"Death in a Shetland Family" by Marsali Taylor

 

These murder mysteries starring sailor and sleuth Cass Lynch are getting better with each novel. 

In fact, the whodunnit element is increasingly taking a back seat to an exploration of life in the Shetlands. In this novel we enter the horse world with an escaped stallion and a horse show. We learn about crofting, Roman Catholicism, and genetics. And, of course, there is the sailing.

There is also a murder. Cass doesn't know the family herself, but she knows those who do. She listens to the gossip, weaving together the testimonies to try to find a story. Red herrings are deftly presented. Ambiguities are exploited. And in the end Cass is imperilled, captured, fleeing, hunted. This is a skilfully written classic cosy crime with a dash of jeopardy.

Gavin, the policeman boyfriend? He is in the Highlands because his mother is ill. Meanwhile Cass has to tend their small-holding, including hens, ponies and sheep. She worries whether she can cope with living off the water.

Real characters with real dilemmas.

And the book is brightened by some fabulous descriptive passages, of which my favourite were:

• "Even though it was a bonny day, blue and warm as summer, the colours had turned. The orange hens-and-chickens along the Tingwall verges had withered to brown lollipop heads, and the royal purple of the heather on the hill behind them had bleached to a creamy white, with blue pincushions of scabious growing through." (Ch 1)
• "Kitten was the colours of spices shaken over a worktop, ginger and nutmeg and cinnamon all mixed together" (Ch 2)
• "I woke to a shepherd’s warning; the glass of the window reflected a red light onto the white shade of the overhead lamp, and the window framed thin cirrus tinged coral-gold which faded as the sun rose. A grey shroud lay over the hills, somewhere between a summer heat haze and an autumn mist. In the garden, a last magenta rose flared among the cloud shape of the daisy bushes." (Ch 4)
• "The sea was fretted over with ripples; the hills were auburn, with hummocks of moss like jade rocks among the heather." (Ch 7)
• "I looked west as I came out of Cribba Sound, past the Atlantic swell rolling in from the sea road leading to where there was nothing in the world but your ship poised on a saucer of shining water under a great arch of sky, and felt my heart ache for it." (Ch 9)
• "It was only five o’clock, but the light was already mellowing to tints of evening, the hills dusted with gold, the moorgrass stems glistening. The yellow buttons of tansy by the gate were translucent above their fresh green leaves." (Ch 9)
• "The sun was behind the hills now, but there were slanting gold shafts of light through the gaps in the clouds, and over the soft green hills, and the sound was filled with whisky-amber water." (Ch 21)

Marsali Taylor must be a talented artist: she can certainly paint irresistible pictures with words. These passages are a literary equivalent of a promotional film for the Shetlands tourist board. If only she hadn't mentioned the midges!

She's also very good with psychology, showing a deep understand of human (and, in the first quote, horse) nature:

• "He’s got himself into that high state where he wants things to be back to normal but doesn’t quite know how to get there, like a toddler refusing to go to bed." (Ch 1)
• "Even Vaila, who knew her own mind and shared it generously, paused to think when Rainbow suggested caution." (Ch 2)
• "He oozed superiority, but if he really felt that far above us all, he wouldn’t need to try so hard." (Ch 3)
• "‘So,’ I said, summing up, ‘a man in possession of a good croft needs a wife with a good income to support him.’" (Ch 16) Okay, she's nicked that one but it's a lovely bit of humour.

This series now transcends the crime genre. Exceptionally entertaining but also a delightful read.

July 2026

Published by Headline Accent in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

This is the fourteenth novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The books, in order, with alternative names, are:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival
• An imposter in Shetland

"Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott

This is perhaps the most celebrated novel by an author who was a huge best-seller in his time and respected by Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens among others.

It belongs to the now-outdated 'gadzooks' style of historical fiction with lots of 'thous', 'haths' and 'yes' etc. I suppose that created verisimilitude in those days but it sounds forced and inauthentic to my ears. Modern historical novelists, such as Ken Follett, in The Pillars of the Earth, avoid this. But you can say for Scott, who was one of the pioneers of historical fiction, that he did it better than some of his later imitators, such as Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake.

It is told in the 3rd person omniscient style, past tense, and framed as a story, allowing scope for the author to interject, for example: “His furred cloak and high cap, seen by the wiry and broken light, would have afforded a study for Rembrandt, had that celebrated painter existed at the period.” (Ch 22) He also bids for verisimilitude by citing his sources. For example, in chapter 24 he mentions both the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and the Wardour manuscript as sources. The latter, however, is fictional, Wardour being a character in The Antiquary, published 4 years before Ivanhoe).

He has clearly done a significant amount of historical research. This is displayed as early as  chapter one, when Wamba points out that Saxons talk of swine and oxen because they farm the animals, while the Normans use the words pork and beef when they eat the meat. Given how early this was written, I was impressed with how accurate Scott seemed to be, although there are some discrepancies and inconsistencies, in particular with dynastic relationships, where, for example, great uncles and prescribed and grandfathers and grandfathers as fathers.

In terms of the plot, it is a cracking yarn, a classic adventure story. It includes a jousting and melee tournament with not one, but two, incognito knights who, naturally, defeat all comers. It includes outlaws waylaying travellers in the forest, an attempt at torture in a castle dungeon, the siege of that castle and an ordeal by combat to save the life of one of the heroines who is threatened with being burned as a witch. Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, and bad King John make an appearance.

On the other hand, the characters are very one-dimensional. In the main, heroes are goody-goody superheroes and villains are horrid. There are exceptions. The Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert is initially no more than a rapist but, impressed by Rebecca's spirit, woos her for a mistress and, in the showdown, when selected as champion for the Templars against Rebecca, asks her to elope with him. Similarly, Maurice de Bracy is in two minds about Rowena. 

Is it anti-Semitic? Isaac the Jew, a moneylender, is a major character and is stereotyped as both cowardly and covetous. However, Scott spends considerable length pointing out how the Jews in this period in England were persecuted and terrorised and in this way condemning anti-Semitism. Rebecca, Isaac's daughter, is the principal heroine; she is strong-minded and virtuous.

Is it sexist? Comments such as, “Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours.” (Ch 36) make it seem so, although that is spoken by a villain. Again, Scott is keen to create strong heroines. But there is nevertheless a feeling that he is making stereotypical assumptions. Perhaps the best that can be said is that he was enlightened for his time.

Is it racist? There are very few characters of colour and they are in subordinate positions. There are some unpleasant racial epithets.

So what did Jane Austen see in Scott? (She once said she would read no novels other than those by herself, Maria Edgeworth, who wrote Castle Rackrent, and Walter Scott.) Scott reviewed Emma favourably so the respect was mutual. Fundamentally, they wrote in very different genres. Scott compared Austen's style to that of Dutch interior painting: controlled and utterly realistic. He was writing melodrama and deliberately using exaggeration and extravagance to create drama and to excite the reader: very baroque. 

Selected quotes:

• “It is comfort to think that we leave behind us on earth those who shall be wretched as ourselves.” (Ch 24)
• “This damsel has wept enough to extinguish a beacon light. Never was such wringing of hands and such overflowing of eyes ... A water-fiend hath possessed the fair Saxon." (Ch 25)
• “Glory ... is the rusted mail which hangs as a hatchment over the champion's dim and mouldering tomb.” (Ch 30)
• “Even in our own days, when morals are better understood, an execution, a bruising-march, a riot, or a meeting of radical reformers, collects, at considerable hazard to themselves, immense crowds of spectators.” (Ch 43)

It's an entertaining story but somewhat long-winded for modern tastes (every character must be introduced with a long paragraph of description) which I found wearisome. 

There is a full synopsis of the plot (spoiler alert) under my byline.

June 2026; 519 pages

First published in 1819 by Archibald Constable

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin Popular Classics in 1994

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Synopsis: spoiler alert

Ivanhoe is set in 1194 when King Richard I, captured returning from the crusades, has been ransomed and is expected back in England soon. Since the 1066 Norman Conquest, almost all of the land is owned by Norman barons who act like warlords, tyrannising the local populations of Saxons.

It starts with a group of Norman knights and church leaders riding through Sherwood Forest, asking directions for Cedric’s manor, hoping to spend the night there. Cedric is one of the few Saxons still in possession of land. He hosts the Normans; the dinner is interrupted by another stranger, Isaac, a Jewish moneylender. The anonymous pilgrim who escorted the Normans to the house wakes early the next morning and, having overheard Templar knight Bois-Guilbert planning to abduct Isaac, warns Isaac; helped by faithful swineherd Gurth, the pair slip away. In gratitude, Isaac lends the man a suit of armour and a warhorse.

A tournament is being held at Ashby Castle in the presence of King John. The first day is jousting. A mysterious knight who calls himself Desdichado (= Disinherited) defeats, one by one, the five champions, including Bois-Gilbert, and is declared champion of the day; he chooses as Queen of the Tournament, Lady Rowena, the beautiful and royal Saxon ward of Cedric, engaged to a Saxon nobleman called Athelstane but in love with Cedric’s son Wilfred of Ivanhoe (who was disinherited by his father for this presumption and has left the country to go on the crusades).

On the second day there is a mock battle between two sides. Desdichado’s side is triumphant but only after another anonymous knight who calls himself Le Noir Faineant (= The Black Sluggard) rides to the rescue of Desdichado. The wounded Desdichado is revealed to be Ivanhoe. Rebecca, Isaac’s daughter, a skilled healer, takes him to her house to treat him.

The tournament ends with an archery competition won by an archer called Locksley. It’s Robin Hood!

Le Roi Faineant has spent the night eating, drinking and singing in the cell of hermit The Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst (Friar Tuck).

Travelling through the forest, Isaac, Rebecca and the wounded Ivanhoe, as well as Cedric, Athelstane and Rowena, are captured by mercenary knight Maurice de Bracy and his companions, who are masquerading as outlaws, and taken to Torquilstone, the castle of Reginald Front-de-Bœuf. Gurth and Wamba, Cedric’s jester, escape only to encounter Locksley, leader of the real outlaws. Le Roi Faineant and the Friar turn up. They go to besiege the castle.

Inside, Front-de-Boeuf tries to extort money from Isaac by torturing him in the dungeons. De Bracy tells Rowena he wants to marry her; she turns him down. Bois-Guilbert tells Rebecca he wants her to be his mistress; she threatens to jump out of the tower window if he lays a hand on her.

The siege starts and the besieged send a message that they will kill their captives. Wamba, disguised as a priest, goes into the castle’to hear Cedric’s confession’ but then changes clothes with Cedric who slips out of his cell. On his way out, Cedric meets withered crone Ulrica, and has a lengthy conversation with her, eliciting her back story as if he has all the time in the world. As Urfiried, she was daughter of the original lord of the castle which Front-de-Bouef usurped, raping her and keeping her imprisoned. In revenge, she sets light to the castle as the besiegers gain entrance. Front-de-Bœuf is killed in the fire. De Bracy is forced to surrender to the Black Knight, who identifies himself as King Richard. Athelstane is wounded and presumed dead. Bois-Guilbert escapes with Rebecca to the local Templar preceptory.

Lucas de Beaumanoir, the Grand Master of the Templars, is in the preceptory to to sharpen it up. Discovering that Bois-Guilbert's girlfriend is a Jew, he accuses her of witchcraft. Prompted secretly by Bois-Guilbery, she demands a trial by combat. She must find a champion in three days to defeat the champion appointed by the Templars or be burned to death. The Grand Master picks Bois-Guilbert as the Templar’s champion. He’s in a dilemma: does he fight for the love of his life, or fight against her champion and thus maintain his chivalric honour.

At his own funeral, Athelstane returns to life, demanding food. He pledges allegiance to King Richard and cedes Rowena to Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe hears about Rebecca’s plight and rides hard to become her champion. He arrives in the nick of time but he’s exhausted. Bois-Guilbert and Ivanhoe ride a joust; both fall. Ivanhoe gets up; Bois-Guilbert stays down. He has had a stroke or a heart attack from the conflict of emotions inspired by loving Rebecca and having to fight against her, and he is dead.

Rebecca goes to Rowena and tells her that she and her father are leaving for Cordoba in Muslim held Spain where the Jews aren’t persecuted. She will become a healer. Rowena wins Ivanhoe.

Other novels by this author

Scott wrote a series of historical novels which were hugely influential at the time. They are known as the Waverley novels after the title of the first (later novels were often published anonymously as 'by the author of Waverley). 

• Waverley (1814) set during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion
• Guy Mannering (1815) set in Scotland
• The Antiquary (1816) set in Scotland
• The Black Dwarf (1816) set in Scotland
• Old Mortality (1816) set in Scotland
• Rob Roy (1818) about a Scottish bandit
• The Heart of Midlothian (1818) set in Scotland after which the Edinburgh football team was named
• The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) set in Scotland which inspired the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Donnizetti
• A Legend of Montrose (1819) set in Scotland
• Ivanhoe (1819) set in mediaeval England, complete with Robin Hood
• The Monastery (1820) set in Scotland
• The Abbot (1820) set in Scotland
• Kenilworth (1821) set in Tudor England
• The Pirate (1822) set in Shetland and Orkney
• The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) set in Jacobean London
• Peveril of the Peak (1822) set in England
• Quentin Durward (1823) set in mediaeval France and Belgium
• St Ronan's Well (1824) set in Scotland
• Redgauntlet (1824) set in Scotland and northern England
• The Betrothed (1825) set in  Wales
• The Talisman (1825) set in Palestine at the time of the Crusades
• Woodstock (1826) set in England and Brussels during the English civil war
• The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) set in Scotland
• Anne of Geierstein set in Switzerland
• Count Robert of Paris (1831) set in Constantinople in 1097
• Castle Dangerous (1831) set in Scotland

"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

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Spark

This delightful short novel sparked the classic film starring Maggie Smith. 

Miss Brodie is a spinster teacher at an Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s. She has selected a small group of girls to hothouse; she attempts to indoctrinate them with the idea that culture, art and style are more important than practical subjects like arithmetic; she repeatedly praises Mussolini and other European fascists. She frequently sees 'her girls' outside school, including at the house of one of the teachers with whom she is having an affair. This unconventional approach to education puts her into conflict with the school establishment but they haven't any hard evidence to use against her. Miss Brodie's influence extends to attempting to manipulate the sex-lives of the girls as they reach maturity. Eventually one of them betrays her. 

Perhaps like a good teacher, this very short novel uses repetition. It has a recursive structure and repeatedly jumps between different times. For example, it starts by introducing the 'Brodie set', the six girls, at the age of sixteen before jumping back to when they were ten and being taught by Miss Brodie. Details about their adults lives are interposed: we know how Mary dies before the end of chapter one. This non-chronological narrative helps focus on the question of who betrayed Miss Brodie and on what grounds. It reminded me of the conversational narrative of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford but this book employs an omniscient narrator telling the tale in the third person past tense so they can't be unreliable ... can they?

The ‘Brodie Bunch’ consist of six girls. They taught my Miss Jean Brodie for just two years, when they are ten and eleven, and her influence stays with them and shapes their characters.

The six girls are introduced in the first chapter. The three most important are Mary, the plump girl who isn't very clever and who always gets the blame; Rose who, we are repeatedly told, is or will become famous for sex; and Sandy, who has a strong interior monologue and is always telling herself stories in which she features as the heroic sidekick of a romantic hero from a novel. 

A theme of this book is Miss Brodie's belief: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.” (Ch 1) [This is a modification of something claimed about Jesuit education; one of the other themes is religion and the tension in Scotland between Calvinism and Roman Catholicism.] On the other hand, as Scottish poet Rabbie Burns said: "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!"

Another theme is that sexual desire inevitably disrupts the development of adolescents, particularly when it is bottled up as it is in the context of a single-sex school. It's also important (and potentially destructive) for spinsters and during the nineteen-thirties there were a lot of women left high and dry after their potential or actual partners had been killed during the First World War.

Selected quotes:
Pronouncements of Miss Jean Brodie:

• “I am putting old heads on your young shoulders ... and all my pupils are the crème de la crème.”  (Ch 1)
• “These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, always remember that.” (Ch 1)
• “You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.” (Ch 1)
• “There must needs be a leaven in the lump.” (Ch 5)

Others

• “Mary Macgegor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire.” (Ch 1)
• “Sandy was never bored, but she had to lead a double life of her own in order never to be bored.” (Ch 2)
• “Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.” (Ch 2) She does indeed look like that!
• “She was not out of place amongst her own kind, the vigorous daughters of dead or enfeebled merchants, of ministers of religion, University professors, doctors, big warehouse owners of the past, or the owners of fisheries who had endowed these daughters with shrewd wits, high-coloured cheeks, constitutions like horses, logical educations, hearty spirits and private means. ... They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbors the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford group and put spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test.” (Ch 3)
• “The school-mistresses were of a still more orderly type, earning their keep, living with aged parents and taking walks on the hills and holidays at North Berwick.” (Ch 3)
• “Those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man-to-man.” (Ch 3)
• “She turned to the blackboard and rubbed out with her duster the long division sum she always kept on the blackboard in case of intrusions from outside during any arithmetic periods when Miss Brodie should happen not to be teaching arithmetic.” (Ch 3)
• “Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long preserved dark musquash coat. She had been retired before time. She said, ‘ I am past my prime’.” (Ch 3)
• “Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were the squares on the other two sides.” (Ch 4)
• “There was a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life.” (Ch 4)
• Calvinism, in the opinion of one of the characters, is the "belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died.” (Ch 5)
• “Miss Brodie ... had elected herself to grace in so particular way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn't stand it anymore.” (Ch 5)
• “It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd’s lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as Informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea.” (Ch 5)

I did the maths problem mention in chapter four. It seems to me that the two questions are the same. "c.g." stands for centre of gravity (now called centre of mass) which is the place you would have to hold the ladder to keep it horizontal. By taking moments you can calculate that you would need to support the ladder 4.5 feet from the bucket.

It's an entertaining novel and an easy read yet it manages to explore in depth the characters of Miss Brodie and Sandy. Deservedly a classic.

It was chosen by Time magazine as one of the best 100 English novels since Time began (1923). A poll by the BBC rated it 63rd best novel ever.

Muriel Spark novels:

• The Comforters (1957)
• Robinson (1958)
• Memento Mori (1959)
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
• The Bachelors (1960)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
• The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
• The Public Image (1968) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Driver's Seat (1970) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• Not To Disturb (1971)
• The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
• The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
• The Takeover (1976)
• Territorial Rights (1979)
• Loitering with Intent (1981) – shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Only Problem (1984)
• A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
• Symposium (1990)
• Reality and Dreams (1996)
• Aiding and Abetting (2000)
• The Finishing School (2004)

May 2025; 128 pages
Originally published in 1961 by the New Yorker in the USA and by Macmillan in the UK
My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 2000

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

"This Good Book" by Iain Hood

Matthias Grünewald, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A beautifully written book about art and religion; it was also very funny.

 Susan Alison wants to paint the most perfect Crucifixion and when she encounters fellow art student Douglas she realises she has to have her as her Christ. He models for her over the next fourteen years, as the pair of them try different poses, different perspectives and different techniques. Meanwhile his career as a conceptual artist - he exhibits bags of his urine - progresses by leaps and bounds. 

I thought this was an incredible book. In one sense it is about the platonic but deeply loving  relationship between these two young people, but which reminded me of that in One Day by David Nicholls. But it is also about different understandings of God and Jesus, asking questions like: exactly how much did Jesus love his mother? and how does God experience the passage of time? There were moments when I wondered whether Douglas, a child prodigy in a number of fields, was supposed to represent Jesus. Susan Alison has quasi-epileptic 'absences' in which she says things that later seem to foretell the future so she must be some sort of prophet? But mostly it is about art and the varieties of art and the price that has to be paid for art.

I'm not sure I have ever experienced a book that was so immersed in visual art. Right from the first page when the narrator, Susan Alison, catches a glimpse of the belly of Douglas and reflects: "His flesh was yellow ochre and burnt siena and raw umber and there was a halo of pale blue-white fluorescent light around his head and shoulders. The light around him in the darkness of the hallway formed a circle, and the door frame formed a square. He moved his legs into an isoceles of reflected light from the fake while and blue diamond tile linoleum floor. Eight heads high. The perfection of the proportion of him. The luminousness of him." (Ch 1) Susan Alison and Douglas have repeated discussions about art. We are in the mind of Susan Alison every step of the twisted way as she explores the terrain in which she will create her masterpiece. This is art, art, art; the only comparable books in which art is so foregrounded that I can think of are My Name is Asher Lev (which is also about a painting of the Crucifixion) and its sequel The Gift of Asher Lev by Chain Potok. My novel Bally and Bro is also about an artist. 

TGB alludes repeatedly to paintings of the crucifixion, for example: "Matthias Grunewald's lip-smacking relish at twisted the emaciated body of Christ as he tortures the paint and makes Christ bleed near-solid gobbets of blood. Or Nikolai Ge's hideously terrifying and terrified Christ screaming at the top of his lungs to the sky and a God who cannot be there as his bedraggled rags soak with blood-red paint." (Ch 1) Fabulous descriptions which made me long to see these paintings: I have subsequently found many of them on the internet.

The first-person narrative voice, very Scottish and full of colloquialisms, is very strong in this novel and both the principal characters are fully realised in all their complexities; the narrator's stereotyping of Douglas is repeatedly confounded. The plot is perfectly paced (there's a huge climax almost exactly at the 75% turning point), and nicely twisted towards the end, and it was not till about 60% that I had my first hint of how the book might end. There's a surprising amount of humour, mostly around the idea of Douglas as a "don't say 'piss artist' because everybody says that." (Ch 2) There's also a lot of profound thinking about both art and religion. And the descriptive prose (such as in the paragraph above) is sometimes breath-taking.

Selected quotes:

• "Like all good Christians, she wanted good paintings of suffering and torture and death and rape and incest and child sacrifice and bestiality. Good Bible stories. Good paintings." (Ch 1)
• "Jesus needed to be beautiful, because if he's not beautiful then what is he? Jesus as God had to be the most beautiful man and the perfection of man, because if he's not that then what is he?" (Ch 2)
• "What else? Oh yes, he could drive and had a car. I know! Who would have thought?" (Ch 3)
• "Can you make your jokes funny so that I can identify them." (Ch 3)
• "Genuine is better than authentic." (Ch 6)
• "He was peeing into bags to pay for those meals. Scotland's shame!" (Ch 7)
• "The biggest arse that ever came off the arsehole production line." (Ch 8)
• "Like throughout history, all that the art owned by the Church proved is that it was the Church that had stolen the money from the peasants to pay for the bloody art." (Ch 9)
• "A turbulent mess of fleshy waves that was yellow ochre and burnt siena and raw umber and blackened blue and sickly , yellowing white and blood vermillion." (Ch 10)
• "The first failure of art is to not name a piece Untitled, because to need to title it means that the image or sculpture or installation or whatever it is cannot explain itself.  ... it's like a kid making a line drawing and then writing underneath it 'A DOG'." (Ch 14) I always think this is true when a poet at a poetry reading tells you what their poem is about before they read it: if you need to do that, it isn't good enough. I also felt this very strongly when looking at the Turner Prize entrants at the Towner Gallery in 2023 - 2024; in some cases (mostly downstairs) I would never have guessed what the artist intended without the text telling me. And that to me means that the artwork has failed. 
• "The two great traditions in crucifixion paintings: humiliation and exaltation." (Ch 14)

This superb book worked for me on every possible level. A strong narrative voice, a great plot, a deep relationship between two utterly believable characters and a great deal of food for thought. Six stars out of five! June 2024; 200 pages

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

"The Devil's Footprints" by John Burnside

A woman kills herself and her sons, but not her daughter; did she believe the boys were fathered by the devil? Her brother was killed by the narrator, who was also her former lover; was he the father of her daughter? The daughter runs away, or is she abducted? Another woman is killed by a car driven by the town drunk, one of those who has been persecuting her family for years. Two men are abducted ... but only one is tortured and killed. Has this small seaside town been cursed by the devil whose snow-bound footprints crossed it from the sea to the countryside a hundred years ago?

Beautifully written, with a wonderful hook at the 3% mark: "Even though Moira didn't know it, even though nobody knew it but me, I was the one who had killed her brother, when I was thirteen and he was fifteen, killed him and left him to rot in the old limeroom on a weekday afternoon, when we should have been in school." (The Evening Herald; p 10). I defy you not to read on after that.

It continues, drip-feeding the avid reader with other nuggets. As the narrator says: "I was told this story as a child; or rather, I overheard it. I caught a fragment here, a glimpse there, and I put it together piecemeal, adding details and amendments of my own, making it richer, making it bright and mythical and sure. Making it up." (The Devil's Footprints; p 5) The construction is nearly perfect.

 Selected quotes:

The page numbers refer to the Ulverscroft Large Print Edition of 2008

• "A forceful and crudely handsome boy, manufactured ... on one of God's off-days." (The Evening Herald; p 9)
• "Family is a self-perpetuating mechanism, like a virus." (The Evening Herald; p 20)
• "Out here the stars have always felt closer, the wind a participant in my daily life, giving me the dreams I dream, following me into the house on a blustery day like a familiar dog, snuffling around the hall for a minute or two before vanishing into the kitchen." (The Evening Herald; p 34)
• "His tongue flickered between his lips in soft appraisal." (The Evening Herald; p 60)
• "A forlorn child in a narrow seaside town, a boy among grim-faced adults whose only life was church and work." (The Evening Herald; p 79)
• "She didn't want to live ... like some stain fading slowly on the air" (Le Reniement De Saint Pierre; p 135) This reminded me of The Great Divorce by C S Lewis in which he describes ghosts as "man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air.”
• "Just a man; which was to say: a set of wants, a collection of impulses, a bundle of needs, only half of them visible to his own sorry gaze." (The Dark End of the Fair; p 239)

John Burnside also wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• Glister about another boy in a seaside town damned and doomed by the ruins of the industrial manufacturing plant.

April 2024; 311 pages

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

"Lanark" by Alasdair Gray

Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of his best novels since 1939. 

 This novel combines a sociological novel exploring the death of a society with an autobiography of the artist. It incorporates aspects of metafiction, for example, in the sequence of the parts (Book 3, Prologue, Book 1, Book 2, Book 4) and in the Epilogue (placed within Book 4) which incorporates the author discussing the plot with the protagonist, footnotes and an 'Index of Plagiarisms' directing the readers attention to the literary sources of the novel. 

I enjoyed books one and two which followed a lad called Thaw through childhood, school and art college to his first commission, a period in which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempts to lose his virginity, and at the end of which he suffers a breakdown. 

The frame narrative (books three, which comes before one, and four, which follows two) follows the picaresque adventures of a lad called Lanark, who is presumably Thaw, post breakdown. The narrative starts in a city we later learn is called Unthank into which Lanark has strayed having forgotten his name (this was very like the beginning of Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney). Soon Lanark is swallowed (Book of Jonah?) and falls into an underground world (Alice in Wonderland?) which is run by the sinister Institute. Later he leaves the Institute to travel through an intercalendrical zone back to Lanark where he endeavours to prevent the destruction planned for the city. So, a dystopia, with hints of The Time Machine by H G Wells mixed with You Only Live Twice? In this experimental fiction phase of the book, the author's ever-fertile imagination spawns lots of incidents and loads of characters and somehow fails to present a narrative that gels. Whilst I had been invested in the trials and tribulations of wannabe-artist Thaw, I never really cared what happened to Lanark or his world.

In the end, whilst appreciating the author's erudition (all those sources!) and his skill, I was disappointed. 

But there is humour ("Do you abuse yourself? Certainly, if I've been stupid in public."; Ch 18) and there are wonderful descriptions ("The yellow or purple spots of occasional roadside flowers shrieked like tiny discords in an orchestra where every instrument played over and over again the same two notes."; Ch 18) and the text is saturated with ideas.

Sources

The Index of Plagiarisms in the Epilogue gives an alphabetical list of sources for this novel. They include:

• William Blake
• John Bunyan since Lanark's progress in parts three and four could be regarded as a rather Rabelaisian version of Pilgrim's Progress
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Lewis Carroll
• Joyce Cary's The Horses Mouth (particularly its hero Gulley Johnson who is a "Blake-quoting penniless painter of a mural illustrating the biblical Genesis in a derelict church")
• William Golding (whose protagonist of the book Pincher Martin is either dying or dead)
• James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka: the Index cites the last chapter of The Trial but parts three and four are very Kafkaesque
• Charles Kingsley: The Water Babies, much of which involves a journey through a sort of purgatory after the hero has drowned himself
• H G Wells: specifically the sublunar civilization in The First Men on the Moon

But I was reminded of other novels too, particularly Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney and the work of William Burroughs.

Selected quotes:

• "the film ... was about people who undressed soon after the beginning and then did everything they could think of in the circumstances." (Ch 1)
• "He knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn't do very much." (Ch 2)
• "If a writer doesn't enjoy words for their own sake how can the reader enjoy them?" (Ch 4)
• "Metaphor is one of thought's most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing." (Ch 4)
• "genital eagerness sucked thought out of him." (Ch 5)
• "why should we even try to be human if we are going to die? If you die your pain and struggle have been useless!" (Ch 7)
• "A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying." (Ch 7)
• "Names are nothing but collars men tie round your neck to drag you where they like." (Ch 9)
• "In modern civilizations those who work in the sunlight are a despised and dwindling minority. ... As for lovemaking and friendship, humanity has always preferred to enjoy these at night." (Ch 9)
• "Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself and the recipe is separation." (Ch 11)
• "She expected splendour. Most of us expect it sometime or other, and growing old is mainly a way of learning to do without." (Prologue)
• "He kept these pictures between pages of Carlyle's French Revolution, a book no one else was likely to open." (Ch 16)
• "A nearly naked blonde smiling as if her body was a joke she wanted to share." (Ch 18)
• "Various plants struggled in the poor soil, fighting with blind deliberation to suffocate or strangle each other." (Ch 18)
• "Hard-backed leggy things with multiple eyes and feelers, all gnawing holes and laying eggs and squirting poisons in the plants and each other." (Ch 18)
• "We are all hate, big balloons of hate." (Ch 18)
• "Men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the recipe is hate." (Ch 18)
• "The skin disease returned and his throat looked as if he had made an incompetent effort to cut it." (Ch 19)
• "People ... think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon." (Ch 20)
• "Everyone carried on their necks a grotesque art object, originally inherited, which they never tired of altering and adding to." (Ch 21)
• "Folk near the river were usually gaunter, half a head shorter and had cheaper clothes than folk in the suburbs." (Ch 22)
• "My mother told her she wasn't fit to sleep with a pig. Which forced me into the unenviable position of declaring she was fit to sleep with a pig." (Ch 23)
• "He was struck by the clarity of the stars. They were not like lights stippling the inside surface of a dome but like galactic chandeliers hung at different levels in the black air." (Ch 23)
• "Great beetles emerged. The city was full of them. They were five feet long and shaped like rowing boats with antennae and had mouths in their stomachs." (Ch 23)
• "Of course she's frigid. So am I. But nobody stays the same forever and even lumps of ice, surely, will melt if they rub together long enough." (Ch 24)
• "All night he was dipping in and out of sleep, but at such a shallow angle he never noticed." (Ch 26)
• "The mountain has laboured and given birth to a small obnoxious rodent." (Ch 36) This is an adaptation of a Latin epigram from Roman poet Horace.
• "Prosperity is made by the bosses struggling with one another for more wealth. If they have to struggle with their workers too, then everybody loses." (Ch 38)
• "Touch tells me you are near me but eyes talk about the space between." (Ch 41)
• "Grampa says there isn't a God. People invented him. They invented motorcars too." (Ch 41)
• "He had lost someone or something, a secret document, a parent, or his self-respect." (Ch 41)

March 2023; 561 pages

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