinlochbervie! His own story is not without misfortune, though.

Love, along with sex and death, is of course one the three main preoccupations of the novel as a form. With Shams, Shafak’s focus on it here is more on the religious ideal but it is counterpoised with Ella’s relationship with ‘Aziz’. But Shams himself is incapable of extending his general love for humans with the more intense feelings a married man ought to have for his wife. Kimya reflects on her love for him that “Little did I know that I was making the most common mistake women have made throughout the ages: to naïvely think that with their love they can change the men they love.”

In his own way too, Shams is a fundamentalist.

Is there slight imbalance here, though? Would the novel succeed as well without the framing device? Possibly.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful, complex and compassionate book. As an author Shafak is certainly the real deal.

Pedant’s corner:- “on my doorsill” (usually it’s a doorstep,) strived (strove,) caravanseries (caravanserais,) “portabella mushrooms” (Portobello mushrooms,) bookstore (in an email from “Aziz”. As a Scot, he would surely say ‘bookshop’,) “like a broken faucet” (ditto; ‘like a broken tap’, but then, the book is written in USian,) “off of” (I know it’s USian but it annoys me. Just ‘off’, please,) “no other” (none other.)

Polygon, 2018, 93 p, plus iv p General Foreword to this reprinting of Spark’s works and xii p Introduction by Dan Gunn. First published in 1971.

The events of this novella all take place over one night in the villa by Lake Leman in Switzerland owned by Baron and Baroness Klopstock.

Well, I say events, but the most significant happens off-stage, in the room where the Baron, the Baroness and their visitor, Victor Passerat, are closeted, with strict instructions not to be disturbed.

The butler, Lister, and all the servants seem to know what that event will be and act as if it is by force majeure, that there is nothing they can do to prevent it. Lister indeed insists that they must follow the script, as if they are acting in a film. In the meantime they are recording (onto a reel-to-reel tape recorder) their stories of the night.

Dan Gunn in his introduction says that the normal fear of the author of such things is in including spoilers is vitiated in this case by Spark herself having Lister tell his below stairs audience what will happen. “‘Let us not split hairs’” he says, “‘between the past, present and future tenses.’” Gunn goes on to ruminate on the difference between literature in French and English in this regard. The former has more or less dropped the preterite (the passé simple) in favour of the present perfect tense, whereas in English that can quickly become stilted and unsustainable. It is, he says, merely a heightened example of Spark’s eschewing of plain foreshadowing in favour of outright prolepsis, (see my comments on possible prolepsis in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) the novel an example of meta-fiction before that term was coined.

Be that as it may, the result here, along with the distancing effect of the present tense narration, is to make the reader simply not care what happens. If there is no jeopardy, or the jeopardy cannot be combatted, why should we carry on reading? I would go so far as to say that adopting such an approach is a dereliction of duty on the part of the author.

This novel encapsulates my reservations about Spark’s writing, which I once described as reading through a layer of glass.  Make that opaque glass.

With the possible exception of the mad man in the attic the characters are fairly unconvincing and their manners of speech indistinguishable. No one in this book behaves in any rational way. It is simply unbelievable.

Spark does, though, does essay the punning observation “Klopstock and barrel.”

I had thought to read all of Spark’s fiction in time. The more I do the less I feel like doing so.

Pedant’s corner:- “routing among the vegetables” (rooting among,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, scyth (scythe.)

Arcaia Books, 2014, 742 p, plus 9 p Dramatis Personae. Translated from the Catalan, Jo Confesso, (Raval Edicions SLU, Proa, 2011,) by Mara Faye Lethem.

How to describe a book that is so unlike anything else I have read yet at the same time has echoes of so much I have? Simultaneously a history, a biography, a love story and a tale of friendship; with moments of joy, moments of sadness, moments of betrayal, moments of horror. Twisting, shifting and refusing categorisation, it contains multitudes. Humanity in all its guises, many of them unappealing.

Confessions is a long, complex, but nevertheless still easy to read, novel, ostensibly the life story of Barcelona native Adrià Ardèvol, whose misfortune it was – as he tells us in the novel’s first sentence – to be born into the wrong family. He describes it as an unforgivable mistake. This is not quite a paraphrase of Tolstoy’s aphorism about families but it does prepare us for the frosty nature of his relationships with his parents, neither of whom he thinks ever loved him, or each other. Indeed, he wonders why they bothered to get married in the first place.

Possibly as a result of this coldness the young Adrià personifies his toys, Sheriff Carson of Rockland and the Valiant Arapaho Chief, Black Eagle, who act as a sounding board for his thoughts and conscience since they talk back to him – sometimes even initiating the conversation. This discourse diminishes through time but never entirely disappears.

Adrià’s father was a dealer in manuscripts, incunabula, antiquities, curios etc (given the unprincipled nature of his transactions I hesitate to call them objects of virtu – but of course the objects themselves would be blameless) and kept a shop in Barcelona. One of his gifts to Adrià was a Storioni violin, made in Cremona in 1674, whose sound is better than a Stradivarius. The novel is also the story of that violin, named Vial, of its creator and its ownership.

The narrative is frequently addressed to “you”, and at first this “you” might be assumed to be the reader but then it is found to be Sara, the love of Adrià’s life, to whom he is relating his life story – and his sins. The text contains repeated instances where the word confiteor is repeated as a single sentence.

That love is Sara Voltes-Epstein, an illustrator of artistic talent, who is a Jew and incurs the suspicions of Adrià’s mother, who think she is after the Ardèvol family’s money and hence scuppers any chance of Adrià marrying her. Here the familiar arc of boy meets girl boy loses girl takes shape and indeed the two do get together later – years later – but that strand, though the central tragedy of Adrià’s life, is only a small part of this voluminous book, one of whose historical scenes implicitly draws parallels between the mediæval treatment of Jews and its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. That Sara is Jewish is central to Adrià’s story and his ultimate anguish.

The narrative is not straightforward, slipping between first and third person (I and he/Adrià) seemingly at random, conversations switch from direct to reported speech then back again with no punctuational signals, descriptions within them of past events are presented as a historical account of what those speakers would have said (or did say.) The setting can change years, decades – or centuries – within a single paragraph or even sentence. Often someone’s speech is suddenly cut off midline by an interruption. We witness the same scene from several different viewpoints sometimes hundreds of pages apart. Yet this all seems organic, all natural. Everything flows.

It is the violin which ties the whole together, acquired by Adrià’s father for a knock-down price from a former SS officer who took it from its rightful owner inside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, given to Adrià to play – but he has no desire to have a career as a violinist. In contrast his friend Bernat does do so but in turn wants to write stories which Adrià tells him have uninspiring prose and he should stick to the violin. All interleaved with the unfolding of Adrià’s life, we see scenes of the violin’s construction from a cache of uniquely treated wood and its subsequent passing down through the generations, the shutdown of the monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal in the 15^th century, the significance of the number 615428, the resonance of the Urgell painting in Adrià’s childhood home of the Sant Maria de Gerri monastery receiving the light of the sun setting behind Trespui and much, much more. Occasional, highly intermittent, sections are rendered in italics, apparently written by Bernat which in the end cast an utterly different light on what we have been reading before.

This might all seem too elaborate a construction to balance but Cabré is entirely in control of what he is doing and is not afraid to show it. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad” is a straight quotation from Gabriel García Márquez though Adrià does not actually face a firing squad – except metaphorically. The nearest literary comparison to the effect Cabré creates that I can think of is Kurt Vonnegut, but Vonnegut is more off-beat, more fanciful. Confessions deals entirely in the human sphere. “Evil existed before the war and doesn’t depend on any entelechy, but rather on people.”

There is a comment on the changing of attitudes over time when a lecturer says, “‘In the eighteenth century, if you weren’t wearing a wig, makeup, stockings and high heels, they wouldn’t let you into the salons. Today, a man wearing makeup, a wig, stockings and heels would be locked up in prison without any questions being asked.’” This was in Franco’s time in Spain, which Adrià – and Cabré – experienced. That dictatorship is only lightly touched on in the text but adds an undertone of colour.

Adrià tells Sara through his memoire, “you will continue living in these lines every time someone reads these pages,” but it is his overall story of greed and hate, but also friendship and love, the enduring constants of human interactions, that will linger.

Confessions is a tour-de-force.

Pedant’s corner:- On the inside cover blurb “reaches a crescendo” (reaches a climax.) Otherwise; “which much hve been immense” (which must have been,) Mrs Canyameres’ (Canyameres’s.) “Even thought I was very young” (Even though,) “wile away my time” (while away,) “the only thing that kept him in Cremona were the attentions of the dark, passionate Carina” (the only thing … was the attentions,) “having caught me in fragranti” (in flagrante,) “but the silent was thick” (silence,) “off of” (x 2, no ‘of’, just ‘off’,) “inside of me” (no ‘of’, just ‘inside me’.) Obersturbahnführer (Obersturmbahnführer,) Fèlix Morlin (elsewhere always Félix Morlin,)  “inside out fatherland” (our fatherland.) “‘Who knows.’” (Who knows?) Planas (Plensa?) “worse for the wear” (no ‘the’, just ‘worse for wear’,) “you mouth dropped open” (your mouth,) the perfect place to sooth the torments” (to soothe; to sooth would be a different thing entirely,) “the strict silence that accompany the twenty four hours” (accompanies,) Complin (Compline,) insuring (ensuring,) Germany (German,) “his licence exam” (his driving test.) Strumbahnführer (x 4, Sturmbahnführer?) “‘Where’d you get that come from?’” (‘Where’d you get that from?’ Or ‘Where’d that come from?’,) “as if she had shook off a few years” (shaken off.) “Kamenek, with a smile, slide the microphone towards” (slid the microphone,) “to stab he who pauses” (to stab him who,) forrage (forage,) “for a several years” (no ‘a’,) “to be hear it for myself” (no ‘be’,) consierge (concierge,) an extraneous quotation mark. “I was wracked by my bad conscience” (I was racked by.)