DISCOVERIES

The Slow Air of

Ewan MacPherson

Thomas Fox Averill

BlueHen Books: 260 pp., $13

“WHISKEY should be a pleasure, not a need, and a cheerful habit rather than a way to dull pain,” says Ewan’s father, Rob, Scotsman-in-exile, connoisseur of Scotch and women, who is full of advice he never follows.

The town of Glasgow, Kan., is far too small for his goings-on, and it’s his son Ewan who bears the burden of his father’s reputation. Motherless, he grows in his father’s shadow, learning about Scotch whiskeys and how to play the bagpipes. “Smoke,” his father orders one night. “Hebridean smoke. And the cool, moist sea and dark peat.”

You’ll know Speyside whiskey from Highland just reading the first three chapters. But whiskey, like haggis and the poet Robert Burns, is just a backdrop to this story of a young man trying to find his own way to love.

“All hornpipe and no slow air?” His father asks about one of his son’s youthful affairs. In the end, Ewan is all slow air to his father’s hornpipe, as he pursues the love of his life for far longer than it takes to make a decent Scotch.

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Elspeth Huxley

A Biography

C.S. Nichols

Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press: 482 pp., $35

ThIS is not the biography that captures the unsung glory of Elspeth Huxley’s writing, but it’s a start. If you know her work well, C.S. Nichols offers a robust account of who’s who in Huxley’s novels, but she suffers from the biographer’s disease of too much information for a reader who has been tantalized by Huxley’s most famous novel, “The Flame Trees of Thika,” and simply wants to know more.

Nichols adds much about the “Happy Valley set,” those remnants of empire, more British than the British, whose descendants still cavort in and around Nairobi as though Hemingway and Karen Blixen and Lord Delamere were all still dancing at the Muthaiga Club and drinking sundowners.

Huxley was born in 1907 and came to Africa at age 6. Her mother, Nellie Grant, was the dominant force in her life. Here was a woman more competent than most men in Africa, able to scrape by and survive. She passed on her riding, shooting and storytelling skills to her daughter, who died in 1997.

Huxley wrote 42 books and was a journalist and commentator for the BBC. When asked why her books never became as famous as they should have, she replied that it was because she was a colonial. Her balanced view on the lives of colonials (ending in the firm belief that they had no business in Africa) made her unpopular reading in the years of struggle for independence.

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The Hard Facts

of the Grimms’

Fairy Tales

Maria Tatar

Princeton University Press:

325 pp., $22.95

“THEY may invite us to take the royal road to the unconscious,” Maria Tatar writes in this expanded edition of her classic book, “but they also lead us off that now beaten track into uncharted territories.”

The “hard facts” include “murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest,” as well as “perverse forms of incest and child abuse.” She shows how the tales evolved from the Grimm brothers’ original, scholarly collection of oral folk stories into the household book, second only in popularity to the Bible for many years after its 1818 publication.

There can be no doubt that the Grimms worked hard to “sanitize” the folk tales, removing, in particular, unwanted pregnancies and certain forms of incest but leaving, even heightening, the violence for their younger audience. For all their morality, writes Tatar, “transgression is the motor of the plot in most tales.” Tatar looks at villains, male and female, and protagonists, male and female, and ends with a chapter on the good old art of getting even, as it is practiced in fairy tales. “The Hard Facts” is a clear, imaginative and fascinating illumination of the stories we thought we knew.