[In the following positive review, Cunningham compliments Johnston's skilled prose in Shadows on Our Skin.]

More long-distance relations and soppy-minded well-wishers are poised maieutically about Jane Austen's unfinished The Watsons than medieval angelologists might decently have risked covening on the head of one of their theological pins. A. N. Other, assisted by a couple of great-great-great nieces, re-doing (the second re-do; the first was by the niece's grand-daughter) niece Catherine Austen's novel of 1850, putatively based on knowledge of what The Watsons was to have been, allegedly gleaned from Jane's sister Cassandra and Catherine's step-mother (Jane's friend) Martha: why must the pin-heads shore their ruins about a great writer's fragments? It's quite a different story when, say, Kafka has actually written all the bits Max Brod sorts out, or when Wives and Daughters is left with only a couple of steps still to totter so that almost any old editor could safely hazard their destination. But of our volume's 26 chapters Jane Austen has only supplied a disproportionately meagre five.

What a five, though. Pre-Mansfield Park and Emma stuff, admittedly, and so not quite managing to bring off the arrival of the aristocratic Osborne set at the fustian delights of the Dorking ball that Emma Watson has been escorted to by her friends the Edwards, without sounding a mite like the juvenile Charlotte Brontë. But setting in motion a tough-minded Emma and a kind Elizabeth with a decrepit father and two sharply selfish sisters, and an awful sister-in-law to cope with. And, to boot, no money and few real marriage prospects. ‘I would rather be teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like,’ says Emma; ‘I would rather do anything than be teacher at a school,’ ripostes Elizabeth. That's the authentic Austen note of spinsterly desperation. So is Emma's reminder to Lord Osborne that ‘Female economy will do a great deal, my lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.’ These heroines spare no one, not even themselves. Nor does their author go in for kindly sparing:

Robert was carelessly kind, as became a prosperous man and a brother: more intent on settling with the post-boy, inveighing against the exorbitant advance in posting, and pondering over a doubtful half crown, than on welcoming a sister who was no longer likely to have any property for him to get the direction of.

More kin than kind, indeed. Emma ‘was beginning to feel that a family party might be the worst of all parties.’

Most promisingly biting starters, these: but between niece and great-great-great nieces the family party has contrived a very un-Austen carry-on—the worst of all parties, in fact. Emma is plausibly sucked into the Osborne world and, still more plausibly, eventually marries Osborne's old tutor, the Rev. Mr Howard. But the imbroglio of jealous mother, dandified hangers-on, overheard troth-plighting, and (faint shades of Lydia and Wickham) threat of breach-of-promise action that nets a husband for another of the sisters, is sub-Victorian rubbish of the worst kind. Reproaches fail one. It's lower than Brontë-juvenile; it's a sub-Disraeli plot with no redeeming smartnesses of chat; it's Silver Fork with flaunted tarnish. And none of the limp attempts to instil the right tone (a mention of Johnson's Dictionary, a sneer or two at Methodisticality, the odd flash of spirited hatred) works. What this The Watsons amounts to is a travesty, a Mona Lisa with moustaches.

With relief, then, to a couple of fictions that are all their author's own work, even if each is little more than a short-story conception spun out nearer a conventional novel length. Jennifer Johnston writes with the deceptive fluency that only comes of the tightest control, and produces in Shadows on Our Skin an extremely attractive story about modern Londonderry whose superbly casual calm almost belies its insider's grasp of the hellish detail. Her account of Joseph Logan, an inattentive schoolboy, already promising to be a great wordsmith, who cannily treads the exploding minefield laid down by his bedridden father's generation of Free State heroes and his brother Brendan's Provo chums, is gripping (especially when he's left holding his brother's gun early one morning as the British Army bashes in the front-room windows). It's also movingly convincing (you simply don't, it's made clear, just turn over your Provo kin, Bishops and Peace-Marchers notwithstanding: Ulster's more complicated than that). And, to underline the complexity, we're left not knowing why Kathleen, lonely schoolteacher, befriends Joe and Brendan, nor what her engagement to a British soldier has to do with the interest in them she keeps up until the Boyos cut off her hair and send her packing.

Overtly more pretentious, Dominic Cooper's Sunrise goes for a sort of William Goldingesque primitivism. Munro, a slow-thinking Scot in his late fifties, quits the Kirk during his daughter's wedding service, fires his council house (his wife's plastic flowers and mantelpiece of knick-knackery particularly infuriate him), and runs for freedom. He's pretty earthy to start with: a forester, his hands (Cooper's good at this sort of description) are ‘knotty and cut’ (his fellow-parishioners have faces ‘creased and scabbed’). But in his flight from his native island to his sister Bessie's croft, and then, hunted by imaginary agents of the law, scraping for very life across loch and hill, he's reduced still further to the level (it's continually harped on) of a beast. Occasionally Sunrise reads like The Thirty-Nine Steps minus its tension, and the hard, friendless consonantality of the world that Munro bangs against (a blunt stutter of skarts, clegs, graip, fank, bothy, stabs and all the rest) can get you down as Hopkins does. But, all in all, yielding man and unyielding nature are compellingly done.