286- ] English Literature , Glen Duncan

286-] English Literature

Glen Duncan

Glen Duncan is a British author born in 1965 in Bolton, Lancashire, England to an Anglo-Indian family. He studied philosophy and literature at the universities of Lancaster and Exeter.

In 1990 Duncan moved to London, where he worked as a bookseller for four years, writing in his spare time. In 1994 he visited India with his father (part roots odyssey, part research for a later work, The Bloodstone Papers) before continuing on to the United States, where he spent several months travelling the country by Amtrak train, writing much of what would become his first novel, Hope, published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic in 1997.

His novel I, Lucifer was published in 2002. The premise of the book is that Lucifer has been given a month to live in mortal form to get himself back into God's good graces before the end of the world. The film rights have been sold. The book was provided with a "soundtrack" by Duncan's longtime friend Stephen Coates and his band The Real Tuesday Weld, a cross-platform collaboration repeated for Duncan's book The Last Werewolf. The pair have toured and performed at various live events and festivals together including at the British Film Institute.

According to critic William Skidelsky in The Observer, Duncan "specialises in writing novels that can't easily be pigeon-holed". Similarly, David Robson in The Daily Telegraph has noted that Duncan is "an idiosyncratic talent", adding,"You never know quite which way he is going to turn."

In 2013, Glen Duncan took the pseudonym of Saul Black to publish a thriller, The Killing Lessons, in 2015.

Bibliography

Hope (1997)

Love Remains (2000)

I, Lucifer (2002)

Weathercock (2003)

Death of an Ordinary Man (2004)

The Bloodstone Papers (2006)

A Day And A Night And A Day (2009)

The Last Werewolf (April 2011)

Talulla Rising (June 2012)

By Blood We Live (February 2014)

Valerie Hart series

Published under the pseudonym Saul Black:

The Killing Lessons (2015)

LoveMurder (2016)

Anything for You (2019)        

  

285- ] English Literature , Louis de Bernieres

285  ] English Literature 

Louis de Bernieres 

Louis de Bernières (born 8 December 1954) is an English novelist. He is known for his 1994 historical war novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin. In 1993 de Bernières was selected as one of the "20 Best of Young British Novelists", part of a promotion in Granta magazine. Captain Corelli's Mandolin was published in the following year, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. It was also shortlisted for the 1994 Sunday Express Book of the Year. It has been translated into at least 11 languages and is an international best-seller.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. In 2008, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by De Montfort University in Leicester, which he had attended when it was Leicester Polytechnic.

Politically, he identifies himself as Eurosceptic and has voiced his support for the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union.

Biography

Louis H. P. de Bernières-Smart was born near Woolwich in London in 1954 and grew up in Surrey. The name de Bernières is inherited from a French Huguenot ancestor. He was educated at Grenham House school—where he reported the pupils were subjected to "hellish abuse"—and at Bradfield College, and joined the army when he was 18, but left after four months of the officer training course at Sandhurst. He next attended the Victoria University of Manchester and the Institute of Education, University of London. Before he began to write full-time he held a wide variety of jobs, including being a mechanic, a motorcycle messenger and an English teacher in Colombia. As of 2008 he lived near Bungay in Suffolk.

In 2009 he separated from his partner, actress Cathy Gill, who took custody of their children, Robin and Sophie. Eventually, he gained equal custodial rights. He has never remarried.

De Bernières is an avid musician. He plays flute, mandolin, clarinet and guitar, although he considers himself an "enthusiastic but badly-educated and erratic" amateur. His literary work often references music and the composers he admires, such as the guitar works of Villa-Lobos and Antonio Lauro in the Latin American trilogy, and the mandolin works of Vivaldi and Hummel in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. He has dystonia, which affects his playing.

Books

Latin American trilogy

According to de Bernières, his experiences in Colombia, and the influence of writer Gabriel García Márquez—he describes himself as a "Márquez parasite"—profoundly influenced his first three novels, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992).

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

De Bernières' most famous book is his fourth, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, in which the eponymous hero is an Italian soldier who is part of the occupying force on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Second World War. In the US it was originally published as Corelli's Mandolin.

In 2001, the book was turned into a film. De Bernières strongly disapproved of the film version, commenting, "It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby's ears being put on backwards." He does however state that it has redeeming qualities, and particularly likes the soundtrack.

Since the release of the book and the movie, Cephalonia has become a major tourist destination, and the tourist industry on the island has begun to capitalise on the book's name. Of this, de Bernières said: "I was very displeased to see that a bar in Agia Efimia has abandoned its perfectly good Greek name and renamed itself Captain Corelli's, and I dread the idea that sooner or later there might be Captain Corelli Tours, or Pelagia Apartments."

Red Dog

His book Red Dog (2001) was inspired by a statue of a dog he saw during a visit to the Pilbara region of Western Australia. It was adapted as a film of the same name in Australia in 2011.

Birds Without Wings

Birds Without Wings (2004) is set in Turkey, and portrays the tragic fate of the diverse people in a small village, who belong to different language-speaking groups and religions, towards the end of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Kemal Atatürk, and the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War from the Turkish viewpoint. The book was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book).

A Partisan's Daughter

A Partisan's Daughter (2008) tells of the relationship between a young Yugoslavian woman and a middle-aged British man in the 1970s, set in London.

Notwithstanding

Notwithstanding (2009) is a collection of short stories revolving around a fictional English village, Notwithstanding, and its eccentric inhabitants. Many of the stories were published separately earlier in de Bernières's career. Notwithstanding is based on the village of Hambledon in Surrey where he grew up, and he muses whether this is, or is no longer, the rural idyll. Some of the stories are autobiographical, such as "Silly Bugger 1" about a boy who brings up an abandoned rook, which becomes his companion, the rook sitting on his shoulder as he goes about his life – de Bernières is pictured on his website with a rook sitting on his shoulder. Notwithstanding is rich in local detail, containing references to the nearby villages and towns of Godalming, Chiddingfold, and Haslemere, as well as to Waitrose, Scats, the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, the Merry Harriers pub and the "suicidal driving" of the nuns at St Dominic's School. De Bernières reflects in the Afterword:

"I realised that I had set so many of my novels and stories abroad, because custom had prevented me from seeing how exotic my own country is. Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations... We are rigid and formal in some ways, but we believe in the right to eccentricity, as long as the eccentricities are large enough... Woe betide you if you hold your knife incorrectly, but good luck to you if you wear a loincloth and live up a tree.

Blue Dog

The movie Red Dog: True Blue (2016) is adapted from a screenplay by Daniel Taplitz. In this prequel to the Red Dog, a boy named Mick is sent to the outback to live with his Granpa after a tragedy befalls on him, it looks as if he has a lonely life but while exploring the floodwaters, he finds a lost puppy covered in mud and half-drowned. Mick and his dog immediately become inseparable as they take on the adventures offered by their unusual home, and the business of growing up, together. Louis de Bernières tells the story of a young boy and his Granpa, and the charismatic and entertaining dog..

The Daniel Pitt Trilogy

The Daniel Pitt Trilogy, comprising the three novels The Dust that Falls from Dreams (2015), So Much Life Left Over (2018), and The Autumn of the Ace (2020), follows the life of its central character Daniel Pitt, a flying ace in WWI, and the McCosh family through the 20th century. The story was strongly inspired by de Bernières' own grandfather's life.

Bibliography

Novels

The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990)Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991)The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992)

Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994), originally published as Corelli's Mandolin in the US Red Dog (2001) Birds Without Wings (2004)A Partisan's Daughter (2008)The Dust that Falls From Dreams (2015)Blue Dog (2016) So Much Life Left Over (2018)The Autumn of the Ace (2020) Light Over Liskeard (2023)

Short story collections

Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village (2009)

Labels and Other Stories (2019)

Plays

Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World (2001)

Poetry

A Walberswick Goodnight Story (2006) Imagining Alexandria (2013)

Of Love and Desire (2016)The Cat in The Treble Clef (2018)

Non fiction

The Book of Job: An Introduction(1998)

Notwithstanding is a short story collection by British author Louis de Bernières. Published in 2009, it was inspired by Hambledon, the Surrey village in which he grew up during the 1960s and 1970s.

Inspiration

In the Afterword to the collection, Louis de Bernières addresses the nation. He looks back wistfully to a time when "Villages were proper communities", with pubs and shops and a rectory "with a proper rector in it". The stories in Notwithstanding, he explains, with just a hint of a huff, are a celebration of the "quirky people" he remembers from his childhood in Surrey: "the belligerent spinsters, the naked generals, the fudge-makers, the people who talked to spiders".

Stories

It contains 20 stories, first publication in brackets :-

"Archie and the Birds" (Punch, March 1997) - Communicating with his mother via walkie-talkie, the narrator sticks seeds to the living-room window in an attempt to stop his retriever Archie from bringing dead birds into the house.

"Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers" (Country Life, Nov/Dec 1996) - Mrs Griffiths makes punch and mince pies in preparation for the visit of carol singers, but ends up giving them to Obadiah, "the last peasant in the village".

"Archie and the Woman" (The Independent, 15 August 1998) - Still walkie-talking, the narrator's mother asks him to find a wife. He begins his search with the help of Archie.

"The Girt Pike" (The London Magazine, Jul/Aug 2002) - How 12-year-old Robert caught the infamous 'Girt pike'.

"The Auspicious Meeting of the First Two Members of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet" - The new music teacher, who plays the clarinet stops to help a fellow Morris Minor driver who has broken down, only to find she is collecting pheasant feathers to clean her oboe.

"Mrs Mac" (Daily Telegraph, 27 Dec 1997) - Amateur spiritualist Mrs Mac, accompanied by her husband, visits his graveside.

"Colonel Barkwell, Troodos and the Fish" - Colonel Barkwell is suspicious of the poached salmon he has prepared as host of a dinner party, so tests it on his cat Troodos without incident. However, after dinner the cat is reported dead.

"All My Everlasting Love" - 13-year-old Peter has reached puberty, fallen in love with a friend's sister and left a note in her handbag to meet her on a secluded bench.

"The Devil and Bessie Maunderfield" - Bessie the new housemaid at Notwistanding Manor catches the eye of Piers De Mandeville, the squire's son, who promises that if he does not marry her then the Devil may have his soul. Bessie falls pregnant and Piers' resolve weakens.

"The Auspicious Meeting of the Third Member of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet with the First Two" : Brian and Jenny are practicing Devienne duets, when Jenny's husband catches Piers de Mandeville (a descendant of the Lord of the Manor) loitering in the flowerbed and listening intently.

"Footprint in the Snow" - The rector is told that Sir Edward Rawton is dying, and needs Communion. Then on Christmas Day the church bells ring what the Rector recognizes as a passing bell for a death.

"The Happy Death of the General" (Sunday Times, 8 July 2001) - The general often forgets to dress and one day is found in Godalming, naked from the waist down and soon finds himself in Belleview home, the largest house he has ever had with "an enormous staff of servants".

"Rabbit" (New Writing 10, Picador, March 2001) - The Major puts down a rabbit dying of myxomatosis which brings back unwelcome memories of killing from war.

"This Beautiful House" (The Times, 18 Dec 2004) - a man considers the house in which he grew up in before a fire started by candles on a Christmas Tree killed himself and his family.

"Talking to George" : John the gardener complains about his dull life, Alan his assistant is in love with Sylvie the stable girl, and George the spider sits in his web.

"The Auspicious Meeting of the First Member of the Famous Notwithstanding Wind Quartet with the Fourth" : Jenny now works in a music shop in Goldalming where she is offered a Buffet clarinet to buy, but she is suspicious as it is stamped 'Property of the ILEA'.

"Silly Bugger " - Robert is given an abandoned rook fledgling to look after which he names Lizzie. His Uncle Dick resolves to teach it to say 'Silly Bugger'.

"Silly Bugger " - Royston Chittock, having retired to Notwithstanding takes up golf and determines to construct a putting green on his mole-ridden lawn, with the assistance of Dick, with Lizzie making her last appearance as she utters the fateful words 'silly bugger'.

"The Broken Heart" (Saga Magazine, Jan 2003) - Obadiah Oak's daughter persuades him to sell up and move to Devon, but he cannot let go of his old home.

"The Death of Miss Agatha Feakes" (BBC Radio 4, 1996) - The last day in the life of the title character and with her menagerie of pets.

"Afterword" - The author explains his inspiration for the stories in the collection.

Reception

Ian Sansom in The Guardian writes "Notwithstanding is a village where "strange things happen from time to time". There is a case of suspected food poisoning. Someone kills a rabbit. Someone catches a fish. A grumpy old lady sends Christmas cards. All the stories have that well-told, underwritten quality of the fairytale or the fable: occasionally, and at their very best, they also have the necessary fairytale bite and discomfort...The experience of reading this collection is rather like being wrapped in a tartan blanket and handed a nice mug of cocoa. Treats on offer include the adventures of Colonel Pericles "Perry" Barkwell, tales of the pipe-smoking Polly Wantage, and the sorry story of the poor old general who is slowly losing his mind. There is a mysterious "hedging and ditching" man and a dog called Archibald Scott-Moncrieff. And of course Obadiah Oak, the village's literal and proverbial last peasant, who "exudes the aromas of wet leather and horse manure, costive dogs, turnips, rainwater and cabbage water, sausages, verdigris, woollen socks, Leicester cheese, fish guts, fraying curtains, mice under the stairs, mud on the carpet and woodlice behind the pipes"."

Carol Ann Duffy in The Telegraph notes "de Bernières here has his eye and ear firmly on English eccentricity and individualism. His intention may well have been to make the familiar strange, but his stories achieve the opposite. While not quite the vanished world that the author feels it to be – the emotional intensity of de Bernières’s sense of the “better laughter, warmer rain” of the past serves up a comforting fictional world that his many loyal readers will find delicious" and concludes "it is interesting that the most haunting stories, literally, are about ghosts: a woman who lives happily with the ghost of her dead husband; a man’s death protectively foretold by the spirit of his grandmother. It is here that de Bernières’s sentimental attachment to his lost boyhood village comes closest to narrowing the gap between then and now."

284-] English Literature , Louis de Bernieres

284- ] English Literature

Louis de Berniere 

Louis de Bernières is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels and one collection of short stories. He was selected by Granta magazine as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Vintage, 1994) was an international bestseller and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. A Partisan’s Daughter (Vintage, 2008) was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award. His second collection of poetry, Of Love and Desire, was published in 2016 (Harvill Secker).  In November 2018, Harvill Secker published Louis’ third collection of poetry, The Cat in the Treble Clef, which looks at family and the connections we make through place, time, music and love. His most recent book, Labels and Other Stories, was published by Harvill Secker in April 2019. It features tales from throughout his career as a masterful storyteller and transports us around the globe, from the London Underground to Turkish ruins to the banks of the Amazon.

His historical trilogy that began with The Dust That Falls From Dreams (Vintage, 2016) and continued with So Much Life Left Over (Vintage, 2019), was completed in 2021 with The Autumn of the Ace (Vintage). The Mail on Sunday call de Bernières ‘a single cherishable voice’.

Louis’ latest book, The Light Over Liskeard was published by Harvill Secker in October of 2024.

As of December 2024, you can find a graphic novel adaptation of the cult classic, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, with illustrations from Arnaud Ribadeau Dumas (Cyressa).

Louis de Bernières (born 8 December 1954) is a British novelist most famous for his fourth novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin. In 1993 de Bernières was selected as one of the "20 Best of Young British Novelists", part of a promotion in Granta magazine. Captain Corelli's Mandolin was published in the following year, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. It was also shortlisted for the 1994 Sunday Express Book of the Year. It has been translated into over 11 languages and is an international bestseller.  

283- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

283- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

The Great Chain of Unbeing

The Great Chain of Unbeing is the eighth fiction book by Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 2018. It was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book Awards (the Saltire Society Literary Awards) and nominated for the British Science Fiction Awards. The title alludes to the great chain of being and the book consists of stories that range widely in theme and style but are subtly linked. The book has been variously interpreted as a short story collection or novel.

Some of the pieces were previously published in different versions. The opening story, "The Unbeginning", first appeared as "Livacy" in the anthology NW15, published in 2007. Nicholas Royle commented then, "Andrew Crumey's unique blend of impenetrable physics and penetrating imagery, in 'Livacy', is as subtle and affecting as the best of his work." Another piece, "The Last Midgie on Earth" (a cli-fi set in a globally-warmed Scotland) first appeared in Headshook, published in 2009. Milena Kalicanin commented on it, "Scotland becomes Crumey's synonym for a postmodern utopia." A piece titled "The Burrows" first appeared in The Seven Wonders of Scotland (2012). Stuart Kelly wrote that it "imagines a subterranean Scotland, simultaneously a new frontier, an exploitable territory, and a metaphysical conundrum" and found it "both intellectually nimble and eminently re-readable."

Reception

Adam Roberts wrote in Literary Review: "Andrew Crumey’s new book is a quasi-novel built out of connected short stories. It’s something for which we English have no specific term, but for which German critics have probably coined an impressively resonant piece of nomenclature (Kurzgeschichtenverkettung, maybe?). It’s as good an example of the form as I know... The Great Chain of Unbeing is unboring, unusual and quite brilliant."

Alison Bell wrote in the Scottish Review of Books: "Crumey has the perfect pedigree for what turns out to be something of a genre-romp through historical fiction, sci-fi, dark comedy and Brooklyn-twang McCarthy era spy thriller... He understands nuclear fission, the Big Bang theory, radio waves, the life cycle of the bed bug, and they’re all here... It’s clever stuff, ingenious, occasionally baffling and deeply satisfying."

Stuart Kelly wrote in The Scotsman: "This subtle stitching is reminiscent of previous works by Crumey. D’Alembert’s Principle was a triptych of stories where things interlinked. Both Mobius Dick and Sputnik Caledonia were again tripartite novellas that by winking between the stories became novels... In “Between The Tones” we meet Conroy, a concert pianist who narrates his life in the style of a Raymond Chandler hard-man."

Conroy also appeared in Crumey's novel The Secret Knowledge. Other names recurring from previous novels include writers Alfredo Galli (from Music, in a Foreign Language) and Heinrich Behring (from Mobius Dick). The book therefore fits T.C. Baker's description of Crumey's work as a whole: "These novels, crucially, do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct."

Jack Deighton wrote in Interzone: "His latest novel is unconventional even in Crumey’s terms... What we have here is perhaps a literary expression of sonata form – 'in the development the tunes get mixed up,' but with something to be discovered between the tones yet nevertheless totally accomplished."

 

Contents

Title	Description	Publication history
The Unbeginning	John Wood, a blind cosmologist, describes how his father witnessed an atom bomb test. He has a tribologist friend named Roy Jones.	An earlier version, "Livacy", appeared in NW15: The Anthology of New Writing, Volume 15, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Maggie Gee (2007).
Tribology (or The Truth about my Wife)	In Moscow, Roy Jones is mistaken for an author named Jones, whose writing is praised by critic Richard Sand.	An earlier version, An Expedition to the Taiga, appeared in Magnetic North, edited by Claire Malcom (2005).
Introduction	An interviewer waits to meet Richard Sand at Cafe Mozart. Mention is made (p39) of Heinrich Behring and Alfredo Galli – fictional authors who featured in the novels Mobius Dick and Music, in a Foreign Language.	An earlier version, Meeting Mr Sand, appeared in Gutter 9 (2013).
Fragments of Behring (Four historical sketches)	The pieces are "Silk", "A Room in Delft", "Parable" (about Montaigne), "A Lesson for Carl" (about Beethoven).	"A Lesson for Carl" appeared in So, What Kept You: New Stories Inspired by Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver edited by Tess Gallagher, Claire Malcolm, Margaret Wilkinson (2006).
Singularity	Patrick, a cosmologist and colleague of John Wood (p74), waits for results of a cancer scan. Another patient is Jack Fisher (p71). While waiting, Patrick sees a poster of a Greek island (p72).	An earlier version was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.
The Assumption	Jack Fisher and his wife Fi are visited at their Greek island home by Jack's daughter Anna. The novella-length story ends with the words "a great chain of unbeing". It marks the mid-point of the book. The second half is mostly comical in tone and increasingly surreal.
Between the Tones	Surreal comedy in multiple parts about a classical pianist called Conroy (namesake of a character in The Secret Knowledge) who thinks there is a plot against him, led by Richard Sand. Conroy discovers an old memoir by a radio engineer and amateur sf writer who assisted Edwin Howard Armstrong in the 1940s and met Theodor Adorno (a philosopher fictionally portrayed in The Secret Knowledge). The engineer also met Heinrich Behring (who was writing a novel about Beethoven) and was hired by the Rosier Foundation (a name from Mr Mee and Mobius Dick) for an obscure assignment possibly involving nuclear weapons.
Fragments of Sand (Six little pieces)	The pieces are "The Post Artist", "Bug", "The Burrows", "Scenes from the Word-Camera", "The Last Midgie on Earth", "That Place Next to the Bread Shop".	"The Last Midgie on Earth" appeared in Headshook, edited by Stuart Kelly (2009).[20] "The Burrows" appeared in The Seven Wonders of Scotland, edited by Gerry Hassan (2012).
Impossible Tales	Harry Blue, a "freelance philosopher", meets Richard Sand at Cafe Mozart. Sand is working on a translation of Alfredo Galli's Racconti Impossibili, or "Impossible Tales" (a book mentioned in Music, in a Foreign Language). The story is intercut with a science fiction story about the drug-taking crew of a "space trawler", and the storylines come together at the end.
The Unending	Fantasy about a child born like a plant into a world of ice.	An earlier version, "Water of Life", was published in the Sunday Herald (2009).

 

282- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

282- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

The Secret Knowledge

The Secret Knowledge (2013) is the seventh novel by Scottish writer Andrew Crumey. It was his first since returning to his original UK publisher Dedalus Books, and was awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Part of the writing was done while the author was visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. It was longlisted for the Guardian's "Not the Booker" prize.

Synopsis

In 1913, composer Pierre Klauer envisages marriage to his sweetheart and fame for his new work, The Secret Knowledge. Then tragedy strikes. A century later, concert pianist David Conroy hopes the rediscovered score might revive his own flagging career. Music, history, politics and philosophy become intertwined in a multi-layered story that spans a century. Revolutionary agitators, Holocaust refugees and sixties’ student protesters are counterpointed with artists and entrepreneurs in our own age of austerity. All play their part in revealing the shocking truth that Conroy must finally face – the real meaning of The Secret Knowledge.

Themes

Some of the action is set in Scotland at the time of the Battle of George Square. Other parts are set in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Specific reference is made to the socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, who appear as characters in the novel. A chapter set on Capri and based on Benjamin's love for Asja Lacis is written in the collage style of One Way Street. Benjamin's suicide at Portbou is also made part of the plot.

The novel is, in part, concerned with the concepts of the multiverse and quantum suicide, which have featured in previous novels by Crumey, and in articles and conference talks. Reference is made to motifs from Crumey's earlier novels, particularly the Rosier Corporation which appeared in Mobius Dick. The missing wife of pianist David Conroy (called Laura) appears to be the same character of that name, who appeared in Mobius Dick and is referenced again in The Great Chain of Unbeing.

Reception

Publishers Weekly called it an "intelligent work of speculative fiction" with "heavy-handed melodrama" in places, but said "the philosophical questions the book raises are clever and insightful."

Reviewing it for the Historical Novel Society, Lucinda Byatt wrote: "Whether this qualifies as historical fiction is a moot point: it’s set in multiple pasts... Described as an “intellectual mystery”, the book explores the illusion of progress in history, perhaps also in our individual lives, a tribute to Benjamin’s own theories. Interestingly, the women are the most coherent and linear characters: Yvette and Paige, in particular, but even the historical figure, Hannah Arendt, who appears in the book alongside Theodor Adorno.

The Sunday Herald reviewer Lesley McDowell called it a "novel of ideas... more accessible than some may expect, and more gripping and more encompassing, too."

James Smart wrote in The Guardian, "With its enthusiasm for secret societies and acts that echo through time, The Secret Knowledge mines the fruitful ground between Cloud Atlas and Foucault's Pendulum, but fails to reach the heights of either. The dialogue can be tooth-wrenchingly annoying... but some scenes – a febrile union meeting, a loaded meeting between rival pianists – are wonderful."

Sputnik Caledonia

Sputnik Caledonia (2008) is a novel by British writer Andrew Crumey which won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, the UK's largest literary prize at the time.

It depicts a Scottish boy who longs to be a spaceman, is transported to a parallel communist Scotland where he takes part in a space mission to a black hole, and returns to the real world in middle age, possibly as a ghost. The novel is in three “Books”, with the central one (set in the alternate world) being longest, predominantly serious in tone, while the outer sections are shorter and more humorous. The title refers to the Russian Sputnik program and the alternative name for Scotland, Caledonia, suggesting the idea of Scotland as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

The book was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, losing to Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture. The other shortlisted authors were Mohammed Hanif, Adam Mars-Jones and Toni Morrison. It was also shortlisted in the fiction category of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards, losing to James Kelman's Kieron Smith, Boy.

Plot

Book One

Robbie Coyle, nine years old at the start of the book, lives in Kenzie in Scotland's Central Belt in the early 1970s. He dreams of going into space; but because of his father's anti-American, pro-Soviet views, he wants to be a cosmonaut rather than an astronaut. He picks up an Eastern European radio station called Voice of the Red Star, imagines it to be a telepathic signal from another planet, and begs to be taken there.

Book Two

Nineteen-year-old Robert Coyle lives in the British Democratic Republic – a Communist state founded after the overthrow of Nazi occupation in the “Great Patriotic War” – and has arrived at the Installation, a secret military base in Scotland, to take part in a space mission. A strange new object has been detected in the Solar System, believed to be a black hole, and the volunteers are to explore it telepathically. Robert has confused memories of the time before his arrival, and the reader is left guessing the connection between Books One and Two. Perhaps the Robbie of Book One has been transported to the other world as he wished; or perhaps the Robert in Book Two is a “parallel” version of the younger Robbie in Book One. The Installation itself is like a “black hole” in the sense that people arrive from the outside, but nobody ever seems to leave - except perhaps in death.

Book Three

In a present-day recognisable reality, Robbie's parents from Book One are now pensioners. Their story alternates with that of “the kid”, a runaway 13-year-old obsessed with science fiction stories such as Doctor Who, and with the idea that “in an infinite universe everything is possible”. He meets a middle aged man (“the stranger”) who claims to be a spaceman on a mission. The stranger could be the parallel-world Robert grown older - or a terrorist engaged in identity theft. Resisting logical resolution, the novel reprises and reworks themes that have recurred throughout the course of the book, creating an aesthetic unity that is emotionally ambivalent: a juxtaposition of the comic tone of Book One with the dark pessimism of Book Two.

Reception

Jonathan Coe called Sputnik Caledonia "the most impressive achievement yet from a still undervalued writer: in its combination of dystopian science fiction with warm but unsentimental childhood memoir, it struck me as being firmly in the tradition of - and worthy of comparison with - Alasdair Gray's Lanark."

In The Scotsman David Stenhouse wrote that Sputnik Caledonia was one of "very few" Scottish literary works that "actually does come close to 'envisioning' an alternative version of Scottish statehood".

Ken MacLeod called it a "very fine novel", adding "it looks like SF. But it can't be read as SF... In Sputnik Caledonia, the parallel world is a metaphor of what is lost in every choice. That's why the book is literary fiction and not SF, and is all the better for it."

Critical analysis

David Goldie in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945 considered Sputnik Caledonia "reminiscent of Gray's Lanark in the way it doubles its central character, Robbie Coyle, a Scottish boy fixated on space exploration, with Robert Coyle, trainee cosmonaut in a parallel British People's Republic, contrasting homegrown Bildungsroman with dystopian counterfactual history."

Lisa Harrison compared Sputnik Caledonia with Matthew Fitt's But'n'Ben A-Go-Go. "Their fictive worlds are Scotland, though not as we know it - they each present a Scotland stripped of stereotyping, thus reformed and redefined through fiction."

 

281- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

281- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

 Music, in a Foreign Language

Music, in a Foreign Language is the first novel by physicist Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 1994. It won the Saltire Society First Book Award for that year, in a ceremony broadcast on STV.

It is an alternate history novel that imagines Britain occupied by the Nazis during World War 2, becoming a communist state afterwards. The central character, Charles King, is a physicist and musician involved in a dissident journal. His story is embedded within that of a narrator writing in post-communist times. Crumey has said that inspiration came from the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, and eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. The title comes from a poem within the novel, written by a character in response to one by C.P. Cavafy.

Crumey explained a further reason for his choice of setting in an interview. "The most significant was a research trip I made to the University of Wroclaw in Poland, whose Institute of Theoretical Physics was situated in what, until only a few years previously, had been the local Communist headquarters. There was still much evidence of the former occupancy, and this labyrinthine building captured my imagination. But the only way I could bring it into my own domain, was to imagine such a building existing in Britain."

Music, in a Foreign Language was published in the United States in 1996 by Picador USA. Translated editions were published in Greece, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Taiwan and Romania.

The book shares its title with a 2003 album by Lloyd Cole.

Reception

Kirkus Reviews called it "a genuine novel of ideas, more than a little disorienting in the early going, as we labor to understand how its several parts will intersect—and surprisingly stimulating and exciting, as we see how Crumey imperturbably puts it all together. A formidable debut, from a writer whose possibilities, so to speak, seem virtually unlimited." Publishers Weekly called it "a thought-provoking but somewhat too ambitious debut."

Brian Stableford, in The A-Z of Fantasy Literature, called it "a polished exercise in postmodern/metafiction set in alternative world". The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945 commented on the "inventive intertwining of science with literary and musical culture" in both Music, in a Foreign Language and Crumey's later novel, The Secret Knowledge. The book has been described within postcolonial scholarship as a "mock dystopia". Hartmut Hirsch related it to the theories of Michel Foucault, calling the novel "a spatial utopia that, at the same time, is a heterotopia... By giving Britain the characteristics of a socialist regime, one historical and cultural space is superimposed on another to produce a third, heterotopian space, which defamiliarizes Britain as well as socialist regimes in general. A fragmented history of this alternate Britain is reproduced in a text which is itself fragmented... The intertextual references to Borges, Svevo, Calvino and Eco are clear."

Pfitz

Pfitz is a 1997 novel by Scottish physicist and author Andrew Crumey. It concerns an 18th-century German prince who dedicates his life to the construction of imaginary cities. The name Pfitz is taken from an inhabitant of one of the prince's fanciful cities, Rreinnstadt.

In 1997, the book was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times. In that newspaper Andrew Miller said it, "makes for rewarding reading – cerebral, adroit, not afraid to take chances but never allowing itself to be seduced by theory, by mere cleverness."

It was published in Germany as Die Geliebte des Kartographen ("The Cartographer's Lover") and was the subject of a prize-winning television feature by Eva Severini.

In 2013 the Scottish Book Trust selected it as one of the 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years.

Critical analysis

Mark C. Taylor related the multiple "authors" in Pfitz to complexity theory. "Pfitz is not just about emergent complexity but is a brilliant enactment of it. One of the strategies Crumey and his coauthors use to generate complexity is to create multiple self-reflexive loops by folding authors and readers into each other until the line separating them becomes obscure."

Stephen J. Burn sees Pfitz, Tom McCarthy's Men in Space and David Mitchell's Number9dream as examples of a subgenre he terms "multiple drafts" novels, with Pfitz being "the earliest—and arguably the most representative—example of this form." Burn's term "multiple drafts" is borrowed from Daniel Dennett's model of consciousness. Burn writes that Pfitz shows "evident familiarity with Daniel Dennett's work" and says it "might be considered to provide the hidden internal blueprint for different levels of the novel's action."

Toon Staes sees Pfitz as a "systems novel", a term coined by Tom LeClair who applied it to writers including Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Ursula Le Guin. In Staes' usage, "systems novels feature multiple nonlinear and fragmented narrative strands that gradually fix the reader's attention on a network of relationships," with Pfitz being "an interesting test case."

Colin Manlove described Pfitz as a "'postmodernist' fantasy" with "a vision of a universal machine of wheels and cogs that churns out infinite textual universes, each of which has no 'reality' as we commonly know it."

 

280- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

280- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

Mobius Dick

Mobius Dick (2004) is a novel by Andrew Crumey. It features an alternate world in which Nazi Germany invaded Great Britain and Erwin Schrödinger failed to find the wave equation that bears his name. This world becomes connected to our world due to experiments with quantum computers. The title parodies Moby-Dick.

The science-fiction plot centres on a mysterious mountain hospital in the Scottish highlands. Interweaving tales re-write the historical stories of Robert Schumann's stay in a similar clinic in Endenich and Schrödinger's visit to the Alpine sanatorium of Arosa, both of which echo the situation in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Connections are drawn from the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, particularly The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.

It was longlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Reception

A Companion to Crime Fiction describes Mobius Dick as a 'metaphysical detective story', comparing it with Kobo Abe's Inter Ice Age 4 and Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 'linking apocalyptic science fiction and metaphysical detective/mystery stories through antiphonal narratives, alternating "science" and "mystery" to yield reciprocal modes of displacement.'

Mr Mee

Mr Mee (Picador, 2000; Dedalus Books, 2014) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, his third set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century (following Pfitz and D'Alembert's Principle). It has three alternating story-lines: one featuring a pair of 18th-century French copyists, and two with modern protagonists - elderly Scottish book collector Mr Mee and university lecturer Dr Petrie. The lecturer's strand is serious in tone. Dissatisfied with his marriage and suffering ill health, he muses on French literature and becomes infatuated with a student. The other two strands are comic. The copyists become guardians of an esoteric encyclopaedia, and Mr Mee wishes to find it. He turns to the World Wide Web (still fairly new at the time of the novel) and discovers pornography and drugs, with farcical consequences.

The copyists, Ferrand and Minard, are based on two men mentioned briefly in Rousseau's Confessions. Their fictional versions – described by one critic as "something of an eighteenth-century Abbott and Costello"[1] – resemble the title characters in Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet.[2] The lecturer Dr Petrie thinks Ferrand and Minard never existed, comparing Rousseau's Confessions to Proust's In Search of Lost Time - something that appears to be a memoir but is really a novel.

The copyists' encyclopaedia is the work of Jean-Bernard Rosier, a character from D'Alembert's Principle. The name recurs in subsequent Crumey novels: The Rosier Corporation in Mobius Dick, the Rosier Foundation in The Great Chain of Unbeing.

The first chapter of the novel includes a version of the Monty Hall problem, presented as a letter from Rosier to D'Alembert about a hostage whose life depends upon choosing which cup a ring is hidden under. Chapter 8 has a version of the unexpected hanging paradox and also alludes to the uncertainty principle and measurement problem.

The name Mr Mee may be a pun on "me", reflecting the novel's concern with truth and authorship in first-person writers such as Rousseau and Proust. It might also hint at encyclopaedist Arthur Mee, or the novel's year of publication, MM in Roman numerals. The title was changed by some foreign publishers: the Italian translation was titled Il professore, Rousseau e l'arte dell'adulterio; the German edition was Rousseau und die geilen Pelztierchen.

Reception

Booker Prize judge Roy Foster wrote in the Financial Times: "We ended with a shortlist to be proud of, and a magnificent winner in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, but I still think regretfully of a few that got away (some only just)... Andrew Crumey's Mr Mee is wildly expansive and generally light-hearted: it weaves together the story of an octogenarian Scottish scholar discovering sex through the internet, with an 18th-century French whodunnit about a lost philosophe encyclopaedia and a dying academic's obsession with one of his students. The French element is a triumph in itself, but each story is reported in a perfectly manipulated voice, the deadpan humour never wavers, the cross-references thicken intriguingly, and in the end all the tangled threads resolve into a beautifully executed pattern which is oddly moving.[3]

Miranda Seymour wrote in the New Statesman: "Andrew Crumey is one of the most original novelists around. I wish that Mr Mee, in which he mixes together murder, fairy tales, Rousseau, pornographers and the internet to dazzling effect, had made it on to the Booker list. It deserved a place there.[4]

Reviewing Mr Mee in The Washington Post, Andrew Ervin noted the similarity between a line near the start of the novel and the opening of Borges' story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of an encyclopaedia and a mirror". Crumey's character says, "I owe my discovery of the Xanthics (and hence of Rosier’s Encyclopaedia) to the coincidence of a flat tyre and a shower of rain." Ervin wrote: "Borges lurks in the shadows of Mr Mee, and he becomes the reader's Virgil, an essential guide through an abyss of literary references, allusions and constructs. Although his name remains unuttered through the vast majority of the book, other historical figures do turn up as characters, minor plot functionaries and tongue-in-cheek jokes on the part of the author. Rousseau plays a sizable role in the goings-on, and Diderot turns up to tremendous comic effect. The works of Kafka, Kant and especially Proust, among many others, line up for inspection before it's over... It's the rare novel that makes you want to begin anew as soon as you've finished the last page."[5]

In Scotland on Sunday, Ruth Thomas wrote: "My own sympathies lay with the dying lecturer, whose story is the least contrived of the three, and whose character the least like a caricature. His infatuation with his student, although rather sickening and Humbert Humbert-like, also reveals a real sadness and emptiness at the core of his life, and this is poignantly and delicately written. Similarly, Mr Mee's incompatibility with the 20th century, let alone the 21st, is at times a very moving portrayal of the way old people's needs are overlooked by society. In common with the others, Mr Mee has a strong voice, full of enthusiasm and passion for life - or at least, his interpretation of it. And this is ultimately how the whole novel comes across - an odd story, occasionally a little hard to stomach, but told with such energy and conviction that you can't help admiring it."[6]

Hilary Mantel wrote in the New York Times: " In a novel so cerebral as Mr. Mee, it would not be surprising if the characters were paper-thin and the jokes a species of facetious quibbling. But Crumey is a sensitive writer, and he creates an unexpected amount of sympathy for both the wistful Dr. Petrie and the awesomely naive Mr. Mee. He has a sharp wit and taps the sort of deep, rich vein of comedy accessible only to authors who respect their own characters... Fans of Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn will relish this novel's puzzles and paradoxes, its unfolding and ingenious designs. Yet it is never hard going, always good-humored, jaunty and sometimes enjoyably silly. Crumey is a confident narrator, and his book has a heart as well as a brain. It is not only an intellectual treat but a moving meditation on aspiration and desire."

In 2003 Hilary Mantel was a judge of Granta's "20 best British writers under 40", along with Ian Jack, Robert McCrum, Nicholas Clee and Alex Clark.[8] Crumey was selected on the strength of Mr Mee, but on being told, immediately pointed out that although the book was published before his 39th birthday, he was now over 40, hence ineligible.[9] Two other writers were then found to be ineligible as well, and all three had to be replaced on the list. Ian Jack later wrote, "That meant the published list included three names we'd previously ruled out - three writers who, after a little flurry of phone calls between the judges, moved up in our ranking from "Quite Good" to "Best". There can be no more telling illustration of the arbitrariness of literary lists. I write this as a comfort to those who fail to get on them, and a caution to those who do."

Critical analysis

Timothy C. Baker commented on the use of Gothic tropes such as found manuscripts in the work of Crumey and other Scottish writers. "Use of such tropes can be limiting... In other texts, however, including Gray's Poor Things, Crumey's Mr Mee, and A. L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad, each of which embeds Gothic elements in another genre or mode, the trope exceeds these limitations and allows for a greater reflection on the relationship between language and experience."