Harvill Secker, 2019, 234 p, including 2p Contents and 2 p Acknowledgements.

This is Logan’s latest solo collection of stories, her first, The Rental Heart and other fairytales, I reviewed here. I have also read her novels The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming.

The stories here are chiefly burdened with overly long titles eg Birds Fell From the Sky and Each One Spoke in Your Voice or We Can Make Something Between the Mushrooms and the Snow. As the title implies the subject matter tends to be dark. On the whole the collection is tinged with magic realism or outright fantasy and often tips over into horror.

The stories are prefaced and interspersed with what at first appear to be authorial interjections about the circumstances of writing the book and the author’s private life but these short passages soon evolve into what is obviously as much of a fiction as the stories which surround and envelop them.

The book is divided into three sections: The House, The Child and The Past. The first story in each is composed of four short pieces labelled respectively First Fear, Second Fear, Third Fear, and Fourth Fear but most of the stories deal with fear of one sort or another. These fears tend to be female concerns: childbirth and the things attendant on it (apprehensions about what is gestating, what has appeared, is the child safe and well? Am I a good enough mother?) abduction, rape, domestic restriction. One, about seeing a Punch and Judy Show and recognising its hideousness, is told almost entirely by way of footnotes. Another takes the form of a questionnaire – including its rubric. Another alludes to the story of Snow White but takes it in an even darker direction.

From my experience of her writing so far (see links above) Logan presents herself best, as here, at short story length.

Pedant’s corner:- “and fold it on itself” (‘fold in on itself’ makes more sense,) “for heaven’s sakes” (is USian. Britons say ‘for heaven’s sake’,) “into his screeching maw” (stomachs don’t shriek,) “aren’t I?” (Scots say ‘amn’t I?)

Picador, 2022, 397 p.

This, Stuart’s second novel, is running over much of the same ground as his first, Shuggie Bain. Again we have a mother who is neglectful due to being an alcoholic, and her three children, of whom, here, like Shuggie, Mungo is the youngest. As Shuggie did Mungo has an older brother and sister, in Mungo’s case Hamish (Ha-Ha) and Jodie respectively. Unlike in that first novel the narrative of Young Mungo does not focus on the mother, here Maureen Hamilton, who, because she wants to feel she is still young herself, that she still has a chance in life, insists on being called Mo-Maw rather than Maw, but is mostly seen from Mungo’s viewpoint. The only exceptions to this are passages relating to Jodie’s brief hours of escape from feeling responsible for Mungo – with a married man, one of her teachers no less, not much of an escape – and a brief relation of a telephone call by one of Mungo’s tormentors to his own estranged family.

Mungo is devoted to his mother a fact which Jodie in particular finds irritating. He is also unsure of how to be a man. Perhaps as an indicator of Mungo’s uncertainty Stuart has given him a nervous itch on his face, an itch he keeps scratching.

The novel as a whole is composed of two intermittently interweaved strands which recount events in “The May After” and “The December Before.” The setting is Glasgow sometime in the mid-1980s – Jodie mentions the AIDS epidemic.

In “The May After” Mungo has gone on a fishing trip up north with two men known as Gallowgate and St John. Mo-Maw consented to this as an attempt to toughen Mungo up, to make a man of him. The fact that she knew little of these two, having only met them at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, does not bother her until too late. They take the bus north, soon coming upon “the green hills of Dumbarton.” Well, yes. Compared to Glasgow Dumbarton is green – or the green around it is more easily perceived.

“The December Before” is more the core of the book, describing Mungo’s daily life, tholing Mo-Maw’s prolonged absences from their house, making do as best he can with the help of Jodie’s administrations, his meeting with James Jamieson, who has a doocot on a scrap of waste ground backing onto a motorway, the constant chiding by Hamish (who is the local young hardman) to be more like him. Ironically it is the trip north which does that.

The inhabitants of the close where the Hamiltons live, put-upon Mrs Campbell in the flat below and Poor-Wee-Chickie on the ground floor, the latter the subject of suspicion as being thought to be gay and likely a child molester but who doesn’t care about that, are both kind souls, looking out for Mungo and Jodie. It was in December that Mungo met James and the pair began their friendship which soon grows into something deeper and to which Hamish takes great exception. For two reasons, James is Catholic and Hamish hates them (though he can’t articulate why, only that meting out violence in their direction is fun) but more importantly any hint of Mungo liking boys will reflect badly on Hamish’s standing.

A sentence describes those from more fortunate areas of Glasgow, “Middle-class Glaswegians had no loyalty, when it suited them they draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket but they knew none of its chill, none of its need. These Glaswegians were acceptably foreign and endlessly entertaining to the English.”

Stuart writes well, his prose is well above serviceable, but I was less enamoured with the violence portrayed. Moreover, the similarities between Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain tend to detract from the impact of either book. In his next book Stuart really needs to break free from the template he has used in his first two.

The cover actually does this book a disservice. The two youngsters kissing have too much facial hair to match the description of Mungo in the novel and the kiss is more passionate, much more uninhibited, than anything that occurs between Mungo and James in the text.

Sensitivity note. Refers to “the Paki shop,” but people did in the 1980s.

Pedant’s corner:- “inside of” (just inside, no ‘of’,) skillful (USian, the British spelling is skilful,) ball-peen hammer (more often spelled ball-pein.) “Other’s didn’t like the way” (Others didn’t like..,) snuck (sneaked,) “by her stocking feet” (stockinged feet,) fit (fitted,) “as his eyes slid towards to the soundless television” (either ‘towards’ or ‘to’; not ‘towards to’,) sprung (sprang,) “Stanley knifes” (Stanley knives,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “had to tilt his head backwards to breath” (to breathe,) “trying to make a man of out you” (a man out of you.)

Knight Books, 1969, 151 p, plus 8 p Diagrams and Technical Data.

Super Nova is the name of a(n as yet unused in an emergency) rescue ship based on the Moon.

The scene is set on the Moon base, a relatively large establishment with some married couples and a few children among the otherwise unattached. Not quite in that last category (but also not far from it) are Nurse Janie O’Donnel and Assistant Signaller Steve Murray who are attracted to each other but not as yet actually an (as we would say now) item. Gender roles are pretty much what were recognised as such in the late 1960s. Most of the women are either married and stay at home or have nurturing roles. One of the more unusual characters is Norman the News – whose nickname is perhaps an indicator of the author’s Scottish background – a reporter for Earth based newspapers.

The crisis which leads to Super Nova’s launch comes when a supply ship, the Archimedes, is stopped in space near to the incoming Satellite 907 – which has, incidentally, somehow or other managed to make the round trip to Pluto and back in a matter of days – along with a failure of communications. O’Donnel was originally scheduled to be on the Super Nova but Murray volunteers since the usual signaller is incapacitated but mainly to be near O’Donnel.

There is a large amount of information dumping (the story was intended for young adults though.) More noticeably these days the societal assumptions of its time or, rather, of MacVicar’s time, he was born in 1908 after all, are littered through it.

It turns out that in its pass round Pluto Satellite 907 has been taken over by that (minor) planet’s native intelligences, intrinsically hateful. They had in the past boosted Pluto from orbit round Neptune, a manœuvre which also forced Triton into its retrograde motion round its parent.

Close encounters with Satellite 907 lead to the Super Nova’s crew beginning to develop feelings of antipathy towards each other, leading on to much worse emotions. This is of course the influence of the Plutonians. Relief from these comes when Pluto’s spin takes the relevant transmitter round its edge. (Did they not, I wondered, have a relay system to ensure continuity? Never mind, it’s for YA; let’s carry on.)

The main action involves Murray having to approach the satellite during the transmission lull to deactivate its self-destruct device. For this he needs the relevant tools and Janie offers to take them to him. There is an uncomfortable scene where after he loses consciousness and Janie performs the actual deed she later tells him (in order to protect his self-esteem) that he did it.

One of the characters ruminates that, as a historical phenomenon, “Nobody seemed to like the Jews” then that “this was partly their own fault for being so inward looking, so close and clannish, so rigid in their beliefs.” Victim blaming or what.

But all on Earth is apparently now in harmony, technical and social benefits bind everyone in fairness to contribute in work and example. The Plutonians are somehow managing to undermine these feelings of togetherness and instilling fear and distrust – even hate.

The orbital dynamics of all of the ‘stopped in space’ gubbins are of course nonsense but without them there wouldn’t be a story.

The quaintness of this vision of the future is underlined by one of the characters using a “pocket space-range calculator” (looking like a cross between a set-square and a spirit level!) which was his own invention.

It is unusual to find in a work of SF, let alone a juvenile, as these stories were called back then, references to Goethe and James Hogg.

Similarly, I doubt any other piece of SF has ever employed the Scots word ‘douce’. Kudos to Scotsman MacVicar for that.

Diagrams of Satellite 907, the Archimedes class of ship, Pluto’s escape from orbit round Neptune, the Super Nova, a Moon Bus (with a crane attachment!) a laser-armed scout ship and a lunar vacuum suit appear as an appendix.

Sensitivity note: as well as the reference to Jews above, there is a mention of a Negro mayor, and the phrase “the nigger in the spatial woodpile.”

Pedant’s corner:- collander (colander,) “[responsible] for discovering minerals, oils and other products” (oils? On the Moon?) “dog’s-bodies” (nowadays – and perhaps even in 1969 – dogsbodies,) similies (similes,) span (spun,) “on the base of pure logic” (on the basis of pure logic,) “came to a stop in her orbit” (spaceships are not cars; they cannot just stop, they keep going until something changes their direction. This, as a plot point, ought to have been elaborated on,) 9o7 (907,) I noted the abbreviation ‘mike’ (which is now often rendered as ‘mic’,) the burst of flame from an atomic explosion “would become a towering mushroom cloud” (not in space it wouldn’t. The ‘cloud’ would be approximately spherical in shape,) “a spot of rust having formed” (on a screw fixing on a spaceship. In space the chemical conditions for rusting are not present. [To be charitable I suppose the rusting could have occurred during manufacture on Earth.] But also only iron can form rust [other metals corrode, but the result is not rust] but if they are to be launched from Earth, iron is too dense a material to make spaceships from.)

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.)

Victor Gollancz, 1985, 157 p.

As its title betokens this novel is about the lives of the inhabitants of a tenement which is old, built of grey granite in a town on the east coast of Scotland, and is personified in the first chapter as being somewhat intolerant of young people, preferring its inhabitants to have lived a little. As we start there are no children living in the building.

On the top floor we have Mrs Miller, a now reclusive widow embittered by the death of her husband in a lightning strike. She has visited her daughter in Rhodesia, and has all the prejudices against “the blacks” which that engendered.

Opposite live Mr and Mrs Cameron. He is a dyed in the wool Protestant, hence naturally a rabid supporter of Rangers. He is profoundly anti-Catholic and beats his wife.

Below them are the Masons, still young and expecting a child. Mr Mason feels guilty that he does nothing to confront Cameron’s violence. On the same floor lives former teacher Trevor Porter who claims to be a poet but is unpublished and has regrets about the lack of attention he paid to his now late wife.

On the ground floor are Mrs Floss, left relatively well off when her husband died, who takes cruises – and lovers while she’s at it – and retired milkman Mr Cooper who has a summer job as a lavatory attendant, tales of which he regales to Mrs Mason, which she finds a bit creepy.

Each impinges on the others but mostly in passing until a celebration of the Masons’ baby leads to the novel’s signal act.

The novel has some insights but there is something curiously inconsequential about it all and nobody in the tenement the reader can really root for. It could have done with a leavening of the humour found in the author’s “Murdo” stories.

Pedant’s corner:- “There had been …. widowed, men” (no need for that comma,) “he had wakened up” (woken up,) “James’ car” (James’s,) mediaeval (hurrah!) “a Rangers’ supporter” (‘a Rangers supporter.’ No-one would write, for example ‘a Motherwell’s supporter.’)

Salt, 2023, 183 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 8.

Alice Thompson is a veteran of seven previous novels but as far as I’m aware none of them has been Science Fiction. Concerning as it does a voyage to another planet (or, strictly, to its moon) this book could hardly be described as anything else. Yet it is not a typical exemplar of modern SF. Unlike the brashness of the average space exploration story its tonal qualities are more reminiscent of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris or David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. Its epigraph, perhaps the most famous quotation from The Tempest, suggests the trajectory that will follow.

A prologue sets up the body of the text as a tale of lost memory. Artemis was the sole human returnee of her crew from their trip to Oneiros on the spaceship Chimera in a search for bacteria that could break down carbon dioxide to obviate global warming. Two dryads, hybrids of computing powers and cloned human DNA provided by anonymous donors, came back with her. Though she has none of Oneiros she is now setting down as a novel, Chimera, the memories she has of the trip.

This odyssey from a beleaguered world where – apart from “the IT elite, the governing body called the elITe” (who do not allow their children access to computers or smart phones) – all humans seem to be in thrall to “widespread automation and the internet of things” and “virtual reality had destroyed downtime and daydreaming” while “in many ways all human progress, except for AI, had stagnated,” is an incongruous endeavour. The crew seems mismatched and detached. Artemis tells us that in space humans are not allowed to dream; it is too unsettling for their daily work. Though she got on the trip more or less by subterfuge and has a slightly unbalanced mental history she is in charge of the medication to ensure this. “Pills suppress rapid eye movement.” Dryads record everything they see and hear. In their ever-lurking presence they come across like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey before David Bowman pulled its plugs.

Adding to the distancing effect odd things happen on board. Though it is cruising faster than the speed of light jolts affect the ship’s smooth passage. A dryad alters the temperature controls for no good reason. A bacterium appears on a microscope slide as if out of nowhere. Artemis starts to hear ringing bells. One of the crew, Ivan, disappears.

The oddnesses do not stop there. On Oneiros itself they land miles away from their destination and have to trek across a snowscape to reach the base built for them by automated fabricators. Artemis discovers there had been a previous research ship to the moon, the Siren, but Mission Control, personified in an AI named Cressida, lost contact with the crew and pilot dryads returned the ship. She begins to see shadows.

On a novelistic level the writing here is perfectly acceptable, though the book has flaws. Thompson brings attention to her use of quotations via asterisks and footnotes. That may be all very well in academic tracts but in a novel it distracts from the narrative. Oneiros is a tad too programmatically named. At times the information dumping could have been better integrated but there are also indications of a lack of familiarity with SF as a genre or with scientific processes. Stars are visible through Chimera’s windows even though it’s travelling faster than light. (I doubt light could be seen if it’s moving slower than any potential observer.) Before their trek across Oneiros, the crew take oxygen pills. (Just how are these supposed to work?)

The novel’s central concerns are the relationship between humans and dryads and the nature of consciousness – which Ivan opines may be a fundamental property of matter. The crew’s fate and that of Artemis are bound up with the absence of dreams. How does their loss affect people, how does their lack impact on the dryads?

An Epilogue describes Artemis’s novel’s fate and may be commenting on Artemis’s reliability as a narrator.

Chimera is a solid, very readable piece of work but in drawing comparison to Lem and Lindsay is setting a high bar.

Pedant’s corner:- “She turned to the dryad.’ Why?’” (She turned to the dryad. ‘Why?) “Just logarithms and data” (this was about a dryad. ‘Just algorithms and data’ makes more sense,) bacteria (used as if its singular. Occasionally the proper singular ‘bacterium’ pops up,) focussed (focused.) “our brains our designed to look for connections” (Our brains are designed to.) “There was always had a book of poetry” (no need for the ‘had’,) two sentences couched as questions but lacking their question mark. “Cressida gave him a disarming smile” (gave her,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech, “she could make out, through the blizzard, snow that covered the entire surface of the moon, with abnormally high mountains in the distance” (a blizzard tends to obscure anything more than a few metres away,) “minus 40 centigrade” (the official designation for that temperature scale is Celsius.) “‘Check for cuts. Frostbite can get in’” (Cold can get in [though it’s actually heat being lost] and then frostbite might develop.) “Their strength and stamina was formidable” (the ‘and’ makes this plural; ‘were formidable’,) “outside of it” (outside it.) “A empty wardrobe” (An empty.) “His brain was wired different” (differently.) Technicolour (I believe it was spelled Technicolor,) “like an idea struck the flat previous” (I haven’t a clue what this is supposed to mean,) “refraction of protons” (this was about light; refraction of photons, then,) “of this moon ?” (the space between moon and the ‘?’ was there to distribute the words in the line evenly but it looked odd.)

Dedalus, 2023 , 509 p. Reviewed for ParSec 8.

Crumey’s work has never been marketed as Science Fiction but has many intersections with the genre; not least his exploration of parallel worlds and alternative histories. This is by far, at 509 pages, the most lengthy of his novels yet published. It features some of those earlier preoccupations – music, concepts from Physics, the reliability of memory – yet cannot be said to be truly like any of its predecessors. It is multi-layered, multi-voiced, in parts reading more like a biography of Beethoven than a novel, but never less than readable.

We start off with a memoir from Beethoven’s sister-in-law, Therese, of his last days, but most importantly for this novel, of his last words, ‘Everything is allowed.’ Crumey deploys Therese’s voice beautifully. Practical, no nonsense, down-to-earth; not given to indulge the great man, for all his celebrity. We can utterly believe this is a woman who knew Beethoven and all his faults. But on this point Crumey has a trick up his sleeve.

There follows the first instalment of “Beethoven and Philosophy” as written by one Robert Coyle (the same one as in Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia) ruminating on that subject – on which he has been asked to write a piece for a book commemorating the 250^th anniversary of the composer’s birth. This superficially rambling but actually tightly written account discusses Beethoven’s music, life and connections while describing Coyle’s own circumstances navigating the Covid lockdowns, particularly the difficulties experienced by his deaf and dementia-ridden father and put upon mother. Coyle’s story weaves in and out of the text, interspersed with other sections centred on Axtoun House not far from Berwick Upon Tweed. These narratives are as written by the present-day Adam Crouch, a 1920s writer named J W N Sullivan (a confrère of John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield,) another memory of the house as it was in 1823 delivered by a woman named Marion who was called to act as governess to the owner Colonel Wilson’s all but idiot ward, an 1860 polemical reminiscence from one of Beethoven’s biographers, Schindler, and a recollection of a visit to the Hyle Centre at Axtoun House in 1923 by one Celia Carter. Most of these are returned to, only Marion’s and Celia’s are not.

Marion’s is by far the longest section in the book and, while being read, seems to bear very little relation to the rest. In it Crumey subverts the conventions of the 1820s novel via Marion’s assertive personality (a bit too twenty-first century?) and her taking down in invisible ink of Colonel Wilson’s letters written to a “Dear Brother in The Fold,” a shadowy organisation which Marion initially dismisses. However, in this intricately woven novel it is unwise to discount any detail. As Coyle later says, “We may have a book on everything, masquerading as a novel, or as a criticism of Shakespeare, or as a history of music,” and on the subject of writing a novel about Beethoven further opines, “were it not that the plethora of pre-existing attempts already gave sufficient argument against, others could easily be adduced.” The subject is greater than the imitation and the project would require “a mutual inter-relation of form and content, in a manner I can’t imagine.” A neat deflection of any possible criticism of the present endeavour.

In the 1923 sections we discover that a woman named Martha being treated at the Hyle Centre is under hypnosis recalling (as false memories?) the experiences of Therese and we may infer it is her transcribed speech, some of which J W N Sullivan peruses, whose prose has up to now been presented as that of Therese.

Scientific speculation also peppers the narratives. We are told that while Einstein’s theory enables verifiable predictions and explains certain observed facts, Beethoven’s music expresses, “What is explained or expressed amounts to a kind of knowledge or meaning that enlarges human understanding.” Apparently E T A Hoffmann said, “Beethoven’s music pulls the levers of horror, fear, dread, pain, and awakens the infinite longing that is the essence of romanticism.” Martha’s recalled memories are compared to a kind of telepathy analogous to radio, with transmitters and receivers, possibly even amplifiers. A physicist at Axtoun House mentions reverse causality where an event may be determined by a future condition rather than the past and we are treated to Ouspensky’s thought that time is three dimensional, like space. Coyle comes to the conclusion that “there is no flow to time – we only think there is.”

It is, though, Beethoven’s life and legacy that ties everything here together; or rather “a lost opera by Beethoven, commissioned by freemasons. Like The Magic Flute but altogether darker.” An opera entitled The Assassins, or Everything is Allowed. Later revealed as being set in the time of the Crusades, featuring guardians of a magic elixir said to bring immortality or death to whoever consumes it, Hachichin, whose name may, or may not, have been derived from the drug.

As Coyle, Crumey has a go at those twenties authors who used the “real people as fictional characters technique” and who “turned life into art with fiercely score-settling energy, perhaps because the truth of their passions was greater than any that could be invented, or maybe they just lacked the confidence to make things up.” His own proposed novel will be about the inescapably mediated way Beethoven’s music is now received; as something – “as performance or meme, as story or picture, as succession of emotions, always as ‘as’.” I leave the final ‘as’ for the reader to discover.

The relevance of Crumey’s background in Theoretical Physics to everyday life – and to literature – is stated in the thought, “Quantum physics asks us to imagine forms of matter existing simultaneously in contradictory states. One need only look at human affairs to see such things in effect.”

This is exemplified in literature. It ought to be even more so in Science Fiction, where, as in music, everything is allowed.

Pedant’s corner:- “Vocal chords” (cords,) “suitably discrete” (of sexual liaisons; so ‘discreet’,) “Dr Hines’” (Hines’s,) “suddenly its increased” (it’s,) “and offered to Sullivan” (offered it to Sullivan,) “the kitchen cupboard was a different story when I opened and was rewarded” (when I opened it and was.) “‘Bring it when your ready.’” (When you’re ready.)

Canongate, 2018, 137 p.

This is part of a departure for Kennedy. Her earlier books were short story collections and novels intended for adults. However in 2017 she started producing a series of children’s stories about featuring Uncle Shawn and Badger Bill – and llamas. The Little Snake is another diversion. On one level it is a children’s story, on another a fable, and on a third a meditation on death.

Mary is a girl living in a strange city where kites are flown from rooftops. One day she feels a strange sensation and observes a golden circlet round her ankle. This is the little snake Lanmo. Usually he is the angel of death, but with Mary he forms a friendship. Lanmo comes and goes many times throughout her life seeing her grow up, fall in love and mature while her (nameless) city becomes less and less hospitable as time goes by and war encroaches on its inhabitants.

Lanmo tells her of his sense of oddness that humans spend so much of their time contriving so many different ways to kill each other when their lives will end in any case. Selflessly he helps her escape to a better life but is in turn changed by her.

This is a book coloured by intimations of the modern world, the shadow of war, the necessity of migration, the kindness of strangers, the acceptance of death at the end of a life well lived.

For such a short book it carries quite a punch.

Pedant’s corner:- remarkably – even though the book is short – there is nothing to report here.

Penguin, 2022, 374 p.

The book is set in a remote(ish) Highland glen, Glen Conach, named for the (unofficial) Saint who first converted the locals to Christianity, in three different time periods.

There are extracts from the Book of Conach, amounting to tales of his doings and good deeds. (In many ways these reminded me of the life of the Zen Buddhist, Hakuin Ekaku, as told in Alan Spence’s Night Boat. Then again the lives of religious ascetics are all probably very similar.)

That book was in the early 1800s in the library of Thomas Milne, Baron of Glen Conach, and a certain Charles Kirkliston Gibb had been invited (or invited himself) to examine and translate it. Dated entries from Gibbs’s journal of the time, found in the house’s ruins after it was destroyed by fire in the 1830s, are the other major thread. Gibbs thinks Milne is “surely a Tory but even sixty years since that did not oblige a man to be a Jacobite.…. Most Scots are Jacobite to some degree, whether they own it or not. Lamenting ‘what might have been’ eases our guilt at having thrown in our lot with the English. It is part of our character, I think, to love a lost cause.” The ‘sixty years since’ reference to Scott’s Waverley and the latter sentiments of this passage are another example of this perennial Scottish Literature itch.

The third strand, from the present day, gives us the thoughts of an old woman, Maja, who has a benign interest in a young boy, Lachie, who tells her he has seen a ghost. Her musings are a kind of framing device, topping and tailing the book. This gives the novel’s structure an unbalanced feel, though. The extracts from the book of Conach are undoubtedly necessary but they are too many and can feel repetitive. (Read about one ascetic and you’ve read about them all.)

The book’s transcriber Gibbs is a complete chancer, wanting to spin his examination of it out in order to avail himself of his host’s hospitality for as long as possible and casting around in his mind for which laird of his acquaintance he can sponge off next. Nevertheless, his debates with Baron Conach provide scope for philosophising. The Baron tells him, “‘Humans are the same in whatever condition they are found, though when men from different societies are by chance thrown together they may perceive themselves to be so unalike that one takes flight, while another worships, a third enslaves and a fourth murders his fellow creature. This is tragedy, my dear Charles, but is it not true? When Cain slew Abel he slew himself also.’”

Gibbs finds himself at first repelled by the Baron’s daughter Jessie’s birthmark but they become drawn together as much by proximity as anything else. The servant, Elspeth, though, has the best lines. She sees through Gibbs from the off and is as perky and sassy as you could wish. Her connections to the family are strong enough for her to have eyes on the estate’s heir. She says she’ll take a soldier for herself. Alexander Milne is indeed away with the army – as countless others from the glen have been, some not to come back, a familiar Highland tale. The army’s expedition to Walcheren ends badly, of course. But it does bring Elspeth her soldier.

The village is a microcosm, the local dominie and the minister both harbouring secrets. Gibbs reflects on one of the minister’s sermons that “The common folk of Scotland yield to none in their religiosity but I do wonder sometimes how deep it runs, and if one day they might suddenly discard it.” Perhaps a latter day thought untimely ripp’d.

In the present day researchers from university are scouring the glen to record oral tales of Conach, the details of which sometimes differ from those in the long lost book.

We end with Maja’s tale of the dumb lass, a stranger like Conach, who turned up in the glen in the aftermath of the Second World War and was taken in. “We humans have our waifs and strays like any other species of animal. We probably have far more.” The lass was dumb only in the sense that she did not speak.

A book, then, about kindness to strangers, refuge, and place in the world.

Robertson is never less than worth reading.

Pedant’s corner:- “came to nought” (came to naught.)

House of Lochar, 2000, 174 p. First published 1987.

This is Mitchison’s imagination of what life in pre-historical Orkney might have been like for its human inhabitants. It is not much differet from her tales of the times when Vikings were the dominant force in the islands.

The characters she shows us, however, have names which are more descriptive than abstract (Metoo, Barebum, Hands, Thinlegs, Keeper, Good Woman, Big Woman,) as they cope with their world and seek to understand and exploit it. Hands is fascinated by what he calls the shining edge, glimmering out beyond the sea horizon, and builds a rudimentary boat to get to it, taking some of the others with him. What they find there is more of the same but the new land contains less than a handful of fellow humans, some of whom had disappeared from their settlement years before. Along the story’s way these ancient indigenes learn to spin wool and weave yarn.

This may not have been exactly how Orkney’s earliest humans lived but seems plausible enough.

Pedant’s corner:- “this had to been seen to” (to be seen to,) “in Hands’ mind” (in Hands’s mind.) “There was also children old enough” (There were also children,) “as the cows names came up” (cows’ names,) “like their Aunties names” (Aunties’ names,) a missing opening quote mark at the beginning of a piece of direct speech.)