Shorter version already published on the Radio 2 Book Club group on Facebook.

I have a confession to make. No, I haven’t hidden a body anywhere! It’s just that (hand on heart) I am not usually a huge fan of murder mysteries. There, I’ve said it. If I read them at all they are usually ones set in historic periods. I am rather more inclined to the likes of Brother Cadfael (remember Ellis Peters?) than John Rebus, I suppose. During Lockdown I found myself avoiding dramatised versions too (not watched a single episode of Line of Duty) – reasoning, with half-baked logic, that life was already quite grim enough without inventing someone fictional in order to murder them.

For this Highlands-based series, however, I have to make an exception. I stumbled across the first, Shadow Man, a few years back and surprised myself by enjoying it, so much so that I looked out for the next, What Lies Buried. It was even better in my view. In the Blood is the third in the series. Can you read it without reading the previous two first? Of course you can, but I am willing to bet you’ll want to backtrack and fill in the gaps afterwards.

The reason for this guilty pleasure is personified in Lukas Mahler, Margaret Kirk’s enigmatic and convincing ‘leading man’ (much of Kirk’s writing shouts screenplay – this is crying out to become a TV adaptation). There has been considerable discussion about political correctness in detective fiction recently – some of the hard-drinking, disgruntled dinosaurs who have been around for years are aging with their authors and struggling, unrealistically, with the red tape of modern policing.

Mahler is very different – a modern detective who both kicks against and understands the system within which he works. He has a complex back story which is only being revealed by cunning degrees. A traumatic childhood. A foreign connection. A disturbed mother. And – something so many of us can relate to – migraine when under stress. Which he is, of course. Constantly. Some of it the job. Some of it, undoubtedly, self-inflicted.

In the Blood sees Lukas facing up to the death of someone he admired, someone who inspired him. The victim has died – truly horribly – in a remote corner of Orkney. He quite simply should not have been there. The reason he is forms the backbone of a plot rich in local detail ranging from drug-dealing to botany (straight back to Brother Cadfael’s herb garden for a moment), folklore and the occult. There is the tantalising addition of a hanging storyline involving Lukas’ love interest, Anna, and the echoes of how they met, plus a plethora of Orcadian and Highland characters (I have an especially soft spot for Fergie and his highly dodgy motor).

This is a landscape I am fortunate already to know, love and dwell in, but if you have never explored the Highlands and Orkney this excellent murder mystery could well be the trigger for the holiday of a lifetime.

Highly recommended.

For visually impaired readers, this large paperback features a dramatic red and black cover with a distant seascape and standing stones – possibly the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney.

In the Blood is published by Orion Books priced £14.99 and is also now available as an ebook.

I aim never to ruin a book for future readers through review spoilers but with a book of this complexity and depth that may prove a challenge, so be warned…

Equally challenging, I suspect, will be the bookshop head-scratching over which shelf to put this on (I have a soft spot for genre-busting fiction but booksellers prefer their wares to be more easily categorised).  Here in the Highlands, readers will find it displayed under local author, of course.

Elsewhere in the UK, if placed on the fiction shelf, the fans of landscape writers such as Rob MacFarlane may miss it and they would love the generous descriptions of Strathspey, as much a character within this book as the well-crafted family which carries the narrative. It is a mysterious read too – but will it sit entirely comfortably on the mystery table? And to place it in the murder mystery corner would be over-presumptuous, for it is that elusive hanging storyline, with its string of clues found, which forms the backbone of the book.

In my view, bookshop proprietors, the solution would be a small table of its own, bang opposite the entrance.

Nor is this a novel about farming, or families, or friendship, or even faith per se, although Of Stone and Sky draws on all these themes. It is certainly a book which explores love, both the love of people for one another – brothers, youngsters, couples – and love of the place in which they live, to the point of obsession, to the point of madness. And the borderline between madness and sainthood can run very thin.

Through the midst of all this messy, gritty rural Highland reality strides a shepherd, a good one: he says scarcely a word and yet his presence – and subsequent absence – is at the heart of this novel. An elegaic note for a whole hill-farming way of life is sounded here and yet the leaving off of possessions, the passing on of a shepherd’s crook feels somehow spiritually uplifting and hopeful. A strange and potent combination.

The word which surfaces and resurfaces as I reflect on this read is real. I know this place too. I have worked within it. I do not just see its landscape but, to some degree anyway, I feel it. To me Of Stone and Sky now seems less like a story I have read than one which I have been told at intervals, perhaps by an unlikely yet appealingly teetotal publican, leaning across the bar of some battered Highland pub in Strathspey or Badenoch (that’s bade to rhyme with spade not bad with sad, incidentally). To anyone who raises an eyebrow at the appealing and unorthodox ‘otherly’ priest-pagan who figures prominently within the plot, I would counter with the story of a real one: a priest who decided his faith would be better served by starting a printing press in a deprived city area, who has helped many local folk overcome their addiction through employment.

If you prefer your Highland fiction to be of the skin-deep Fifty-Shades-of-Tartan variety, this probably isn’t the book for you. It is no light read. Of Stone and Sky is set in the real Highlands, where folk have always struggled against the elements and adversity to survive; where farming (and hill sheep farming in particular) is no longer financially viable without subsidy; where the hands of the rich and powerful have grasped the great estates since the eighteenth century. The owners nowadays are often wealthy and shadowy absentees – and yet they too have their place in the story and should be seen for who and what they are, not as menacing outsiders. They too can heft to place as the generations start to forge more meaningful connections.

The book’s poetic title (reminiscent in more ways than one of Tolkein’s allegory Of Tree and Leaf) suggests a book about wild places and that is the stage on which Merryn Glover places a generation of compelling characters, some more hefted to place than others, to act out their lives. I like my characters flawed and here there are flaws aplenty: a kind of reverse Cain and Abel relationship, star-crossed lovers, physical disfigurement; tragic people, damaged people, broken people – all bound together by the stones and sky which both define and envelop them. And they all feel so real to me now that I could reach out and hold their hand – or in a couple of cases, slap them, as appropriate.

This is a book to which I will return: so few people write about the realities of life here. The highest Highlands is no easy nor ordinary place to live, a sanctuary to many but a prison to some. Which view you take depends not just on wealth (although these days every penny helps) but also on whether or not you ‘hear it in the deep heart’s core’.

A compelling and unusual read which explores the world which is to be found between the visions of the Highlands as heaven and as hell – and I highly recommend it.

Of Stone and Sky by Merryn Glover is published in hardback by Birlinn, cover price £16.99.

This battered little fork hangs on the wall of my toolshed in perpetuity, its tines now so worn as to render it almost useless. I would never part with it: as with so many of my unlikely family treasures, there is story or two attached.

This is the garden fork with which my mother prised a new vegetable plot out of a raw field of twitch (couch-grass) at Drumcudden, the house she built in Cullicudden on the north side of the Black Isle, which was to became my childhood home. She levered so many boulders out of the thin soil that a small cairn rose in one corner of the garden to mystify future archaologists. Every time the fork struck another sullen lump of glacial quartz or granite (rounded and pounded by the river of ice which flowed from Ben Wyvis to Rosemarkie 13,000 years ago) it wore away the steel tines, just a fraction more. Mum said the sound of it, the feel of it, made her heart quail and her spine jangle – but she was, in this, as she was in all things, indomitable. Her garden kept us fed with delicious fruit and vegetables (and sprouts) all year round.

In retirement Mum moved to Fortrose and the fork went too. Her garden was smaller and less challenging so she took on the restoration of a dowdy area of rough ground on a new roundabout at Chanonry Point. With the help of a team of local people over several years, she planted wild bushes and flowers and grasses, creating a haven for wildlife; she found her fork could easily vanish into the undergrowth, so she added a circle of red insulation tape to the handle to make it more visible.

Then one day the fork toppled over and its handle split. She bound that up with black insulation tape – insulation tape always her go-to mend material. Why not just replace the handle? She was frugal, of course, but it goes deeper. For the same reason that I cannot take the fork to the Smiddy to be re-tined, she could not reheft it either. This wasn’t ever just her fork; so it is doubly not just mine.

As readers of Major Tom’s War will know, Tom, my mum’s father, returned to England from Germany some months after the end of the Great War. His wife Evie had already secured them modest rented accommodation on a farm in Burmington near Shipston-on-Stour (where both my aunt Libba and my mother Numpy were born in 1920 and 1922). It was at Burmington Cottage that Tom was finally, after an absurdly long wait, re-promoted to Major.

Five years of warfare had taken their toll on Tom; he was not yet fit enough (mentally or physically) to continue working as a solicitor. Instead he became a farmhand, operating a mechanical steam plough. Perhaps that is when he acquired this small fork – not too heavy, a tool he could handle without his damaged lungs struggling for breath. He has routed his initials, T.H.W., deep into the handle, perhaps to avoid confusion with those of others working on the land.

Eventually Tom recovered enough to take up a country solicitor’s practice in Manningtree, Essex. He and Evie bought a burned-out shell of a mediaeval house called Abbot’s Manor in Lawford. Restoring it must have been cathartic after the devastation Tom had witnessed in villages and towns in France. Together Evie and Tom made a garden, planting an espaliered Doyenne du Comice pear against one wall. The fruits were plump and green-golden, speckled with russet. Against another wall nodded the fat and floppy egg-yolk heads of an old rose named Climbing Lady Hillingdon. Doubtless Tom’s fork wore down its tines a little more in planting those.

Thirty years later, my mother left my father, in the bitter winter of 1968. She drove north through blizzards in an old blue Austin A40 which leaked oil the whole way to be reunited with her sister at her home at Drynie Mains on the Black Isle. Bobby, our feckless Dalmation and myself slithered on the beltless back seat, squeezed between an assortment of Mum’s most precious possessions: the family portraits and photograph albums (though she left one propping open the door of the marital home she fled), a silver teapot, some porcelain and this garden fork.

My turn now to have planted a Doyenne du Comice pear, a Climbing Lady Hillingdon rose and to add another, an old black-red French rose named Guinée, a gift from my own beloved sister. I think of it as Harnam Singh’s rose, the rose which represents all the Indian troops alongside whom Tom served: valiant and dutiful warriors, but also sons of farmers, who loved the countryside and who admired roses. It is a Guinée rose which graces the cover of Major Tom’s War, shedding its blood-coloured petals over the steel-grey cover.

These days I seldom use the fork, but once in a while I will take it down from its peg on a sunny day just to press it into the soil as far as it can go. It pleases me to think of its short tines being reduced still further by my own land.

My genes, precious gifts from Tom and Evie and my Mum, have taught me always to dig as deep as I can.

Happy gardening – and if you have a garden tool you also love irrationally, do share it…

The greatest adventure story, the best thriller I have read over the last twelve months is not a work of fiction. It is this book by Cal Flyn, ‘Islands of Abandonment.’

With everyone from David Attenborough downwards warning us that the apocalypse is nigh if we human beings do not mend our polluting and over-populated ways, there is a risk that we become de-sensitised to the urgency of the message. This risk is doubled during a time of pandemic when the psychology goes ‘Look, no, sorry, can’t take any more doom! Pass me a slice of pizza and something entertaining to read, for God’s sake!’

It is essential therefore that authors like Cal Flyn come at the same subject from a fresh viewpoint and that some readers do engage with what she has to say, because it is essential reading, if frightening (her work is subtitled Life in the Post-Human Landscape).

Each chapter is an edge-of-the-seat adventure story. Alongside Cal, we crawl into dark tunnels by torchlight; we hear footsteps in the attic of the long-derelict house; we encounter a variety of ‘abandonment’ zone hosts, some more stable and trustworthy than others; we slither under the fence of a WWI woodland surrounding an area so toxic nothing has grown there since (this one had particular resonance for me, having visited the battlefields and read Lars Mytting’s ‘The Sixteen Trees of the Somme’). There as elsewhere, Flyn bends or breaks the law in pursuit of her goal – access to the unthinkable; to areas of our planet today which foretell what it may all become tomorrow.

There is a Mad Max dimension to her encounters with the often-below-the-radar human inhabitants of these strange, off-limits places. There are those who need to stay out of sight of authority for a plethora of hair-raising reasons, those who are waiting, waiting, feeding white mice for scientists who will never return; those who have become obsessed with the volcano which has robbed them of their home.

Humans are not however the main focus of ‘Islands of Abandonment’. Flyn instead shows us that our planet really does not need humanity to survive, which we may or may not find comforting (I most certainly did). She argues that sometimes even well-meant human intervention is less positive than leaving Earth alone to mend itself. Nature is reclaiming even impossibly contaminated places such as Chernobyl and somehow species which live there are adapting and surviving. This does not mean they are not sick, changed, poisoned, but they are still here. Fragile humankind is however much less resilient and able to change in these circumstances, although some are trying hard to bring about that change.

This book should be read by anyone with an interest in rewilding (it is in a way a global take on Isabella Tree’s ‘Wilding’, about the Knepp Estate near London). My favourite chapter focused on the island of Swona, which you can see en route for Orkney from the mainland. Cattle were abandoned there and have defied all attempts to ‘help’ them by herding them on to boats. They are now many generations wild and have become the focus of study by scientists. Their behaviour is entirely unregulated by farming and they have become a true herd again, led by a bull who, when deposed in old age, departs to dwell in peace on an isolated area of the island, and around whom, when he sickens and dies, the whole herd gathers to pay its respects.

Enjoy your next steak…

I envy Flyn her (pre-Lockdown) travel budget if not the focus of her writing. Stand by to visit Scotland, Cyprus, Estonia, Ukraine, Detroit, New Jersey, Staten Island and California in the USA, France, Tanzania and Montserrat. Everywhere she visits has been abandoned by humanity for a variety of reasons: natural phenomena such as the eruption in Montserrat; social, military and political change; and sheer inhabitability caused by human pollution, sometimes brought about decades ago. Our human inability to think/care about beyond one’s own lifetime/benefit has already served the planet very badly.

Some scientists are already predicting the end of human society as we know it within the next decade. This is no longer the potential problem of future generations, it is our own. Flyn tells us that there is already a ‘Voluntary Extinction Movement’ – which makes more sense after reading this book than it did before. Our human future will now involve an increasing number of ‘no go’ zones due to global warming, pollution, radiation and over-population. It is a bleak prospect for us – but as Flyn shows us in this fine piece of writing, it is not so bleak for a planet which has infinite potential for reinvention.

Like Rachel Carson before her, Flyn sheds a brilliant light on the unspeakable and unthinkable future of humankind. It is a warning but not one altogether without hope. An important and beautifully written book, this is a ‘Silent Spring’ for the 21st century.

Would make an excellent book club read.

#Longread review alert! NB a shorter version of this review appeared in the Radio 2 Book Group in February 2021.

Every now and then a book comes along which stops you in your tracks: one which really matters. Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera is one such read. It is currently out in hardback and (soon, doubtless) will appear in paperback. Its cover is adorned by a fat British bulldog crouched at the top of a lofty column. I found myself wondering how author and publisher arrived at both title and cover image. The book could have been called The Empire Still Strikes Back. Its cover could (should?) have been blood red.

Sanghera is a well known author, journalist and broadcaster and so is accustomed to being in the public eye: with this book he has however experienced trolling as never before.
Although some Lockdown trolling can be attributed to isolation and frayed nerves, Sanghera has been trolled for a different reason: he has dared to ask his readers to think – that’s it, just think – about the legacy of Britain’s colonial past.

Empireland questions the often fervently-held but misguided and anachronistic belief that we are a godly nation which has unfailingly brought British ‘values’ (whatever they may be) to inferior countries, always to mutual benefit. We still justify our imperial past with a cry of ‘oh, but we gave them the railways…the civil service…the legal system…’ etc; but this notion of a munificent and altruistic British empire is a long-standing self-deluding lie.

As a colonial nation we brought countries (to which we had no legitimate claim) into the Empire by stealth or by force. We deposed legitimate leaders. We murdered people, often in cold blood, for imperial gain.

We eradicated first peoples (Sanghera describes, chillingly, how a long line of British soldiers walked across Tasmania, shooting its original inhabitants with no more concern than you would a rabbit). We sold others into slavery and took what was not ours to take: people, wealth, produce, property, territory. The word ‘loot’ is an Indian one for a reason. Our museums and our stately homes are still full of this imperial plunder.

Not every plundered object held here could or should be returned to where it came from – but if return is not possible then the story of its theft needs to be given equal weight alongside its origin, its antiquity, its craftsmanship or its value. Institutions such as The National Trust should be celebrated for exploring this issue, not criticised, as has (unbelievably!) been the case in recent months.

I would like to have seen an additional chapter in Empireland which showed how religion and empire co-operated to lethal effect (supplanting the valid belief systems of first peoples with Chistianity, often brutally imposed) but perhaps the author will explore this in a separate work, as it is a huge subject.

BlackLivesMatter opened up discussions about the legacy of slavery worldwide. In the UK it will be remembered for the toppling of statues of slave traders such as Edward Colston in Bristol. Sanghera stops short of describing such actions as futile but does urge far greater positivity and creativity of response. His lively suggestion would be leaving such statues in situ and pelting them with rotten fruit once a year. My own would be to topple them without damage but then to leave them in situ, suitably interpreted, removed from their literal and metaphorical pedestal – so that our children can look down on them and see they were, after all, just men.

In a local museum two dull but worthy Victorians portraits have always hung in a quiet corner. After reading Empireland I looked at them with fresh eyes.These were ruthless merchants, opium barons, the drug royalty of their day, who were in it for the money. They spent no time reflecting on the ethics of their enterprise and merit no respect.

Sanghera points out that Empire was built on action – often bold, reckless and dangerous action – and not on intellect. The legacy of this today is catastrophic.

Reading Empireland coincided with my studying the history of the North West Frontier, where generation after generation of not especially bright but bold and brave boys who joined the army were massacred by the local residents who not unnaturally objected to their alien presence.

These actions are still being written up as heroic by historians today but they were anything but: at best they were inadvisable and illegal, at worst suicidal. 21st century military historians are generally male and they love their subject, which can lead to a dangerous fondness of the past. Sanghera’s book works because he is NOT a historian.

Sanghera points out that we have been conditioned to value such heroic failures as the Massacre at the Khyber Pass in 1842 more than success. A retreat from Kabul without loss of life would not have caused the flicker of an imperial eyelid.

And who reached the South Pole first? Not the ill-equipped and poorly-led Robert Falcon Scott – but the clever Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who listened to indigenous locals and planned accordingly. And yet as Sanghera points out it is Scott’s ‘heroism’ – which led to the horrific and untimely death of his entire party – which is commemorated and celebrated.

We are all damaged by this colonial legacy. The imperial past continues to affect our psychology today. Sanghera shows how we like our politicians to be jovial buffoons. We (and they) still use the phrase ‘too clever by half’ as a criticism of intellect. At Oxford David Cameron was a bright outsider, while Boris Johnson, his inferior academically, was somehow the golden boy. This attitude pervades our politics too and recent catastrophic political decision-making for Britain stems largely from a popular mistrust of clever people and institutions. Bring back the intelligent, dull politicians whom we can trust!

I know Lockdown is hard on everyone, and that comfort-reading novels is entirely understandable – I do it myself (and I’m even writing one…). We are all going to be changed by our experiences over the last year and few of us for the better.

Please, though, consider reading this remarkable book. Especially if the first thought which springs to mind after hearing the word ’empire’ is ‘biscuit’. If enough of us read books such as Empireland, it could just change Britain, and the world, and our children’s futures, for the better.

#LongRead review alert!

NB a shorter version of this review was first published in the Radio 2 Book Club Discussion Group.

I generally never read political memoires but was given this enormous first edition for Christmas. I have had to prop it up on a pillow to read it as my hands are quite small!

If you want to understand how Donald Trump came to power, make yourself read this book too. From the moment Obama was elected the Republicans closed ranks and opposed everything he tried to do – even when individually they often admitted they could see the benefit in what the first Black president of the USA was trying to achieve.

Parts of it made me want to cry out of sheer frustration that grey and blinkered bigots like Mitch McConnell could behave as they did. Attempts to derail new policies aimed at reducing climate change make particularly painful reading, especially since we know who it was who succeeded Obama and what Trump attempted during his toxic presidency.

Racism, often unspoken, floats just beneath the surface of politics in America like a slick of toxicity, often extinguishing all energy for positive change. Obama, an able and decent man (whose memory for names, places and the detail of his campaign and presidency is extraordinary) tried hard to make the world a better place. He and his remarkable team were, to a degree, successful. That they were not entirely successful is largely down to a political system no longer fit for purpose, which has sought to derail democracy itself using democratic processes – and institutionalised political racism.

Obama makes a valid comparison with the rise of fascism before WWII in the way Republican opposition evolved over his tenure. I could not help wondering if, had Hillary Clinton won instead of Obama, we might have had Biden next and be looking at Obama only now? Trump might then never have reached the White House: I think the racist Republican response to Obama was greater than would have been the sexist Republican response to Clinton, who as Obama admits was the tougher and more experienced politician at the time.

The global erosion of democracy by the far right is far from over. Trump may be out of the White House, but the Hydra has many heads.

Top reader tip – there are loads of unfamiliar-to-Brits acronyms (like TARP – nope, me neither) only defined in the index – so keep a pen and paper handy.

Vee Walker is an author living on the Black Isle the far north of Scotland. Her WWI novel Major Tom’s War was a prizewinner at the 2019 SAHR Military Fiction Awards.