Fair Helen (for review 31)

The title page of Andrew Greig’s latest novel Fair Helen announces that we have to deal with ‘a veritable account of “Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea”, scrieved by Harry Langton’. This may seem of a piece with the unpretentious gorgeousness of the dust-jacket and the faintly Tolkienian map of ‘the Borderlands’. But Harry Langton is a necessary as well as an enjoyable creation. Without him, Greig might find himself exposed in this intimidating territory, a retelling of one of the most famous Border ballads collected by Sir Walter Scott. Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea’s qualities of simplicity, melody and drama have, indeed, set it in better stead today than most of Scott’s novels. To sing a ballad as it was meant to be sung is a clear, if not necessarily an easy, task; to expand upon its themes in fiction is more dangerous. Greig risks affronting both the shade of Scott and the tradition Sir Walter purported to preserve. Harry Langton, ‘scrivener, spy, side-kick, lover, betrayer’, is the mask behind whom Greig can conceal the audacity of his grave-robbery.

But if Langton were only a mask, he would be worn to little purpose. His language, his location, his physicality and mortality conspire to deliver him as a peculiarly incarnate presence. ‘Ane doolie sessoun…’,[1] the first chapter heading murmurs, quoting Henrysoun - a poet consigned to the glorious past even within the past of the novel itself, clinging on amid Langton’s mental lumber. The scattered inflections of Langton’s Lallans convey his period and atmosphere with style, tact, and a playful glossary; but above all, they act as an engine of characterisation. Here is an educated old man, tetchy, adrift, retained as ‘a relic of lang syne’, a professional nostalgic catering to the romantic sensibility of his cultivated, modern patron.

That patron is William Drummond of Hawthornden, whose castle still offers shelter to writers today, but whose poetry is now, as Langton continually and snidely predicts, largely forgotten. It is Langton, Drummond’s picturesque old librarian, as stubbornly loyal to the ethos of Lucretius and Montaigne in his mind as to the language of Henrysoun on his tongue, who seems to us the more far-seeing. By dangling his narrator so neatly between two Scots poets – Henrysoun, indigenous, demotic, vital; Drummond, cosmopolitan, courtly, mannered – Greig makes his own sympathies clear. But he also avoids making Langton a mere spokesperson, a man ahead of and therefore alien to his own time.

Although (to over-simplify) a middle-class bisexual atheist at odds with his age, Langton is made so for detailed and convincing reasons; his mother was a gentlewoman married into ‘Embra’ city folk, while his university education deepens his ambiguities of rank and habit. He is stuck in a life he finds demeaning and a country estranged, ‘now the Kingdoms are united and the Court gone south’. ‘My breath puffs clouds as I scrape clear the garret window, ice slivers melt under yellowed fingernails…What remains of my right hand is warm in wool, as are my feet and scrawny thrapple.’ This is not a narrator cribbing his appearance to the reader over his shoulder, but a done man, counting his faculties.

‘I had not seen Adam Fleming since his mother’s wedding. He had been silent and inward then, remote across the crowded hall. Tall, slim, and agile, in his black cloak of grieving for his father…dagger in embroidered pouch…’ We too have met young Fleming before, though in our world, as CS Lewis says of Aslan, he has another name. What Greig does with Hamlet in Fair Helen is at first disorienting; at worst we might even suspect the arrival of historical fiction’s hackney carriage, neither ordered nor intended. The blurb should set us right, though: ‘The legend often called the Scottish Romeo & Juliet…brilliantly re-presented as the source of an equally famed, more complex drama’. So that’s all right, then: but, as with the ghost of Henrysoun and the loom of Drummond, there is more at work here than arch allusion. Adam the Dane, or Hamlet Fleming, will eventually lead us to one of the best bookish jokes in a novel full of them. But at first, he invites an assumption. Langton and Fleming, his ‘dearest friend’, were fellow undergraduates at Edinburgh, ‘the city, the courts, the college where we had once disputed fine points with words and argument, not the finer point of dagger and short sword’. ‘He had been effortlessly good with racquet, rapier and small pipes, while I was a dogged trier.’ Greig seems to have chosen – as Hamlet did before him – Horatio as his narrator.

But in this Hamlet we are treated to scenes in Wittenberg, or ‘Embra’, alma mater of Langton, Fleming, and Greig himself. Evoked at first in shared jokes, French tags and kestrel cries, the memory of university days becomes, more and more, the key to the novel’s central relationship (one that easily eclipses that of Fleming and the titular damsel). Edinburgh University in the latter 16th century is an arena where the otherness and drama of history, high politics and the High Renaissance can mingle with knowing, familiar accounts of undergraduate existence, flirting with anachronism without tainting the whole. Fleming and Langton, languid gentleman and infatuated swot, are not wholly free of Sebastian and Charles, but this does them no harm. The pair’s dreams of travel and adventure as they climb the hills above the city at night could come from any time – ‘We could rent a house by the Tiber, live by translation and scrivening! We would gather news and gossip, live on a retainer from the King. He said I would make an excellent spy.’ Yet these half-baked small hours schemes are historically specific – the King is donnish young ‘Jamie Saxt (but six years our elder)’ – and come to have proleptic impact on the plot. Hamlet had more than one schoolfellow, and Langton, seemingly Fleming’s loyal Horatio, is actually more of a Rosencrantz, manoeuvred by the hidden, powerful hand that feeds him. ‘I was not quite the free man my friend imagined.’

The identity of Langton’s paymaster is another of Greig’s post-modern, Early Modern jokes – it is Sir Walter Scott. Not quite, indeed, the baronet of the ballad, but his collateral ancestor, Scott of Buccleuch and Branxholme, a notorious reiver who adapted superbly to the Union of the Crowns, became the King’s proxy in the Borders, and founded a ducal dynasty. If Fair Helen were Wolf Hall, this Scott would be its hero; seen instead from outwith himself, he casts a pall of pleasing noir. ‘Among these hot-headed, impulsive, unbridled warrior lairds, he seemed cool as a well-run pantry.’ Langton is particularly fluent on the subject of Scott’s eyes – ‘pale and shining as a coulter blade’. ‘I felt myself a mouse running before them, twisting and turning from their edge…I felt a grue pass through me like a chill wind shaking a field of grain. He had seen too well where I was going.’

No traditional interpretation links Sir Walter Scott, 1st Lord Scott of Buccleuch, to the story of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea, but Greig’s leap here is, geographically and politically speaking, as plausible as it is devious. The Annandale scene, as Langton observes, is tiny: ‘Embra apart, one could ride to any of the principal locations…within the hour. Aristotle would approve.’ The events that inspired the ballad are bald and visceral – the heir of Fleming met the heir of Bell, in a duel over the heiress of Irvine; she fatally threw herself in the way of Bell’s bullet, whereupon Fleming killed Bell, indeed according to the ballad ‘hacked him in pieces sma’’. The contentions of land in this story are as obvious as those of love. In history, while Fleming, Bell and the rest of the reiving clans declined, Scott alone flourished. Of course, in this masterly cui bono prosecution, Greig is not a wholly disinterested party. By emphasising Lord Scott’s role as Machiavellian victor, the tamer of the Borders’ heroic lawlessness, the re-teller slyly suggests that Langton’s tale is the suppressed truth behind the delicate ballad handed down by Scott’s famous descendant: a sort of literary counterpart to Andy Wightman’s searing indictment of Scotland’s landed classes, The Poor Had No Lawyers.

Yet Greig must be careful not to push this intimation to the point of explicit churlishness towards his great predecessor; after all, he acknowledges in his novel’s epigraph, in the words of Montaigne, one of Langton’s heroes, ‘I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that bines them’. He quotes the ballad in full before the novel opens, in snatches throughout – always, of course, in a version he owes to Scott, the version Scott himself called ‘an imperfect state’. To take Scott to task for the contents of that version is to risk inaccuracy as well as ingratitude. As ever Greig’s ingenious solution involves Langton - personally concerned in, not to mention responsible for, the whole incident, and understandably irked by the bowdlerisation of ‘the ballad-mongers’:

Fair Helen, chaste Helen…Tastes and times have changed to favour the respectable and douce, and rendered those days of quick-blooded men and women into something noble, picturesque and sexless. They do her a disservice. She was much more than fair and chaste.

Thus Langton rebukes both Drummond and his Caroline gentlemen, and Scott and his Romantic readers; but Greig’s own guiding spirit is more generous to Scott. In the stables of Crichton Castle and the corner of an inn in Southwark, Langton encounters the same theatrical ‘senior man’, ‘balding’, ‘quiet’, with ‘lustrous eyes’.

Something about him made one want to tell all, like a confession but without any judgement made at the end…His listening reminded me of Buccleuch, except that I sensed it was not earthly power that this man sought. Nor did he seem especially bent on heaven.

Speaking of heaven, Borges has a story about this same man once he got there:

…he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”

For Scott to be placed, even obliquely, even ancestrally, even unfavourably in such a comparison is an elegant enough tribute from Greig to offset Harry Langton’s cavils.

[1] ‘A dismal season’, as Langton reluctantly renders it, before exclaiming ‘Ah, Robert Henrysoun, what a falling off is here!’

Unsuccessful application for cataloguer post at Peter Harrington

I have grown up aware of unusual and beautiful books, and spent most of my life reading them. Françoise Sagan remarks that general conversation with strangers is unnecessary, next to the more important questions, ‘Whom do you love? What are you reading?’ How convenient, then, if the answers to both coincide. I have never interpreted the adjective bookish as anything less than a high honour.

I like my reading, whether for pleasure or study, to be directed both by happy accident and specific curiosity. I am particularly interested – by now professionally so – in biographical questions; when I read English at Oxford, I did my best to evade academic theory, preferring the antiquarian pursuit of immersing myself in the lives and historical periods of writers, their friends, issue, relations, acquaintances, commercial, personal, political and amatory rivals, and other connections. These things seem to me both interesting in themselves and a prerequisite for developing an accurate ear for the language and idiom of particular authors. My postgraduate degree included courses in palaeography and bibliography – in particular, as it turned out, examining manuscripts by the courtier and verse translator Sir John Harington, the playwright Thomas Middleton, the Jacobite Bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury, and early editions of Shakespeare, Spenser, Ariosto and Tasso. I would value the opportunity to develop these skills by putting them to more practical use. I am used to concentrated work, absorbing and distilling large quantities of information. I have an eye for detail, and set great store by accuracy. I would have much to learn about the specifics of the book trade, but I am quick to master a new idiom and have had some cognate work experience assisting the cataloguers in the Old Masters department of Christies.

I am drawn to the Latin languages and can read and write French and Italian and speak them communicably. My spoken and written Spanish is much more basic, but I can read it. I developed a love of the classical languages and literature at school, and can still (with a little persistence) translate poetry, inscriptions, and tags in Latin and Greek. My amateur but intense emotional attachment to medieval literature and history, as well as some of my university work, gives me a foundation in Old and Middle French and English. I am also interested in historical and dialect Italian, and fairly conversant with the vernacular of Dante.

My historical and biographical interests are miscellaneous and have become, if anything, more so during and since university. Over the last two years I have been working on a life of the learned but popular medieval historian Sir Steven Runciman, a man famous for his ‘ability to ignore the conventional limits of time and space’, as one obituarist put it, and I stand by this catholic approach to the past: history as the true study of human beings, that should not be artificially simplified into movements and neat periods. Partly with this principle in mind, and partly for pleasure, I have found myself absorbing information from many different eras with little or no fixed, utilitarian objective in mind, but I would hope that working as a cataloguer for Peter Harrington would be a serendipitous way to put this magpie temperament to practical purpose.

My historiography is, academically speaking, adrift in a state prior to the Annales, but I am confident with the basics: Roman emperors and popes, Guelphs and Ghibellines, the names, dates, and wives of the Kings of France, England, and Scotland, the pronunciation of Wriothesley, the Civil War and who backed whom, the Dutch usurpation and its pragmatic, mercantilist aftermath. From the eighteenth century the past often seems to me more vividly resurrected via letters memoirs and the higher gossip: outstanding examples being Walpole, Creevey, and Greville. My attachment to and affinity for these genres extends in the twentieth century to wide reading and familiarity with the novels, memoirs, and letters of Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly, Barbara Skelton, Simon Raven, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and so on in a quasi-Petrine succession, whose best contemporary representative is, I think, the novelist and historian James Buchan. While assisting the new OUP variorum edition of Evelyn Waugh, I found several unpublished Waugh letters in college archives, and am still engaged in similar, if more ambitious, work for my book on Steven Runciman. However, these recherché tastes do not by any means preclude a vigorous interest in current political debate and journalism: I keep up with the broadsheets and weekly periodicals and am au fait with current intellectual controversies.

Whenever chance has taken me in the direction of your bookshop – fortunately, of late, more and more – I have found a lot of pleasure and excitement there. I imagine you will have many more professionally qualified applications for your post, but if you are interested in taking a chance on someone who is hungry to learn and has a real appetite for the material, I hope that I would not disappoint you.

Sonnets from Sir Agravaine

1

My mother, Morgause, was a looker

So when King Arthur won the war

She merged the roles of spy and hooker

Of mother, sister, queen and whore.

She took her four boys from the Orkneys,

Went down on – if you trust the talk – knees,

Returned north with a brood of five,

My brother Mordred wombed, but live.

Her brother, au contraire, slept badly,

And dreamt of sharp and ominous things;

Serpents with legs, lions with wings -

Their rampant forms vexed the king sadly,

His couchant bed he left post-haste,

Rode off, more vigorous than chaste.

2

A heartsick king has but one notion

For putting conscience in its place

For shame and guilt, there is no potion

Can match the pleasures of the chase.

His knights and huntsmen came in plenty,

Pursued a hart whose tines were twenty,

But none equalled their young king’s force,

For Arthur’s spurs slew e’en his horse.

Thus forced to dally by a river,

Already pensive, he heard sounds:

The questing hues of thirty hounds –

Duly surpassèd with a slither,

As something crawled its way to slake

Its thirst. He pinched. He was awake.

3

But not for long – though not now dreaming,

My uncle Arthur by this time

So wearied beyond thought or deeming

Fell into rest that knew no chime.

Until rudely once more awoken

By a strange knight sans sign or token,

Who bellowed: ‘Have you seen my Beast?

Could you lend me a horse at least?’

The king’s groom drew up a fresh charger,

The stranger rustled it and left

My uncle furious and bereft,

But fortunate – the thief was larger.

(His name in truth was Pellinore,

Orkney’s sworn enemy in war.

4

He killed King Lot, who was our sire:

Both he and his son paid the price,

After – but, no, I mustn’t tire

You out with all this sordid vice.)

Back to King Arthur, still yet steedless,

Who understandably proved heedless

Of Merlin lecturing from disguise,

With words insufferably wise,

But when the snide sage was unmasked,

Now learnt with incremental dread

Of just who had been in his bed,

And got some hard truths quite unasked.

He asked his mother, Queen Igreyne,

For proof: he hoped for none, in vain.

5

Four sections full of combat later,

We find my uncle back on form,

Spirits recouped, he fears no traitor,

Feels no calm before no storm.

He’s exercised by just one matter –

quite far removed from Merlin’s patter –

The need to source a decent brand,

Since his sword shattered in his hand.

Arthur has heard of the best steel

From far Toledo, further still

The craft of Milan, edged to kill –

But Merlin has another deal

In mind, and harps upon the stock

Of an outlet beneath a loch.

6

The wizard’s tale was fey and wild –

Myself, I doubt it to this day.

I fear my uncle was beguiled

Whatever bards and jugglers say.

Some sing of pale limbs, taut and trembling

(The very savour of dissembling!)

Of fairy damsels, boats that glide

Without a pilot or a tide.

Suffice to say, the king was granted

A weapon with a diamond’s touch

A scabbard whose gemmed worth was such

To ransom emperors. Enchanted?

Perhaps it might as well have been,

But without doubt ‘richly beseen.’

7

Its pommel a pearl oceanic,

The hilt in stripes of beaten gold,

Its crossbar vivid and organic

With silvered sapphires untold.

Emeraldine lozenges surround

Sharp adamant leaf all around.

Its very name a precious hoard,

That Hebrew, Trojan, Grecian sword:

Your weird, whirred wooing yet I hear,

Excalibur – even now and nigh,

What recreants feel before they die,

Cut steel – Caliburn – I fear…

I fear to die? It is not just

That – to turn Orkney’s blood to rust.

8

At any rate, it pleased my uncle,

Became his sceptre and his sign.

Each several embedded carbuncle

Endeared it sweeter in his eyn.

It was a part and pact of power,

The thorn that must maintain the flower.

It was a rich blade, and a king

So armed, becomes a dangerous thing.

With May still in her youthful flourish

Even to Orkney came the law –

Crofter’s boy, queen’s son, spawn of whore,

All that on May-Day drew first nourish,

All these were subject to the state,

State and the sword, and no kind fate.

9

They put these May babes on a vessel

Down the grey waters of the Usk,

Several hundred, more or less – all

Nearer far to breast than rusk.

In high winds the ship brast asunder

Succumbed to sea-spray, cliffs and thunder

And, just perhaps, to fouler play.

So none of these bairns outlived May

(excepting one, my baby brother,

Caerleon-conceived, Kirkwall-born,

fostered by fishermen in scorn,

Mordred, whom no king’s crime could smother).

The people blamed Merlin the sage,

Forgave their king on grounds of age.

10

What of it then, this sword of magic,

The seal of a stainèd reign?

Say rather, vile fraud and tragic,

And fitted well to its refrain.

Mewed about in scams monastic,

Blunted, boasted and fantastic,

Sold then to sweeten regal pacts,

Tarnished in the harsh light of facts.

Looted, layered, and preserved,

In some long-forgotten suite,

Glassed in from any kind of feat,

Caliburn got what it deserved.

So far I’m obliged to endite.

Sir Agravaine of Orkney. Knight.

Curriculum Mortis

The Muslim Council of Britain’s recent decision to attack Michael Gove’s proposed draft for a new history curriculum is not a surprising one. In isolation, it wouldn’t even be very worrying. As it is, though, it’s the latest in a series of disavowals, some more serious than others. Simon Schama, who had previously worked on the proposals, at once ostentatiously disowned the published form – the draft, he said, bore ‘no resemblance’ to the one he had helped to develop a month earlier. Then, on 13th March, came an extended criticism in the TLS from David Cannadine. Cannadine is both a serious historian, and untainted by association with the Richard J. Evans types who are determined to block any emphasis on narrative history. At first his criticisms seemed sensible enough, but pessimistic and unexciting; even small-c conservative. Without extra time in schools, he argued, history cannot gain ground significantly; the curriculum is neither here nor there. It was when he began to specify the problems with the draft that my disagreement turned inexorably into disbelief.

Surely Cannadine had somehow got the wrong end of the ruler? How could it be that six year olds were to be introduced to the subject of history in the form of abstract, worthy-sounding but in fact debatable concepts – ‘civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy’ – rather than simple and effective stories? And surely Gove – that William Wilberforce, that Olaudah Equiano of the Academies – believed in letting teachers determine which stories to tell, and pupils decide which to hear, and when? How could it be right – how could it be practicable – that, as Cannadine claimed, the draft’s slavish adherence to the dreaded Key Stages allowed children only to learn once, fleetingly, at some particular and arbitrary age, about ancient Greece, or the Crusades? Had Cannadine been assimilated by the opposing lobby the Education Secretary refers to without compromise as ‘The Blob’? But when I dug out the draft to check all was well, it proved all that Cannadine had warned, and worse.

The ‘narrative’ versus ‘themes’ history curriculum debate is probably as much about entertainment as politics – which is why I still think Gove’s policy, imaginatively implemented, has potential to be transformative, vote-winning as well as genuinely beneficial to the vital cause of interesting schoolchildren in history. The consistent success of stories, from the Bible to Rowling to Mantel, by way of any number of boxed set DVDs, indicates to me that there is a solid majority, otherwise without political allegiance, in favour of narrative history. Nevertheless, its opponents’ favourite line of attack is to slam it as ‘boring’, ‘rote-learning’. Gove’s most important task was to show them why they were wrong, and, on the basis of the deadly draft, he has failed in that task.

Hugh Trevor-Roper – inarguably one of the least boring of historians – once, like Disraeli and C.P. Snow before him, described this country as one made up of two worlds –

...on the one hand, the solemn, pompous, dreary, respectable Times-reading world, which hates elections (indeed, hates life) and thinks that everything should be left to the experts, the professionals, themselves; and, on the other hand, the gay, irreverent, genial, unpompous world which holds exactly opposite views, the world of the educated laity who do not see why they should be excluded from political matters because they are not politicians, nor from intellectual matters because they are not scholars…

The Coalition – that unexpected offspring of a loveless Establishment marriage – has always risked looking as if it belonged to the first camp. It is to Gove’s advantage and credit that he generally sounds like he comes from the second; the changeling child of Aberdonian fisherfolk, now turned journalistic swashbuckler. So why has he approved a plan so bereft of narrative excitement, a draft that struggles to placate and fails to persuade?

Let us take it stage by dreary Key Stage. KS 1 (for ages 5-7) is a peculiar cocktail of the patronising, the overweening and the inexact. A bullet point earnestly presses the importance of teaching what ‘before’ and ‘after’ mean. There follows the forbidding clutch of abstract ideas excoriated by Cannadine, the most totalitarian of which is probably ‘the concept of a nation’. Then there’s the SISA section – ‘Significant Individuals Such As.’ Various pairs of famous and virtuous beings follow, but nothing defines why precisely they qualify as famous or virtuous enough for the under-7s – and not once is their entertainment value considered of importance. The only good idea here is that places, events and worthies local to the school should be prioritised – though it does get one wondering about catchment areas for the glorious dead.

KS 2 (for ages 7-11) is, by contrast, exhaustingly full. It has evoked a universal cry of ‘How’ – how to teach and how to learn so much so fast. Some emphasis is a little odd – the Stone Age to the Celtic settlement is almost all pre-history. Isn’t the lesson that history, that stories, begin with and rely on written accounts important in itself? Neither are those, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, who complain of insularity and Anglocentrism mistaken; even France only staggers in once or twice, let alone Saladin or Averroes. But the main problem is that this incalculably rich and exciting saga – Roman Britain to Queen Anne – is under the current scheme snatched away, like Narnia or Philip Pullman’s shape-shifting daemons, with the onset of puberty.

KS 3 (11-14) is where the Goveite rigour really stiffens into rigor mortis. It reads in fact as if written during some unsteady collusion between Gove’s loyal henchmen and his sworn foes, veering about between Clive of India and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. This conveys not so much political neutrality as narrative incoherence. Again, there’s too much too fast, but with two centuries rather than two millennia under discussion, much of it is unlikely to be very gripping (‘the impact of mass literacy and the Elementary Education Act’, dully post-modern; ‘Lloyd-George’s coalition’, worthy of Hansard.) A sense that Gove is for some reason banking on Scottish independence permeates these hurried plans; how otherwise would he expect to get away with blandly ascribing Adam Smith to ‘the Enlightenment in England’? The draft adds insult to its self-inflicted injuries by fetishizing 1989 as a stop-date, precisely as 1066 and All That – in jest – mummified 1918 as the End of History.

But I still believe in Gove – in what he is doing, and that it can be done. He must start by pulling a repeat trick – consigning this draft to educational history rather than historical education. When the curriculum emerges, poor Simon Schama must again be startled. The transformation will be entire. For early history will now be taught somewhat like early science. First will come long years of stories, lovingly and luxuriously told. It hardly matters what they are; the Trojan War and King Arthur will do very nicely, as long as they are well told. Then, fewer, swifter and still more exciting, will be the years of revelation – that all these stories, that all stories, are lies, though they contain truths. That despite and because of being lies, they are all-important. And that historians, teachers, pupils, and politicians are all entitled to engage in the humanising habit of confecting their own stories.

'missed moment' for the Telegraph...WORTHLESS MEN

‘Somewhat mechanical,’ comments Montague Beckwith, the shell-shocked officer in Andrew Cowan’s First World War novel Worthless Men, of his suffragist sisters’ minds, ‘though exceptionally well-oiled.’ The same faint praise might be applied to the story at large. Cowan confides in an afterword that ‘the origins of this novel lie in some interviews I conducted in my mid-twenties while setting up an oral history archive in Norwich’, and this daunting ancestry can show. Details and observations emerge with more insistence than sprezzatura.

The novel’s structure is meticulous, its apparatus unstartling. The present, apparently become the natural tense of government for historical fiction, stays on. The old modernist vogue for Aristotelian unities keeps us in one market day and one town, waiting for the Tommies (and cows) to come home. Restrictions of grammar, time and place are relieved by the freewheeling recollections of five characters; three members of the younger generation, and (featuring more occasionally) two of their parents. At one point we meet a factory-hand called, plausibly enough, Mr. Rivett, and Worthless Men is indeed a thing of bolts and rivets. In wartime, after all, every component matters.

The first and last mind’s eye the reader experiences in Worthless Men is that of Walter Barley, a small, plucky, industrious lad, enlisted much too young (we find out why, slowly). Cowan can be maddeningly close with information, but he’s relatively free with Walter’s situational USP. From the moment Walter, missing in action, witnesses his mother and sister discussing his (just) possible return, it’s fairly clear that, as they can’t see him or hear his interruptions, he must already be beyond this life. Yet Cowan is teasingly physical in describing this ghost, ‘lice-ridden’ from the moment of his materialisation, his pockets full of ‘fluff and tobacco strands’, his fingers wincing at the still-sharp quill of a carefully preserved white feather.

Walter is a kind of everyman’s Hamlet, his tragedy already run. His father is an absent drunk, and he believes his mother to be carrying on with the local butcher. Cowan convinces us through the son to (mis)judge the mother accordingly, while the butcher’s trade permits reiterative echoes of Wilfred Owen. One notion neither Walter nor the novel channels is spiritualism, the craze that was to riddle the post-war bereaved. Although Worthless Men is a work of social history quite as much as it is of fiction, Cowan offers the presence of ghosts as an exclusively literary device, rather than a socio-historical phenomenon.

Perhaps he felt his novel had space to examine only one discredited pseudo-science, for both its plot and characters are steeped in discussion of eugenics. The title Worthless Men itself comes from a monograph by Gerard Oram, which makes the point that First World War private soldiers were executed overwhelmingly more often than officers because of institutional military disdain for ‘working-class stock’. Cowan’s two eugenic theorists are the officer, Beckwith, and the pharmacist, Dobson. Beckwith is a particularly articulate voice but also the least nuanced character; a rapist and murderer, a proto-fascist, and, of course, a gentleman. The closest thing he has to a positive human quality is despair. Dobson, domestically a pathetic and pompous tyrant, but an indispensable, informed medical resort for the city’s poor, is more interesting. His inseparable enthusiasms for contraception, abortion, and eugenics provide an unsettling comparison to contemporary orthodoxies and heresies.

The story’s real battlefield is Gertie Dobson, who acts both as Walter’s belle dame sans merci and Beckwith’s would-be Tess Durbeyfield. Brought up as the Dobson marriage’s daughter, her heritage proves to be more complicated, in a twist that crossbreeds romance and eugenics. Her first name would appear to be borrowed from Joyce’s lovely cripple, desirable and repellent, perfect and flawed. This Gertie’s flaw is backwardness, indeed near-imbecility by Dobson’s and Beckwith’s standards. But her moral innocence, which allows her, for example, to treat her father’s theories as harmless peculiarities, comes as an attractive relief.

Cowan keeps the Beckwith family, the area’s seigneurial dynasty, mainly in the background, while getting them just right. They are new money, chapel, Liberal, suffragist and insufferable, providing employment for all, and - in a gradual unspooling with gruesome consequences for the denouement - barbed wire for the trenches.