A Son of the Rock

Bamburgh Castle lies on the coast of Northumberland with views to Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands.

Castle from Bamburgh village:-

Castle from below:-

From south:-

Castle buildings from courtyard (stitch of three photos):-

Tower from courtyard:-

View from lower courtyard:-

Old entrance from lower courtyard:-

Castle from north wall:-

Castle keep:-

Mantle, 2019, 348 p plus 5 p List of characters, 5p Afterword and 2 p Acknowledgements.

This novel’s title is not particularly apposite – though it does allude to its subject, those Greek tales of the Trojan War – as it barely mentions the legendary ships at all. Instead, its focus is on the women caught up in that conflict and more or less sidelined in all the years since they were first written about. And not simply, like Pat Barker’s Women of Troy sequence, on the Trojan women, but also on the those the Greeks left behind and the Muses and Goddesses said to have influenced affairs.

Thus we have the muse Calliope irritated by the importunings of “the poet” for her to sing for him of the events he wishes to describe (Haynes thereby echoing the usual translation of the Iliad’s opening line, “Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.”) Creusa, woken by the tumult of the city’s fall, fearing for her five-year-old son and wondering where her husband Aeneas has got to. The captured Trojan women on the shore by the Greek camp, their travails only beginning but intermittently returned to through the narrative. Penthesilea the Amazon, fighting for Troy against the Greeks to atone for being responsible for the death of her sister. Penelope, writing increasingly tetchy letters to her husband Odysseus as his long absence is exacerbated by failure to return promptly on the war’s end and then prolonged on – and on and on – (the poet’s missives suggesting he will use any excuse not to come home.) Chryseis, the daughter of Apollo’s priest, who is befriended by Briseis in shared adversity. The sea-nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, bemoaning her forced marriage to a mortal and her son’s own mortality. Laodamia begging her husband Protesilaus not to be the first onto the beach at Troy, though she knew he would be. Iphigenia, tricked by her father Agamemnon’s promise of marriage to Achilles into being sacrificed for a favourable wind to set sail for Troy. Aphrodite, Hera and Athene using wiles and false promises to trick Paris into his famous judgement. Oenone, who rescued Paris as a baby after he was abandoned due to the prophecy that he would cause Troy’s downfall. Eris, goddess of strife, setting up the business with the golden apple. Hecabe, Queen of Troy, struggling to accept her new diminished status but still able to revenge at least one of her dead sons. Her daughter Polyxena, accepting her fate with stoic dignity. Cassandra, cursed to see the future as the present and not to have her visions believed. The goddess Gaia resenting the ravages humans wreak on the Earth. Clytemnestra nursing her fury at Iphigenia’s death and preparing her vengeance for it for ten long years. The three Fates spinning the threads of mortals’ lives. Andromache slowly coming to terms with her new life as a slave.

Not a straightforward linear narrative, then, and the many viewpoints and scenes mean the whole thing comes across as fractured and a bit scattershot. This stands in contrast to Haynes’s previous novel The Children of Jocasta which was more tightly focused. The lack of linearity of the storyline works, though, and Haynes clearly has a deep knowledge of her source material.

Her main point, that the sufferings and endurance of the women of these wars (and by extension the women of any war) are as – or even more – heroic than any acts carried out by warriors is certainly worth considering.

Pedant’s corner:- “Odysseus’ nurse” (Odysseus’s,) “Aeneas’ heart” (Aeneas’s,) Briseis’ back” (Briseis’s,) Chryses’ character (Chryses’s,) all names ending in ‘s’ are given s’ rather than s’s for their possessives, “to staunch your bleeding” (stanch,) “each head will open its gaping maw” (stomachs are not usually located on heads,) “‘that Hector deserved to die.’ she said” (‘that Hector deserved to die,’ she said’,) “not known to have expressed regret for any cruelty he had perpetuated against anyone” (he had perpetrated against anyone.)

A figure of a kilted soldier in bronze atop a pedestal of granite stones, this lies in a small park area to the side of a roundabout at the junction of Nairn Road, Bridge Street and St Catherine’s Road.

From park area:-

Front view:-

Side view:-

Great War dedication and names:-

World War 2 dedication and names:-

Gulf War name:-

Co-founder of Hot Chocolate and, along with Errol Brown, co-writer of their early hits, Tony Wilson died in April. The promotion of Brown as lead singer eventually led to Wilson leaving the group. This is one of those early hits.

Hot Chocolate: Emma

Anthony Nathaniel (Tony) Wilson: 8/10/1936 – 24/4/2026. So it goes.

Memorial to crew 3 of 120 Squadron killed in a crash over Afghanistan in 2006. Forres War Memorial in background:-

This one is courtesy of my younger son who sent me the photo from his trip to Lochinver last year.

Lochinver is a village in Assynt, Sutherland.

Its War Memorial depicts a kilted soldier with rifle at the ready atop a granite column above a tapering plinth.

Here can be seen dedications to both World Wars. Second World War names shown below. (Great War names are on the memorial’s sides.)

Inlaid Table, Brodie Castle:-

Bed:-

Bedroom:-

Library:-

Stained glass armorial window, bearing the Brodie Arms:-stained glass

Little, Brown, 2020, 442 p.

The sixth Karen Pirie book and again she is juggling two cases.

The first is when a skeleton is discovered in a campervan stored in a house’s garage for years. Suspicion falls on the deceased owner’s former lover, who abandoned her for a life as an artist. The second is a live case of a body hauled up along with a creel by a fishing boat off Elie. Since the dead man is one James Auld, whose brother Ian, a high-up civil servant in the Scottish Office, disappeared ten years before, and Karen had recently reviewed his case, she is given the remit.

James had fallen under suspicion of murdering his brother and to escape that had made a new life for himself by joining the Foreign Legion and then settling in France as one Paul Allard. Since the initial investigation was carried out in Fife DS Daisy Mortimer out of the Kirkcaldy Police office ends up seconded to Karen’s Historic Cases Unit. (This becomes semi-permanent when Karen’s assistant DC Jason Murray – aka the Mint – suffers a broken leg during the investigation.)

Connections in both cases are soon made – though not between them – but take time to tease out. In the meantime Karen is still grieving over the death of her former lover Phil Parhatka and worried about the direction her new relationship with Hamish, owner of a small chain of coffee shops in Edinburgh and a cottage up north. He does perform a useful function here though by identifying a mysterious male in a photograph of Ian Auld found in James’s French apartment. This is David Greig, once an enfant terrible artist, who committed suicide not long after Ian Auld’s disappearance. When Karen learns six well-known Scottish paintings were stolen from the Scottish Office and replaced by forgeries in the years immediately prior to the Toy/Lib Dem coalition government she begins to join the dots.

Pedant’s corner:- Plus points for “amn’t I?” “There were a handful” (there was a handful,)  “James’ message” (James’s.)

A ceiling. As I recall we were told this was plaster made to look like carved wood:-

Another ceiling:-

An armorial ceiling:-

Fire Range:-

A fireplace:-

Heavily carved fireplace:-

Vintage, 2000? 568 p. First published 1961. (The publishing information page gave this edition’s date as 1994, but the author information page states he died in 1999 so it must have been some time later.)

How to approach a novel whose title has contributed a concept to the world’s lexicon of phrases? Indeed, a novel whose cover describes it as “One of the great novels of the century” and was no 99 in the recent Guardian list of 100 greatest novels ever, thus spurring me on to retrieve it from my tbr pile. That makes it 34 of those 100 I have now read. (It made no 8 in the readers’ list.)

And how will it conform to the great novelistic concerns of love, sex and death?

Well, Catch-22 is a war novel, so that’s death ticked off – though not often directly. Fear of death, yes, (the background to the eponymous catch,) but not death itself. Sex is certainly alluded to, but in a perfunctory way, and there is precious little love displayed in its pages. Some of the characters say they’re in love but the reader may beg to doubt it.

War novels have a head start in the importance stakes. They do tend to be taken seriously, as Kate Atkinson noted.

War is, of course, a deadly serious business; but it is also at its root utterly absurd and non-sensical. In Catch-22, Heller has chosen to lean into that absurdity. Heavily. At times so heavily it tips over into farce.

The text is full of digressions, repetitions and conversations which circle back on themselves or have characters repeating to each other what each has just said. It is decidedly non-linear with the narrative sometimes jumping from one scene to another mid-sentence. Scenes from main character Yossarian’s training and the island of Pianosa where he is based in the ‘now’ of the novel slide into each other without demarcation. Character descriptions tend to the grotesque and few of them impress as real people. The treatment of women is perfunctory and off-hand. The overall impression is of a surrealistic collage which goes thoroughly overboard at times with such character names such as Major Major and A Fortiori.

But it is not really so much a novel of war as of the US military mindset. Colonel Cathcart’s desire for promotion (or publicity,) the rivalries between senior officers more important to them than the war itself. Cathcart’s continual raising of the number of missions his charges must fly before their tour ends and they can be sent home is the proximate cause of bomb-aimer Yossarian’s refusal to fly any more, his natural fear of being killed not then being evidence of the insanity which would ensure his withdrawal from combat. Quartermaster Milo Minderbinder’s black market activities – supposedly to benefit all the soldiers on the base – with his fingers in every pie imaginable plus a few more, extend even to dealing with the Germans and undermine the war effort in other ways.

The novel does undergo a mood change halfway through chapter 39 (out of 42) when the narrative becomes more sombre and it is from here on that Cathcart and Colonel Korn suddenly show more perspicacity and cunning than up to that point.

I can’t decide whether this is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (a phrase I have purloined in a bid for comic effect) or the most annoying novel I’ve ever read.

I think I lean towards the latter.

Sensitivity note: the word ‘nigger’ appears – as do ‘kike’, ‘wop’ and ‘spic’.

Pedant’s corner:- “the educate Texan from Texas” (that’s where Texans usually come from,) “a bus depot blazing with red and yellow lights” (wouldn’t they have a blackout?) “clefted chin” (cleft chin,) receptable (receptacle,) german (x 1, elsewhere, as is proper, German,) “threw this arms about” (his arms,) “and order him” (and ordered him.) “Now She sat” (she,)  “how many times she’s packed his bags” (he’s packed his bags,) “like most of all” (Liked most of all,) mispronounciations (mispronunciations,) “Dr Stubbs’ fault” (Stubbs’s.) “‘Another country heard from’”  (elsewhere this phrase is rendered as another county heard from.)