Blood, treachery, religion and a

RosemaRy Goring, literary editor of the Herald newspapers and formerly of Scotland on Sunday, is mild and courteous in manner, and gentle of speech. a st andrews graduate, she has also worked as an editor of dictionaries, and of the Church of scotland’s Life and Work magazine. If you were told she had written a novel, you might expect something elegant and understated, an ironic comedy of manners or morals. you couldn’t be more wrong. After Flodden is a tremendous Romance, the work of a wild and turbulent imagination, a tale of blood, slaughter, treachery, devotion, and adventure. It’s as violent, though not as economical, as a Border Ballad; and for great parts of the novel, it’s the world of the Riding Ballads that we are invited to

Iinhabit. can’t believe that anyone who loves Romance will not delight in it.

The plot is properly complicated, even hard to follow. No matter; a couple of weeks ago, in reviewing Robert Low’s Bannockburn novel The Lion Rampart, I quoted scott as asking “What is a plot for but for bringing in fine things?” Quite afTer flodden by roseMary goring Polygon, 329pp, £14.99

review by so; there are fine things in abundance here. you may sometimes lose the track of the story – or indeed stories, for there are many of them – partly because the author, audaciously but effectively, moves back and forward in time. It doesn’t matter, for you will soon pick it up again, and the time-shifts, which are well handled, work to deepen and enrich the narrative.

It is, like many Romances, a quest novel. The young heroine, Louise, a French girl living in edinburgh, whose elder sister marguerite was the mistress of the king, James IV, till she died in childbirth, sets out, alone but for the company of her devoted and ferocious dog (somewhat puzzlingly described as a vixen rather than bitch), in search of her brother Benoit, lost or not