The Murders of Molly Southbourne
Tor.com, 2017, 117 p.

Molly Southbourne has been brought up from birth with the mantras:-
If you see a girl who looks like you, run and fight.
Don’t bleed.
If you bleed, blot, burn and bleach.
If you find a hole, find your parents.

She has a genetic condition that means copies of her, described as mollys, will grow – in days, from any source of sustenance to hand – to full sized human replicas. Replicas intent on killing her. Her only recourse will be in killing them first, hence the mantras, and then disposing of the remains. In extremis she has tattooed on her arm a number she can call on for help.

Molly’s story is told by way of a framing device wherein our narrator is being held captive – by Molly herself as we find out when she relates her past to the narrator after making sure she is quiescent.

Albeit laced with an abundance of violence this is an enjoyable mixture of fantasy, horror, paranoid thriller and spy story, given a Science Fictional gloss when it is revealed Molly’s mother was a spy sent behind the Iron Curtain to investigate a secret Soviet project to find a cure for fertility rates falling worldwide, then to steal it. Caught in the act, she instead injected herself with it, hence Molly’s condition.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian; spellings such as hemophilia etc (haemophilia, or better, hæmophilia.)

The Survival of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson
Tor.com, 2019, 122 p.

Our narrator calls herself Molly Southbourne but no clones form from her blood when it is shed. She is, though, the same molly whom the original Molly kept captive in the previous book before going off to confront the army of mollys whom we assume did Molly to death. This molly has all of Molly’s memories, of her parents Connor and Mykhaila Southborne, of all the mollys she murdered to prevent herself being killed.

This book, though, is slightly different in that at least to begin with there are interpolations [headed Transcript] of the thoughts of Professor James Down, an academic whom Molly set her cap at in Book One; fatefully as it happens because some of Molly’s blood must have leaked into him and he has what Thompson has dubbed in this book a hemoclone [sic] growing inside him – a molly which will kill him: as one did her previous lover, Leon, for the same reason.

Our viewpoint molly soon finds herself pursued by other women identical to each other; called tamaras after their originator. Tamara is trying to protect our molly as it is her belief that the organisation Molly thought was there to protect her is in fact designed to kill hemoclones.

This all seems to be set during the Cold War, contemporaneously with the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcher. Both Molly and Tamara had within them artificial cells, the ones Molly’s mother and presumably others as well as Tamara had been infected with. This renders the concept as fully Science Fictional. We are told these artificial cells act as matter converters. From a drop of blood they can make “a full human duplicate based on the genetic material of the Prime from almost any base material: wood, soil, organic waste, even metals.”

In this strange paranoid world our molly soon comes to trust no-one.

Pedant’s corner:- Again published in USian. “James Dawn” (elsewhere he’s James Down,) “a full human duplicate based on the genetic material of the Prime from almost any base material: wood, soil, organic waste, even metals” (this phrase reads as if a full human duplicate could be made solely from metal; it could not,) hemoclone (haemoclone or, better, hæmoclone,) “the lay of the land” (the lie of the land.)

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.)

This was my Scottish reading (including a Scottish setting) in 2019.

Those in bold were in that list of 100 best Scottish Books.

15 by women, 15 by men, one non-fiction,* two with fantastical elements.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
A Concussed History of Scotland by Frank Kuppner
Romanno Bridge by Andrew Greig
Winter by Ali Smith
Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land by John Crowley
The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
Tunes of Glory by James Kennaway
Hy Brasil by Margaret Elphinstone
Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
The Land the Ravens Found by Naomi Mitchison
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
Independence by Alasdair Gray*
The Lantern Bearers by Ronald Frame
Gone Are the Leaves by Anne Donovan
Children of the Dead End by Patrick MacGill
A Pass in the Grampians by Nan Shepherd
Brond by Frederic Lindsay
The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh
The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams
Its Colours They Are Fine by Alan Spence
Reality, Reality by Jackie Kay
Salem Chapel by Mrs Oliphant
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Spring by Ali Smith
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
Jelly Roll by Luke Sutherland
The Citadel by A J Cronin
Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison
Where the Bodies Are Buried by Christopher Brookmyre

Polygon, 2007, 220 p. First published 1984. One of the 100 best Scottish Books.

Glasgow University student Richard sees a man throw a boy off a bridge into the River Kelvin but at first thinks he must have imagined it. Through the medium of fellow student Margaret Briody, whom he fancies and who asks him to deliver a package for her, it is not long before he is drawn into a complex situation involving IRA sleepers, multiple murder and the machinations of agents of the state against Scottish independence activists (though this last does not become clear until quite late on in the book.) Chief of those agents is the mysterious Brond of the title, whose baleful presence pervades the novel.

Before settling into the more or less standard thriller mode, though with the odd philosophical aside, the narrative has a tendency to be slightly overwritten, as if Lindsay is trying too hard, though there are some fine touches. (Of the noise-propagating acoustics of the University of Glasgow’s Reading Room Robert says, “It was such a drawback in a library I was sure the architect must have won a clutch of awards.”)

The politics of the plot are mostly relegated to the background. One character describes Scotland as a valuable piece of real estate, another opines, “here in Scotland we have this difficulty finding our voice.” One English girl questions Robert, “‘What do you mean “accent”?’” before adding, “‘I don’t talk like a Cockney… I talk like ordinary people who sound as if they don’t come from anywhere.’” One of the spooks speaks of the necessity “‘to forestall … the risk, however remote, of the natives here getting restless.’”

In my view there are too many thriller/crime novels on that “100 Best” list. Brond is yet another. I can see, because of the background politics, why some people might regard it as a significant Scottish novel but it doesn’t, to my mind, really address the nature of Scottishness, or go much beyond “the state acts in its own interests” trope though it incidentally reflects attitudes of some English people to their neighbours.

It does, however, all pass easily enough but I was never able to suspend my disbelief to the required degree.

Pedant’s corner:- like lightening (lightning,) sulphur lamps (they did give off a yellowish light but they were sodium lamps,) the Barrows (always known as the Barras, never the Barrows. Its name above its gates even says ‘the Barras’,) contigent (contingent,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, comitments (commitments.)

Pan, 1999. 421p

Saul Garamond is arrested when his father is found dead having fallen, jumped or been pushed, through a window of their house. Saul is sprung from custody by a mysterious figure who calls himself King Rat and asserts that Saul’s mother was a Rat. King Rat is able to move freely between the London which Saul knows and the unnoticed spaces which constitute a hidden Rat city. Under his tutelage Saul becomes rat-like too but King Rat, of course, is not quite what he seems. In this netherworld Saul also meets the Bird Superior, Loplop, and Anansi, head of the spiders. Meanwhile Saul’s friend Natasha, a creator/DJ of Drum and Bass, is befriended by a mysterious flute player called Pete and Police Inspector Crowley is increasingly puzzled by the spate of bizarre and bloody murders occurring on his patch.

The other city conceit seems to be one of Miéville’s running themes; it also occurs in Un Lun Dun and THE CITY & YTIC EHT though of course this would be its first appearance. (King Rat is the last in my attempt to catch up with Miéville’s oeuvre apart from his latest Kraken.) This one is very London-centric though, which annoyed me strangely.

The language of the novel is simple; even a little sketchy at times. In this it has pre-echoes of Un Lun Dun. Indeed, were it not for the violence and the expletives this could well have been a tale for young adults.

Though the plot strands do cohere and music is integral to its resolution, at times the novel appears diffuse, as if it does not know whether to be a fantasy, a musical odyssey or a police procedural – though it has embedded within it a nice retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story told from the rats’ point of view. Miéville also takes the opportunity to throw in a minor bit of political consciousness raising.

Had I read this on first publication I could certainly have foreseen an Un Lun Dun – though perhaps not a Perdido Street Station.

But: One of the characters seems to be under the impression that layered music never existed before Drum and Bass. Come off it.