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To the Dogs by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 2024, 334 p, including 2 p Acknowledgements.

“The reception area had been designed with an eye to vomit and violence.” Thus begins this book, which if you hadn’t already known this was a crime novel would certainly have alerted you instantly.

Jim Brennan is the son of a minor criminal who managed to evade a life of petty crime and has worked himself up to the position of vice-Chancellor at the Universty. He has lived comfortably with his wife Maggie and children Eliot and Sarah till his existence is turned upside down by Eliot’s arrest for possessing drugs with the intention to deal. This drags him into the shady world he thought he had left behind as he finds himself having to dance to the tune of the gangsters to whom Eliot owes a large amount of money, all while navigating the problems of his work – a student who has committed suicide, the University’s possibly compromising connections with China, the Principal’s impending retiral, a Physics professor’s antipathy and the overseeing of granting of contracts for new buildings.

This odyssey into the darker side of life leads him into contact with Eddie Cranston, now a low-grade criminal lawyer with a sideline in helping youths to stay out of trouble, a property developer called Henders, an ex-student named Becca and – eventually – with one of his father’s old sparring partners.

In a conversation with Henders he contrasts the change in attitudes over his life by saying, “‘My dad was a low-grade hardman. An occasional enforcer with what we’d now call anger management issues. Back in the day folk just said he was mental.’”

There is, though, really only one incidence of violence in the book – which occurs offstage – and also a death in the climactic scene, but on the whole the novel doesn’t actually deliver on the threat of that opening line. Not that that’s a bad thing.

As a portrait of a man caught on the horns of a prickly dilemma it is entertaining enough with Welsh’s typical good writing and convincing characterisation.

Pedant’s corner:- “on the brew” (usually rendered as ‘on the broo’; from burroo, a west of Scotland corruption of bureau, itself short for Employment Bureau, the precursor of Job Centres,) “breath smelt of fruit pastels” (fruit pastilles,) “an urge to hoick and spit” (to hawk and spit,) “wedding band” (is a USianism, the British is always wedding ring, which was used five lines later, so maybe this was to avoid quick repetition,) Henders’ (several times; Henders’s,) “hung themselves in despair” (hanged themselves.) “He got to his feet, ending indicating the meeting was over” (either ‘He got to his feet, ending the meeting’, or, He got to his feet, indicating the meeting was over’,) “made it barely seemed to matter” (made it barely seem to matter,) “before he hung himself” (hanged himself,) “Rowan was on her knees in the kitchen, cleaning the oven, when Jim entered the kitchen” (doesn’t need two mentions of the kitchen.) “A barbers manned by …” (A barber’s,) “that another pair of eyes were observing him” (another pair … was observing him.) “A crowd of students were streaming down the hill” (a crowd  … was streaming.) In the acknowledgements; “Writing a books is nice work if you can get it” (either ‘Writing a book’ or, ‘Writing books’.)

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 2022, 373 p, including 3 p Afterword.

This one was published twenty years after Welsh’s first novel The Cutting Room and in it she returns to the central character of that book, Rilke, an auctioneer for the financially troubled Bowery Auctions. Rilke is gay and the intervening years gives Welsh, through Rilke, the opportunity to comment on the evolution in attitudes towards homosexuality that has taken place in that time. (Some prejudice still appears here but on the whole the other characters – even those he is meeting for the first time – by and large accept who and what he is.)

This starts from the first scene where Rilke is attending the wedding of the two Bobbys, where the parents of one of the two grooms were never to be mentioned. Rilke has to escort one of the guests, Jojo, out of the reception to avoid the possibility of a scene. Jojo gives Rilke a tip about the wind-up of an estate at Ballantyne House in Dumfries and Galloway whose owners are looking to sell off the house contents, a commission which might save Bowery Auctions’ somewhat failing fortunes. The next day Jojo is found dead in an alley.

As Rilke delves into the circumstances of the death via Jojo’s lodger, an art student calling himself Sands, he gets embroiled with gangster Jamie Mitchell and encounters a strange situation regarding the affairs at Ballantyne House and farm, where there was a car crash a week or so before and the auction crew rescue a frightened Vietnamese refugee, Phan, on a nearby road.

Welsh is always on top of her material here and interweaves her plot intricately. We are almost incidentally given glimpses of the more outré aspects of Glasgow’s gay scene.

Her talent for characterisation is illustrated by the on-off relationship between the auction house’s owner, Rose, and police Inspector Jim Anderson. There was the neat observation, “He had slicked his wet hair back from his face, like Brian Ferry before the cardigans set in.”

This doesn’t quite reach the levels which The Cutting Room did, but it is still a very good piece of crime fiction. A cut above you might say.

Pedant’s corner:- Burns’ (Burns’s,) “the frail women’s exit” (frail woman’s,) “a pair of storm doors” (on the top floor of a tenement? Storm doors are external. I think Welsh meant ‘vestibule doors’,) Sands’ (many times; Sands’s,) “black surplice” (on a minister at a funeral. Surplices are traditionally white and can be worn at funerals. If they’re black they’re most likely not a surplice but an ecclesiastical gown.) “Rose looked out of place the lady of the house” (needs a comma between ‘place’ and ‘the lady’,) “aren’t I?” (The speaker was a Scot. We say ‘amn’t I?’) “a group of youths were huddled” (a group … was huddled,) “people who never had no luck at all” (the sense demands ‘people who never had luck at all’,) “Sand’s said” (Sands said,) “some bullets” (these were for a shotgun, which traditionally is loaded with cartridges, not bullets. As indeed this shotgun was, later,) “let off three quick shots” ([again traditionally] shotguns can fire only twice before needing reloaded,) distributer (distributor.)

No Dominion by Louise Welsh

John Murray, 2017, 380 p, including ii p Afterword.

This is the last in Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy in which a pandemic known as “the sweats” has ravaged society. Stevie Flint from A Lovely Way to Burn and Magnus McFall from Death is a Welcome Guest have now been on Orkney for seven years. Apart from the cathedral, still used for significant occasions, Kirkwall has been abandoned and burnt to minimise disease risk. The centre of what authority exists lies in Stromness and is run on democratic lines. Stevie is President of the Orkney islands and has no sexual partner. Neither has Magnus but he acts as father to Shug, a boy now an adolescent and one of the seven children on Orkney who survived the sweats and have been fostered out.

We start at an Easter gathering in Stromness in a former hotel, with the odd musical turn and the adults drinking. It has become obvious that Shug is attracted to Willow, another fostered child also reaching adulthood. Her foster father Bjarne is not keen on the idea of the pair having a relationship and when they leave together gets into an argument with Magnus.

The gathering is interrupted, though, by the arrival of a boat in the harbour containing three people, one of whom, Belle, Magnus had met on his way up to Orkney. The newcomers agree to quarantine on Wyre, one of the smaller islands.

Things come to a head and Magnus finds Shug beaten up. Going to confront Bjarne he discovers him and his wife Candice shot dead in their home. The same night several children go missing, Shug, Willow, other girls called Sky and Moon, a boy, Aril, and a two year-old, little Evie. The three strangers are gone too. Stevie and Magnus delegate themselves to follow them into mainland Scotland to retrieve the children.

From there it is the usual post-apocalyptic scenario, meetings with every-person-for-themselves types, religious nutters, travels through various quasi-feudal fiefdoms, Do-Not-Enter-On-Pain-Of-Death signs, all-but-forced labour in the big city, and, for Stevie, the threat of rape from men who don’t know her.

Welsh has shown she can write. Her first novel, The Cutting Room, was an unusual take on the crime genre and her second book, the novella Tamburlaine Must Die, was simply superb, but it’s a pity she has more recently tipped over into thriller territory. She does illustrate, though, that carrying on earlier notions of morality in post-disaster times has its problematic edges. In her Afterword she says that her vision of the world is that most people are fundamentally good. But books with only good people in them are likely to be boring. No Dominion isn’t boring but it doesn’t really add much to post-disaster literature.

Pedant’s corner:- “Magnus had drank more than he was used to” (had drunk,) snuck (x 2, sneaked,) “Magnus sunk to his haunches” (sank,) “lifted the valence” (the valance,) “3AMP fuses” (3 Amp fuses,) “Burnham Wood” (it was in dialogue but it still should be spelled ‘Birnam Wood’,) wheescht (usually spelled ‘wheesht’,) “the oldest of the pair” (older of the pair.) “The City Chambers were nearby” (in Glasgow the City Chambers is usually spoken of in the singular; was nearby,) “sunk to his haunches” (again! sank,) “the Orkneys” (this was Stevie speaking. Traditionally Orcadians would refer to ‘Orkney’ or ‘the Orkney Islands’. But she wasn’t Orcadian,) “The City Chambers’ marble floors” (if singular then ‘City Chambers’s’.) “Three candelabras” (candelabra is already plural,) a missing end quote mark on a piece of dialogue, “better shape that the provost” (than the Provost,) “‘Let’s hope none of the bastards’ aim improves’” (of the bastards’ aims improves.)

Death is a Welcome Guest by Louise Welsh

John Murray, 2015, 380 p.

This is the second in Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy (see here for my review of the first) written pre-Covid. To read it in the midst of a pandemic is odd but the similarities are outweighed by the differences. “The sweats” is at once both more virulent but more forgiving than Covid. Those who die succumb quickly, those who survive do not experience lingering symptoms.

Avoiding the usual hazard of middle books of three Welsh cleverly has a different viewpoint character from A Lovely Way to Burn. This is Magnus McFall, sometime comedian, who witnesses the first manifestations of “the sweats” while playing down the bill to a much more successful comic. His reflection that “London had not closed for the Blitz, the IRA, or al-Qaeda. It would take more than a few germs to shut down the city” is of course not borne out by our own pandemic experience.

On his way home after a gig he prevents the rape of a girl but is himself mistaken for the rapist and so finds himself in jail awaiting trial. Not a good place to be at the outset of a pandemic. When his cellmate dies he is placed in with Jeb who is in the sex offenders wing and garb. It later transpires Jeb is in solitary because he was a policeman found guilty of murdering the woman whom he had a relationship with on an undercover assignment.

Their breakout of jail is brutal – not least to other inmates – and they make their way into the country on motor bikes using back roads, with Magnus aiming to return to his home in Orkney. Several close encounters ensue before the pair end up at Tanqueray Hall, a big house containing a small religious group led by the elderly Father Wingate. We have here almost the perfect closed community, the setting for many a crime story. And the murders have already started.

The breakdown of civil life is a staple of apocalyptic tales, as is attempts to restore order by harsh actions. To a certain kind of mind catastrophes are soon latched on to as a manifestation of God’s punishment for wickedness. The ideas that a Supreme Being could be benevolent and that disasters can occur to the innocent, are beyond that mind set. The fact of survival is no guarantee of innate goodness, and it can of itself unhinge the survivor.

Character is a tricky aspect of the post-apocalypse tale. Norms of behaviour may change as a result of the event, but some human constants will remain so. Welsh’s scenario is the classic one of the SF so-called ‘cosy’ catastrophe, albeit with a modern twist and an added dash of crime (which itself is a concept liable to undergo change in the aftermath.) There are inevitable echoes of John Christopher in Death is a Welcome Guest even if Welsh has never read him (though I suspect she has.) She certainly knows how to keep the reader turning the pages. It remains to be seen whether in the third of the trilogy the expectations of that sub-genre are fulfilled.

Pedant’s corner:- “(how many hours ago?).” (that full stop after the bracket is unnecessary. The question mark acts as a marker for the end of the sentence.) “A series of tabloid headlines were riffling through Magnus’s mind” (A series was riffling. Extra points for ‘Magnus’s’ though.) “Wylie Coyote” (that cartoon character is Wile E Coyote,) “vodka and tonics” (tonic is an adjective here so cannot be made plural; ‘vodkas and tonic’, or ‘vodkas with tonic,) snuck (sneaked. Please,) “hooching with them” (usually spelled ‘hoaching’ or sometimes ‘hoatching’,) staunch (stanch.)

A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh

John Murray, 2014, 362 p.

It was strange reading this during a Covid lockdown. In the background of this novel is traced the progress of a disease known colloquially as “the sweats” – fever, vomiting, diarrhœa – which seems to kill most of those who contract it. The differences between what most novelists used to imagine such an epidemic would bring in its train (selfishness basically) and what transpired in real life (cooperation and compliance, mostly) are marked. Future disaster novels may need to take a different tack. But then again “the sweats” appears more virulent than Covid and its mode of transmission (not really elucidated in the book) less amenable to preventive measures.

The actual plot of the book is more of a straightforward thriller. Stevie (Stefanie,) a presenter on a shopping channel, starts off worrying why her boyfriend, Simon Sharkey, a flashy surgeon, did not meet her as planned nor contact her later. When she goes to his flat she finds him dead, apparently not in suspicious circumstances. She soon begins to exhibit the effects of “the sweats,” suffering alone in her flat for days but is one of the seemingly few who survive catching it. A note left for her by him asks her to deliver a laptop he’d left in her loft specifically to a Mr Reah (and only him) at the hospital where he worked. The reception she gets there raises her suspicions. Reah is also dead and the other medics seem very keen on getting the package from her. The rest of the book is concerned with her search to find out why Simon died and who killed him.

Welsh’s first two books, The Cutting Room and Tamburlaine Must Die were superb. She seemed to shift tack a bit with her next few, straying further into crime/thriller territory. This, the first in a trilogy (The Plague Times,) is firmly within that category. To my mind it suffers by that. Welsh’s writing, though, cannot really be faulted.

Pedant’s corner:- sneakers (why this USianism? Welsh uses the term trainers, as well as sneakers, later,) bannister (banister,) “the letter from beyond the dead” (seems oddly phrased. It’s usually ‘beyond the grave’ but the person in question hadn’t had a burial/cremation at this point,) “a cellophane-wrapped syringe” (unlikely to be cellophane, that’s far too brittle to be wrapping syringes in. ‘plastic-wrapped’ or ‘bubble-packed’,) Amir Kahn (Amir Khan,) Summers’ (several instances, Summers’s,) “electoral role “ (roll,) Forth Railway Bridge (that’s the original, it doesn’t need a qualifying adjective; Forth Bridge,) “the name Fibrosyop discretely etched on a sign” (separately etched? Singly etched? Or discreetly – ie subtly, tastefully, modestly – etched? Perhaps Welsh meant ‘etched in isolation’, in which case it’s fine.)

Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times Again

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

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

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

Books Again

The Girl on the Stairs by Louise Welsh

Hodder and Stoughton, 2013, 298 p.

 The Girl on the Stairs cover

The viewpoint character here is Jane, heavily pregnant and newly arrived in Berlin to stay with her Lebenspartner, Petra, in an apartment block. The room being prepared for the baby is dark and overlooked by a derelict set of flats. Their neighbours are a single man and his daughter, Alban and Anna Mann. Anna is the titular girl on the stairs. Jane overhears Anna’s father shouting at her and sees bruises on her face and so becomes increasingly convinced Anna is being abused, despite Anna’s denials.

She observes Anna in various situations, at a U-Bahn station interacting with older boys, crossing the space towards the derelict flats – a haunt for all sorts of undesirable behaviour – coming out of the downstairs flat, where the Beckers live, going into the nearby church which has a relatively new young priest. On talking with Frau Becker, a woman still mentally scarred by the Russian occupation of Berlin, she is told Mann killed his wife, Greta, and buried her under the floorboards in the flats opposite.

All the while Petra is less than attentive to Jane, out at work all day or off to a conference in Vienna, and Jane’s imagination whirls around, causing her to delve into Anna’s life and unwittingly to set in train a chain of events which will lead to tragedy and a vindication, of sorts.

Via the medium of Mann’s former professional life as a gynaecologist Welsh offers the possibility that Jane’s fears about Anna are a consequence of pregnancy affecting her emotional balance or if they are indeed valid.

Welsh’s writing is smooth and fluid, the novel exquisitely plotted, the psychological motivations and subtleties of the characters utterly believable and the whole is never less than readable and engaging but there was something about it that felt as if it was an exercise verging on by the numbers. Perhaps it was the foreign setting – and in that respect Berlin was an absence here, there was nothing to illustrate the character of the city – but there was something distanced about it, not in the Muriel Spark class of distanced but certainly more surface than depth. Crime aficionados would probably find it fine though.

Pedant’s corner:- “she wanted nothing more but to lie down” (usually ‘than to lie down’,) occasional missing commas before pieces of direct speech, politeness’ (politeness’s,) “aren’t I?” (Jane is Scottish, supposed to be from Glasgow, she would say ‘amn’t I?’) staunch (stanch,) “out of synch” (usually ‘out of sync’.) “The congregation were beginning to” (was beginning to,) focussed (focused.)

The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 2006, 375 p.

 The Bullet Trick cover

The novel is set variously in Glasgow, London and Berlin and intercuts between the three at intervals. It starts with William Wilson, mentalist and illusionist, having fled back to Glasgow to hide after a sojourn as a conjuror in the Berlin night club Schall und Rauch has gone wrong. He had only taken that job after a one-off gig at a London venue – a benefit for a retired policeman, Jim Montgomery, nicknamed ‘the Wizard,’ – was followed by the violent deaths of the club’s proprietor Bill and his boyfriend Sam, whose knowledge of Wilson had got him the gig. Bill had prevailed on Wilson to use his palming skills to remove a package he said belonged to him from the detective’s jacket pocket. Montgomery wants it back – even tracking him down to Berlin. Wilson’s need to return to Glasgow depends on his awareness of this and of the possible dangers of the conjuror’s bullet trick of the title. Only once back in Glasgow does Wilson open the package to see what it contains.

This is where the whole enterprise falls into what I might call the standard thriller plot. A single untrained individual besting the world and solving a decades old mystery don’t ever strike me as very likely. Welsh’s gifts as a novelist are many, a feel for character and an eye for description among them. She does this sort of plot well enough but somehow or other the reader (well, me) always suspects that Wilson’s situation isn’t going to turn out to be as black as he paints it.

There is a reminder of the buttoned-up attitudes inculcated into Scots by centuries of Calvinism when Wilson says of an old friend that he, “pulled me into a hug that was traitor to his west coast of Scotland origins.”

The cover of the edition I read is emblazoned with a quote from Kate Atkinson, “Her most thrilling yet.” I was not quite so enthralled, maybe because of the conjuring business. If a faker is telling you something then you must expect fakery. Of the four Welsh novels I have read so far the best has been Tamburlaine Must Die, perhaps due to its historical setting.

Pedant’s corner:- conjurer (I prefer the spelling conjuror,) Saturday Night at the London Palladium (that Palladium TV show was on Sunday nights,) “her bosoms” (a person traditionally only has one of those,) “there were nothing but shadows” (there was nothing,) junky (junkie,) “licensed grocers” (grocer’s.) “The crowd were clapping” (the crowd was clapping,) “the audience were getting used to” (the audience was getting used to.) “He’s doing his standard grades now” (it is – was – a proper noun, Standard Grades,) “over an over” (over and over,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2,) a missing end quotation mark. “‘You could of found me’” (You could have found me. This was in dialogue but the speaker was German and I suspect would not be so ungrammatical when speaking English.)

Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 2011, 395 p.

Murray Watson is a lecturer in English, having an affair with Rachel, the wife of his head of department, Fergus Baine. Murray is about to go on sabbatical to research the life and untimely death by drowning of all-but-forgotten poet Archie Lunan. He also has a complicated relationship with his brother, Jack, an artist who is mining the dementia of their father for his art.

Watson’s researches take him to the ex-department head, Professor James, who knew Lunan in his youth, and suggests Blaine had greater knowledge of the poet than he admits to, and to the island of Lismore off which Lunan died and where Lunan’s lover, Christie Graves, still lives. She wrote a book in the aftermath of Lunan’s death of which Professor James says, “I think it had something better than authenticity. It had integrity, and that’s all the truth we can ever hope for.”

On the island, with some input from his B&B proprietrix Mrs Dunn and Graves’s more-or-less unwilling assistance, Watson untangles the circumstances of Lunan’s death and Blaine’s connection to them.

The book is readable enough but in the end becomes an uneasy crossover of a novel of contemporary manners and crime story. Still, Welsh has an eye for characterization and description.

Pedant’s corner:- Hastings’ (Hastings’s,) “maybe she had always intended to it end like this” (it to end like this; or, to end it like this,) “a new wave of Scottish poets were throwing off the class-consciousness, self-obsession and non-poetic subject matter of the previous generation” (a new wave was throwing off,) “the management were simply optimistic business would pick up” (the management was optimistic,) “watched them slide slowly through the yellow viscous, like migrating stars” (the viscous what? Viscous is an adjective, not a noun,) “a root aboot in” (about,) “the Great Western road” (it’s always just been Great Western Road, no “the”,) “the prospect of whole new exhibition” (a whole new,) politeness’ (politeness’s,) rawl plugs (rawlplugs,) Meilke (elsewhere always Meikle,) “had hung himself” (hanged,) Reeves’ (Reeves’s,) fleur-de-lis (it was plural, so, fleurs-de-lis, or fleurs-de-lys,) sung (sang,) “the way another women” (either other women, or, another woman,) sunk (sank,) “the Barralands Ballroom” (is often pronounced that way but is actually Barrowlands,) an extraneous single end quote mark, “a homemade stigmata” (stigmata is plural, one of them would be a stigma.) “He’s been one of” (He’d been,) “‘Aren’t I?’” (the speaker was Scots, so, ‘Amn’t I?’) “Murray dropped their speed to crawl” (to a crawl.)

Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh

Canongate, 2005, 158 p.

 Tamburlaine Must Die cover

This novella is certainly a departure from the genre and style of Welsh’s first book, her novel The Cutting Room, a contemporary (more or less) crime tale set in Glasgow. The time here is London in 1593 and we are reading Christopher Marlowe’s account of his past few days, written in case he does not survive the morrow. Drawn before the Privy Council to answer charges of blasphemy and atheism (someone has been disseminating leaflets of this nature as written by “Tamburlaine” and naturally this is assumed to be Marlowe himself after his success with his play Tamburlaine the Great,) he is set free in order to procure evidence against Sir Walter Raleigh. His efforts in this direction are taken over by his quest to discover the person who had betrayed him; a search in which we are led through the byways, hideaways, stews and fleshpots of Elizabethan London, the politics of power and the drawbacks of having an influential patron.

I must confess I have not read nor seen any of Marlowe’s works – so how well Welsh captures his voice I cannot say, but it was convincing enough. Of course true Elizabethan prose would have been fairly impenetrable to the modern reader in any case so some degree of accommodation is to be expected.

On a second thought this is not actually so much of a leap by Welsh. She is still dealing with intrigue and crime. She has done it well though and is now on my look for list.

Pedant’s corner:- I couldn’t find ambidextor anywhere, on line or off, but its context was as if of people who might play one side against the other; nor could I find cosiner (but it may be a variant of cozener as it was in a list of felons of various sorts.) Otherwise:- wainscoted (wainscotted,) Baynes’ (Baynes’s,) hung (hanged, or was hung Elizabethan usage?) from whence (whence means from where, so from whence can only mean from from where.)

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