There’s No Home

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

This novel, by Alexander Baron, is set in a two-month lull after the fighting in Sicily in summer 1943 as the Allies regroup to launch an invasion on the Italian mainland.

The remnants of a British Battalion – 60 men – are quartered in the bombed-out and poverty-stricken backstreets of the town of Catania and gradually begin to form attachments with the local, mainly female, population.

Observed through the eyes of Sergeant Craddock, who forges a relationship with a young mother Graziella Drucci, whose soldier husband is missing in Africa, the military action is peripheral and the novel focuses closely on these attempts, on both sides, to forge  a new domesticity and some sort of rapprochement on the emotional scars of the war.

Alexander Baron

Born in London in 1917, Alexander Baron joined the Communist Party only to leave it at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. He served in the army during the Second World War and wrote three novels inspired by his wartime experiences, From the City, from the Plough (1948), There’s No Home (1950) and The Human Kind (1953). He wrote fourteen further novels, and also wrote screenplays and television scripts. Baron died in 1999.

Letters from a Stoic

Review by Steve Savage

Letters from a Stoic, the title of Robin Campbell’s selection from Epistulæ Morales ad Lucilium by Seneca the Younger, is one of those titles that seem unnecessarily offputting. (Two others that come to mind are Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth and Hugh Miller’s My Schools and Schoolmasters, and I shall leave the reader, if sufficiently interested, to find out why.) It is true that Seneca’s book consists of letters, and it is true that he was in the Stoic camp rather than the Epicurean, so the title is not inaccurate. However Seneca’s version of Stoicism is urbane and inclusive – he regularly quotes from Epicurus to make a point – and anyway at this distance his philosophical views are likely to be less interesting than his descriptions of his own life and environment.

Lucius Annæus Seneca

Lucius Annæus Seneca (Seneca the Younger) was born in Corduba (Córdoba) around 4BCE. He had a successful career in Rome, becoming a quaestor (i.e. overseer of public finances). Success was a risky business in ancient Rome — Seneca was condemned to death under Caligula and again under Claudius, but survived and was exiled to Corsica, where he wrote essays, poems and tragedies.

After eight years of exile, Seneca was recalled to Rome and given the task of tutoring the son of Claudius’s new wife Agrippina. This boy was to become the emperor Nero. When Nero succeeded the murdered Claudius, Seneca became one of the most powerful and wealthy figures in Rome, a power behind the throne, once more arousing envy on the part of others, which grew to the point that Seneca retired from public life, with Nero’s consent. He spent the next few years studying philosophy and writing, including the Epistulæ Morales ad Lucilium (a selection of which was published under the title Letters from a Stoic). In 65CE a conspiracy against Nero was uncovered, in which Seneca was implicated, and he was ordered to commit suicide.

A Grain of Wheat

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

By Ngugi wa Thiong’o, this novel of Kenya in the years and days immediately leading up to Uhuru – Independence Day – in 1963 ranges over the country’s social history and through powerfully drawn characters knits a convincing portrait of society in the ridges (townships) of Gikuyu or the ‘White Highlands’ – which could be seen in opposition to the picture presented in ‘White Mischief’ in which black faces are rarely glimpsed.

The Gikuyu people had been forcibly removed and forced to become labourers and squatters on the land they had, until the late 19th century, thought their own.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. He went to school in Kenya and went to Makerere University College (then a campus of London University) in Uganda and Leeds University in Britain. Ngugi burst on to the literary scene in East Africa with the performance of his play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, as part of the celebration of Uganda’s Independence. In a productive literary period, Ngugi wrote eight short stories, two one-act plays, two novels, and a regular column for the Sunday Nation under the title, As I See It. One of the novels, Weep Not Child, was published to critical acclaim in 1964; followed by the second novel, The River Between (1965). His third was A Grain of Wheat (1967).

Poems – Tim Steer

Review by Brian Murray

Wilson of Garson, Manson of Quoys, Seatter of Sandside, Skinner of Gorn, Lyon of Clett, Towers of Fillets, The Mowats of Ramray and Western Horn…

That litany of names and holdings was compiled from order-books and labels, on articles for customers on Graemsay, when a youthful ‘bike and barrow boy’, son of the proprietor, Cecil Steer, speculated about the inhabitants of that island, seemingly remote from Stromness’ North End.

It was a summer holiday on Graemsay that gave form and identity to the farms, and put a face on owners whose names had been so resonant in Tim Steer’s mind for a considerable time. Forty-odd years on, the people who made him welcome are paid tribute to in a book, by the lad who worked hard for his Saturday ten bob.

Brian Murray

Brian Murray read English at Glasgow University, and was a teacher in the west of Scotland, Adviser in English for Ayrshire and a Head Teacher. With Archie Bevan he has been editing the unpublished and uncollected work of Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown – twelve volumes to date, with others projected. He is the co-author of Interrogation of Silence: The Writings of George Mackay Brown.

Bhowani Junction

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

Highly successful on publication in 1954 when events of a decade earlier in India were still fresh in the mind of John Masters, its author, and the public at large, Bhowani Junction is set at the time of Indian independence and therefore has superficial similarities to the slightly better known work of Paul Scott. But while the Raj Quartet has been popularised by a successful TV series, Masters’ work has rather receded from familiarity like the film made of this novel starring Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner.

The novel has three main protagonists and is a more focussed and narrower study of the personal and social problems of three of the main social groupings in India just before Partition, particularly of the Anglo-Indians, or ‘half-castes’. While in Scott’s work this grouping was rarely glimpsed or alluded to only in minor characters, in Bhowani Junction, two of the three main protagonists are Anglo-Indians, and the third is the British officer, Colonel Rodney Savage, effective though rather brusque. By far the largest part of the narrative is given by the first person narration of Patrick Taylor, an anglophile ‘Anglo-Indian’ Railway official, and Victoria Jones, a beautiful Anglo-Indian WAC(I).

John Masters

John Masters was born in Calcutta in 1914 and was educated at Wellington and Sandhurst. He returned to India in 1934 as an army officer. During the Second World War he served in the Middle East and Burma. After the war he was a staff officer in GHQ India in Delhi, and then served as an instructor at the British Army Staff College in Camberley. After this he left the army and moved to the United States, where he became a successful writer. He lived in New Mexico, where he died in 1983.

His many novels include Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), The Deceivers (1952), The Lotus and the Wind (1953), Bhowani Junction (1954), Coromandel! (1955), Bugles and a Tiger (1956), Far, Far the Mountain Peak (1957), To the Coral Strand (1962) and The Ravi Lancers (1972).