The Merchant’s Mark by Pat McIntosh

I regard this series as something of a personal discovery, since I haven’t come across many reviews among the book bloggers I read, which is a pity – the series, set in medieval Glasgow, makes an original and worthy contribution to the ranks of historical crime fiction.

Our hero, Gil Cunningham, is a rather earnest young man at the start of his career – when we first meet him he is resigning himself, with great reluctance, to following his uncle David into a life in the Church. Gil is very aware that the world is an interesting and exciting place, but his family has lost its influence with the Scottish court (a small matter of being on the wrong side during one of those minor domestic skirmishes that so characterised the House of Stewart (in this case, the battle of Sauchieburn, which saw the death of James III at the hands of a rebel army led – in name, at least - by his son, James IV).

James IV of Scotland

The setting for series is Glasgow in 1492 – at this time the city, with a population of some 2000 by the end of the century, had a university and grammar school, and a cathedral dedicated to St Mungo (known outside Scotland as St Kentigern); importantly, this was the year in which the Pope made the See of Glasgow an archdiocese, thus granting considerable power to Robert Blacader, the new Archbishop, who is to play an important part in Gil’s life.

So much for the history lesson, now to The Merchant’s Mark, the third book in the series. It begins with Gil and his friend, the merchant Augie Morison, eagerly awaiting the opening of a barrel containing books from the Low Countries – printing didn’t arrive in Scotland until 1508. Unfortunately, the barrel turns out not to contain books, but a severed head and a saddlebag of money and Augie, who has collected the barrel from Linlithgow as part of a regular shipment, and travelled with it Glasgow, finds himself arrested for murder of the unknown victim. Gil, however, has achieved something of a reputation for his successful murder investigations of murder, so he is soon on the road, hoping to establish the dead man’s identity and to prove his friend’s innocence. His travels take him across southern Scotland to Stirling and Linlithgow, and finally to Roslin.

It was fun to recognise in this last location an experience that the author and I must have shared. In 1997 a massive conservation project began at the famous Rosslyn Chapel, and a canopy was erected over the roof, to allow it to dry out. While the canopy spoils the appearance of the Chapel, it has one important advantage for the visitor, in that it has allowed access to a walkway around the roof, offering an intimate and unusual view of the building. I am sure that Pat McIntosh, like me, found this irresistible, and that she was quick to make the imaginative link to another time when this building was shrouded in scaffolding, that of its construction.

A view of Rosslyn Chapel under its canopy, November 2004

The door of the church opened quietly when Gil lifted the latch. They stepped in, and it swung shut behind them with a boom which reverberated in what seemed like a vast, draughty space smelling of incense and pine resin. The floor was flagged; when Gil held his lantern up the vault of the aisle glowed in the dim light, but beyond the pillars the nave vanished upwards into darkness, with a faint, distant hint of high scaffolding. How do the poles stay up there? wondered Gil.

McIntosh brings this distant past to vivid life, its customs, its people, its language, with a warmth and attention to detail which should put her at the forefront of the genre. Her research – which is clearly a labour of love – is impeccable, and as the series has progressed her writing and her characters have both matured. Her influences are clear to see - Ellis Peters and Lindsay Davies are clearly there in the careful period detail, the characterisation and the humour, but even more important is the debt owed to Dorothy Dunnett: these books sit comfortably between the worlds of Nicholas de Fleury and Francis Lymond, and Gil shares the scholarship of these two men, if not their propensity for mayhem. Less ambitious in scope than Dunnett’s two series, the research is less obtrusive – these are books which can be read without a concordance (though we may recall that Dunnett also wrote a detective series, a somewhat heady mix of Jilly Cooper and James Bond!)

In my review of the fourth in the series, St Mungo’s Robin, last year, I voiced the concern that the writing could be a little confusing, although I wondered if I might be doing the author a disservice by reading them out of order. I now think that beginning with the first, The Harper’s Quine, is indeed the best way (no, really?) – a debut novel, it introduces both characters and setting at a slight more leisurely pace than the later ones. Of course, I am persisting in reading them as they appear on the library shelf, but Scottish history is familiar territory, as are language and landscape (James IV, a young man at the time of these stories, met his end not 10 miles from where I’m sitting - the last British monarch to die in battle), so despite my disordered approach, I am becoming an eager advocate on their behalf. It occurred to me as I reached the end on The Merchant’s Mark that the word which best summed them up is good-heartedness – both in the main characters, and in the author’s handling of them. There are five in the series at present, but I see that 6 and 7 are listed on the publisher’s website, which is good news. My favourite character so far is Gil’s sister, Kate, and I hope she will put in further appearances – apparently, the author likes her too, so the chances are good. Oh, and the dog, Socrates…

June’s books

Unless by Carol Shields
Amberwell by D.E. Stevenson
The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge
The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham - re-read
The Grim Reaper by Bernard Knight
Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdsdottir
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
Thy Servant a Dog by Rudyard Kipling
Enchantment by Monica Dickens
Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith

Oh dear, not a single library book among these, as I didn’t have time to go to Berwick to choose any. Only eleven books in total, too – the month started with a Devon visit, where I read the Kipling and Bennett books while it rained outside, but it cleared long enough for a visit to the wonderful Hill House Nursery, where I took pictures for Cat Musings.

It was back to London mid-month, and to the unpleasant experience of minor, but miserable dental surgery so that, instead of spending the evening listening to music at St John’s Smith Square, I retired to my hotel room and spent a wretchedly sleepless night feeling sorry for myself. The next two days were a whirl of meetings and trains and, although I promised myself that I would do nothing more demanding than reading, I didn’t get through much. I had taken Unless with me to London, but it was too serious for my debilitated state, so at the station I bought The Grim Reaper by Bernard Knight, thinking that a straightforward medieval murder mystery would be preferable. A few pages in to this book, which is set in Exeter in 1195, this caught my attention:

De Wolfe was well aware of the Cornishman’s antipathy to religion, though. . . he had never discovered the cause of Gwyn’s phobia for the Church.

It was too much of an anachronism for me – the same thought could have been better expressed in language more appropriate to the setting. I enjoyed the Exeter setting – De Wolfe’s house is opposite a building where I used to work on the edge of the Cathedral Close (and, now I think of it, under another!) and, although Exeter was heavily bombed during the war, remnants of the medieval city are still there in its street names and churches, so I could follow the characters around in my mind’s eye. While not being terribly impressed by this series, I do like books about places I know, so it kept my mind off my troubles until I got home, where I embarked on a bit of serious comfort reading.

I’m still on my marathon read through the Campion novels, and The Fashion in Shrouds was a re-read to keep the order more or less correct. It’s notable for the very welcome return of Amanda from Sweet Danger, who cheerfully appointed herself Campion’s sidekick in the earlier book, and is equally determined on the role in this one. We learn just a little more about Campion’s background in this one (which is set in the fashion house where his sister Val works) mainly through a chilling letter from his mother.

The Monica Dickens book felt like a bit of an oddity. She is mostly remembered for three splendidly funny books about her early work experience: One Pair of Hands, which describes a period “in service” working as a cook general, One Paid of Feet, in which she was working as a nurse, and My Turn to Make the Tea, about being a junior reporter on a local paper. Her novels, both for adults and children, are often concerned with social issues, so that An Angel in the Corner, about a young woman who marries “out of her class” is a fairly sombre read. Enchantment, despite its title, is another such, about a young man of no great ability or intelligence, and bullied by his father, who escapes from his dreary life as a junior counter assistant in a department store by spinning stories in which he is hero. His spare time is spent on role-playing by correspondence (this is before the days of computer games), and his increasing difficulty in maintaining a boundary between gaming and real life brings him into contact with someone who might just be seriously dangerous. Dickens seems to be genuinely interested in the “little” people she writes about, and they are convincing even when unsympathetic. I couldn’t like Tim – in fact, I often wanted to give him a good shaking – but he held my attention to the end.

The Third Canadian Book Challenge

And off we go again! For the first challenge, 415 books were read and reviewed. For the second it was an amazing 1137, and I’m trawling the list looking for interesting things to read for the forthcoming year.

For the second challenge I read only books by women, but I’m not going to limit myself this time. I did wonder about only reading books on dystopian futures, but I decided that I might not be able to find everything I wanted, so I plan to focus particularly on books I’ve been waiting to read. That provides me with a couple of certainties: William Gibson’s Spook City, which has been on the TBR pile for a while, and Douglas Coupland’s new book, Generation A. I’m going to hear him talk about this book at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August, though I’m not sure it will be out here until September. Gibson and Coupland are two of my favourite authors and a new book by either is always an eagerly anticipated pleasure.

My reading will have to be limited to what I can get here in the UK, I can’t afford to buy any more books from Canada, so it will focus largely on authors who are well-known internationally. So Atwood and Munro will almost certainly feature – it’s time I got round to attempting Oryx and Crake again.

Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which has had some excellent reviews, is another book that’s on the shelf waiting; in my early teens I was very attached to an enormous Victorian book on poisons that my father had picked up at an auction; he liked it too, and now that he’s gone – without my assistance, I hasten to add – it sits happily amongst my own collection, so I think Flavia de Luce and I will get on very well.

I seem to have read quite a favourable few reviews of Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air over the two challenges, so I think it’s a must, but the one I really like the sound of will have to wait until I can find someone to bring a copy back for me – Shelf Monkey, by fellow challenge reviewer Corey Redekop sounds just my kind of book (oh, hang on, son’s best friend works in Staples so he must have access to padded bags, and last time he was over here I gave him my copy of The Gum Thief, so he owes me a favour!)

One of my recent re-reading binges was The Salterton Trilogy by Robertson Davies. If I could have found my copy of The Rebel Angels I would have read that too, but as it is, it can go on the list, and we’ll just have to hope it turns up somewhere at the back of all those double-stacked books. Another book that’s been waiting for a while is No Great Mischief by Alistair Mcleod.

Finally, I’d like to read some non-fiction, and first choice is What Species of Creature by Sharon Kirsch, a book with a glorious cover and lovely illustrations. More on this one soon.

That leaves me with four books to scour the library/raid the bookshelves for; at the moment, the list looks like this:

William Gibson, Spook City
Douglas Coupland, Generation A
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air
Corey Redekop, Shelf Monkey
Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
Alistair Mcleod, No Great Mischief
Sharon Kirsch, What Species of Creature

The Second Canadian Book Challenge

The Second Canadian Book Challenge finishes on Canada Day, and there are still two books I haven’t reviewed for this challenge; this is partly a reflection on my feelings about them but, for the sake of completeness, I shall sum up my impressions here.

Dead Cold by Louise Penny was the second book about Inspector Gamache. I talked enthusiastically about the first, Still Life, earlier in the year, taking pleasure in its sense of place and characterisation. I enjoyed the second less, feeling that it suffered slightly from leaving a too much unresolved in order to set up subsequent books in the series, leaving me with the sensation of being cheated, rather that of eager anticipation. Penny is a new writer, and there’s a lack of balance here between open-endedness and the closure necessary to each episode in a series. The story itself moves along at a good pace, reintroducing all the favourite characters first encountered in Still Life, and Gamache himself develops nicely, though I thought his wife helping out with his unsolved cases smacked more of plot device than reality. The victim is a really unpleasant individual, and I think more subtlety is needed -– Penny likes to paint portraits of horrible people, but she does it with rather a heavy hand. I shall read the next one, but the community I enjoyed so much in the first is beginning to feel a little claustrophobic.

A Boy of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews was also a slight disappointment. As I read, I found myself comparing it with one of last year’s choices, Steve Zipp’s Yellowknife; to me, as a British reader, they have a similar sense of expansiveness and open space which contrasts with the more enclosed space of small communities, but for reasons I can’t quite define I preferred the less well-known Yellowknife. They share a quirky sense of humour and, if Toews doesn’t quite go down Zipp’s magic realist route, there are nods in that direction. She has a lightness of touch as a writer and I can see the quality there, but it doesn’t quite work for me. I couldn’t engage with any of the characters, and I found myself rushing the end. I’m interested to see that some of the other reviewers who talked about Toews’ books seemed to have similar reactions. I think I'd like to try The Flying Troutmans, though.

This completes the second challenge, and I did indeed only read books by women. I didn’t manage to finish the first, only reviewing 7 books for it, but that’s 20 Canadian books in two years, and I went to hear Margaret Atwood speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival last August. I shall certainly be taking part of the third challenge and will post about the choice of books soon!

The “Anne” books by L.M. Montgomery

Like many women of my generation, I read Anne of Green Gables when I was young, and I saw a couple of adaptations on television, but it wasn’t until last year that I discovered how many books there were in the series, and decided to embark on them all in order. It was a year in which I considered myself fortunate, because I spent many happy hours immersed in the events of Avonlea and Ingleside.

Anne of Green Gables, the first in the series, tells the story of the orphan Anne Shirley’s arrival at the farm of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. They were expecting a boy, and there are tense pages for Anne and the reader while the elderly brother and sister make up their mind as to whether she can stay. Once it’s decided, Anne’s natural ebullience is unquenchable, and she gets into a succession of scrapes to try the patience of her new guardians, while making friends and rivals in the community. Anne is instantly lovable, and the reader shares her despair about her red hair, and her yearning to be called Cordelia, so that when, at the end of the book, she has to curtail her dreams, we both suffer with her and admire her determination. I read this book in the edition edited by Cecily Devereux, which has an introduction and some interesting back matter, including contemporary reviews, which I found quite informative. I would have welcomed similar treatment for the whole series.

The second book follows her early days as a teacher in the local school, and introduces her adopted siblings, the twins Davy and Dora. The tone is similar to the first book, since Anne is as prone as ever to disaster, especially as organiser of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, but the in the third book, Anne of the Island, we see her start to mature, and a quieter note begins to emerge. Anne is now at Redmond College, and sharing a house with friends. Here she begins to truly appreciate domesticity, and becomes more reflective, while still maintaining her love of storytelling. She doesn’t lose the charm that she has for the reader – instead we feel as though there is a deepening relationship as she matures.

The next book sees Anne as principal of Summerside school, learning to cope with difficult pupils and parents. This is one of my favourites, I think – I like the venture into the Gothic with Anne’s visit to Tomgallon House, and her landladies at Windy Willows (I wonder, incidentally, whether Montgomery liked cats, because they seem to be singled out for misery in her books!). Interestingly, it was written much later than the others, and is epistolatory, which I enjoyed because the letters make it a very “chatty” book.

From book five onwards we join the married Anne, and the mood is often more sombre, though her joy in her new home and new friends always resurfaces. Montgomery never, in the earlier books, shies away from the fact of death, but in the loss of her first child Anne encounters the grief which means that her happiness can never again be perfect. The story of her friend Leslie Moore, too, deals with unhappy marriage, loss and a kind of duty which is contrary to all of Anne’s experience, not joyful duty but a burden. I felt, increasingly impressed that Montgomery didn’t try to shelter her young readers from the woes of life, but was trying to prepare them for what they might meet later, and there is a presentiments of war in the next book. Anne of Ingleside is much occupied with the visit of Gilbert’s dreadful aunt, who tries the patience of the entire family, but also focuses, one by one, on Anne’s children. It’s a lovely portrait of a happy and contented family, and is followed by, and contrasts with, Rainbow Valley, which is more concerned with a neighbouring family, the Merediths, who have lost their mother and are neglected by their father.

The last book, Rilla of Ingleside, was hard to read. The youngest of Anne’s children, Rilla (named after Marilla Cuthbert) is the last child still at home, and she’s a frivolous, carefree child until war breaks out and all the young men join up. Endeavouring to be more responsible, Rilla starts organising the local junior branch of the Red Cross and, on a fundraising visit, suddenly finds herself with a baby whose mother has just died. Caring for a helpless infant is daunting, but she is determined to do her best. It’s the agony of waiting that makes the novel so hard, though, the depiction of a community in limbo waiting to hear if its children will survive, at a time when news could take weeks to arrive, and the reading of news and waiting for corroboration of secondhand reports is a constant theme. The pain and grief of the small community is exemplified by the Blythe’s elderly dog, who accompanies Jem to the station and then waits out the duration of the war – I could hardly bear it. At the same time I found this woman’s perspective on the war illuminating and rewarding.

There is a “prequel” to the Anne books written by Budge Wilson, Before Green Gables, intended to explain how Anne became the kind of child she was, imaginative and resourceful. I started to read this, and gave up, but it demonstrated to me how successful Montgomery’s books are, because they never for a moment lag, or lose your interest – there is always a sense of freshness about them. I compared them to Susan Coolidge’s Katy books, which I also returned to recently, and found much less satisfactory than I recalled; the attempt to grow up with Katy (in What Katy Did Next) was, I thought, pretty dull, whereas Anne at every stage of her life feels like an old friend, one of those people you can meet after a long period with a feeling that you’ve never been apart.

I’ve listed the books in order below, for the benefit of non-Canadian readers!
Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Anne of Windy Willows (Windy Poplars in the US and Canada)
Anne’s House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Rainbow Valley
Rilla of Ingleside

Unless by Carol Shields

"It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I’ve heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I’ve never understood what they meant."

Some years ago I was a guest at a dinner given in honour of Carol Shields, who had given a lecture in the department where I was working, in which she talked about the writing of Unless. It was the second time I had met her, and in the interim she had become extremely ill, so that it was clear to everyone that this would very likely be her last visit to the UK. I was a pretty silent guest, as I recall, as usual preferring to listen to the conversation around me. Nevertheless (and that’s the title of Chapter Four of this novel), with a fairly recent course in bereavement counselling behind me, I felt the theme of loss was one with which I had a degree of familiarity, and I was acutely aware that she must recently have faced not just the loss of health, but also the imminent loss of her own life, for which I took the novel to be, at least in part, a metaphor. I was, I admit, fascinated and impressed that she should choose to tackle this loss by anatomising it in a work of fiction.

So it might seem rather surprising that I haven’t read Unless until now, though it has been on my shelf for some time. The initial prompt to read it came from John’s Second Canadian Book Challenge, but the reason I took it to London with me last week was the comments made by one of the guests on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read, where it was chosen as one of that week’s three books. Children’s novelist Terry Deary (not a writer whose work I know) pronounced it a waste of time (I paraphrase, so I hope he’ll forgive me if I misrepresent him) because reading is to entertain and not to improve the reader. Why on earth, he said, would you want to read about being miserable? Now, I admit that I’d put it off all this time because I knew it would make me sad and perhaps angry, but this enraged me so much that I felt compelled to defend it, because I believe that one of the most important functions of literature is precisely to offer the opportunity to extend the scope of your imagination and thus, experience, to provide the means with which to empathise and relate to others. Just as myths and legends did for our ancestors, so modern literature does for us (and this is a theme which Susan and Nymeth have recently expanded on with much wisdom). Fictionalising experience can allow an exploration of feeling in ways which may not always be open to writers of fact, as well as providing a safer means of doing so. This is particularly true for children (what parent wouldn’t rather have their child introduced to the idea of fear through a “scary” story, than by experiencing it first-hand?), but applies also to adults: should I limit my exploration of the possible loss of a child to watching reality television? can I only understand the plight of women in Afghanistan by risking my own life? Iris Murdoch described the novel as important precisely because it allows a reflective, rather than scientific, examination of the human condition, and this is exactly what Shields is giving us here.

Unless did indeed make me sad and angry, but there was also much to be amused by. Reta Winters is a translator who has recently written a “light” novel, My Thyme is Up, and is now planning a sequel (Thyme in Bloom) in which her characters Alicia and Ramon are planning marriage. Shields has been accused by her critics of being over-concerned with the minutiae of everyday life and relationships, and so too is Reta, so that she spends hours investigating trombone playing on the web, and worrying about whether Alicia should get married. Such displacement activity is described in detail, as is her house-cleaning, recognisable avoidances of what is always near the forefront of her mind: the terrifying absence of her daughter Norah. None of the family can imagine what has driven Norah to drop out of university to sit on a street corner, begging, with a sign around her neck which says “Goodness”. Reta wonders if it may be an accretion of small things, the insidious erasure of women from the world, which

is split in two between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded female otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang.

Her husband, Tom, meanwhile, thinks that it may be post-traumatic stress, although none of them is able to point to any event which may have caused it. Erasure is a constant theme: the young Muslim woman who commits an act of self-immolation, Reta’s unsent, angry letters and, in a wonderfully funny scene, her inability to finish a sentence when she meets her new (male) editor.

A book about a woman writing a book, it is insightful about the writing process, as in the chapter which deals with work (or the absence of it) in novels. The denouement is sly, and difficult – I don’t want to say too much about it, but I’m still musing on it. It’s interesting that Shields was writing a novel, when she died, in which one of the characters had just missed the chance to write about 9/11, thus remaining a writer, like Shields herself, concerned with small, personal, everyday tragedies – the difference being that for Shields it was a choice, whereas for her character it was an accident of timing.

This is a book to read when you’re in a contemplative mood, and it is one that will stay with you.

Forests of the Heart by Charles De Lint

Another read for the Once Upon a Time III Challenge (I’m afraid that I may not finish Marina Warner’s hefty and fascinating book, No Go the Bogeyman, because it is overdue at the library – I may have to buy a copy after all*).

As with other De Lint books, Forests of the Heart follows a number of main characters and weaves their stories around each other like a piece of Celtic knotwork. It’s set in Newport, a city neither US nor Canadian, our first step into the marginal lands that De Lint regularly inhabits, and from where it’s a short leap of the imagination to find ourselves in that other place where old and new world magics might struggle for supremacy. Because, of course, when the settlers travelled from the “old” world, they brought their legends with them, only to find that the “new” world had its own genii loci – spirits of place. So the old gods, displaced, but living on in the memories of the settlers, drift around the margins, sometimes seen by those who have the ability, nurturing the desire for a place of their own until they can find someone who has the power to bring it about.

The focus is the old house, Kellygnow, an artist’s community cared for by Nuala, a woman of obvious power. First to arrive is Bettina, a Mexican-Indian healer, who is hoping to restore her inner peace, lost when her grandmother disappeared or died. She is both familiar with the duality of this world/other world, and uncertain of it, but she recognises that the men she sees hanging about outside the house and names los lobos, belong to the other world, and she finds herself strongly drawn to one of them.

Los lobos, the Irish guys who are always there in the pub, drinking and smoking and watching, and are so sharply drawn that the reader can almost smell them, smoke and beer and something also more feral and dangerous, so that there is always a sense of threat which quickly becomes real when the unsuspecting Hunter tangles with them. The real object of their interest, though, is Ellie, a sculptor. Chosen for her magical potential, she is invited to Kellygnow, where they want her to make an artefact which will enable los lobos to oust the native spirits, the manitou.

De Lint manipulates his various mythologies with assurance, incidentally depicting, in a series of flashbacks to the Arizonan desert, some of the most enchanting “spirits” I have come across. When I finished the book I had to Google los cadejos to find out more about them, and they are still singing and performing their clickety-clack dance in my head. In fact, I found Bettina’s strand of the story the most absorbing, an intriguing acquaintance with a mythology borne of heat and dust that is largely new to me, child of northern forests and Celtic darkness that I am. I’ve read a handful of De Lint’s books – this is my favourite to date, and will, I think, remain so.

* Indeed, since I wrote this it has been returned, and a sizeable fine paid!