The Fair Botanists by Sara Sheridan

The Fair Botanists

When – and I’m sure it will be when, rather than if – they make the film of The Fair Botanists, the opening scene has to be the extraordinary sight of a group of fully mature, twenty-five feet trees apparently perambulating down a suburban Edinburgh street. They are, in fact, being transported on barrows from the old Edinburgh Botanic Gardens to the site of the new Gardens – the ones we know today. This scene is the startlingly vibrant beginning to what is, throughout, a startlingly vibrant evocation of 1820s Edinburgh. 

Sarah Sheridan marshalls a fascinating and complex array of characters, some real – notably Sir Walter Scott and King George IV – and some invented. Like all the best fictional characters, of course, they are built on the edifices of real people, and Sara has clearly done her research, giving us, amongst others, a Georgian courtesan, a court diplomat and the aged scion of a prosperous Edinburgh family whose wealth, like many of those at the time, was probably garnered on the backs of slaves. We also have the head and the head gardener of the Botanic Gardens, assorted staff and workers, a young widow, the bastard offspring of Robert Burns, a talented and ruthless plantswoman and a blind woman whose remarkable sense of smell is put to particularly effective use in the distilling industry. 

Their worlds collide through the unlikely premise of an Agave Americana plant, monstrously tall and ready to flower, the only example in Europe known to do so. So rare and exotic are the seeds of this plant that overnight they become highly coveted. What follows is a fascinating and hugely enjoyable story of daring and despair, endeavour and loss, played out against the backdrop of an imminent – and inaugural – visit to Scotland by King George. Friendships are forged and broken, hopes dashed, emotions raised, all of it in the New Town of Edinburgh which is literally being built around them. 

The Fair Botanists is brilliantly researched but it wears its research lightly. In its female protagonists we have two strong and determined women. They don’t always do the right things but they always do them for the best of reasons. The novel doesn’t shy away from the issues of the day – Henry Dundas literally casts a shadow over Edinburgh today, through the Melville Monument in St Andrews Square, and The Fair Botanists doesn’t shirk from examining his baleful legacy. The compromised position of women in Georgian society, too, is aired through the various experiences of Belle, Elizabeth. aunt Clementina and Mhairi, but there is never any didacticism in the narrative. Rather, it is a joy to read from start to finish.

This is highly recommended.

The Regret by Dan Malakin

 

Full disclosure: I know Dan Malakin slightly. Back in about 2005 to 2008 we were both in an online writers’ group, Alex Keegan’s Boot Camp, famed for its forthright approach to literary criticism. Or brutality, if you’d prefer. We also spent four days on a writers’ course at Alex’s house in Berkshire, and we met up again once more, along with the estimable C.L. Taylor (another Boot Camp alumnus) at the launch of Alex’s short story collection in London. However, as a former Boot Camper, Dan will know that none of this makes any difference and I won’t pull my punches in this review... 

Actually, I don’t need to. The Regret is a quality novel for a number of reasons, and Dan Malakin is a skillful writer. One of the areas we used to score stories on in Boot Camp was pace, by which I don’t simply mean that the story rattles along at a tremendous lick, but rather its pace is in sympathy with the plot, character, theme and mood of the work. The Regret does indeed rattle along at pace, but importantly this is not to the detriment of character or emotion. Where many novels eschew character building in their headlong impulse to thrash the story along, The Regret draws us expertly into the troubled mind of the protagonist Rachel, a woman who has suffered trauma in her life and is now, forcibly, having it revisited on her. Previously hospitalised for anorexia and associated mental health issues, she reacts to the terrifying position she finds herself in by reverting to type, and observing Rachel’s disintegration is harrowing. The reader wills her to succeed, even as she descends deeper and deeper into terror. It’s brilliantly handled. 

It’s a very modern story, and it confronts issues central to the 21^st century zeitgeist, looking at social media and the often malign influence it can have. The story revolves around a hacker who targets Rachel by using sophisticated computer hacking skills to take over her social media accounts, to intercept her wages and have them redirected to another account, to fabricate reports on her work computer to make it appear she has been negligent in her work as a nurse. In our massively connected world, where everyone is online all the time and our personal information is far more vulnerable than we would care to recognise, the dangers Rachel faces are all too real, and Dan Malakin explores them in a dramatic and telling way. The ease with which Rachel’s life is torn asunder is chilling. 

For all its modernity, though, there’s a Hitchcockian feel to the narrative, based as it is on an innocent whose life unravels because of the actions of external agencies. At first, of course, no-one believes her, thinking she was responsible herself for some of the things which happened. And, typical of the genre, details are layered ever denser, with new things happening, gradually increasing in intensity, gradually pulling Rachel ever closer to disaster. But just when you begin to think “hang on, that’s a bit implausible”, something else crops up which explains it and makes it credible again. It takes tremendous skill to be able to continually throw new adversity at the main character while all the time making it believable. Dan Malakin achieves this brilliantly. 

All in all, this is an excellent read. Dan has just signed a two-book deal with Serpent’s Tail and it’s not hard to see why. If you want a story that zips along at electric pace, but still packs an emotional punch, then The Regret is the book for you.

The Yellow On the Broom by Betsy Whyte

 

When I was a young boy living in Crieff in the 1970s, every October the Meadows would be occupied by dozens of vans and caravans, filling the entire area between the back of Commissioner Street and the old railway cutting, where now stands the Cooperative supermarket and its car park. There were caravans and people everywhere, the sounds of living, the instant creation of a new, mobile community within the existing, settled one. These were Scottish traveller families, congregating for the tattie howking, or picking the potato harvest. Travellers were immensely hard working, and tattie howking – by hand in those days, of course – was especially hard work. It was a remarkable spectacle, these transient families meeting in common purpose as they had done at this time every year, back through generations.

When they arrived, my mother used to warn me to behave myself “or the tinks will take you”. We called them tinks then. We didn’t think it demeaning. We know better now, although it’s probably too late for it to really matter. I fervently wish my mother hadn’t tried to frighten me like this because the travellers were decent, compassionate people who would never have done me any harm, as my mother well knew. When she was a girl, back in the 1930s, one of her best friends was a tinker lassie and my mum regularly got into trouble with her parents for playing with her. One time, she got lice and her father washed her hair in paraffin. Still, she continued to play with her friend. So why she chose to frighten me in this way is a mystery.

Within a matter of years, this annual congregation of the travellers on the Meadows was a thing of the past. A way of life enjoyed by travellers over centuries was eradicated within a single generation. I’ve always thought that was a terrible thing. As it turns out, though, those 1970s meetings that I witnessed and thought were the continuation of an ancient tradition were, even then, showing signs of terminal decay. That much is clear on reading Betsy Whyte’s wonderful memoir, The Yellow on the Broom, which details Betsy’s early life on the road with her family in 1930s Scotland. They travelled constantly, going from job to job and place to place before one year, much to Betsy’s horror, over-wintering in a new Council house in Brechin. But the story she tells us, of itinerant life in the years before the war, was already the last gasp of a unique culture. Betsy wrote later:

 

The end of the war was ... the beginning of the end for the Scottish travelling people. With bewildering speed camping sites disappeared almost completely. Soon too, the farmers had machines which took over many jobs that the travelling folk had done. Even if a farmer did need workers, he was not allowed to have campers without providing flush toilets and running water, etc. Some farmers who grew a lot of berries did have those things put in, but for the majority it was not worth their while.

 

And, even in the 1930s events relayed in The Yellow on the Broom, the portents are there. There is one chapter, near the end, where the family go to all their usual camping points around Blairgowrie, only to find, on each successive site, “No Camping” signs had been erected. Travellers were always mistrusted and disliked and yet, for all that, in the old days a symbiotic relationship existed between the tinkers and the hantle – their name for non-Travelling folk. The travellers would request boiling water, or milk, or old clothes, and offer clothes pegs or baskets in return. The hantles and the tinks could co-exist, sort of.

But all that began to change. Ironically, partly it was due to the establishment of the welfare state. Before, people felt it was their duty to look after each other, even strangers, even outsiders. But with the advent of the welfare state we began to believe that it wasn’t our personal responsibility to look out for other people, but the state’s. That is a sad bastardisation of Beveridge’s noble vision behind the establishment of the welfare state but it is the truth, nonetheless and, in the less welcoming world that resulted, a way of life withered and died.

When I started working in Perth and Kinross District Libraries in 1981, my main duty was accessioning books – putting on the various stamps and labels, giving them a numerical accession number, jacketing them and so on. I remember once having to accession dozens of copies of The Yellow on the Broom. It must have been a reprint because the book was first published in 1979. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, other than to curse how many damned copies of it there were: the time went slower if you had lots of copies of the same book to accession because you had nothing fresh to look at. I remembered it, and I remembered what the book was about, but I never bothered to read it. I was young. History was interesting enough in an academic sort of way, but it didn’t really connect, even although, as it turned out, I was part of the last generation of hantles to witness a congregation of travellers and their once vibrant, now extinct way of life.

I’m glad, now, to have read The Yellow on the Broom, and to have entered the life of the clever, obstinate, short-tempered but kindly Betsy Whyte. I’m glad I know a little of how she lived, and I’m glad she had a happy childhood, oblivious that she was one of the last to experience it. Their life was very hard and it doesn’t do to romanticise it. All the same, the traveller way of life was vibrant and vital and meaningful.

Now it is gone and, in that, I fear we have all lost something a little precious.

 

Not the Deaths Imagined by Anne Pettigrew

Not the Deaths Imagined by Anne Pettigrew

Beth Semple, the narrator of Anne Pettigrew’s terrific first novel the medical Tartan noir Not the Life Imagined, is back in an even better sequel, Not the Deaths Imagined. Still a GP in Glasgow, Beth becomes embroiled once more in a story of deaths and deceit and dodgy doctors. This time, though, Beth herself is in jeopardy, along with her family, and the book gallops along to a rousing and frightening climax.

As with the first novel, Not the Deaths Imagined is mostly narrated by Beth herself, and we get her highly moral, utterly decent view of a world which becomes increasingly murky. Interspersed throughout, though, are third person interludes where we are taken into the viewpoints of the other characters, particularly the dodgy ones, and this gives the novel a pleasing balance. The story unfolds and the reader is taken on the journey of good (Beth) and evil (David Goodman). We know a clash is coming and we wait nervously for it to happen. Supporting Beth along the way are a number of her friends whom we first me in Not the Life Imagined.

David Goodman is a doctor in another practice in Glasgow, one with which Beth’s practice has a reciprocal agreement for out of hours cover. It is during one of these occurrences that Beth is asked to sign a “Part Two” form for a recently deceased patient, permitting the body to be released for cremation. Beth, unable to honestly say she can agree the cause of death, refuses to sign. This honest, dutiful act sets in train the frightening events of the novel.

Goodman, it becomes clear, is a multiple killer, bumping off his more elderly or vulnerable patients having first ensured their wills have been changed to include him. Nothing much, not more than £5000 or a painting each time. Not enough to draw attention. Enough to be lucrative. Besides, there is the thrill of the act, which never diminishes.

Goodman is clearly insane, and it is notoriously difficult to write such characters effectively. Either they are too normal and the reader can’t buy into it, or the writer tends to ham things up so much the character ends up like Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther films, driven to raging madness by Clouseau and his incompetence. Anne Pettigrew avoids these extremes and in the process she creates a deliciously monstrous villain.

It is obvious from reading the novel that the author was a GP herself. Her familiarity with medicine and general practice gives an air of authenticity and credibility to the drama that unfolds, so that you can implicitly believe what you are reading. Not the Deaths Imagined rattles along pleasingly and the reader is drawn into Beth’s increasingly frightening world, willing the deaths imagined not to include her or hers. In a dramatic climax, the answer to that hangs in the balance...

King Crow by Michael Stewart

King Crow - a review by Rob McInroy

Paul Cooper, a lonely, insular schoolboy from Salford, should probably be taken into care. His mother, a depressive, can barely cope with motherhood. She goes out with her girlfriend and leaves her son to sort his own tea of pizza and lagers. His father has disappeared, thrown out of the house years ago. His sister has left home. All he has is birds, which he learns about assiduously, even obsessively from a Field Guide to British Birds, itemising how many he has seen in the wild. 186, 187, 188. The one he wants to see more than anything is the raven. Ravens are outsiders, too, living their own way, carrion-feeders for the most part, solitary. Paul would decry the anthropomorphism in this observation, but the raven is the bird-world encapsulation of Paul’s own nature. Not that he knows this.

King Crow is a remarkable novel. in many ways. With the lonely boy and his love of birds there is an inevitable link to Barry Hines’s Kes, despite the Pennine barrier between the two novels’ settings. I am also greatly reminded of Daniel Shand’s Fallow, another road novel in which, from the outset, violence is inevitable (although it should be noted that King Crow predates Fallow). I think, though, the novel it most reminds me of is Patrick McGrath’s Spider, although if you haven’t read Spider I would urge you not to Google to find the reason why before you read King Crow because doing so would deliver a huge spoiler, and that would be a great shame, because Michael Stewart makes an excellent job of the sleight of hand which lies at the heart of this novel.

Recently moved to a new school and friendless, Paul becomes fascinated by a fellow pupil, Ashley, who seems to Paul to be everything he isn’t. Confident, brash even, handsome, tough, he is someone Paul can look up to. An unusual friendship develops in even more unusual circumstances, the consequence of which is that the two boys find themselves on the run, pursued by a criminal from whom they have stolen a bag of drugs. The novel thus becomes a road novel, but like none you’ve ever read before.

For starters, they decide they will go to Cumbria, in search of Paul’s beloved raven and tramp the hills in search of birds. They meet up with Becky, middle-class, a raver on the look-out for adventure. In Cumbria and meet a hermit. From there things spiral...

Interwoven throughout are Paul’s meticulous explorations of different birds. These are beautifully written. Stewart is a fine writer about nature, in the manner of Jon McGregor or Melissa Harrison. Thus, as well as being a road novel, it’s also a piece of natural history. You will learn fascinating details along the way – there is no such bird as a seagull, for example – but the writing is so good it never seems didactic. Rather, Michael Stewart uses these digressions into natural history to explore the character of Paul. Brett Easton Ellis did the same thing with the music criticism interludes in American Psycho, and Stewart’s handling of what is a genuine technical challenge is impressive indeed.

The novel grows ever darker and ever darker until you reach a point where you read a sentence and stop and think: what? And you read the sentence again and think: what? And the story shifts again, taking you with it, spinning into a future and reflecting on a past which seem equally unknowable.

I’ve compared Michael Stewart to quite a number of different authors in this review, and done so deliberately, because there are echoes of each of those in his prose. But while he may share attributes with these writers, he synthesises them into something entirely unique.