The Singing Sands

Josephine Teys last novel The Singing Sands, published posthumously, features Alan Grant on sick leave from Scotland Yard and trying to recover from an unspecified nervous crisis that has left him with acute claustrophobia.

After chancing on the accidental death of a fellow passenger on the sleeper to Scotland, Grant decides to ignore the business and concentrate on getting well. As time passes he finds himself obsessing over a handful of lines of poetry written by the dead man, and eventually he travels to the Hebrides in search of the singing sands of the sonnet. Despite not finding a solution to the mystery of the man in compartment B7, he enjoys himself hanging out with the locals and finds, rather to his surprise, that his shattered nerves have started to rebuild themselves. On returning to his cousin's house, he almost falls in love with a visiting viscountess only to be saved by an American pilot who believes that he may have be friends with the man in B7.

Although notionally a crime novel, the book is really a study of a man forced to re-evaluate his life choices. Thus Grant's initial attacks of claustrophobia might be read as some sort of reaction to emotional confinement, as might his later idea to resign from the police, get married and have children. But Grant being Grant, abandons all these ideas as soon as his usual personality starts to assert itself, even leaving poor, charming Zoë Kentallen in the lurch when the mystery starts to pick up again.

(Grant's flakiness with women is fairly consistent across the novels. He's extremely dismissive of the two nurses in The Daughter of Time, refering to them as the Midget and the Amazon, and treating them as little more than their physical characteristics — he certainly doesn't seem to find anything in their faces to snag his imagination. Despite admitting to a youthful crush on his cousin Laura, he routinely rebuffs her attempts to matchmake, while his friendship with Marta Hallard seems to work largely because he's confident that she isn't interested in him. I presume all of this is intended to be read as code for gay-pre-Wolfenden, but I could be wrong because there isn't all that much to go on).

The solution to the mystery, when it finally comes, is only partially satisfying. Grant, with the help of Tad Cullen, manages to identify the passenger in B7 and to come up with a reason for the man to have been on the train on the night of his death. He even manages to come up with a pretty decent hypothesis behind the death and to come up with some actual physical evidence to prove it. But in the end, his victory is rather undermined by a substantial download from another character which explains all the in's and out's of the case in overly fussy detail. But this is a minor quibble, given that I've already accepted that the book isn't really a crime novel...

Guardian on the Templeton

When the Guardian ran their April Fools piece last week, I found myself complaining to my father that, so flaky has the Graun been over the last year or so, it wasn't much of spoof, so similar was it to some of their genuine articles. So today's editorial on Martin Rees and the Templeton prize, a piece so bad it would embarrass a Sixth Form philosophy student, might be disappointing but it isn't exactly surprising.

( Detailed complaints )

Perhaps I'm being unnecessarily grumpy. I don't agree the basic premise, but that's fine. I don't expect to agree with the Guardian's editorial pieces. I do, however, expect them to at aspire to cogency and properly reasoned argument otherwise I might as well be reading the Mail...