Books in brief

Scotland: The Global History, 1603 to the Present by Murray Pittock ( Yale UP, £25)

The title of Murray Pittock’s excellent new history might simply read “Scotland,” but really it is as much a fascinating study of the Union as it is of Scotland’s evolving place in the world. In the century leading up to the union of parliaments in 1707, Scots were already accustomed to the idea of operating beyond their borders: Scottish merchant communities were ubiquitous across the continent, while most major European militaries contained Scottish regiments. Scots, seemingly on the make since time immemorial, were very good at giving each other a leg up at the expense of everybody else—and under everyone’s noses.

This helps explain the later persistence of what Pittock calls “Scottish associationalism” within the British Empire, whereby connections based on kinship and family ties were the most important. (“I am an Aberdonian and it is probable that you knew my family,” as John Reith would later write in a job application to the Scottish chair of the BBC.) Between 1790 and 1813, Scots supplied a quarter of officers to the East India Company, an organisation their country was banned from trading with pre-Union. This suggests the merger of parliaments was more an agreement based on economic convenience than any fellow feeling towards a southern neighbour. The rise of modern Scottish nationalism in the context of imperial decline in the 20th century, then, was consistent with this longstanding selfinterest, especially when the rewards of postwar centralisation were denied to Scotland in favour of London and the southeast of England.

As the UK becomes evermore inward-looking in the wake of Brexit, and Scotland’s ability to look beyond the strictures of its state is further undermined, we are again asking whether Scotland belongs outside the Union. But, as Pittock suggests, the Union has always been in a state of existential flux: during the original Union debates of the late 1600s, Scots aristocrats like Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun suggested that a “federal” arrangement might be the best way forward. Sound familiar? David McAllister

Scots, seemingly on the make since time immemorial, were very good at giving each other a leg up

The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to Aliens by Philip Ball (Picador, £20)

That even plants might have a degree of consciousness is one aspect of mind considered in Philip Ball’s wide-ranging new book. Some evidence: anaesthetics that work on animals also freeze the insect-consuming behaviour of plants such as the Venus Flytrap. Plants have messenger molecules very similar to those in the nervous systems of animals and are hence affected in the same way.

Peering into other putative minds—animal, plant, AI, alien—Ball breaks the narcissistic trap of our sapiocentrism, our default assumption that the world is ours first, and only later should we condescend to find a little space for the rest of creation.

Ball comes to commonsense conclusions on some of the most contentious issues. He defends free will against a barrage of assaults and rebuts the reliability of the Turing Test for computer intelligence. He argues that the ways that AI and the human mind work are totally different: humans are the product of four billion years of biological evolution and several hundred thousand years of cultural evolution. A disembodied brain cannot possess the symbolic resources of a mind. The notion of uploading the mind into digital storage is dismissed as a category error.

Ball deals equally coolly with the possibility of communicating with other minds in the cosmos—having recently learnt to message the universe after billions of years, why would we expect another life form suddenly to respond?

Ball is the laureate of curiosity and a one-stop source of wisdom. This book will teach you a lot about minds; but it will also make you marvel at the capacious and sagacious one possessed by its author. Peter Forbes

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99)

Kirsty Bell, an Anglo-American, had always found something troubling about her flat overlooking the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. When a leak appeared, and her marriage to a German began to drain away, she decided to investigate the area’s porous history. “Things tend to disappear in a city built on sand,” she writes.

What follows is a fascinating mosaic of the German capital.

Bell rummages through the archives of her 19th-century building for fragments of life, and sets them alongside, for example, her thoughts on the sketches of Adolph Menzel, the “depressing dimensions” of the city’s architecture—as revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg put it—and brilliant glimpses of the 1920s and 1930s through the eyes of writers and artists Gabriele Tergit, Hannah Höch and Käthe Kollwitz. This is not the usual Boy’s Own, Führer-obsessed history of Berlin; Bell highlights the women who transgressed borders and pushed the city on.

Among them were the Trümmerfrauen, or rubblewomen, who restored order in the aftermath of war. Bell discovers ruins buried under turf and, quoting research in epigenetics, shows how the “suppressed emotions” of traumatised generations continue to be passed on. She walks the line of the Wall, and reports on Berlin’s extensive squatter and protest movement, though without truly exploring the city’s subcultures or how dancefloors brought together clubbers from east and west after reunification. Since 2010, she laments, independent Berlin has been steadily flushed out by corporate money.

Bell interrupts an absorbing read when questioning her own project, or repeating the already-said with platitudes or paraphrases. That’s a shame, because a shrewder edit may have transformed this intriguing book into a gem.

JA Hopkin

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout ( Viking, £14.99)

In Lucy by the Sea, writer Lucy Barton recalls a film she watched as a child where white ping-pong balls bounced around in front of a blue screen, randomly hitting off each other. “I thought: That is like people. My point is, if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little.”

Elizabeth Strout’s pandemic novel, the fourth in the Lucy Barton series—the third of which, Oh William!, is nominated for this year’s Booker Prize—is an unflinching depiction of the ways we are all alone. The book opens in March 2020 when Lucy, an anxious novelist who grew up in poverty in rural Illinois, is grieving for her second husband David. When Covid-19 breaks out in New York, she is persuaded by her scientist exhusband William to escape the city with him for a house on the coast in Maine.

We follow Lucy for a year as she and William navigate the long, grey days. Her family face their own challenges: her daughters Becca and Chrissy are locked down together— Becca is reeling from her husband’s betrayal, Chrissy from a miscarriage. Strout’s most distinctive skill—the ability to render every character, big or small, with precision—is on full display: Charlene Bibber, a cleaner in a care home, has the “faint odour of loneliness”; her eyes “shone with an almost happiness.” Lucy forms a deep friendship with former attorney Bob Burgess, who uses their walks together as a chance to furtively smoke cigarettes away from his wife.

Lucy finds love in the novel, but Strout never looks away from the loneliness that is inherent in being human: “We all live with people—and places—and things that we have given great weight to. But we are all weightless in the end.”

Sarah Collins

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sort of Books, £16.99)

Ten years after his debut novel, Chinaman, novelist Shehan Karunatilaka has returned with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a Booker-longlisted, wisecracking satire set in 1980s Sri Lanka. Many of Karunatilaka’s concerns remain the same. Can a country move on from its civil war? What traces does a life leave?

The novel starts with its hero waking up dead. Maali Almeida, a self-described “Photographer, Gambler, Slut,” has spent his career bearing witness to the brutalities of Sri Lanka’s war. Now in the underworld, he has only a week—seven moons—to direct his friend Jaki, and his lover DD, to a box of photographs stored under his bed. These images could “bring down governments”: they depict bodies, carcasses of Tamil homes, faces of “vanished activists.” He must also work out the cause of his own death. He is both victim and detective in this story.

Even though the “worst has already happened,” the dramatic stakes are still nailbitingly high. Almeida often compares his gambling to the roulette of life. “Rich and poor all equal before the law,” says the policeman investigating Almeida’s death. His mother simply responds: “Good joke.”

Mordant humour is the book’s greatest asset—and Karunatilaka’s prose crackles with it. And what an ear he has for dialogue: discussions dance between a large cast of demons, dead bodies and corrupt NGOs. He writes in the second person, a choice that feels initially removed, but subtly brings the reader into that exchange.

Such polyphony does not always make for the easiest read. But this is part of the book’s reward, which parcels philosophy, magical realism and political commentary into one. It’s a remarkable work. Lucy Thynne