S.G. MacLean's 'The Bookseller of Inverness' 2022

 

Quercus paperback edition - 2023

This is one of the best historical novels I have read for a long time. A few years back, I bought Shona MacLean's four books in her Alexander Seaton series and enjoyed them. So, I was delighted when my daughter gave me this novel for my birthday. It is not surprising that MacLean has a PhD in History, specialising in 16th and 17th century Scottish history, as it is abundantly clear that she knows her historical onions!

After the Battle of Culloden - on 16th April 1745 - Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drummossie Moor. He survived, only by pretending to be dead when the Duke of Cumberland's forces 'swept' the moor, killing those Jacobites still perceived to be alive. His best friend, Lachlan, lying next to him, perished. Six years later, his brutally slashed face still bearing the marks of the battle, finds Iain working as a bookseller in Inverness. A stranger enters the shop and begins to scan shelves, taking books out, opening them, cursing, shoving them back in. He is searching through the books once belonging to the 'Old Fox', Lord Lovat, executed in London for his part in the 1745 Rebellion. The next day, on opening the bookshop, Iain finds the man dead with his throat cut. The murder weapon lies next to him - a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. The man, Davie Campbell, was a scoundrel, a thief and assassin for hire, bought to find out who had betrayed Jacobites in the past. 

Iain, and the reader, are henceforth to be enmeshed is a tale of revenge and deceit - and murder.

Shona MacLean points out, in her Author's Notes, that at every turn in the Jacobite story, you will find tales of the courage and agency of women, and her story is peppered with striking examples. There are the Grandes Dames, two of whom we first meet  in the Prologue of May 1716. Mairi Farquharson (Iain's grandmother, although he is born out of wedlock to her wayward daughter, Charlotte) and her friend Janet Grant are to play fundamental (if rather different) parts over three decades later. The other Dames are Catriona Lamont and Eilidh Cameron. Other major roles are played by Mrs Elizabeth Rose and her daughter Julia, both technically Hanoverians, but very different in character. Then there are Ishbel MacLeod, a confectioner, and Barbara Sinclair, a Milliner, who has favoured Iain with her bed on more than one occasion.  All these women add a vibrancy and a verisimilitude to the novel. 

This not to say that the author cannot create life-like and compelling male characters: such as Aeneas Farquharson, Mairi's kinsman and 'servant'; Donald Mor, Iain's bookbinder, who spirals out of roaring control during his regular drunken sprees; Richard Dempster, Iain's assistant, English born but wedded to the Jacobite cause; Arch MacPhee, Inverness town constable and boyhood friend of Iain; little Tormod MacLeod, Ishbel's mixed race son; and, two sides of the British government's coin - the upright Major Philip Thornlie and the blackguard Captain Edward Dunne.

The story-line, plotting and narrative drive are all good, but what makes this an excellent read for me is the character drawing. Here are a few examples:

Donald Mor - then came the familiar shout from the bindery, a stream of Gaelic invective rounded off with, 'A-mach a seo! Get out of here!' and then, 'Son of Damnation, Iain Ban, there's a man here will die of thirst...Donald would have his wages on a Friday night. Little could be done about the outrages he would perpetrate between then and when he last stumbled senseless to his bed at some point on the Saturday, but he could thereafter be relied upon not to be seen about the streets of Inverness until the Monday morning. He would then be a model of sobriety until the next Friday night.

And there they were, suspended in the candlelight against the background of dark wood, heavy velvet and damask, as if captured in oils by Allan Ramsay himself: the Grandes Dames. His grandmother Mairi Farquharson and her three lifelong friends: Catriona Lamont, Janet Grant and Eilidh Cameron, Swathed in silk and lace, their jewels glittering, flickering light from fire and candelabra turning the amber in their crystal punch cups to liquid gold. The silver strands in their hair, the lines on their brows, the veins on the backs of their hands carried in them the whole story of the Jacobite cause...they had ridden out, each one of them, behind the men of the '15 rising in the name of King James...

Major Thornlie - the barrier between ourselves and savagery is finer than gossamer. Once rent, we do not easily recover ourselves... He looked at his reflection in the glass and considered what he saw. Was it a fool? He was forty-three years of age and blind in one eye...the man looking back at Philip Thornlie from the glass was not a fool, and there was time yet to ask something more of life. 

Captain Dunne:  it is important to distinguish between a cause that requires pity, and one that requires discipline.

Above all, there returns Iain's father, Hector MacGillivray, engaged in a secret mission for yet another rising on behalf of the Stuart cause. Presumed dead by most, including Iain, he now comes back to dominate those around him. He had come further into the light and under its glow he seemed little changed. Sixty-three years old now, and the handsome face was almost as firm, the stomach as flat as Iain remembered...the look in his eyes was that of a man not ready to relinquish his prime, and the back was straight as a ramrod. 

Thoughts of R.L. Stevenson occurred as I was reading MacLean's novel. I think he would not have been displeased to be linked to the author.

Alec Marsh's 'Enemy of the Raj' and 'Ghosts of the West' 2020 & 2021

Having read Alec's first Drabble and Harris thriller - Rule Britannia - I thought I would purchase and read the second and third books in the series whilst on holiday in West Yorkshire. They proved just right for relaxing in the northern sun.

Headline Accent paperback edition - 2020

Set in India in 1937, Sir Percival Harris is hunting tigers with his long-suffering friend, Professor Ernest Drabble. Harris is also due to interview the Maharaja of Bikaner, a friend to the Raj, for his London Newspaper. They are joined by a local journalist, Miss Heinz. But is she all that she seems and, if not, does it matter? In the background (and very quickly in the foreground) is the movement for Indian independence. Once the two men get to Bikaner, they find themselves confined to their quarters and caught up in an assassination plot.

Rather like a John Buchan novel, it is fast, furious and far-fetched. There is a very useful 'Author's Note' at the end of the book, where Marsh  delves into the history of the real-life Sir Ganga Singh, the Maharaja of Bikaner (reigned 1887-1943): he was a pioneer in terms of civil engineering but also in terms of civic institutions. He was also a patriot, albeit in the unusual context  of British rule in India, and he was a thoroughly good man, even if today we find his ardent sportsmanship distasteful...as described in this story, he went off to fight for the Empire in the Great War, and he was at the peace talks in 1919 and signed the Treaty of Versailles. He really was a statesman on the world stage...

Marsh has no time for any nostalgic feeling about Britain's legacy in the Indian subcontinent, preferring to concentrate on contrition. I wanted to address the darker side of British rule in India, and in a broader sense, colonialism, and to do something to address the slew of nostalgic versions we are assailed with. Too often it is the story of good men - like the fictitious Superintendent Goodlad in the novel - doing bad things...one of the chief sins is the racial bias of the hierarchy and exploitation of the Raj. There writes an early 21st century author and where he might just have a different viewpoint from the Buchan of a century earlier.

Headline Accent paperback edition - 2021

Once again, the reader finds Harris and Drabble travelling down an historical byway, of fact mixed with fiction. This time, it starts in St George's Church, Gravesend in Kent. They are there to assess the despoiled grave of Pocahontas. The scene quickly shifts to the British Museum, where they find that a pipe and a battle shirt, said to have supernatural powers, worn by Chief Sitting Bull at the Battle of Little Bighorn (1876), have both been stolen. The curator is later found murdered! Then Drabble remembers an advertisement he had seen in a newspaper: Tonight - Last Chance to see Col. Grant's Wild West Show at the Earl's Court Exhibition Centre. So off they go, to watch sharpshooter Fanny Howell, Ferguson's Rough Riders, Black Cloud & the Lakota Sioux and a rendition of Custer's Last Stand at Little Big Horn. Coincidence? It climaxes with an elderly chief addressing a spellbound audience of several thousand. My name is Black Cloud. I was yet two moons from my sixteenth birthday when the Battle of the Greasy Grass - that is the what you call the Battle of Little Bighorn or Custer's last stand - took place. Well, you could have knocked audience members down with one of his feathers.

There is something very fishy about these coincidences; so fishy, that the intrepid duo find themselves embarked on the SS Empress of the Atlantic for New York, along with the entire Wild West troupe. At the Captain's table, Harris and Drabble are introduced to Mr Wheelock, of the United States government, and Major Sakamoto of the Japanese Embassy in London - both are to play important roles in the story's development. Black Cloud gives Harris a detailed account of his early life (born in the moon of Black Cherries etc.); Harris emerges from the interview in sombre spirits: The Americans...what a bunch of bastards. Christ alive. They're practically as bad as the Belgians...the poor old Indians. I mean, I've always understood them to be a bunch of wild savages. But it's obviously nothing like that at all. They're clearly a remarkable people. Harris is, however, about to find out that minor prying can lead to personal disaster. He experiences a horrifying  encounter and when the ship docks is nowhere to be found.

Luckily, his pal Professor Drabble has met up with Dr Charlotte Moore, a research fellow at Oxford, daughter of a Professor Moore who gave lectures when Drabble himself was an undergraduate. They hit it off famously and are together for the rest of the tale. Once again, Marsh ends his novel with some 'Author's Notes' and he uses them to castigate severely the incoming Europeans' treatment of the indigenous population, who went from enjoying a free rein across an entire continent to being shepherded into several hundred reservations....The horrific story of what happened between 1600 and 1900 is at the heart of this novel and deliberately personified in the character of Black Cloud. Marsh describes his background reading as a thunderous march through the bloody and remorseless history of United States-Native Indian relations. His novel, which describes a grand plan for the Sioux tribes (with Japanese military aid) to launch a separatist bid for freedom in the 1930s, is just a work of fiction, but it is clearly inspired by real anger on the author's part for the Native Americans position then.

It is interesting that Drabble gets his girl - I see that a fourth novel in the series, After the Flood, has just been published (24th July), and it starts with Drabble and Charlotte on their honeymoon in Istanbul in 1938. Of course, Harris is with them; he was best man. I get the feeling that Harris, with his drinking, his foolhardiness, his pro-Empire views, is partly in the novels for the author to poke fun at and, even, to be an Aunt Sally for his outdated views. Personally, I would prefer him not to be in the books at all!

R. D. Blackmore's 'Springhaven. A Tale of the Great War' 1887

 

Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington first edition - 1887

This is the second Blackmore novel I have read recently, but the first in the three-decker first edition. The author chose as the period for his new novel the time when Napoleon, in his scheme for reorganising Europe under French hegemony, planned to invade and conquer England. For two years a huge force waited along the coast for an invasion order that never arrived. The project was finally shattered with the English victory at Trafalgar. Whilst the lives of the great country-houses went on as happily as before, the danger existed and the threat loomed large in the lives of those who lived along the southern and eastern shores of England. Blackmore focused his interest upon a small community in Sussex, close to Hastings. 'Springhaven' is Newhaven, then a quiet fishing village and according to Blackmore's Lord Nelson, "the place of all places in England for the French to land". The novel begins: In the days when England trusted mainly to the vigour and valour of one man, against a world of enemies, no part of her coast was in greater peril than the fair vale of Springhaven...

The villain of the book, Caryl Carne, son of an English father and a French mother, is entirely credible. A man with a burning desire to seek revenge on a country who has seemingly destroyed his inheritance, leaving only a semi-destroyed castle above Springhaven, and few of the acres once belonging to his family. He it is who is to prepare  the Springhaven area and beyond to receive the French invaders and who stocks up the cellars of his castle with weaponry and gunpowder for such a day. The spell that Carne casts over the mercurial Dolly Darling, is fully understandable in the light of the psychological make-up of the man and the girl. Another life-like character is the (inevitable?) parson in the novel, the Rev. Joshua Twemlow, no prig, no pedant, and no popinjay, but a sensible, upright honourable man, whose chief defect was a quick temper...he did not pretend to be a learned man, any more than he made any other pretence which he could not justify. But he loved a bit of Latin, whenever he could find anybody to share it with him, and even in lack of intelligent partners he indulged sometimes in that utterance. He admitted, I am not a man of the world, but a man of the Word.

Blackmore paints a measured picture of Nelson, who comes down to Springhaven on more than one occasion: For although he was not in uniform, and bore no sword, his dress was conspicuous, as he liked to have it, and his looks and deeds kept suit with it...his face was light and quickness. Softness also, and a melancholy gift of dreaminess and reflection, enlarged and impressed the effect of a gaze and a smile which have conquered history.

The book abounds with flashes of humour, of loving and detailed descriptions of the countryside and a plentiful cast of genuine characters. There are the Darlings, led by old Admiral Darling at Springhaven Hall, who has two daughters - Faith and Horatia Dorothy (Dolly) Darling, Nelson's godchild, who could not be happy without a little bit of excitement...she was always longing for something sweet, and thrilling, and romantic. Well she finds the latter two in Carne, but certainly not the aforementioned. There is Zebedee Tugwell, Springhaven's 'chief' - every community of common sense demands to have somebody over it, and nobody could have felt ashamed to be under Captain Tugwell. Here he is on his dandy-rigged smack, the Rosalie: his mighty legs were spread at ease, his shoulders solid against a cask, his breast (like an elephant's back in width and bearing a bright blue crown tattooed) shone out of the scarlet woolsey, whose plaits were filled with the golden shower of a curly beard, untouched with grey...the forehead was heavy, and the nose thick-set, the lower jaw backed up the resolution of the other, and the wide apart eyes of a bright steel blue, were as steady as a brace of pole-stars.  No wonder fair Dolly thought him a wonderful man. Napoleon stood no chance.

Other characters, such as Mr Cheeseman, who gets into a tangle with Carne and ends up trying to hang himself; Dan Tugwell, who leaves home in high dudgeon due to his father's beating and helps the French for a while,  and Harry Shanks; Mr Swipes, the Darlings' obstreperous and conniving gardener; Blyth Scudamore, a shy Classical tutor but brave naval officer when needed and who is dazzled by the Darling girls, especially Miss Dolly; all these, and others, help to create a fast-moving and well-told plot. Carne dies in his own conflagration at his family castle; Admiral Darling dies, killed by Carne; Admiral Nelson dies on Victory; and it is to the latter that the novel ends its final thoughts: seat shall be at the Lord's right hand, and his memory shall abide for ever; because he loved his Country. The company rose, laid hand on heart, and deeply bowing said - "Amen!"