Compton Mackenzie: The Rival Monster (1952)

Edition: Penguin, 1983
Review number: 681

When a flying saucer is seen to crash into the Loch Ness Monster, the worst is feared for one of Scotland's greatest treasures. But soon a new monster is seen in the Hebridean Todday Islands, and this causes a great stir - has Nessie abandoned its home in disgust at being the target of extraterrestrial attacks? Or is it a rival taking advantage of Nessie's disappearance?

This ludicrous premise lies behind Compton Mackenzie's funniest novel (at least of those I have read), which is a sequel to both Monarch of the Glen and Whisky Galore. Many characters from both these novels re-appear here, unchanged in the least. This includes the incredibly self important Paul Wagget, who naturally doesn't believe in anything so unlikely as any kind of monster and seeks to persuade eye witnesses that they were mistaken, to their great annoyance.

Wagget's twin daughters make an entrance here, having been away serving in an anti-aircraft battery in Whisky Galore, and they provide the romantic subplot. Their rivalry mimics that between the Todday monster and the Loch Ness monster, though both of these are fairly low key contests; as far as Elsie and Muriel are concerned, it consists mainly of confusing their suitors, who cannot tell them apart. They also provide more evidence of Wagget's awfulness; I'm not sure what the best word is to describe any father who encourages his grown up children to call their parents "daddo" and "mumsy".

Émile Zola: L'Assommoir (1876)

Translation: Leonard Tancock, 1970
Edition:  Penguin, 1970
Review number: 680

Zola's novel caused such a commotion and was considered so immoral that its original serial publication was halted. Over the next century, it has proved sufficiently influential that the reason for this is to a large extent hidden, particularly in translation. Zola's story treats of the Parisian slums, and it is written in the language which would have been used by the characters, not in the equivalent of the exaggerated, cleaned up Cockney used by English writers but one which used the vocabulary of the streets. To use swearing and slang in literary fiction is not now something shocking, but in the 1870s it was totally unheard of to use such words in print.

It is not just the language used in L'Assommoir which was considered shocking. There is a fair amount of sex in the novel, both inside and outside marriage, for one thing; and the whole story is the tale of a woman's gradual degredation through laziness and drink. (The title is a slang term for a shop which sells alcohol.) Gervaise is basically the principal agent of her own destruction; she is not the virtuous saint so often portrayed in novels about working class life from this period - there is no way that she has a strong enough character to rise above her circumstances. (There is one character who is a bit like this in L'Assommoir, a child who is bringing up two younger sisters despite the beatings and starvation imposed on her by her alcoholic father, and typically she does not receive any reward except an early death.) Gervaise is a more realistic character, and her background is also more realistic. It is not the evil capitalist who grinds down the workers and makes their situation impossible. Characters around Gervaise are relatively comfortable, and even she is well enough off at one point to rent a shop. The character who most nearly approximates the grasping capitalist is one of Gervaise's landlords, and he makes a point of his own poor origins.

The two great virtues of L'Assommoir are its rejection of stereotypes and Zola's vivid writing, which even comes through in translation. It is easy to see why it has had such a strong influence. It is a depressing and uncomfortable read, however, and so is the sort of novel one is pleased to have read but would probably not pick up again for a long time.

Compton Mackenzie: Whisky Galore (1947)

Edition: Penguin, 1983
Review number: 679

The best known of Compton Mackenzie's novels formed the basis for a classic Ealing Comedy - which is, of course, why it remains so well known. Like another of the popular films produced by that studio just after the war, Passport to Pimlico, it is essentially a satire attacking the absurdities of rationing, which continued in Britain for some years after the war.

One of the strange events of the war was the export of virtually the entire production of Scotch whisky to the USA, to the point where there was a shortage in Scotland itself. This was particularly hard felt on the fictional Todday islands, which ran dry of their traditional drink, until the US bound vessel the SS Cabinet Minister ran aground of Little Todday, making the thousands of cases of whisky aboard available for illicit salvage. (This is actually based on a true story, the wreck of SS Politician off Eriskay.)

The wily islanders ha cross to bear, in the shape of officious Home Guard commander Paul Waggett. He is forever trying to inspire them with his own ideas of efficiency and the right attitude to the War. He is one of those people who spend ages telling you how they could have won the war in no time - if only he had been consulted. Hurt by the authorities refusal to make guarding wrecks the business of the Home Guard, he tries to stop the pilfering of the Cabinet Minister; it is hardly surprising that he has little effect.

Less happens in the novel than in the film; like Monarch of the Glen, Whisky Galore is a gentle comedy. Mackenzie is described on the cover of The Highland Omnibus, in which these and a later novel The Rival Monster are reprinted, as "the forerunner of Tom Sharpe"; while there are parallels in their humour (ludicrous situations getting out of hand, subversion of establishment and authority figures), Mackenzie does not have the scatological edge that Sharpe has. It would be hard to see a way in which condoms or blow up dolls could appear in a Mackenzie novel, even if it were updated to the year 2000; his writing is more genial and not as aggressive.

Compton Mackenzie: The Monarch of the Glen (1941)

Edition: Penguin, 1983
Review number: 678

Just about the only connection between this novel and the TV series "based" on it is that both are set in the Highlands of Scotland. (I only watched part of the series, because it seemed more like an attempt to repeat the success of Ballykissangel rather than anything worth watching.) The equivalent of the selfish character played by Richard Briers is the blustering but good hearted clan chieftain, Donald MacDonald of Ben Nevis, usually - and appropriately - called Ben Nevis.

There are two strands to the plot of the novel. Chester Royde is an American millionaire who has recently married, and who has come to Scotland to visit something of his bride's roots (she is descended from crofters evicted by an ancestor of Ben Nevis in the Highland Clearances). He is also accompanied by his young, unmarried sister, and it seems to the MacDonald family that nothing would be better in this era of rising costs for the landed gentry than for Myrtle Royde to marry one of Ben Nevis' three sons.

The second strand begins when Ben Nevis takes his guests shooting on the Twelfth, and discovers that the grouse on one of his best moors have been frightened off by a group of hikers. Furious because the trespassers have spoiled his sport, he carries them off, with the help of his brawny children, and imprisons them in the dungeons of his ancestral castle. When saner counsels prevail and the hikers are released, his action prompts the National Union of Hikers to declare war on the Ben Nevis estate, and this provides most of the comedy of this amusing novel. It is a gentle humour, though as the war escalates it loses some of its restraint.

Neil Gaiman: Stardust (1999)

Edition: Headline, 1999
Review number: 677

Stardust is a remarkable homage to Lord Dunsany and other Victorian writers of tales about the lands "beyond the fields we know". Wall is much like other isolated English villages of the mid nineteenth century, except for the wall which gives it its name and for the unusual fair held there once every nine years. That is the only time that the gap in the wall is left unguarded, and sellers of all kinds of wonders come from the land of Faerie beyond the wall.

Tristram Thorn is typical of the village's young men, and like the rest of them he has fallen in love with the local beauty, Victoria Forester. While he is walking with her, they see a star fall in Faerie, and she promises him his heart's desire if he retrieves it for her. The plot seems to develop along standard fairy tale lines until he reaches the star, which turns out to be a young woman with a broken leg from the fall and not the stone he was expecting. To bring back a young woman - who objects strongly - instead of an inanimate object is not the task he expected, and it is from this point that Stardust begins to offer a new slant on a familiar idea.

There is the odd joke here and there, and Stardust is generally a light-hearted novel, but it is atmospheric as well. The major characters are believable, and the whole thing manages to delight in the way that the best children's fiction does while being clearly an adult novel. It works far better than Neverwhere, where Gaiman is struggling to describe what is a strongly visual experience without swamping the rest of the ingredients of the novel.

Iris Murdoch: Under the Net (1954)

Edition: Chatto & Windus, 1954
Review number: 676

The story of Jake Donaghue's aimless London adventures gives the reader the feeling all the way through that it has more meaning than is readily apparent. I found it difficult to see what this hidden significance might be, but still enjoyed the novel. The title probably has something to do with this; it has no obvious relationship to any of the events in the plot.

Jake is a writer who, at the beginning of the novel, is thrown out of the flat in which he's living, as the female friend who owns it has just become engaged to a man she thinks might object to a male flatmate. Seeking refuge with a series of friends, Jake is forced to take stock of his life, his past and his future. Various factors conspire to make this happen, including an affair between two of his friends, and the French novelist whose mediocre works have provided most of Jake's income in the last few years through translations suddenly winning the Prix Goncourt for his latest book.

Subtly funny, Under the Net manages to be both easy to read and cleverly literary. It is well written without showing off, containing interesting and differentiated characters. In its understated way, it certainly deserves to be considered one of the greatest English novels of the century.

Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time (1951)

Edition: Penguin, 1954
Review number: 675

The idea for the setting of this famous detective novel was perhaps stimulated by a desire to imitate Mycroft Holmes rather than his better known brother. Tey was not by any means the first writer of a novel where the crime scene is never seen by the sleuth, who has to rely on reports rather than statements or forensic evidence. There is a minor series of stories by Baroness Orczy, for example; but it is Tey's novel which defines the subgenre. The Daughter of Time has been extensively admired and occasionally imitated, most notably by Colin Dexter.

Tey's sleuth Alan Grant is stuck in hospital; looking a pictures of faces to while away the time - he is interested in the reflection of the personality in the face - he becomes fascinated by Richard III, as shown in his best known portrait. Not seeing the monster who murdered his nephews in the picture, he begins to investigate, with the help of various friends who provide books, or spend time in the British Library.

The Daughter of Time is by no means the first vindication of Richard III - there is a fair amount of evidence suggesting Henry VII as the instigator of the deaths of the princes in the Tower of London - but it is certainly the best known. While never pretending to be an academic history, it does contain a lot of information, which is presented in a remarkably entertaining if somewhat one-sided manner.

The title is ironic, for the daughter of time is truth (the quotation is from Aulus Gallius, though he attributes it to someone else, saying he can't remember who), and time has tended to blacken Richard's reputation rather than reveal what many believe to be the truth. Perhaps if Shakespeare's play had never been written, it would have proved easier for campaigners to re-establish his reputation.