"The Gay Decameron" by Christopher Whyte

A group of gay men, mostly in pairs, gather for a dinner party in the posh Edinburgh flat of one of the couples. They reminisce about the past and tell stories. Some of them have been lovers, or have made love to someone whom someone else at the party has loved. Some of their friends are now dead, for example one committed suicide and another died from AIDS. Each of them remembers their own journey from the first realisation that they were gay to now. 

It's quite convoluted and I needed notes to keep track of who was who and who had slept with whom. Although the characters had different experiences and did different things, I didn't feel that they were sufficiently differentiated. In a way, and perhaps this was the theme of the book, they all merged into one archetypal gay experience. Not that they were all the same! Some experienced long periods of chastity, others were very promiscuous. But the basic pattern was that relationships begin tentatively, with risk, and frequently end in toxic unhappiness, but the goal is almost always a stable, loving and enduring partnership.

The one part of the book I would have junked is the fantasy story of the young lovers set somewhere in the Middle East in the middle ages. I suppose the idea was that this was a world in which gay love was accepted as everyday. But it read like soft porn and clashed with the realistic stories of modern gay life in Edinburgh (and Barcelona). 

Selected quotes:

• “A crossroads town with ramshackle buildings lining either side of the street, like drunken soldiers unexpectedly summoned to parade.” (Ch 2)
• “Sad and alone ... rattling around in this huge flat like the last biscuit left in the tin.” (Ch 11)
• “The further up the tree a monkey is, the more of its backside you get to see.” (Ch 15)
• “The further upwards in price range one goes, the more anonymous hotel rooms become.” (Ch 16)
• “Candles were hard and solid. Yet they transformed themselves into light the moment you gave them the chance.” (Ch 23)

October 2025; 346 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1998

My paperback edition was issued by Indigo in 1999.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Death in a Shetland Lane" by Marsali Taylor

 

Another brilliant murder mystery set in Shetland and starring sleuth and sailor Cass Lynch.

Shortly after her band's triumphs in the Shetland heats of a national talent show, the gorgeous backing singer falls to her death. But was she pushed? And has this anything to do with the singer's boyfriend, accused of scuttling a rival's fishing boat, or a recently exhumed Book of the Black Arts?

As ever, Cass is on the spot. The usual characters are all here: Gavin the policeman boyfriend, Cat and the newly pregnant Kitten, Maman and Magnie and Peerie Charlie. And behind the investigation lies all the everyday life of Shetland and the big question: can Cass settle down with Gavin for a life on shore or is their love doomed?

The joy of this beautifully written series is the feeling of verisimilitude. Whether Cass is performing CPR, sailing with killer whales, playing with a four-year-old or helping at a food bank, this author takes the time and trouble to make me feel part of the Shetland community. As always there is the dialect, carefully crafted so that even a soothmoother like myself can understand what the locals are saying (and there's a glossary in case I struggle). This is so much more than a murder mystery: it is a welcome to another world. 

There are also some beautiful descriptions:

• "I went out to sniff the air and was met by an outrage of cheeping from within the flowering currant bushes" (Ch 4) Outrage!
• "The sea was back to winter cobalt, the hills dusted with icing sugar." (Ch 23)

Selected quotes:

• "the speed o’ him was like the sun upon the wall." (Prologue)
• "all the aerodynamic qualities of a flattened-out sugar bag." (Ch 3)
• "the former Hilltop bar, where we’d tried to buy an underage pint (we’d failed because the sneaky folk of Mid Yell had got an ex-teacher on the bar for regatta night, who could tell the age of teenagers to the second)" (Ch 17)
• "Merran nodded, but continued telling her story backside foremost." (Ch 21)

January 2025

Published in 2023; I read the kindle edition

This is the eleventh novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The first ten books, in order, are:

• Death on a Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders
• A Handful of Ash
• The Body in the Bracken
• Ghosts of the Vikings
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Nothing Left to Fear from Hell" by Alan Warner

Bonnie Prince Charlie has escaped the killing grounds of the Battle of Culloden, fled across mainland Scotland, and is now hiding among the Hebridean islands, hungry, dirty and frequently sodden, with a few loyal companions, ever alert for a hint of a redcoated soldier.

This short novel describes, in visceral detail, his tribulations.  In the first chapter, we watch as he vomits, defecates and urinates. Warner deploys remarkable powers of description as we endure, with the Prince, the infamous West Highland midges, we tramp with him across then landscape, losing our shoes in sucking bogs. To start off with I wondered if, perhaps, the descriptions had gone overboard, foregrounding the language to the extent that the narrative was disrupted.  for example, the end of the second paragraph states that "a blunt phalanx of fumes manouevred from the outcrops of the low island snuffing its colours down to a bulk." The third paragraph then begins: "A shore emerged from the briny effluvium ..." Words such as 'phalanx' and 'effluvium' seemed to me to shout for attention, as if the author was showing off. But then I thought that this sort of language would be routine if this was poetry. That's when I realised that this is wildly, wonderfully, impressively poetic prose. And, once we have reached the second chapter, the balance between description and dialogue, between observation and action, somewhat settles down, leaving the reader with a story that is nevertheless rendered in language so lyrical as to become a thing of beauty in itself.

Then we learn about the characters, focusing on that of the Young Pretender. He is portrayed as "a chancer who brought havoc" as the author himself says in an afterword. He's a chameleon of a man, stoic and terrified, charming and petulant, selfish and repeatedly self-deluding as he describes the latest roofless byre as a palace and assures his followers that he will return with a French army, at times courageous and at others, such as when he is hysterically frightened of being captured and hanged, drawn and quartered, a frightened rabbit. 

This is a remarkable picture of a human being in all his moods and  aspects and it combines with the rapturously expressive and passionate descriptions of the landscape, a character in its own right, to make an outstanding work of literature.

Selected quotes:

• "Rising and dipping oars sounding like the slap of linen shirts on riverside stones." (Ch 1) What a metaphor! And so in period!
• "A terrible frown cracked along the brow, showing some tender pink in a single serration, like the glistening raw streak against the charcoal of barbecued mutton, skewered fresh and smoking from fire." (Ch 2)
• "The hems of her sacking shroud were a sodden mash that dragged over heather clumps, so the creature's means of phantom locomotion beneath were invisibled." (Ch 2) I loved this sentence from the alliteration at the start of the sentence to the anthimeria of 'invisibled' at the end.
• "Herring gulls passed over low, curiously silent like possible informers." (Ch 5)
• "The way to have peace on earth: blindness for all. For sightless men could make no war. ... The cannon? Are you certain our cannon face them, and not us?"  (Ch 6)
• "The magnitude of these cliffs, no so close and huge above them, was a nauseating thing, putting far away the comforting notions that among houses, formed fields, tracks and hedgeways, as we walk to church, we move in a world God fitted for us with snug accommodation, adapted to the size and shape of humankind and rightly appointed." (Ch 8)
• "It walked like an adrift coo with a deid stillborn hanging out the hole in its arse." (Ch 9)
• "The mountainsides were reflected in those waters below, faithful and absolute, so every dimple and dapple of the braes became imitated and inverted on the dark water surface - it was as if the world was unsure which way up it actually stood, for the steady and gorgeous birdsong was unaffected by inversion, the sound had no top and no bottom." (Ch 11)

May 2024; 136 pages

 Warner also wrote Morvern Callar.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Young Adam" by Alexander Trocchi

Young Adam is about a rootless man working on canal barges in Scotland. This hyper-realistic story describes a few months in his life, from the discovery of a woman's drowned body in the canal, through his various sexual escapades.

It is told in very spare prose, which reminded me of The Outsider by Camus. It conjured up images of the 'kitchen sink' films and dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The deadpan narrative related what had happened with very little comment; at the same time there were nuggets of philosophy, such as "It is the word 'I' which is arbitrary and which contains within it its own inadequacy and its own contradiction." (1.1)

I think I most enjoyed the first part of the book, which sets the scene, and seems to be a narrative going nowhere about an amoral young man going nowhere; again reminiscent of the existential novels of Camus (and Sartre). In the second part there is more narrative and at the same time more introspection. It is more conventional and less alienated, yet somehow less amoral (because the narrator seems to recognise his ethical dilemma, so there is more understanding of right and wrong). 

Trocchi also wrote Cain's Book, a more experimental, much less structured and beatnik-influenced book about a junkie living on a barge in America.

Selected Quotes:

• "From the moment I had wakened that morning things had begun to happen, nothing spectacular - I'm not talking about the corpse - but a kind of excitement at the edges of me." (1.2)
• "The brick factory stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke." (1.3)
• "There is a point at which a man and a woman stalk one another like animals ... each move on either side being capable of more than one interpretation." (1.3)
• "I had experienced before this conjunction, I mean the cold air containing the warm smell of a woman." (1.4)
• "What we said was trivial but our way of saying it was not." (1.5)
• "What remained implied what was missing." (1.5)
• "Above, a ribbon of white sky, just beginning to be overclouded, from which rain fell in slender, broken javelins." (2.2)
• "I am a rootless kind of man." (2.3)
• "All judges, it occurred to me, all lawyers and lawyers' clerks ought to be forced to try their case in the nude." (3.1)
• "Whether or not they are conscious of it, all judges must look upon themselves as God. To judge is to presume one is God." (3.2)

December 2022; 153 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"His Bloody Project" by Graeme Macrae Burnet

This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. Other Booker novels, in 2016 and other years, can be found here.

Set in a remote highland village in 1869, this novel is made up of the testimonies of Roderick Macrae, a crofter's son accused of a gruesome triple murder, and others involved in the case. There is never any question of whodunnit, only of why and whether the accused can be described as insane. All the characters are intensely believable (although the narration of the protagonist is hugely articulate and apparently lacking in dialect) and I can't remember so rooting for a murderer since Good Times, Bad Times by James Kirkwood. Once we get into the narrative, it was a page turner. At the same time, the author uses the narrative to highlight the iniquities and abuses of power inherent in the laird-crofter relationship of the time.

Selected quotes:

• "My father did not like Mr Gillies. He was too clever for his own good and teaching children was not proper work for a man." 
• "For folks like us there is no other ship than the hard ship."
• "Mrs MacLeod was an ancient widow known as the Onion on account of the great number of layers of clothing she wore." 
• "It is not the blow that causes greatest distress, but the anticipation of it."
• "The gaoler showed no surprise ..., This class of being exists almost entirely in the present; they think little of the past nor project their thoughts into the future, and are thus incapable of being surprised by anything. They are similarly incapable of experiencing boredom and are accordingly well-suited to undemanding and repetitive labour."
• "Prisoners rarely express remorse for what they have done. Any feelings of regret they might feel are generally limited to the fact of their being apprehended." 

July 2022; 280 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Death from a Shetland Cliff" by Marsali Taylor

 Another murder mystery to be solved by intrepid Shetland sailor Cass Lynch and her policeman boyfriend DI Gavin Macrae. Cass looks after Tamar, an elderly lady, discharged from hospital after a fall, at her remote croft. The vultures gather from near and far (London and even New Zealand). Some want Tamar to leave her the croft. Others are chasing the rumour that one of Tamar's relatives might be an (illegitimate but, under Scottish law, full) heir to the estate of the laird. Has Tamar got something that thieves want? And what is hidden in the container near the jetty? 

Death provokes further questions. Why did the man fall to his death from the nearby cliff? And when further deaths occur: what happened and why?

As it happened, for once, I was ahead of Cass every step of the way. But it didn't matter. I love these books not for the puzzles they pose, though that is an essential ingredient of all good whodunnits, and not for the inevitably nail-biting finish at the end, but for the quality of the writing, the perfectly-drawn characters, the insight into Shetland life, and the lyrical descriptions of sailing and scenery. 

Selected quotes:

• "Given that I’d lived on a series of boats for the last fifteen years, since I was sixteen, I didn’t see why just being female qualified me for the post of Chief Inspector of Housework" (Ch 1)
• "A brown Shetland wren landed on the drystone dyke that enclosed it, bobbed at us, chittered indignantly, then flew into a cranny between two grey-lichened stones." (Ch 1)
• "The stairs were best grade traditional crofthouse, with a gradient similar to a ladder’s, going straight up between wooden walls." (Ch 1)
• "I was still wary of large animals that had a bite at one end and a kick at the other." (Ch 1)
• "The gold flush along the bottom of the eastern cumulus faded to grey, and the clouds jostled over the sun, leaving only a chink of bright sky." (Ch 2)
• "Outside, the wind had fallen to a cold breath on my bare arm. The sky was not yet dark; there was a band of lavender along the horizon, shading up to creamy-blue that gradually deepened to indigo. Three stars glittered. Even as I watched, the lavender darkened to heather purple." (Ch 2)
• "Her eyes seemed too big, green searchlights seeking out other people’s frailties." (Ch 5)
• "She paused, and tilted her head towards the guest bedroom. ‘No sign of life from there. Probably doesn’t know there is a morning.’" (Ch 6)
• "Loretta had copied the short, flicked-back haircut, and walked as if she expected people to bring her flowers as she passed." (Ch 7)
• "I felt my inner socialist welling up." (Ch 11)
• "I wouldn’t keep trying to have my butter and the money for it" (Ch 15)
• “Why on earth,” I told her, “would he carry poison round with him in his backpack when he’s just coming to redd up kin? It’s a bit overly for a first meeting.”’ (Ch 17)
• "Dealing with disturbed people’s all in a day’s work for Superplod." (Ch 24)

This is a crime novel by a writer at the very top of her game.

August 2021

The brilliant books in this series, in order, include:

• Death on a Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders
• A Handful of Ash
• The Body in the Bracken
• Ghosts of the Vikings
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shuggie Bain" by Douglas Stuart

Written in the Glaswegian dialect, a realist and grimly authentic portrayal of the effects of alcoholism on a family living on the breadline.

It is an episodic narrative, told in the past tense, framed by a day in the life of Shuggie, a fifteen year old boy living on his own in a bedsit in Glasgow in 1992. It then flashes back to 1981 after which it gives a chronological account of episodes in Shuggie's life. The perspective jumps between the PoV's of Shuggie and other members of his family: his father Shug, his mother Agnes, his sister Catherine and his brother Leek. 

Shuggie is the eponymous hero and this is his bildungsroman but in many way the principal character is Agnes; the story chronicles her descent into alcoholism and its consequences. She's a beautiful woman who, when sober, attempts to maintain standards of beauty and good manners but is haunted by missed opportunities and what might have been. Sadness, and anger, leads to her drinking.

Shuggie is an infant at the start of the chronological narrative; his childhood is almost entirely blighted first by his mother's drinking and secondly because he is "no quite right", not a "normal" boy but a "wee poofter". He is bullied unmercifully at school and on the housing estate where he lives.

His older half-brother Leek is another tragic character, a hugely talented artist with an unconditional place at art school which he cannot accept because he can't abandon his alcoholic mother. In his eyes, especially after his older sister has escaped through marriage and emigration, he is the carer, crying after a particularly awful incident: "It's too much, Mammy. I can't be the one to save everybody all the time." (Ch 24) I spent a lot of the time fearing for Leek (because of the frame narrative the reader knows from the start that Shuggie will at least survive the story). 

The writing is wonderful. The verisimilitude is such that it is almost memoir: there were echoes of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. The dialect reminds me of the best of Irving Welsh (although his books, such as Ecstasy and Train Spotting are set in Edinburgh rather than Glasgow which anyone but a Sassenach like me can probably distinguish as distinct dialects). Shuggy's bowel problem is like that of Vernon God Little, another Booker Prize winner. 

Selected quotes:

• "On particularly low days he folded all types of his bodily discharge into the taramasalata. He sold an uncanny amount of that bourgeois shite." (Ch 1)
• “Pushing the metal through the bumpy pink flesh was the easy part; the difficult part was resisting the urge to do the same to the customers.” (Ch 1)
• “The littered promises of better things.” (Ch 2)
• "A life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright." (Ch 2)
• "He was a selfish animal, she knew that now, in a dirty, sexual way that aroused her against her better nature." (Ch 2)
• “Leek was a quiet soul, given to watching from the edges, capable of disappearing even when someone was talking to him.” (Ch 2)
  
• “Seeing the lights of Glasgow, he relaxed back into the seat, and for the first time that day his shoulders fell from around his ears.” (Ch 3)
• “Rain was the natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial.” (Ch 3)
• "He watched them rub their pink arms in the cold night air and shelf their tits over tight-folded arms." (Ch 3)
• "He was golden, though in reality, he was more of a dewy, translucent pink." (Ch 4)
• "His sweaty shenanigans had been separated from his family by a few feet of council-grade concrete." (Ch 6)
• "By the time the hackney had turned on the Pit Road, her children were in the hallway and Agnes, sparkling and fluffy, was lying like a party dress that had been dropped on the floor." (Ch 8)
• "It's got peas in it," said Leek, a little hurt that his fifteen-year war against green vegetables went unnoticed." (Ch 8)
• “She had loved him, and he needed to break her completely to leave her for good. ... It wouldn't do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.” (Ch 8)
• "The nights were gathering in again. The street lights were on, and a gang of collarless dogs wandered from stank to stank, sniffing the rotten drains. One pissed, and the others took their turns and marked the same spot." (Ch 9) A super metaphor for the humans who live in the god-forsaken mining town whose pit has closed.
• "Thirty-eight pounds a week was meant to keep and feed them all. It made mothers stand in the little shop and look at pint cartons of milk like they were a luxury." (Ch 10)
• "The women behind her did sums out loud, their lips moving as they counted, adding bread to oven chips to cigarettes and then, defeated, putting the bread quietly back on the shelf." (Ch 10) Later Agnes does the same, putting the food back and keeping her cans of lager.
• “He had grown taller but he had also sunk somehow, like bread dough stretched much too thin. ... He had slid deeper into himself and become more watchful and guarded.” (Ch 12)
  
• "'You should watch how you walk. Try not to be so swishy. It only puts a target on your back.' Leek made a great pantomime of walking like Shuggie. His feet were pointed neatly outwards, his hips dipped and rolled, and the arms swung by his side like there was no solid bone in them. 'Don't cross your legs when you walk. Try and make room for your cock.' Leek grabbed at the bulge in the front of his corduroy and strode back and forth in a half strut, half lazy amble." (Ch 13)
• "She sat on the edge of the clean settee with a can of courage and hissed it open." (Ch14)
• “Agnes's face was very thickly made up, and it looked to Shuggie like the paint had been layered over several other faces she had forgotten to take off first.” (Ch 15)
• "There was a smell of pine about him, from the kind of aftershave that smelled like bathroom cleaner, not a trace of sex in it." (Ch 17)
• “He took her hands and tried to tug her from the chair the way plumbers pull a stubborn clog out of a drain.” (Ch 17)
• "As with any good weather, there was always more rain on the other side." (Ch 18)
• “The redhead was staring at his feet as though there were a story written on his shoes.” (Ch 19)
• “She’d looked as happy as he could ever remember, and he was surprised how this hurt. it was all for the red-headed man. He had done what Shuggie had been unable to do.” (Ch 20)
• "He couldn't worry about next week. He'd have to worry about the rest of this week first." (Ch 24)
• “His face flushed a liar’s pink.” (Ch 29)
• "Ah think the more ye love someone the more they take the piss out of that. They will do less and less of what you want and more and more of just as they fuckin' please." (Ch 32)

A wonderfully written book; a worthy winner of the 2020 Booker Prize and the 2021 debut fiction of the year prize at the British Book Awards.

January 2021, reread and reblogged March 2025; 430 pages

First published in the UK by Picador in 2020.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Love Over Scotland" by Alexander McCall Smith

The third in the Scotland Street series of novels that includes:

• 44 Scotland Street
• Espresso Tales
• Love Over Scotland
• The World According to Bertie
• The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

One of the difficulties when you are publishing a series of novels such as this, with a large cast of recurring characters, must be how you ensure that the books are different. This book opens with Pat fancying a boy called Wolf ... but another in the series also opens with Pat fancying a boy. Bertie plays the saxophone and battles with his mother; the family car has gone missing again. Matthew years for Pat, again. Angus takes Cyril for a walk, again. For the first third of this book I had an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu; I believed I had already read the book. Perhaps this is a strength in that it attests to the strength of the familiar characters as in a TV soap opera. Perhaps this is also why authors are forced to resort to ever more extreme plot lines.

Alexander McCall Smith gently muses over the lives of his characters inhabiting the most genteel part of Edinburgh.

The strength of the books for me lies in the astute observations that he makes. Many of these things have been said many times before ... but they are worth saying:

• “Artists were allowed to look, he thought - no artist could really be considered a voyeur. Looking was what an artist was trained to do, and if an artist did not look, then he would not see.” (C 4)
• “He knew that his life was an adjunct life, lived in the shadow of his master.” (C 7)
• “Smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below.” (C 7)
• “The unmerited dislike of others made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.” (C 14)
• “The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us.” (C 17)
• “People fell in love with those who belonged to others. It happened all the time in fiction, and presumably in real life, too.” (C 24)
• “How many lonely women the length and breadth of Britain found Radio Four a very satisfactory substitute for a man? And Radio Four could so easily be turned off, just like that, whereas men ...” (C 29)
• “His eyes were fixed on the floor, hoping to locate the geological flaw which would swallow him up and save him from his current embarrassment. But of course there was none; at no time is the earth more firm than when we wish that it were not.” (C 39)
• “Such circumstances as these, she thought, remind us of just what we are: salt and water, for the most part.” (C 47)
• "This knowledge that Angus was not with him, made the world as dark and cold as if the sun had dropped out of the sky." (C 51)
• "He wanted to hit Larch, but he understood that principle which everybody, but particularly politicians and statesmen, understand very well: you only ever hit weaker people." (C 54)
• "The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back." (C 56)
• "Although we are most secure - in one sense - in our own homes, we are also at our most vulnerable, for the social persona, the one we carry out with us into the world, cannot be worn at ho,e all the time." (C 80)
• "Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most of us never bother to cultivate." (C 112)

January 2019

"The Unbearable Lightness of Scones" by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the fifth book in a series following the lives of characters living in and around 44 Scotland Street. It follows 44 Scotland Street, Espresso Tales, Love Over Scotland, and The World According to Bertie. In this installment:

• Bertie and Tofu join the cubs, despite being too young, but bossy Olive who claims to be Bertie's girlfriend joins too.
• Matthew, art gallery owner, and Elspeth who used to be Bertie's teacher get married and go on a honeymoon.
• Lard O'Connell, Glasgow gangster, has a 'Reaburn' portrait of Rabbie Burns
• Narcissistic Bruce splits up from his rich girlfriend and is spotted by a photographer as a potential model
• Big Lou's boyfriend gets involved with a the Jacobite Pretender
• Domenica steals a teacup
• Cyril, dog belonging to portrait painter Angus Lordie, fathers six puppies and desires Matthew's ankles.

All of this allows gentle reflections on life. McCall Smith's Edinburgh is so genteel it makes Jane Austen's world look sinister.

Some quotes:

• "While I'm eating lunch, people like me in Shanghai or Bombay are working - such were the implications of globalisation, that paraquat of simple security." (C 6)
• "The moral energy, the disapproval, that had fuelled Scotland's earlier bouts of over-enthusiastic religious intolerance were still with us, as they were with any society. It ... was present now in the desire to prevent people from doing anything risky or thinking unapproved thoughts. ... All that moral outrage, that self-righteousness, that urge to lecture and disapprove - it's all still there." (C 6)
• "The real secret in a still life, he thought, is to give the painting the sense of suppressed energy, if expectation, as if somebody were about to come into the room, to render the still life living" (C 6)
• "He was not sure why his mother had asked him to sit like a good boy; how exactly did a good boy sit, he wondered, and, perhaps more puzzlingly, how did a bad boy sit?"(C 9)
• "And we shouldn't deceive ourselves, Bruce thought; every single one of us makes compromises for money." (C 13)
• "Coffee, in all its forms, looks murky, and gives little comfort to one who seeks to see something in it." (C 15)
• "The barricades in this life ... are often in the wrong place." (C 20)
• "That [the nose] gives life to the face, because the nose has energy and direction. Whatever the subject's eyes may be doing ... the nose has business of its own." (C 30)
• "The architect who had designed these offices was of the school that did not believe in walls, except where utterly necessary to prevent the ceiling from falling down." (C 76)
• "Angus decided not to argue: Domenica had made up her mind, and he would be the loser in any argument. Women always win, he thought. They just always win." (C 77)

January 2019; 328 pages

"Friends, Lovers, Chocolate" by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the second book in the series starting with, and named after, The Sunday Philosophy Club starring philosopher and amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie. Like the 44 Scotland Street books, Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh which is depicted as a genteel village, everyone being middle class and educated and knowing one another. Not exactly Train-Spotting or Rebus!

In this book Dalhousie muses on life while meandering through it. She rather fancies her niece's ex-boyfriend who, unfortunately, still has the hots for the niece. There is the possibility of a dalliance with a handsome Italian. And she tries to solve the mystery of whether the memory of a heart transplant patient might be a 'cellular memory' of the killer of the heart donor.

It is remarkable how McCall Smith can weave a page-turning tale from such gentle observation of not-very-exciting gentlefolks. But he can.

There are one or two acute observations and there are lots of philosophical insights:

• "the stone was flaking slightly, and a patch had fallen off here and there, like a ripened scab, exposing fresh skin below." (C 1)
• "we must be judgemental ... when there is something to be judged." (C 1)
• "The bundle of urges and wants that went with being a physical being ... were at the bottom of most disputes between people." (C 3)
• "We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History ... could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination." (C 5)
• "Weather was a test of attitude ... Nice people ... were nice about the weather; nasty people were nasty about it." (C 8)
• "She could think of nothing worse that sitting for hours under an umbrella, an open invitation to sandflies, looking out to sea." (C 8)
• "Narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about ... we feted these people and fed their vanity." (C 9)
• "If we lived in a global village, then the boundaries of our responsibility were greatly extended. The people dying of poverty, the sick, the dispossessed, were our neighbours even if they were far away." (C 9)
• "Should one let people express their gratitude properly, even if one is embarrassed or reluctant to do so? There is an art in accepting a present, and indeed there is sometimes an obligation to let others give." (C 9)
• "She did not approve of promiscuity, which she thought made a mockery of our duty to cherish and respect others; an emotional fast food, really, which one would not wish on anybody. But at the same time one should not starve oneself." (C 11)
• "To be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with." (C 13)
• "'It's a Sisyphean labour for me. I push a rock up a hill and then it rolls down again'. 'Everyone's job is like that ... I wash things and they become dirty and need washing again'." (C 16)
• "Equality was dull, and goodness was dull too ... Peace was dull; conflict and violence were exciting."(C 16)
• "If one followed the well-ordered life one would start each day with the writing of one's letters of apology." (C 21)
•  "Sometimes the trips not taken are better than those one actually takes." (C 21)
• "Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don't they. Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong. The same applies to our lives." (C 23)

AMS has also written:

• 44 Scotland Street
• Espresso Tales
• The World According to Bertie

January 2019

"The Sunday Philosophy Club" by Alexander McCall Smith

Set in the same genteel and refined Edinburgh as the 44 Scotland Street stories (including Espresso tales and The world according to Bertie), Isabel Dalhousie is a gentlewoman with her own house and a housekeeper. Following a failed marriage and childless, she edits a philosophical review; otherwise she is a lady of leisure. At a night out listening to the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra she witnesses a young man fall from the Gods to his death in the Stalls. Or was he pushed? The stage is set for a gentle exploration of applied ethics, in particular whether and when one should tell a lie.

There is just enough plot to keep the pages turning but the main delight of this book lies in the intriguing insights of Ms Dalhousie. Here are just some of them:

• “She always felt inhibited from any act suggesting a lack of concentration or, worse still, of seriousness.” (C 1)
• “Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment.” (C 1)
• “You loved another, and this made you so vulnerable; just an inch or so too close to the edge and your world would change.” (C 2)
• “You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seems to her to be voyeurism.” (C 2)
• “Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?” (C 3)
• “Why, she wondered, should anyone actually want a hunk, when nonhunks were so much more interesting?” (C 4)
• “Only the very immature and the very stupid are impressed by the depraved.” (C 5)
• “Respectability was such an effort though, and there were bars and clubs where people might go and behave as they really wanted to behave, but did not dare so publicly.” (C 5)
• “How arid it must be to be a man; how constrained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in a desert.” (C 7)
• “I have bags of failings. Same as anybody else. Bags.” (C 13)
• “Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs. Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this ... They were impatient with those who they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged.” (C 14)
• “She was turned into a different station from most people and the tuning dial was broken.” (C 14)
• “Camus was right: the ultimate philosophical question was suicide. If there was no truth, then there was no meaning, and our life was Sisyphean. And if life was Sisyphean, thenn what point in continuing with it?” (C 17)
• “The gulls were considered a pest in the neighbourhood - large, mewing birds that swooped down on those who came too close to their nesting places - but we humans built too, and left cement and stones and litter, and were as aggressively territorial.” (C 21)
• “Why was it wrong to drop litter? Was it purely an aesthetic objection, based on the notion that the superficial pollution of the environment was unattractive? Or was the aesthetic impact linked to some notion of the distress which others felt in the face of litter? If that was the case, then we might even have a duty to look attractive to others, in order to minimise their distress.” (C 21)
• “In a world of need, it was wrong to be anything other than thin. Until everybody was in a position to consume a surfeit of calories, then nobody should carry extra weight. The fat with therefore not entitled to be what they were .” (C 21)
• “People give themselves away every five seconds. Watch the movement of eyes. It says absolutely everything you need to know.” (C 23)

Some challenging ideas!

I also very much enjoyed the next book in this series: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate.

December 2018; 281 pages

"A Question of Blood" by Ian Rankin

Detective Inspector John Rebus is in hospital with a pair of has a pair of bandaged hands when his sidekick Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke tells him that a criminal with whom Rebus had been seen drinking the night before has been burned to death and that two schoolboys have been shot to death in the common room of their public school. These cases both look open and closed: Rebus was on the scene and has scalded (or were they burned) hands; and there is an ex-SAS soldier gunman with the two dead boys who shot himself. But as Rebus and Clarke seek for the gunman's motive, as usual, all is never quite as it seems in the world of Edinburgh crime.

Another classic outing for one of the better detective series.

In fact there is a moment when Rankin transcends his genre. John Rebus goes to Alan Renshaw, the bereaved parent of one of the boys in the school shooting, who happens to be his cousin. He finds him in the loft, playing with his dead son's discarded racing car track. The two men play with the kit for a while until reminiscence gives way to anger. This scene provides one of the very best  portraits of the grief of a bereaved parent that I have read.

The many bits of business possible for a character with heavily bandaged hands is a master-class for novelists. Lighting a cigarette and lifting a glass to his mouth (favourite occupations for Rebus) offer original descriptions; wearing gloves elicits 'fascist' comments; Rebus needs Clarke to drive for him.

Rankin is also particularly good at providing a new twist on sayings. Many of these are too diffuse to quote but they offer an original way of viewing the character.

• "Patience: the one thing he had no time for." (C 1)
• "The woman was not cooking with a full set of saucepans." (C 13)
• "The kettle's trailing the pot one-nil at half-time." (C 14)

Other interesting quotes:

• "Inside, the flat was musty. There was a fug which could have been bottled as eau de Bachelor." (C 3)
• "What was he watching for? Because it satisfied the voyeur in him? He'd always enjoyed surveillances for the same reason: glimpses into secret lives." (C 16)

Other Inspector Rebus books reviewed in this blog include:

• A Question of Blood
• The Naming of the Dead
• Strip Jack
• Tooth and Nail: Rebus in London: poor stuff
• Standing in Another Man's Grave
• In a House of Lies

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

November 2018; 440 pages