Town, country and Scotland

Ross Clark

KILLING TIME by Alice Thompson MAKING A SNOWMAN by Simon Rees

Penguin Originals, £4.99, pp.154

WATERCOLOUR SKY by William Riviere

Hodder & Stoughton, £10.95, pp.205

STILL LIFE WITH INSECTS by Brian Kiteley

The Bodley Head, £10.95, pp.I 14

McX: THE ROMANCE OF THE DOUR by Todd McEwen

Seeker & Warburg, fI2.95, pp. 186

By placing the first novellas of Alice Thompson and Simon Rees between the same pair of cardboard covers, Penguin Originals appear to have made their first move into the market of arranged mar- riages. I fear there is little to save the venture from ending in an ugly divorce, there being little more point in selling these two short works as one than there would be in trying to flog the Bible and the Koran as a boxed set, although Killing Time and Making a Snowman do share the common ground of urban hypnosis.

In the former, Cora, a girl with little to do, spends so much of her time travelling the London Underground that one expects her to end her 53-page stint arriving at Mornington Crescent. However, it turns out that she meets a boy doing very much the same thing (named Adam, so one can tell that what follows is an attempt to symbolise womanhood), and follows him to his lair some distance into a tunnel at Oxford Circus. Access to this can only be gained by running up the track between the passage of trains, which Adam claims to be able to avoid by consulting his time- table(!). Here the fantasy begins, leading predictably to Adam and Cora getting laid against the backdrop of violent London.

In Making a Snowman the narrator is under the delusion that he has killed his landlord, dragged him into the park and rolled his corpse around in the snow until he is the same shape and form as a snowman the children might have built. Although what follows may seem a little out of date in post-greenhouse Britain, he then has to wait a number of days for a thaw which will, he expects, reveal his crime. This is a delusion, as I have said, and as the snowman sheds his clothes to reveal a distinct lack of landlord inside so, too, the narrator takes off his, and is arrested not for murder but for indecent exposure. Like Alice Thompson, Mr Rees shrouds his tale in symbolism, perhaps to an awkward degree; not only does the narrator believe the dark secret of his landlord's body to be concealed beneath the snow, he also labours under the some- what unorthodox notion that it is the skeleton beneath his flesh — the 'bone man' — that is responsible for all his mischievous doings.

William Riviere and Brian Kiteley have both produced relaxed and expansive por- traits of rural things. The former, in keeping with his watery name, registers his special interest in the field of boating; the latter stakes his in beetles, even to the dangerous point of becoming one himself — at one point in Still Life with Insects the narrator talks of how his father was sun- bathing on a river bank when a flood going to pass a very long copy-cat sentence.' '1 am arrived, carried him several miles down- stream and deposited him intact on the bank once more.

Watercolour Sky is set in Norfolk — an ever romantic Norfolk, even though one is reminded towards the end that 'England in the 1980s was hardly an attractive specta- cle' — and is centred on the unsynchro- nised love between local girl Alice Dobell and local boy Kit Marsh, who goes up to Cambridge, spends seven years in Italy and all the time remains rather fond of sailing. If one reads the dust-cover, one discovers that all of these things feature too in the biographical notes on Mr Riviere himself. There is nothing wrong with autobiog- raphical novels, but I do rather wonder if he has left himself anything more to write..

Still Life with Insects is set in North America on either side of the border separating Canada and the United States. The narrator, Elwyn Farmer, an amateur entymologist, lover of beetles, works in pest extermination (yes, beetles) for a grain company that does not share his en- thusiasm for the small beasts. Farmer scribbles down a selection of notes between the years 1945-84 which together amount to only 114 pages and proceed to nothing more than retirement, grandfatherhood and a cancerous hip bone. Still, if you are fonder of exoskeletons than mischievous bonemen it will be an enjoyable read.

Perhaps Penguin paperbacks will next publish Brian Kiteley and Todd McEwen between the same covers on the grounds that they are both North American and according to their publicity photographs look almost identical. However, Mr McEwen has since 1981 been determined to become a fully paid-up Scotsman. His second novel is a portrait of the land in which he now finds himself living, and if, as an Englishman, you felt victimised by Archie McDonnell's England, their Eng- land, then you may well find yourself able to have a snigger back.

McX himself is an inspector of whisky measures who exudes bad health and ailments, a wheezing Scotsman who can claim to have helped his country on the way to number one in the world coronary charts. He does very little, or at least a lot less than drink does to him, but is never dull. We are told that he had two friends but they both died, and the immediate impression that strikes one is that McX will be extremely lucky if he survives 186 pages himself. Nevertheless, there are many more McScotsmen available to take his place: McDram, McPint and so on — only McBernard is missing.

It would be tempting to describe Todd McEwen as a Scots Dylan Thomas, but there is one important difference: Thomas was a drunk who did not always write about drink; McEwen, I suspect, is the exact opposite. Nevertheless, this is a rather fashionable subject at present, and one that will, one hopes, even penetrate the more Calvinist parts of the Highlands.