Scott's Book Review – Page 83 – The Lanark Website

Ingenious Pain by Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Miller_(novelist) and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/andrew-miller) extraordinary first novel, Ingenious Pain (1997), concerns the curious defect that seems to be the source of Dr. James Dyer’s ‘genius’ for the knife. It is his inability, since birth, to feel physical pain. Drive a pin through his hand, tear off a thumbnail, break his leg, flog him raw: he feels […]

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Crossing The River

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

From the acclaimed author of Cambridge (1991) comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips

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A Guest of Honour by Nadine Gordimer

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

A Guest of Honour (1970) is a long, spacious, comprehensive work of fiction. It has all the lineaments of a traditional story. It is leisurely and detailed. There is something Olympian, something magnificently confident in the way in which the writer goes about her work. Her calm certainty camouflages the ease with which she handles

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The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come to live with him;

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The Stricken Deer

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper) was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil’s biography (1929) doesn’t celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper’s own words, ‘the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.’ Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression (http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/help-information/mental-health-a-z/D/depression/). His personal tragedy however enriched English literature:

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God’s Architect

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

No one could have imagined a Pugin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Pugin and http://www.pugin.com/): ‘he is a marvellous man there is only one Pugin’, wrote his friend and admirer the artist William Etty. Inspired and inspirational, needy, driven, inadequately rewarded in his lifetime for work into which he poured his heart and soul, he seems not to have had a

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Leslie Stephen

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

Noel Annan’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Annan,_Baron_Annan) biography of Leslie Stephen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Stephen) justly won The James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1951. This is a fascinating insight into a complex and talented man, and also a window onto the pre-occupations of the Victorians. 448 in University of Chicago Press paperback edition ISBN 978-0226021065 Leslie Stephen

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Mother and Son

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

This is a very unconventional book — it’s nearly all dialogue, and the characters all seem to speak the same way, even the children. Sometimes what they say is nonsensical, and other times they come out with brilliant gems. The acerbic Compton-Burnett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Compton-Burnett), who wrote 19 largely similar books, is not to everyone’s taste, although

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Highland River

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times, SCOTTISH INTEREST

Ken is a scientist, with a scientist’s dispassionate eye for the material world. He reviews his life from the difficult 1930s, through the slaughter of World War I, back to an idyllic boyhood in the Highlands. When the mature man finally reaches the source of the river that has haunted his imagination for so many

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