I found these four short novels with a squeal of triumph in an Aberdeen second-hand bookshop, and bought them for £3. That’s right: the four books that are one of Garner’s greatest creative accomplishments, in a pristine box set, for barely more than they cost the original buyer in the late 1970s. I could barely contain my excitement, and gobbled all four stories over the next two evenings.
The Stone Book, Tom Fobble’s Day, Granny Reardun and The Aimer Gate were originally sold as children’s books. I know I read Granny Reardun as a child because I never forgot the image of the mother scrubbing the floor, moving backwards on her knees towards the door for the last time, where the rest of the family were waiting in their loaded cart to move somewhere they didn’t want to go. Trouble is, I couldn’t remember the title, and wondered for years where that story had come from. It came from Cheshire, Alan Garner’s ancestral county, and the Allman family were put out of their cottage because it was built of the last dimension stone in the county, and the vicar’s wife wanted it for her garden wall. This cruelty and injustice is a mere detail in the novel, since the main plot is about Joseph deciding that he does not want to be a stonemason like his grandfather, and how he is drawn to the forge as if he belongs there instead. Mark Edmonds wrote about Granny Reardun in an essay in the Alan Garner festschrift First Light: ‘It is only when [Joseph] sees their connection, in chisel mark and weathercock, that he fully understands. Metal is not asking him to turn his back; it just wants him to know where and how he fits’ (76).
Joseph is Mary’s son, and she is the stout-hearted daughter of Robert, the stone mason of The Stone Book. She climbs a ladder all the way to the top of Saint Philip’s steeple, carrying her father’s baggin in a knotted cloth between her teeth. Once she’s got over the dizziness she’s quite happy, and climbs the weathercock to be whizzed round and round by her delighted father. She wants to learn to read, but the squire doesn’t like his kitchen-maids to read, so Robert tools and knaps her a prayer-book from green flint, with a fossil fern on the back. There is also one more wonder in the story, that only Mary can see: she’s the bravest of all the characters in this quartet.
Joseph comes back in Tom Fobble’s Day, when his grandson William is learning how to stand up to the bullying Allman boy over the loan of his sledge. Joseph builds a sledge that carries William from the top of the top field past the dangerous rough ground near the gate, right through to the bottom field, well past the sledge graveyard where all the smashed ruins of homemade sledges end up. William’s sledge, much better than the shrapnel that rains from the sky as German bombers pass overhead, unregarded, is Joseph’s best and last job. Edmonds again: ‘The frame and rails are a composite of the forge that Joseph had stepped back from, and the loom used by William’s namesake many years before’ (78).
We go back in time to uncover that awkward bit between the fields, in The Aimer Gate, in which young Robert is put to work to move the stones and rubble by his uncle Charlie, back from France on leave in the First World War. Charlie is a sniper, his leave nearly up, and he has the shadow of death around him. Faddock Allman is the legless Boer War veteran now breaking stones in the road, sitting in his trolley. Charlie treats Faddock kindly, and with respect, one soldier to another. Faddock was the boy who threw stones through his own cottage window when he was working for the team who broke it up for the vicar’s wife’s garden wall, which is why Robert’s father William won’t speak to him. The ruins of the Allmans’ cottage make the ridge in the field boundary that smashes the unwary sledges, and will blunt the scythes of Charlie and the Leah brothers if young Robert doesn’t clear it out. Charlie’s last job is to shoot the rabbits and other creatures escaping from the field portion ever shrinking beneath the scythes. His sniping skill is his route out of farming, and stonework, and metal crafting, but his own plans may include something more drastic than that.
There’s a photograph of the Garners in First Light, with Joseph and Charlie and Mary and old Robert. We don’t really need to know that all the stories are true, or near enough. They are marvellous. Harry Lupton, again in First Light, said it best: ‘They are of such a distilled precision, they are so layered, so finely observed, so pregnant with what lies under their surfaces’. They wear like stone, with stories in every layer.
This time in the 
This is such an engrossing novel because it reads as if history is just unrolling in front of you. In my day job I’ve been using 
In another episode of unexpected emotional pleasure, Sir Ralph the priest goes in search of a hawk (since all medieval priests may fly a hawk as a symbol of their gentility). He meets the recently widowed Dame of Brocton who wants to read him the Lay of Mamillion, which her young husband, recently dead, had composed. This is Sir Ralph’s first encounter with medieval literature, and from the snatches Warner invents for our entertainment it seems to be very like Gawain and the Green Knight, thought to have been written around this time. Thus important developments in English art are connected to the history of this nunnery, but the nuns themselves, being enclosed and very wary of change, don’t know anything about them.
In a way, The Corner That Held Them is more like the ‘naturalist realism’ of the nineteenth-century historical novel, which was as plain and historically accountable as it could be, to be real, and natural. Warner’s interjections and abrupt summaries of a year – ‘In 1208 came the Interdict. In 1223 lightning set fire to the granary’ – sound very like proper medieval chronicles, when there wasn’t very much to remember, or nothing much happened that was important enough to write, on calfskin vellum, which was expensive. The same thing happens to the nuns’ collective memory. They can only work out when the daylight owl began to hoot by thinking back to other events: when the pear-tree blossomed, when the refectory was whitewashed, when Dame Amy had a whitlow. They know about Sundays, but every other day flows past in a nameless stream. This vagueness anchored with memorable events is a familiar habit, we all think of our own personal histories like this. But when history goes into a written narrative, it can do two things. It can become the kind of historical fiction called the ‘felt past’, in which the emotions of characters are up front and palpable, the history illustrating their story of love, or adventure, or revenge.
Lady Baltimore, by Owen Wister, is an extraordinary novel. It wasn’t written as a historical novel, but it certainly is one now: a 1905 depiction of the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, on how life would have been so much better if the South hadn’t lost the Civil War.
Lady Baltimore is about the attempts of New York society girl Hortense Rieppe to persuade impoverished Southern gentleman John Mayrant to stay in love with her. He met her in romantic circumstances, there was an idyll and an engagement, he returned home to prepare for their marriage. She followed to make sure that he did not come to his senses, because he is quite unlike her usual beaux, although, regrettably, poor. And her usual beaux are incredulous that she allowed things to progress this far. Hortense’s pursuit is set in Charleston at the end of the nineteenth century when the New Rich of Newport were becoming a horrifying byword for vulgarity and philistinism for traditional Southerners. I can’t find much online about this novel, which makes me think that its subject matter has persuaded scholars to avoid it. I can’t find any reprints except in a Southern Classics series from 1992, and the admirable Librivox have done an audio book version. Tellingly, the blurb for 1992 edition describes Lady Baltimore as a ‘classic novel of post-Civil War Charleston life’. It talks about the theme of North and South becoming reconciled, but says nothing at all about the other major theme, of how the black American should never attain equality with the white. This is a novel that needs investigation, because of its manipulation of the reader. There is something very strange about the process of reading, and loving, I mean absolutely loving, a novel in all its aspects, and then being stopped in one’s tracks by the narrator’s assumption that something we know is utterly wrong is desirable, and that all the readers will agree with this. An analogy might be as if one were reading a great German novel of the 1930s, being totally wowed by it, and then finding out, too late, that it and its author were seriously pro-Nazi. It’s a kick to the intellect.
Going back to Lady Baltimore, I have to repeat: it is an eminently satisfying novel. The first-person narrator, a Northerner called Augustus, is sent to Charleston by his Aunt Carola, who wants him to find archival evidence that he is connected by blood to the crowned heads of Europe. This is a delightfully satirical sub-plot we needn’t think about much, but it brings Augustus to Charleston, and gives him letters of introduction to the old families of the town who approve, in a superior way, of his task. He himself has no great interest in being royally related, but he is a dutiful nephew, and can see that this task gives him the entrée into a society that he is soon longing to penetrate. He meets Miss Eliza La Heu, the daughter of a plantation family working, in a ladylike way, at the Woman’s Exchange, selling cake and light lunches to the upper classes. He also meets John Mayrant, first introduced as an out of breath young gentleman, who arrives at the Woman’s Exchange while Augustus is taking his first lunch there, to order a wedding cake for the following Wednesday: the ‘Lady Baltimore’ of the title.
I found all this completely delightful. When the Displacers – as Hortenses’s set is named by Augustus – arrive in Charleston in their vulgar automobile, and inadvertently run over Miss Eliza’s dog, and offer her money as a compensation because they think from her modest dress that she is a servant or peasant, we can see this is going to be a deeply felt enactment of the manners of the New Rich versus those of the Old Poor.
Lady Baltimore is deeply rewarding for the marvellous storytelling, the fun of the extraordinary social entanglements, the clever wit, and for the enjoyment of seeing the New Rich routed, as is traditional for this kind of American novel in the Edith Wharton style. Read it also for a very sobering piece of evidence that 12 Years A Slave was not made up in hindsight.
This time, in the 
Another category of non-Roman citizen were the captured children of enemy nobles, who were brought up as fosterlings in nice Roman homes, until the day came when they needed to be put out of the way, perhaps into the army, or married off to someone who would be grateful. The novel begins in a sultry post-coital scene between Beric, a captive Gaulish prince who has grown up in the house of Flavius Crispus, who has just been doing what he’s been told to by his foster sister Flavia, a beautiful, spoiled and very nasty young woman, who hasn’t yet told the besotted Beric about her betrothal, to be announced that evening. Thus the novel begins with an uneven demonstration of power, between the Roman citizen and the non-citizen, between the emotionally cold and the hopelessly dreamy, and between a young woman with a very assured manner and young man who doesn’t know how shaky the certainties of his life are becoming. We can sense his vulnerability right from the first page, and can tell that things are not going to go well.
Every narrative voice in the novel belongs to a character. There is no third-person omniscient narrator, no authorial voice who knows more than the characters or the readers. It’s an egalitarian way to tell a story, which fits beautifully with the Christian ethos that the story illustrates, that everyone is equal and that every person is as important as each other. It’s also a technical tour de force, brilliantly executed, because it’s hard to spot the seamless change in perspectives from one character to another, when – zip – you’re out of Eunice’s bakery and back into Crispus’s house, or into the cellar where the Church meets to worship and receive strength from their beliefs. For a 1930s novel it is also egalitarian in gender and sexuality. Some characters love each other and happen to be men, and also love women: later fans of Mary Renault would have appreciated the delicacy of Mitchison’s touch, who wrote this novel when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. Women too have equal status in the Church. A dancing girl called Lalage is a deacon alongside Manasses, because those who are strongest in the spirit become leaders, and she is strong.
I mentioned that The Blood of the Martyrs is a philosophical and theological thriller. Many of the conversations are between characters trying to explain to each other what Christianity is, and what you do when you are one. In the third part of the novel Paul is in prison with the other characters, and is arguing with them about what needs to be done, and how baptism should be performed. He dictates his letters to other churches to Luke, the doctor who does his best for the prisoners after their torture, but really there is very little he can do for a raped woman who is about to be torn apart by tigers. Stoics and Epicurian characters are also present in the prison, political prisoners lofty in the knowledge that their intellectually superior beliefs do not let them in for such degrading and brutal treatment. But they are shaken by their inability to watch another person suffer and remain unmoved. By witnessing the deaths in the arena, people begin to be converted, and the seed of belief is transmitted by example and by loving kindness. It is a very moving image, drenched with sadness.
Rebellion, or Uprising? In this Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up I’m in the middle of the British eighteenth century, looking at the ‘1745’, otherwise known as the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising, depending on which side you were on. This was the second attempt by the exiled Roman Catholic monarchy of Britain to reclaim what they thought was their rightful kingdom, so let’s have a wee bit of history to fix us in time and space, before I get on to John Buchan’s fascination with the subject.
So that was the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising. Like Flora, I am a Macdonald, descended from Clan Macdonald of the Isle of Skye. However, this took place over several centuries and follows the genealogy of only one of my many ancestors, so it’s a very selective way of claiming a heritage. I’ve never been convinced by the heady romanticism of the cult of Jacobitism. The idea of the glamorous prince from over the water, the tragedy of Culloden and the lost cause, and the resulting oppression of the Highlands, have produced a deliberate nurturing of Scottish nationalist sentimentality about English oppression and the nobility of lost Scottish causes. This can be uplifting, in very small doses, but is disturbingly divorced from historical fact. Vast numbers of novels have been written about the Jacobite theme. Until the mid-twentieth century it was one of the most important subjects in Scottish fiction, first made popular by Sir Walter Scott with his novel Waverley of 1814, and continued by, among thousands of others, John Buchan, about whom I’ve posted several times. Looking at Buchan’s Jacobite novels and how he treated the theme is a useful antidote to some of the glutinous and unhistorical nonsense that has been published about this military, political and dynastic disaster.
Buchan’s third novel was A Lost Lady of Old Years, also of 1899, so we can see what his preoccupation was at this time in his writing life. It takes a very different approach to the ‘45 than is or was usual. The ‘Lost Lady’ of the title is Mrs Murray of Broughton, the wife of Mr Secretary Murray who was hanged for his part in the rebellion, though she escaped. The ‘Old Years’ means of times past: she herself was young and beautiful. History apparently records that she was a bad lot, but Buchan romanticises her spectacularly. His Mrs Murray is pure, perfect and brave in her unswerving support for the Prince, despite the treachery of her husband whom she is beginning to suspect. The main protagonist of the novel, a teenage delinquent called Francis Birkenshaw, is saved from a life of crime because Mrs Murray catches him breaking into her house, mistakes him for the Jacobite messenger for whom she is waiting, and gives him a highly secret political message to deliver to one of the great Jacobite leaders in the Highlands, Lord Lovat.
Buchan’s best Jacobite novel is Midwinter, of 1923, because it is a very plausible story – Dr Johnson (yes, THE Dr Johnson) tries to stop an anti-Jacobite plot at the moment of the Jacobite army’s decision to march away from Derby, and helps to save the marriage of a young girl married to a traitor. It is brilliantly plotted with really memorable characters. We all have a vague idea of Dr Johnson, the grumpy and superior lexicographer sitting in state at a tea-drinking at Mrs Thrale’s house, a figure of importance. This Dr Johnson is a much younger man, and a humble but doughty tutor to the gentility. Whether he 
Negroland is a memoir of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s as an upper-class black girl in Chicago. It’s about race, class, position, white socks, prejudice, hair oil and its stains, integration, politics, fabulous clothes, architecture, representation, style, standards and history. Jefferson mixes poetry and lyrics with historical extracts and retellings of events from daily and national life. It’s not an easy read, though it is extremely absorbing as a subject, because Jefferson’s prose is challenging; the readers are not let off lightly, and have to work to be told what we want to know.
101 years after publication, this week’s 
Mr Britling is the main character in the novel, and becomes the focalising character – the one through whose perspective we see what happens – about two thirds of the way through. His name is a giveaway for his Everyman symbolic role. He represents the British man sending his son and friend to war, and struggling to understand the changes that have overcome his life. Mr Britling is also H G Wells himself, a famous writer and popular commentator, writing books and articles for the newspapers to explain things to the ordinary man, to make his living. And, as the title of the novel suggests, Mr Britling sees it through. He endures the war, as far as it goes, and suffers terrible changes in his life. He also goes through large changes in his understanding of what the war was for and about. The war breaks through Mr Britling’s sense of being in control and well satisfied with the world as he has arranged it, because a very loud and violent thing is breaking through these paper defences.
One fascinating aspect of life in wartime rarely covered in fiction of this period is how household finances were affected. Mr and Mrs Britling were of the leisured classes whose income comes mainly from investments placed carefully in banks all over Europe. The war stops payment on many of these. His profession as a pundit suffers when the wartime newspapers and magazines change their editorial policies, so he publishes a great deal less, and makes less from his books than before. His gardener has long gone to a better-paying job, so he is not replaced, the garden is neglected, which affects the impression of prosperity and sufficiency that the Britling world has always had. Not that Mr Britling just sits in his study doing nothing: he is as busy in wartime as he was in the days of peace, but not for pay. He patrols the lanes at night as a special constable, which gives him a lot of time for thinking, and then writing long drafts of a new way to explain the war and to prevent war in the future. Wells’s also wrote long letters to the newspapers complaining about the things that the novel complains about, so there is an obvious connection between his concerns, and how he filled the plot of this novel. Both men are very anxious to work out why this war had happened, since it seemed to have arrived on the doorstep without any warning.
Lady Frensham’s views about the Germans are objected to violently by Mr Britling, because he has a different relationship with ‘the Germans’. He had had a lovely summer holiday with German families before the war. He has employed Heinrich, a young German tutor for his younger sons, as a long-term guest in the Britling household. Heinrich is a bit of a joke when the novel begins – so earnest, so organised, so obsessive, and yet so anxious about the prospect of war because it will interrupt his planned trip to an Esperanto conference in Boulogne. Heinrich is obedient and dutiful, and knows that he must study philology because it is what he is expected to do by his professors and parents. He returns to Germany at the beginning of the war in great distress: he does not want to fight, he sees no reason why Germany should want a war, but it is his duty to return. Poor Heinrich is always asking for explanations, but no-one gives him any.