Independent People

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

Originally published in two volumes in the decade preceding Iceland’s transition from home rule, granted by Denmark in 1874, to full independence in 1944, this book appeared two years after Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song and in the same year as Grey Granite and has a lot in common with themes and techniques familiar from the three volumes of the Scots Quair.

The author, Halldór Laxness, was a socialist and (at the time of writing Independent People) an admirer of the Soviet system, so this is an indictment and a vivid and accurate depiction of the struggles of rural peasants in early  20th-century Iceland.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

The Book Thief

Review by Catherine Hume

In this story by Markus Zusak we follow a young girl named Liesel Meminger as she travels across 1930s Germany to a foster family. The world around our unsuspecting heroine unfolds into an understated nightmare, where the harsh realities of Nazism and the war only just touch Liesel, her new family, her friends and her surroundings until 1943 when food shortages and bombings become de rigueur. And then comes the Final Solution, with which Liesel becomes entangled, but to a small extent.

The Lieutenant

Review by Catherine Hume

It’s easy to see why Kate Grenville won the Orange Prize in 2001 for The Idea of Perfection. The story of The Lieutenant begins by introducing us to Daniel Rooke, a young boy who lives with the curse of being a gifted child whose main interests are mathematics and astronomy. He is offered a place at a public school where boys still make fun of him for his exceptional abilities, but where he is given one-to-one attention in his interests.

We then encounter the thirteen-year-old Navy Officer Rooke, who is more excited at the prospect of viewing the stars of foreign skies than defending the Realm and conquering ‘natives’. Rooke, as a man-child, experiences the horrors of war, but after a time of recuperation with his family, is sent to another ship with a familiar face in the shape of friend and raconteur Lieutenant Silk.

At The Loch of the Green Corrie

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

This non-fiction title by Andrew Greig combines an homage to the poetry of Norman MacCaig with a fly-fishing expedition to the hill lochs of Assynt.

The book could be neatly summed up in the words of one of Greig’s companions on the fishing trip: ‘Fishing for MacCaig? Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’ For not only does the book relate the author’s friendship with the Scots makar, thereby ‘fishing’ for an understanding of his lasting value as a poet, the writing of the book and the fishing trip were literally undertaken after a request from the poet to fish on his behalf as he, just months before his death, was no longer able to do so. The feisty brown trout in a remote and relatively undistinguished Assynt loch therefore becomes a sacred quest for Andrew Greig and his companions Andy and Peter Dorward on a par with the seeking of the mythical salmon of experience in Neil Gunn’s Highland River.

Light and Darkness

Review by Steve Savage

Set in Japan in the early 20th century, the action of Light and Darkness takes place while Tsuda, a recently-married man aged nearly 30, prepares for and undergoes an unpleasant operation and is persuaded to confront his lingering feelings for Kiyoko, a woman who refused to marry him and chose someone else, by arranging to meet her, supposedly by chance, at an inn in the mountains. The novel was unfinished at the death of Natsume Sōseki, its author, and so the reader can only guess at the consequences of the meeting between Tsuda and Kiyoko.