Once Around the Sun - Book review

What an unusual book; compelling storytelling at its best, handling a theme that spans centuries. Published as a paperback original in 1978, D.G. Finlay’s magical novel Once Around the Sun proved doubly fascinating for me as it was not only well-written and evocative, it also featured Gosport in Hampshire, where my wife Jennifer and I with our daughter Hannah lived for many years.

 

Though labelled as 'general fiction' Finlay is considered to be a horror writer.

There are four parts, each about a different period, all set in and around Gosport, each prefaced with a relevant map.

The first concerns about thirty Scandinavian conquerors who settle by the Solent around early 400s AD. Their chieftain was ‘a hard man, but weary of the restless years behind him.’  Though they found peace and rich land to till, there was the occasional conflict, notably with the Meonwara (present-day Meon Valley, I guess).

Young virile Stoc became the new chieftain in 480. Throughout the writing is never less than eloquent, with good imagery, for example at the chieftain’s funeral pyre: ‘The call to Woden died in the throats of the men and they listened, the hair rising on their skin and the blood standing cold in their bodies.’ (p18) And: ‘When the sun crept out of the mantle of morning mist, there remained only the funeral guards, still as stone in their trance-like vigil over the little hill with its crown of smoking, sweet-smelling ash.’ (p19) Stock took to wife Moanh who gave him much pleasure and two sons: ‘The joy of lying with Moanh and basking in the warmth and strength of hr response to him filled his waking thoughts.’ (p21)

One day Stoc joined the hunt of a wounded wild boar which finally put up a tremendous fight, killing one of the hunters. Stoc took a tusk from the dead boar and carved an pendant resembling two boars and presented it to his wife.

The pendant seems to possess a dark power which subsequently affects the two sons… Brigid weds Bran, one of the boys, so the genes will be passed on…Ultimately, tragedy stalks them, and the pendant survives…

The second part is set in the time of the English Civil War. Polycarpus Miller and his wife Elizabeth had twin daughters, Becky and Biddy, and on their tenth birthday they were presented with a pendant each, one a copy of the original. Becky owned the original and sensed its fell influence on her… And Biddy’s beautiful daughter Prue becomes involved in spying on the governor of neighbouring Portsmouth, for he was loyal to the king while Gosport was allied with Cromwell. When villagers suspect Becky of witchcraft, she is sent abroad to America with her beau Richard Gardenar (in readiness for the sequel, The Edge of Tomorrow, 1979).

The third part takes place in 1783 when American and French prisoners are being held in floating hulks in Portsmouth Harbour. The conditions in the hulks are grim. One of those incarcerated on the vessel Royal Oak is Richard Gardenar. Tom Long works on Gardenar’s hulk and recognises the likeness of their ancestor from a portrait of the 1600s. He determines to arrange for an escape… The night trek across the mudflats is tense and well told. Daughter Brigid wears the handed-down boar pendant and coincidentally the rescued Richard possesses the other, passed on from Becky…

The fourth part is set during the Second World War. Two elderly brothers, Bran and Wayland, live together. This is a particularly dark episode. Wayland is not a pleasant man, a follower of the satanist Aleister Crowley. The area is suffering from frequent rape-murders of local women. Wayland is jealous of Bran’s attachment Mavis. And they both possess the pendant heirlooms… for a final reckoning…

D. G. Finlay set herself a mammoth task and has done a great deal of research and supplies two pages of reference works. She manages to evoke each time period and cleverly names of characters are reinvented for later generations.

The local references are many: the sinking of Henry VIII’s ship the Mary Rose; Titchfield; Privett Farm; St Mary’s Church, Stoke – our church in the 1980s; Fareham; Southsea Castle; Peel Common; Stokes Bay – where we often walked; the Five Alls pub – which I frequented often in the mid-1960s; Spring Garden Lane; Grove Road; the Queen Charlotte pub – where we played skittles; HMS St Vincent, a training brick ship, my first draft in the RN; Brickwood’s Best Bitter; the Gosport War Memorial Hospital – which has been in the news a lot recently; ‘the Asylum out in the country near Wickham’ – presumably Netley, which is now a newish housing complex.

A thought-provoking read with, be warned, a down-beat ending.

Coincidence: there is an uncanny echo from the previous book I read, Deep Purple: ‘... let the bitter-sweet melody of “Deep Purple” flow through him…’ (p256) The book also features a Harry Gardener, a close spelling to Gardenar!

Another coincidence: Dione Gordon Finlay was living in Malta when she wrote this book and its sequel. Jennifer and I lived in Malta a few years earlier, 1974-75.

Book review - Turnstone

First in the twelve-book series about Detective Inspector Joe Faraday, Turnstone (2000) is an excellent British police procedural novel set in the Portsmouth area. I must admit that I found Graham Hurley’s book fascinating as I read about places familiar to me.

The book begins with a young girl finding her way to the police station to report her father Stuart Maloney missing. At the time, DI Faraday was busy with a drug case.  Something about the misper (missing person) case draws in Faraday, however, and the deeper he digs the more certain he becomes that Maloney is dead.

We get to know detective Paul Winter, a rough nut of the old school who prefers to bend the rules to get a good result, CID sergeant Cathy Lamb, who discovers her husband Peter is being unfaithful, Detective Superintendent Arnold Pollock, Faraday’s boss, ‘a thin intense high-flyer with a Cambridge degree and little time for moral nuances’, and DI Harry Wayte, in charge of the area Drugs Squad, ‘who hid his determination to smash the local drug supply networks behind a robust sense of humour and a bottomless thirst’. Interesting characters, all, drawn with depth and humour.

The local drug lord seems untouchable. Winter’s attempts to get something on him backfire spectacularly and embarrassingly, injecting some humour in an otherwise bleak landscape – a landscape also populated by birds of the feathered variety. Faraday is a bit of a bird enthusiast, and has a vast library on them. He has nurtured his son’s interest in them, too: J-J is now twenty-two, and has been motherless for most of those years, Janna having died when he was an infant. J-J is deaf and the relationship between him and his father is touchingly revealed.

The disappearance of Maloney seems linked to some contestants in the Fastnet race. The Fastnet has claimed several lives over the years, and this year is no exception: some boats capsized and one even sank. The survivors, Faraday feels, are connected to Maloney but are not telling.  

Hurley paints his pictures well: ‘Harry… moved in a world where truth was a currency, traded for favours, distorted for gain, abandoned when plain fiction seemed more plausible. Dealing with junkies, and the suppliers who kept them in their cage, you got to disbelieve absolutely everything, even the evidence of your own eyes. See a man with one head, he probably had two.’ (p207)

The title is word-play. Turnstones are two species of wading bird related to the sandpipers, and frequent the mudflats near Faraday’s home. And of course Faraday leaves no stone unturned to get to the bottom of the misper riddle.

A satisfying read. I look forward to the next eleven books!

Writing – word-play – chapter headings continued-2

Last blog on the subject of chapter titles, I provided an insight into Catalyst, where many of the chapters played with variations on the theme of ‘the cat’. See here

However, my psychic spy Tana Standish series chapter titles follow a different format. They’re all single word headings. By doing this, to some extent I’m signposting what the chapter is about, though not giving away too much - because that's always an issue , revealing something that should be a surprise.

Here are the first four from The Prague Papers:

1: Prelude – self-evident, but two-pronged. A) A glimpse at Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Tana’s mission there during the Soviet invasion. B) jumping to the narrative’s ‘present’, 1975, and the beginning of this mission, Operation Ouija. This latter scene is also very relevant to the end, Chapter 24. De-briefing.

2: Tana – yes, most of the book is from Tana’s point of view. However, this chapter shows a long flashback revealing her origins in Poland in 1942.

3. Fort – here we briefly visit ‘the fort’ in Gosport, Hampshire where to this day British spies undergo some of their training.

4. Ilyichev – the name of a Soviet enemy Tana wounded in the past, who now stumbles upon her during her mission and sets his telescopic sights on her…

So, you get the gist. Even a one-word chapter heading can be helpful to a reader should they wish to check back to a scene or sequence of events.

As a possibly interesting aside, Chapter 1 of The Tehran Text is entitled ‘Heart’ and Chapter 1 of The Khyber Chronicle is ‘Herat’, the latter being an anagram of ‘heart’ besides being a place in Afghanistan.

 

1. The Prague Papers e-book available now

Amazon UK here

2. The Tehran Text e-book due out February 17, 2015

3. The Khyber Chronicle - work in progress

The Tana Standish Series published by Crooked Cat Publishing