This was originally published on 12 September 2022 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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The time has come, I think, for me to get back to the day job, so to speak: that is to advertising our books rather than other people’s. I will do this with a good conscience because I believe that these three very different works are worthy additions to the flood of new novels produced in Britain on a weekly basis (hundreds in a week apparently).

Only three books this year, and one of the reasons is the extra work required for Indrek, Volume II of Tammsaare’s pentalogy, Truth and Justice. We are indebted to Matthew Hyde who stepped in late in the process to retranslate the second half of the book. I edited the first half twice and two other editors, Annie Muir and Janice Brent, also went through it, but the real step change came when Alan Teder came to our rescue and carried out a fifth edit, and he brought with him his bilingual status and his knowledge of literature. We are also indebted to him. This project is enormously important to Vagabond Voices and every volume has to be of the highest standard. We have had many e-mails asking about when the second volume would be published, and now that it has been, I hope that they enjoy it and appreciate the translation. 

I will start with Sharon Black’s remarkable poetry, The Last Woman Born on the Island, which is a substantial collection mainly concerned with her native country which is Scotland, and in one poem “Feet”, she compares it with her chosen country which is France. Both have their advantages and are in her blood. In around 2000 there were five million EU citizens living in countries other than their own, which is incredibly low, particularly when you consider that some would be moving within a linguistic area such as Swiss-Germans and Austrians going to Germany or Irish going to Britain. Today, of course, the figures are much higher and Black’s experience is shared by many others, and her “home thoughts from abroad” are not only a proper but also a very topical subject for poetry.

It is not easy, but she avoids nostalgia while retaining her patent love for her homeland. Although she comes from the Central Belt, as the Lowlands are usually called in Scotland, much of the poetry concerns the Highlands and Islands – including the poem which the whole collection is named after. Although she has a distinct voice, her poetry is varied in content: now observational, now emotive and now there’s a soulful irony. I have chosen one poem which can speak more clearly than anything I can say:

Fault Lines (p. 24)

Her voice breaks me slowly,
and the voice behind the voice. Yesterday she spoke
of the backs of hills,

of fish spines on a cutting block,
of promises and mirrors. Fasts and bread.
Today she speaks of waves

and the way they break, over and over.
I would like to be a kissing gate, the contact
breaking time and time again

at both lips of the semi-circle.
The people pausing as they swing the hinge,
shuffle to the other side,

the dogs on leashes, or running free,
weaving through behind them.
The strong bones on their way to summits

or to tend a tumbled wall,
vaccinate a calf, rescue a stuck ewe.
And the bones behind the bones, labouring

under all the weight of yesterday, tomorrow
and the places they need to be
or are simply passing through.

Black now has a considerable body of poetry behind her, both collections and pamphlets, and has won several prizes. She lives with her family in the remote valley of the Cévennes Mountains.

I come next to Jerry Simcock’s Giselle and Mr Memphis, an ambitious debut novel that holds the reader. By the author’s own admission, this book is the product of his youthful experience of student revolts in Frankfurt during the seventies – heady days that took half a century to be distilled into a novel which does not ignore the back story in wartime Germany. It is a story of trauma, repressed memory and memory that suddenly explodes when triggered by single encounter. The subtitle is The Journal of Ignatz Himmelsputz, the latter being a dwarf (an old Saxon word – dwerg – used here in the medical sense and not an insult for a small person) and this must conjure comparisons with The Tin Drum, though I had never discussed this with the author. His partner is Giselle, a black American transvestite (and here too I navigate the problems of modern terminology by using the term current in the seventies when the journal is supposed to have been written). Giselle is a veteran of the Vietnam War, thus adding another dimension to the work, which will give you some idea of the breadth of this novel.

Simcock worked for many years in a child psychiatric unit and later worked with children, young people and adults requiring additional support. He is a creative in the widest sense of the term, as he not only writes, but also paints, gardens and makes willow baskets. Simcock is a practising Zen Buddhist and his twitter handle is @WildseedZen.

Finally we have Indrek, which I mentioned at the start. Indrek appears as a minor character in Vargamäe, which is Volume I, but the final pages prepare us for his central role in Volume II which carries his name. He leaves the countryside and studies at a very eccentric school, and Indrek the novel is the moment in which the pentalogy transitions from the rural to the urban. It is a moment of satire and personal tribulations not devoid of those philosophical questions Tammsaare plays with elsewhere, and it prepares the reader for Volume III in which revolution and the great issues of the day will take on a more public dimension.

Truth and Justice is a series of five books for us all: it could have been written anywhere, but it was Estonians’ great good luck that it was written in their country. It is about Estonia and its historical journey from province of the Russian Empire to independent state (the First Republic), but it is also about the human condition; it is about independence but it is also about the limitations and provincialism of nationalism; it is about the uniqueness of cultures but it is also about the validity and the similarities of all human cultures. Perhaps only a small country can truly understand these subtle realities, and the title Truth and Justice is there for a purpose.

Tammsaare’s great strength is that he can have quite a few themes running concurrently throughout the novel in a low-key manner, so readers only become aware of this quite slowly as they move through the story. One overarching theme of this volume and the entire pentalogy is the relationship between the city and the countryside. The city should be the home of rationalism and learning, and this is certainly Indrek’s perception when he sets off for the town at the end of Volume I and arrives there at the beginning of Volume II, but very soon he is to be disabused. The intellectual ramblings of the townspeople are all over the place, and they seem unaware of their incoherence. They play with ideas and principally wish to demonstrate their erudition, and they live in a perpetual state of rivalry and envy not entirely without their moments of humanity. As readers of Volume I will know, rivalry in the countryside can be open warfare – brutal and unmediated by “good manners”. The town is more nuanced and mendacious, and at times it seems more rancorous and certainly more fickle than anything the cantankerous farmers in Volume I were capable of, which is saying quite a bit.

Tammsaare, like his creation Indrek, was born and brought up on a small farm and left his home to study when he was almost grown-up, however I think that it would be wrong to exaggerate the autobiographical nature of this volume or the remaining three volumes. It is worth mentioning that Tammsaare did not name the volumes, but it appears that some foreign publishers (and possibly some Estonian ones) have found it helpful to do so and I think that they are right. Indrek is certainly the unchallenged protagonist of the second volume. However we should not assume that the pentalogy is anything other than vaguely autobiographical, because I know enough of Tammsaare’s life to know that it does not fit exactly into Indrek’s fictional one. Quite possibly Volume II is the most autobiographical of the five, and although I may be making the common mistake amongst readers of attributing autobiographical elements where there aren’t any, I can’t help feeling that the author’s schooling was in an establishment fairly similar to the one described here, but it has definitely been adapted for his literary purposes.

I believe that Volume II has to be read as an instalment in a much large work. Although it can stand on its own as a remarkable and amusing novel, it is enriched through its relationship with the other volumes.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, September 2022

Cover designs by Mark Mechan, Red Axe Design