"To the Dogs" by Louise Welsh

An audio book.

Glasgow 2017. Jim, a professor (criminology) returns from a trip to Beijing to find that his son Eliot (23) has been caught dealing with drugs again. Maggie, his wife, (an architect) thought Eliot had sorted himself out. They have a daughter Sasha (11) too. Eddie Cranston, a lawyer who was at school with Jim, tries and succeeds (against Jim's wishes - he has shady contacts) to get the job of defending Eliot. Eliot breaks bail conditions and is imprisoned (in the same prison where Jim's father had been).

Cranston's girlfriend Becky was a student of Jim until 2 years before. Her (god?) father was a criminal. Jim gets email saying that Lejur, a Chinese student he'd talked to on his trip, has disappeared. One of Jim's PhD students kills himself (maybe because Jim neglected to send a reference about him). Jim becomes a candidate for the university headship. A new learning hub is being planned. A builder befriends him. In prison, Eliot (who owes money to suppliers) is attacked, nearly killed. The builder had offered to protect him. Cranston has money problems. Jim (without telling Maggie) pays Eliot's debts. He's sent photos showing paying the debt and photos of his wife with a builder. Saudi royalty offer the university a big donation. A colleague, Ron Ferguson, loudly protests. He deals with a student protest against the Saudi offer - "blood money".

Jim contacts a Chinese dissident trying to help Lejur. He gets a phone call from someone offering to get Lejur freed in return for a student being given a first Sasha is threatened, so he meets a blackmailer and gives him info helpful to a builder making a bid. The blackmailer knew Jim's dad. His son is the builder, Peter Hendeson, who Jim met earlier. Ron Ferguson sees the 2 of them together. There's a tussle. Ron falls and dies.

A year later, the new buildings, including the Ferguson Lecture Theatre, are about to open. Saudi money's involved.

I liked 'The Cutting Room'. However, this novel left me cold. The moral dilemmas were presented clearly and I soon suspected how Jim would deal with them. Jim's ancestry is used as the explanation of his more surprising behaviour and reactions. Maggie and Jim's reaction to Eddie's behaviour and near-death experience is explained by their unconditional love.

Other reviews

• David Robinson (Jim Brennan is, we are told, not only the son of a violent criminal but has a professorship in criminology. If having a vice-principal as your main protagonist in a crime novel is already stretching credibility, those two things stretch it even further. My own guess is that Welsh knows this, which is why she fleshes out Jim’s own back story so well)
• Susan Osborne (Her cleverly plotted novel neatly contrasts straightforward crime with the dubious morality of accepting funding from repressive regimes)
• schatjesshelves (The one thing that bothered me is Jim’s lack of understanding of criminals. Despite his upbringing and his degrees in criminology, he seems constantly surprised by their behaviour. The addition of subplots is problematic. The result is a narrative that becomes disjointed and bogged down. ... The plot becomes increasingly convoluted and I found myself becoming annoyed with the constant piling on of Jim’s problems; it felt like they were added just to confuse. The stereotypical characterization of gangsters does not impress. And then the ending seems rushed and leaves unanswered questions.)

"Popular song" by Harry Man (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from "Ink, Sweat & Tears", Magma, etc. Over 30 people get "Special thanks" at the end, and there are 4 pages of notes.

I can see how Luke Kennard might like the book. I guess with this type of zany poetry one should expect poems to contain a mix of good and unsuccessful lines, and for there to be a mix of good and unsuccessful poems. My guess is that many other readers will notice the patchiness but disagree with me about which items are the successes and failures. There's a large margin of error.

Many of the poems are between 1 and 2 pages long, so there was room to weed out iffy lines.

Titles include "Naked as a Pork Loin Steak in a Poppy Field, I Consider a Horse from the Future". In contrast there's also "Broadleaf" which is a straightforward 1st-person PoV about being a tree - "I realise now, just how green I was ... I'm all about giving back to the community"

There's an SF theme - e.g. "After the magnesium rain, Phobos/ appears as if thrown over the lip// of Echus Chasma, like evidence of life/ being called down for tea and, from way up there,/ a chucked raisin - the reply".

"The Moon Is a CD of Bowie's Greatest Hits" is 4 pages of sentences (mostly one-liners) starting with "The moon is". Some work, some don't - it's up to the reader to do the editing. Here are 2 examples -

• "The moon is a face anticipating a kiss"
• "The moon is explaining to our neighbours how their son's tricycle ended up in the pond and why it now smells so strongly of Malibu and burnt plastic and we're sorry"

"If Xanadu Did Future Calm" begins with "As future plans reverse the harm/ neutrinos go superheavy/ where our universe shakes hands/ with one immeasurable by man/ becoming a Big Bang singularity", which has notes, but they don't help me. The poem does a lot of tech-name-dropping.

p.46, p.50, p.54 - No. p.58 is an N+20. No.

Other reviews

• Hannah Stone
• Tim Murphy (Both ‘Alphabets of the Human Heart in Languages of the World’ and ‘A Short Glossary to Russian Code Words Found in Ukraine’ are somewhat technical list poems that include translations in the footnotes. Each seems to be something of an academic exercise and this makes them feel out of place. The same goes for ‘#1984’, which lists more or less title-related hashtags ... ‘Then’ is a particularly strong closing piece ... Overall, while it sometimes feels uneven and is unlikely to be popular with everyone, this is an inventive and challenging debut.)

"Arcadia" by Lauren Groff

An audio book.

In the 1970s a group of people are trying to get Arcadia House ready, having lived in buses and lean-tos. When Handy leaves for a 3-month concert tour, Abe takes control and gets the big house finished. Bit, now 6, his son, was the first child born in the group. He's the main PoV. Hanna is Bit's mother. She gets depressed in the winter. There's no private ownership, more nudity and disability (mental because of drug abuse) than in society as a whole, and more tears. Survival is such a struggle that some people want to leave.

Bit roams and has lyrical insights. He watches his mother being washed by the other women and taken away to the house where she's talked to honestly until she's better. He can see her dreams. "lyrics stretched towards something fleeting". He slips into bed beside a woman giving birth. When he sees his parents cuddling he sees "the empty space that keeps the one from the other, the thing the size of a fist, a heart, a loaf, a rose, the size of his sister he'll never see" and starts crying silently.

By the time he's 14 his father is in a wheelchair (an accident when dealing with the sanitation), and isn't getting on well with Hanna (who's permanently on meds. An artist, Simon, says Hannah is his muse). Helicopters fly overheard. The commune decide to burn the hemp they've been growing and selling. Abe and Hanna have a hidden, secret field of it. Bit hasn't left the grounds - "the world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment." He's heard of televisions, "like tiny Plato's Caves".

The community has nudists, runaways, freeloaders, a tent for swingers, and trippers (people who've damaged themselves with drugs).

He fancies Hella, daughter of Handy (who's always had a soft spot for Bit). Abe allows the class he teaches to question Handy's authority - there's a "Council of 9" so why is Handy needed? On a night of celebrations there's a raid. About 200 people are arrested, a boy dies, and Handy's arrested for having sex with under-age girls. The commune falls apart. Bit and his family leave. Arcadia's converted to a mansion with tennis courts.

There's a jump of a few years. Bit got a Cornell degree, spent a year in Paris, had a few shows of his photographs, taught photography. He's anti-tech. At 35 he meets Hella again. They have a child, Greta. When Greta's 3, Hella disappears. His parents, separated, get together again, living near Arcadia. When Greta's 14. Hanna's 68 and dying. She and Abe have a suicide pact. Hanna survives. Bid looks after her. She refuses treatment. Covid arrives. Hanna tells Bid he's wasted his life helping people. He starts dating Hanna's doctor. Hanna dies, Astrid giving her a morphene overdose.

At one point the reader says "not even looking at the fraycas". My guess is that in the printed book the last word was "fracas".

Other reviews

• Kapka Kassabova (The requited maternal ecstasy the author feels for Bit, combined with turgid storytelling results in a novel that could be a one-page love poem, and in that sense feels 288 pages too long. I became incredulous after I'd heard 100 times that for little Bit, "everything is rich with the incredible" and "his heart is so loud it overwhelms the day". In the end, I felt as though I'd been on a numbing acid trip.)

"Mary; or, the Birth of Frankenstein" by Anne Eekhout

An audio book.

We learn about Mary when she's at Geneva in 1816 with Shelley, Byron, Dr John Polidori and her stepsister Claire. Shelley's into free love. She isn't. Her daughter died. She now has a little boy, William, still breast-feeding. Byron challenges them to write a ghost story.

We also see her at Scotland in 1812 when she was in her mid-teens, staying with the Baxter family. She has a skin condition. She's friendly (intimate) with Isabella, whose mother has died. Isabella's into witches, ghosts and sea monsters. While they're out together they see a humanoid beast (or was it a shared hallucination?). It's rumoured that the local brewer, Mr Booth (who'd been married to Isabella's sister, who died) conducts experiments on life. Mary's warned about Isabella - is she a witch?

She's familiar with Gothic horror stories and Galvani's frog experiments. Mary's famous mother died days after Mary was born. At the end she leave Scotland in one time-line (her skin better, Isabella planning to marry Mr Booth, abandoning Mary) and leaves Geneva in the other timeline (Shelley's father will provide support only if she returns). Claire is pregnant. Byron's likely to be the father but maybe Shelley could be. Her Frankenstein story has barely been started.

Lots of sections seem slow to me. It feels like the majority of the text is involved with the Scotland scenario. I don't mind the lack of action, it's the psychological/character development that stalls.

Other reviews

• Isabela Torezan (What I found most beautiful in this story, though, was not the delicate description of Mary’s love life, from Isabella to Percy, or the sad but surely moving portrait of motherhood. For me, it is Mary’s salvation through writing, the way she realises that her story, her monster, her writing powers were what made her who she was and nobody could take that from her. Writing, alone, makes her a woman, a mother, and a living being)
• theresasmithwrites (The scenes at Geneva read almost like a fever dream, an immersion into the way in which they were all drinking heavily, laudanum mixed with wine, the consequential heightening of everyone’s faculties, and the raging storms all converging into a highly charged atmosphere. )
• Liesbeth D’Hoker (Unfortunately, her straightforward style leaves too little of Mary’s complex mind unturned. ... Her superficial dialogues and explanatory one-liners render a reductive image of a woman who is a victim of her time, of her context, and of the men who surround her. Eekhout’s poor style also prevents the creation of a layered and intellectual character. At times the syntax is of toe-curling simplicity ... Eekhout deviates from the biographical facts on several important points ... It is also quite clever how Eekhout plays with different genres. She mixes coming-of-age passages with horror stories and folk legends and concocts strange scenes that soar with tension. Much less successful are the passages that she overwhelms with psychological platitudes)
• Ray Palen

"Other people" by Peter Campion (Univ of Chicago Press, 2005)

Poems from AGNI, PN Review (5 of them), Poetry, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, etc.

This is another book that's beyond my understanding. I can't work out what the poet's aims are. There's quite a lot of rhyme - e.g.

when you called to tell how, after 2:00, as you searched that club you'd played to find your case, a pane of glass propped out of view sliced you, made my imagination race

Note that retrospectively it's clear that "2:00" is pronounced "two", and that there doesn't seem to be much of a syllabic/stress pattern.

Other reviews

• Robert Pinsky (Closeness of the uncanny to the quotidian is Peter Campion’s kind of material. ... )

"The Blue Hour" by Paula Hawkins

An audio book.

James Becker is the curator of the Fairburn foundation's works. He never knew his father. His mother was an artist who died from cancer when he was young. His boss is Sebastian. James' pregnant wife Helena was once engaged to Seb.

Tate Modern has contacted the Fairburn foundation because they discovered that an art piece the Tate borrowed from them contains a human bone. Becker knows a lot about the artist's work - his mother liked the artist's work too. He drives to Eris where she used to live. Vanessa Chapman, the artist, died of cancer 5 years before, leaving her work to the Fairburn foundation - a surprise because they were her enemy for a time. Grace (once the local doctor then her live-in carer) is her executor who's been slow passing on the diaries and notebooks. She lives on Eris, which is an island some of the day. She and James begin to trust each other. She tells him she helped Vanessa with a morphine overdose at the end. He tells her that Seb's mother Emmaline killed his father Douglas (Vanessa's agent). Vanessa's husband Julian once sold a work of hers to pay his gambling debts. He disappeared along with his car about 20 years before.

We learn about events partly from Vanessa's journals. Grace once saved Vanessa from a rapist.

Seb thinks that Grace is holding onto some works of art and some diaries. Grace wasn't given any art-works in the will though she was given the island and house. Maybe she's hiding evidence that would show her in a bad light?

When Julian last visited the island, he asked Vanessa for money. They slept together. Grace (who fancied beautiful Vanessa) left the house in disgust. Vanessa later left to see (and sleep with) her agent. Did Julian trash Vanessa's paintings and sculptures when he was alone in the house? No. Actually, Grace killed him when he humiliated her, then trashed some works. We learn more about Grace - how she felt rejected by her parents, then her student house-mates. After finding the arts vandalised, Vanessa told her not to return to the house because she knew too much. When Vanessa discovered she had cancer she begged Grace to come back.

James visits again. Grace gets him to stay the night, hiding his car keys. He begins to thinks that Helena and Seb are having an affair. Grace tells James that Vanessa killed Julian. James is phonGraceed and told that the bone isn't Julian's. It's from Nick, who he knows was a student friend of Grace. In a flashback we learn that Nick visited Grace pretending that after drugs/women problems he wanted to be friends with her again, but he ended up humiliating her. She hadn't planned to kill him but when the chance arose, she did. Then she kills James.

In general I liked the writing, (and how Grace gradually became the central figure, she and James having much in common), though -

• When James (his PoV) is on the phone to the Tate we learn that "the man on the phone exhaled audibly". I've seen this phrase before. It irritates me more than it should. Why is the word "audibly" there?
• About 80 mins from the end there's "reached for Grace's hand ... dropping Vanessa's hand .. the cutter between her hand" then "intent on the task at hand". Too many hands.
• Scenes are repeated from different PoVs. Fair enough, though sometimes the differences are barely worth it.

Other reviews

• Fiona Sturges
• bookliterati
• Vicky Leigh ( ‘Blue Hour’, despite being written from three different perspectives again, was much easier to follow. It feels like a two hander, between Grace and Becker.)
• Goodreads - many disappointed readers

"Dwelling places" by David Ferry (Univ of Chigaco Press, 1993)

Poems from Agni, Harvard Magazine, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Raritan, etc. Many of the pieces are translations/adaptions - of Goethe, Rilke, Baudelaire, etc. My favourite poem was Mnemosyne (Hölderlin) though most of the pieces were way beyond me. In general, I don't understand why there are so many words. Here for example is part of "In the garden" - The whole plucked stalk is an event in time:/ a number of blossoms one above the other,/ but some blossoms more fully out than others,/ in an intricately regular scale or series./ Of course, since the flower is plucked, it isn't really/ an event in time, but only the record of an event.