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It’s called Scotland’s shame, the sectarianism that has attached itself to Scottish society and festers therein. The absorption of Ireland’s exiles in the nineteenth century saw Catholicism take steps into the country, much to the chagrin of the Protestant ‘indigènes’, and the rest, as they say, is history. Although it’s not history per se as the divide created then is still very much alive today, most prominently masquerading around within the national sport: football.

Des Dillon’s play, Singin I’m No A Billy He’s A Tim (2005) tackles sectarianism head on. Since its initial performance at the Edinburgh Festival, the play has gone on to tour both Scotland and Northern Ireland, and it was even used by the then Scottish Executive to tackle the issue of bigotry at school level. By turning the spotlight on two football fans — Tim and Billy, immediately defined by their heavy brush stroke of a name –  supporting a team on either side of the divide, Dillon creates a dialogue that explores sectarianism.

Tim, in the green and white, is a Glasgow Celtic fan., and therefore of Catholic stock. It’s not long before Billy is calling him on singing a song about the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins:

Billy: I wish you lot would shut up wi that shite.

Tim: It’s my heritage.

Billy: Yer heritage!

Tim: There’s nothin wrong wi rememberin yer heritage.

Billy: I bet ye’ve never even been in Ireland. (Beat as Tim squirms) Have ye?

Tim: I’m not tellin you where I’ve been an where I’ve not.

A beat, then:

Billy: Ye’ve never been have ye? (Tim ignores him) Answer me then.

Tim: So! What if I haven’t?

Billy: Yees’re aw the same — rattlin oan aboot a place ye’ve never been. If I had my way I’d send yees aw back to fuckin tattie land.

In the dialogue between the two, there’s underlying irony to be had with Billy (”Ma heritage goes straight as a die to Ulster.”), a Glasgow Rangers fan, and therefore Protestant. Situations in real life are, of course, more complicated, but Billy and Tim prove adequate mouthpieces through which the fallacies and the hatred that lie at the heart of the problem can be aired. History, politics, religion, and institutions are all paid a visit for their role in the sectarianism of today.

The scene is a Glasgow jail, on match day. Not just any match day, but the clash of the Old Firm: Rangers and Celtic. Both Billy and Tim, however, have landed themselves in the cells. In such a confined space, there’s little more they can do than talk and take broad swipes at each other, unleashing the vitriol as it comes pouring out, and each eager to take the upper hand. While they are able to trot out all the cliches, the moronic arguments that have seen nothing but a stalemate lasting decades, their own ignorance and naivete in getting caught up in the cycle of bigotry reveals itself, from songs sung in the name of sport –

Billy: Hello — Hello — we are the Billy boys, Hello — Hello — you’ll know us by our noise, We’re up to our knees in Fenion blood…

– through outright insulting –

 Tim: …into these (rhythm of the old Coke advert) Orange-Mason-hand-shakin-Ulster-lovin-finger-ticklin-Tim-hatin-goat-buckin-Proddy-fuckin-bastards.

As the invective becomes exhausted, it seems the only way forward is for reconciliation, and in an ideal world this is what would happen. Dillon’s play explores this ideal world, becoming one along the way, as the notions of how to solve the problems of sectarianism manifests itself within the two players. In truth it happens all too easily, but the characters do come to it via logical means.

Although the skin of the play wraps around bigotry in Scotland, the bones are far more generic, for sectarianism is an issue that affects far flung areas of the world, like the tit-for-tat between Israel and Palestine or the genocide of the Balkan conflict — all disputes that have no end in sight. Dillon’s play works on the basis that common ground needs to be found between the sparring parties and from there, mutual understanding can be fostered, goalposts set, and favourable results achieved. It’s a simplistic enough idea, and hardly revolutionary, but it works in the context of opening up dialogue on the subject.

Tim: Look — I think everybody’s a bigot. We’ve all got bigotry. Every single person’s got bigotry for somethin.

The closing stage, where a symbolic unification occurs is poignant, for gone are the bilious songs that characterised both men and their upbringing, and in comes one that represents Scotland as a whole, the bigotry driven out.

The merits of the play would be best experienced in a theatre rather than on the page, as, given the subject matter, it’s a narrative that could bring people to the theatre who would never think to otherwise. While it’s laudable that it could be used to dispell myths, quash rumours, and educate people on the sectarian divide, its downside is that the casual banter and reheated arguments, especially to those who have heard them all before, become more of a novelty than a criticism. Sectarianism is Scotland’s ‘elephant in the room’ and more literature should seek to attack it. Singin I’m No A Billy He’s A Tim opens up dialogue, and entertains in doing so.

A.L. Kennedy is one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary writers who, over the last twenty years, has produced a body of work spanning novels, short stories, non-fiction, screenplays, and more. In recent years she’s been a regular feature in comedy clubs, something which polarised opinion at the start, and since 2007 her stock has risen with a string of prizes and awards, including the Best Book at the Costa Awards (for fifth novel, Day) and the Austrian State Prize for Literary Fiction, putting her amongst distinguished names like Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Milan Kundera, not to mention two recent British Nobel laureates.

Other than a few short stories from her first collection, I’ve read little of Kennedy, owing to an increasing preference for world literature over what’s on my doorstep. Recently I’ve felt the need to survey home soil writers, and so it is that I read What Becomes (2009), a new short story collection, her fifth to date.

The collection is named for the opening story which opens with Frank taking his seat in a small, empty cinema and waiting for the movie to start. In the prolonged time it takes to gear up, he finds his mind wandering to recent events, to one night in particular that accelerated the fall of an already splintered marriage. As he prepares a soup, slices some squash, he accidentally cuts his finger and here Kennedy provides us with a fantastic piece of subtle foreshadowing, noting that “he hadn’t been paying attention and so he got what he deserved” and, later, when the denouement comes, the echo of “funny how he didn’t feel the pain until he saw the wound” assumes a satisfying symbolic power.

Frank’s a detective,  a catalyst in his failing marriage, for his mind deals with things differently than his wife (”she’d never known the rooms he’d seen…”) and communication between them is strained. While they share the grief underlying the story, each handles it in their own way. She fails to realise he’s hurting, while he retreats inside, forensically trying to overcome the insurmountable.

Invisible rooms - that’s what he made - he’d think and think until everything disappeared beyond what he needed: signs of intention, direction, position: the nakedness of wrong: who stood where, did what, how often, how fast, how hard, how ultimately completely without hope - what exactly became of them.

This sets the stage for what’s to come. The title recalls the old song that asks what becomes of the brokenhearted, and in the twelve stories that make up What Becomes, Kennedy sets out to examine scenes of hopelessness and heartbreak that are at times funny, other times uplifting, yet always underscored with melancholy.

In Edinburgh we meet Peter, a greengrocer, who finds his passions aroused when a younger woman starts hovering around his shop, more for him than his wares. And when he offers her some apples, saying, ‘They’re fine to eat, they’ll be fine for days. But everything’s going off in the end, isn’t it?’, Kennedy once again shows her flair for foreshadowing and picking the precise symbol that reinforces the effect of the overall story. Similarly, in Whole Family With Young Children Devasted, the title appears on a poster about a missing cat, but it readily applies to the wider issues of the story.

The telling of the stories is varied, Kennedy seemingly happy in first and third person modes, and getting into the heads of men and women. There’s also some mild experimentation, where Sympathy, about a woman having sex with a stranger in a hotel room, is told entirely through dialogue.

‘…if we keep talking, we’re going to end up –’

‘Getting to know each other?’

‘That wouldn’t work.’

‘Fine.’

Aside from the symbolic power of the stories, where the success is achieved is in Kennedy’s characters. Her understanding of them is second to none. As she describes their actions and feelings, their thoughts seem to take life of their own, interjecting, pondering, and reflecting on the hopeless situations that circumstance has dealt them. In Sympathy, which follows the death of a children’s entertainer (”Barry with the fake face for parties, Barry who loved to flirt”) who, like a fair number in this collection, was no stranger to an unhappy marriage. The child between is someone for his wife to love, “a consolation for his inability to love her”, a flesh and bones creation made without thinking.

Although, Lynne had been thinking: otherwise, she wouldn’t have stared at her husband as he first picked up his daughter, hefted her tenderly, gracefully, feelingly — so the nurses could not help but remember the scene, believe it — and she had thought — Got you. She’d seen his eyes: the wide, unfamiliar chill that was settling in them and she had thought — Got you. Fuck you. Deal with that.

A highlight of the stories is the humour that runs through the. As God Made Us, in which a group of British soldiers who met in hospital (”Hospital — great place to meet folk, get new mates.”) have their annual meetup, shows this in its dialogue, following the lads will be lads mentality that until the collection’s theme catches up with it in an explosive outburst. Other stories show a subtler, truer humour, such as in Vanish, where Paul finds himself sitting next to an annoying person in a theatre and experiences something we can laugh it, because it’s the way we may think ourselves:

It was ridiculous and unfair to imagine a person like Simon could unknowingly drain each remaining pleasure from those around him and leave them bereft. ‘Do you know his work? Amazing guy. I’ve seen every show.’ Even so, as Simon cast his hands about, shifted and stretched, Paul found himself taking great care that they didn’t touch, didn’t even brush shoulders, just to be sure that no draining could take place.

Returning to the title story, Frank ponders at one point the buttons on a personal music player, saying,

‘They’ve anticipated you’ll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you’ll want that. I want that.’

It rings true for the stories in What Becomes and is perhaps a foreshadowing of the collection itself, for each story is a multi-layered affair that sheds its many skins with each reading. In its singular focus on the melancholy side of human nature, the whole is unified and it becomes a rounded work. And in those epiphanous moments where the stories show their cards, the revelations, through their believability, prove memorable. Kennedy knows you’ll want that. That’s what she delivers.

Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, by opting to throw himself into the mix and tell the story of And Then There Was No One (2009) as a fictional memoir. Set in 2011, Adair has found himself at a literary festival in a Swiss town by the Reichenbach Falls, setting for Conan Doyle’s attempt at ridding himself of his popular detective character.

The influence of Sherlock Holmes plays as much a part in And Then There Was No One as that of Agatha Christie has for the triptych of Evadne Mount novels, and fans of Holmes may be interested to know that Adair reproduces, in full from his fictional new book of Sherlock Holmes stories, his take on The Giant Rat Of Sumatra, first mentioned in The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire (cf The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes) as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.

The reason for this change in the style of the novels comes late, but is worth mentioning, as Adair regularly talks about his novels, past, present, and in translation throughout:

For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about A Mysterious Affair of Style which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.

Like that novel, Adair begins by playing with the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Where the murder didn’t occur until late in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, the murder has long since been wrapped up here. The victim is Gustav Slavorigin,  a Booker Prize-winning author sent, after publishing a collection of incendiary anti-American essays, into hiding, Rushdie style, due to a contract on his head, courtesy of a rich Texan reactionary.

The prologue, seemingly extraneous to the mystery itself, fills in details that, to a first read, seem dry and dull, and in doing so recalls both the introduction to Eco’s The Name Of The Rose and the short foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita. This in itself is strange, given that Adair has mentioned in the past that Nabokov has “become something of an albatross about [his] neck”. The details of this chapter deal with the history of Slavorigin - his early days at university, with Adair, through the rise, fall, and infamy of his writing career. One notable book, and the reason Slavorigin is making a rare public pitstop, is his new thriller, A Reliable Narrator, which gives the game away without, if you catch my drift, doing so.

How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunnit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The idea of a reliable narrator is played around with too, as is Adair’s playful style. Personal views come into the fray, such  as calling the forty-five minutes of literary festivals “so much hassle for so little result” and his description of a book as being “a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves.” As a fictional Adair, he’s able to get away with it, even if, with reference to Slavorigin’s book:

The first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

The usual alliteration, literary and cinematic in-jokes, and postmodern trickery are present and accounted for in And Then There Was No One. The unashamed use of puns (’Google Gogol’, a delicatessen named ‘Salvador Deli’ and a few more Nabokovian references, ‘Son of Palefire’ and ‘Adair or Ardor’) adds to the fun, and I’d like to think that only Adair’s style, like a British eccentric, could get away with a metaphor like “the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London”.

One of the more interesting ploys in the novel is how, as a memoir, Adair manages to introduce his sleuth, the Dowager Duchess of Crime, Evadne Mount, into real events. As the last novel was set in the 1940s and this novel is seventy years hence, and she should be the one dropping dead, he pulls it off well, and humorously, too, introducing her into a book that she should never be written, as per a Q&A session after his reading of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra:

‘You wrote two pastiches of Agatha Christie, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style? Will there be a third?’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.

Amongst the answers at that session there are some interesting insights that, if we believe the reliable narrator, into Adair that show And Then There Was No One as being that personal work, bringing with it a few questions of its own:

‘I read a book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Les Enfants terribles, Death in Venice, or whatever, I like it, I rewrite it. I am in short a pasticheur. Less by opportunism, though, than by superstition. I long ago discovered that I could embark on a new work of fiction only if its premise had already been legitimised by one of the writers in my personal Pantheon. Each of my novels is thus a palimpsest. Scrape away at its surface and you will find, underneath, another novel, usually a classic. I offer no apology for this.’

Apologies are not in order as Adair has produced his best novel since 1992’s The Death Of The Author. His funniest, too. It has more conceptual twists and turns than the labyrinth in Eco’s The Name Of The Rose, another novel that owes a debt to Sherlock Holmes, and probably why the Italian writer was also due to attend the same literary festival. In fact, in Eco’s essay, Travels In Hyperreality, he says that ‘once the “total fake” is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real’, and this is what Adair does with this novel, giving us a reliable narrator, so reliable that we can believe his every word, only to have the rug pulled out from under us, to see it for what it is, yet still believe.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I have a hit or miss relationship with the Canongate Myths series. The contributions of Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood failed to excite me and, expecting no less from Ali Smith (see Girl Meets Boy), found myself suitably impressed. Now Michel Faber has entered the arena to present his reworking of the Prometheus myth, of how he stole fire from Zeus and gifted it to humanity, subsequently being punished for his crime.

Unlike the other writers in the Myths series so far, Faber is one I do enjoy reading: his style is always light, his subject matter nothing if not protean. One only has to read his story collections to get a feel for the variety he’s capable of. Introduced via his The Crimsol Petal And The White, a huge, postmodern Victorian tale concerning the rise of a prostitute to civilised society, I was quick to seek out his other works - another novel, two novellas, and three short story collections. Add to that The Fire Gospel (2008).

Faber’s Prometheus is Theo Griepenkerl,  a Canadian academic with a heightened sense of himself. He’s in Iraq, courtesy of the museum he works for, to tour a looted musem with the intention shipping artefacts home. The tour doesn’t last long as a bomb goes off killing the curator and, by chance, spilling forth some papyrus scrolls hidden for almost two thousand years. His talent being Aramaic, Theo recognises the potential power of the scrolls and smuggles them out of the country:

He could barely wait. Those papyri were burning a hole in his briefcase. They were like a stash of pornography that he’d been forced to delay getting to grips with. Not that there was anything kinky in his attraction to the scrolls; the porn comparison was just…a metaphor. A metaphor for the promises the papyri were urgently whispering from the back seat, of what they were going to do for him.

The scrolls are written by Malchus, the high priest named in the Gospel of John, and deviate from the accepted story of the Gospels.What makes them historically significant is that they are an eye witness account of the Crucifixion, predating the other Gospels by at least thirty years. What else can Theo do but publish them? In doing so, in his role as Prometheus, he brings fire to the world.

The tone of The Fire Gospels is satire. To a publishing industry that has seen Dan Brown’s odious The Da Vinci Code and Richard Dawkins’ confrontational The God Delusion upset the apple cart of Christianity,  generating huge profits as they go, it remains to be seen what the reaction to physical evidence dispelling the Christian faith would be. Faber imagines the likely scenario, that of outrage, and has great fun with the worldwide reactions to such material, nowhere more so than a pitch-perfect chapter of Amazon reviews, complete with the spelling mistakes, irrelevant opinion, or ignorance that someone always seems to find helpful.

I did not buy this book, so this author will not make a dime off me. I read it over a two day period in my local bookstore. The so-called gospel of Malchus is a blatant forgery produced by Muslims to undermine our faith. It’s been tried before. When will they learn?

Beyond the religious aspect Faber takes time out to send up the book industry, in areas such as remuneration, book tours, and marketing. Then, beyond that, the very decline in culture itself, be it in the vacuous array of choice television offers or in noting that the advances for those contributing to culture is low while sportsmen are signing $10m deals.

In continuing with the Prometheus myth Faber has to continue the parallel. The punishment meted out by Zeus was being chained to a rock and have an eagle peck out and consume his liver, once it had grown back, daily. With Theo interested only in money and sex, and never straying into likeable or unlikable territory, it’s hard to care for his predicament when his punishment comes. It’s a low point in the book, especially at such a crucial point in the story, but given the satirical tone Faber just about gets away with it.

Like other Faber works, The Fire Gospels remains an open ended affair leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. It’s good at what it does, spoofing the publishing hysteria over religious books in recent years, but all the time there’s the nagging sensation that Faber can do better.  However, as Theo notes, it’s a case of different strokes for different folks:

If there was one thing the Pandora’s box of Amazon customers had taught him, it was that there was no fiction so outrageously, laughably, arrogantly false that somebody somewhere wasn’t moved to tears by it.

Regular readers of this site are no doubt sick of the mention of Gilbert Adair, given that he’s the most reviewed writer here and I’ve already reviewed the brilliant The Death Of The Author this month. Bear with me, though, for there’s not much of his fiction to go before I can begin to pester with another obsession.

The thing with Adair is that there’s no real consistency to his books. After enjoying the postmodern murder mystery of The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd, he followed it with the lesser A Mysterious Affair Of Style; similarly the high of The Death Of The Author was followed by The Key Of The Tower (1997), arguably the weakest in his ouevre.

Dud or not, reading Adair’s prose is always a delight, purely for the unashamed fun he has with wordplay and subverting expectations. Reading him is always like sitting down to listen to an old friend that you don’t quite trust.

Where other Adair novels wear their literary influences on their sleeve, the obvious comparison for The Key To The Tower is not to be found in books, but movies. Hitchcock’, especially. From the off Adair sets up a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Hitch’s features: two cars on a road in Brittany, both halted by a fallen tree. One of the drivers is Guy Lantern, on holiday from England in his second-hand Mini; the other, in his Rolls-Royce, is Jean-Marc Cheret, a wealthy art dealer. On deciding that the only logical choice is to swap cars and drive off to their intended destinations, meeting up three days hence, they exchange car keys and the story begins.

Cheret disappears from the picture for the novel is narrated by Guy Lantern, the man in the Mini. Continuing on, he reaches where he was headed: the small town of Saint-Malo. After a comedy of errors, Lantern meets Cheret’s wife,  Béa.

Am I, I couldn’t resist putting to myself, am I going to fall in love with her? What a fantasy! It was absurd and puerile and yet…and yet, apart from the unique set of circumstances of our meeting, the romantically corny lightning flash (fate’s patented trademark, its tired old logo) and the swapping of cars, my excuse, my sole excuse, for thinking such a thought was the fact, the indisputable fact, that we all of us lead a double life. No one can monitor our loves and lusts. No one can set police dogs sniffing around the insides of our brains. Sexual attraction is what cosmologists term a singularity. It’s the black hole of the psyche, where the priorities of the realist imperative no longer apply. In my head at least, I told myself, I could do as I pleased.

Ah, the priorities of the realist imperative need no longer apply. It’s a fitting line to throw into the narrative, as it carries a second meaning - it refers to the narrative itself, because from this point onward, what had been a suspenseful and psychological thriller, à la Hitchcock, descends into a whimsical catalogue of unbelievable events, actions, and dialogue.

The basic premise centres around Lantern becoming innocently embroiled in an illicit art trade. It’s pure parody, with knowing winks aplenty, and a range of characters so over the top - like a gangster who uses Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as his Bible - as to undermine the initial seriousness of the book: the suspense is wrung out, the characters lose dimensions as the pages turn. Even the way in which Lantern learns of the crime he’s involved is done in that clichéd style where the criminal delights in having their misplaced genius accounted for:

Béa nodded - and again, I had the feeling that she was willing me on, wanting me to know that I was getting warm, nodding only in acknowledgement of what I had already found out but as if encouraging me on to ever further revelations, drawing each new fragment of truth out of me as, clue by clue, some general-knowledge staple - please sir, 1066 - may be drawn out of a schoolchild.

In all, The Key Of The Tower is a book of halves, strictly divided by the fall of a tree, be they plot points or the structure itself. While the notion of Adair doing Hitchcock is novel, his drive to parody the genre comes off wanting, and I have no doubt that if he’d stuck to maintaining the atmosphere and suspense then a better novel may have appeared. It now seems, however, that when Adair touches on Hitch (Alistair Farjeon in A Mysterious Affair Of Style is pretty much him in all but name) it may just be best to avoid.

But, damn him, there’s no way you can avoid him because, at his best or not, he’s just so readable as to almost forgive him. At the start of the novel there’s a long description of the Mini’s windscreen wipers, with the occasional snatch of the road ahead. While it primarily relates to Lantern’s journey through Brittany, it’s also reads as a clever portent for the reader.

And at those brief moments when the windscreen had been wiped clear, and before a brand new rash of raindrops erupted, it would come as a slight but real surprise, it would even obscurely disappoint me, that the scenery hadn’t meanwhile been shifted and that the dark mute road in front of me remained unaltered, with only an occasional signpost, preternaturally aglow in the gloom, to attest that I had made any headway.

Come the end of The Key Of The Tower, having barely had the rug pulled out from under itself, the scenery hasn’t shifted, the road is unaltered, and aside from a nod here and there, there’s little to recommend it. He’s right, though, that does come as a surprise.

While I’ve read a number of Gilbert Adair’s recent books, the older titles from his back catalogue are out of print. One of these titles, The Death Of The Author (1992), has thankfully been given a second lease of life in the United States, thanks to Melville House Publishing’s new Contemporary Art of the Novella series, a companion to its Art of the Novella, a series showcasing the likes of Joyce, Flaubert, Proust, and Tolstoy.

But the Contemporary range is no stranger to lesser known names itself - The Pathseeker, by Nobel laureate, Imre Kertész was the flagship title So, good company indeed. And, when my copy of The Death Of The Author dropped through the door, so impressed was I by the production values (glossy cover with flaps, bold colour, and nicely tactile pages) that I made the snap decision to purchase all the others within the series, with the intention of subscribing to future releases too.

But to the book. Adair’s work - his fiction, anyway - tends to fall one of two ways: the light entertainment, like his Evadne Mount trilogy; or the heavier entertainment, erudite, but still light. All come with an element of postmodernism. And The Death Of The Author, falling on the erudite side, is a postmodern book about postmodernism.

Although my reading of the book went without knowledge of the events that inform it, I daresay it’s not necessary in enjoying the novella. The reference point is Paul de Man, the Belgian literary theorist whose work had a different light shed upon it when it was discovered  he had written collaborationist articles during World War II, including one of an anti-Semitic nature. De Man’s life story, of living during wartime and teaching in the States, is given here to our narrator, Léopold Sfax.

Sfax is a celebrity in the world of literary criticism, having published two books, the first a study of Yeats:

That book, whose appearance produced quite a commotion, I may even say a scandal, in the advanced academic circles of the day, was Either/Either - I realized I had “arrived” when the Partisan Review reviewer wrote of it as having been wildly overrated, for to be described as overrated by one critic meant after all that I had been highly rated by several.

In it, Sfax argues that literary meanings are not intentions of their authors, no matter what they say - that it’s the reader and their interpretation, be it this or that, that makes the meanings. Following on from this book is the one that makes his career, The Vicious Spiral, the book whose arguments, not given a name, become simply known as ‘the Theory’.

The more closely a text is studied the more insidiously is it drained of sense or legibility, just as the more fixedly a word is stared at on the page the more too is it drained of legibility or sense, striking the increasingly bewildered eye as a mere weird disconnected sequence of squiggles. Words are far older and fickler and more experienced than the writers who suffer under the delusion that they are “using” them. Words have been around. No one owns them, no one can proscribe how they ought to be read, and most certainly not their author.

If de Man is the template for Sfax’s life, Roland Barthes is the inspiration for the Theory, being an echo of his essay Death Of The Author. And it’s the popularity of this book that brings us to the opening scene as Sfax talks with a female student of his who would like to write his biograph. Of course, rather than have someone else tell his story, The Death Of The Author becomes his autobiography, and he meanders off on events in his life, coming each time to the moment that spurred him to sit down and write in the first place.

With any Adair book, being vigilant is part and parcel of reading him, for his texts are not without their games, and there’s always that delight on realising, one again, that he is one, sometimes two, steps ahead. In The Death Of The Author he more than delivers, his games bringing together a beautiful spoof of literary criticism and memoir that, toward the end, adds a murder mystery that fulfils the promise of its title. And, when this cauldron of fun comes to the boil, Adair adds a stinging twist that had me screaming, “you bastard!”

To read The Death Of The Author is not unlike what it must be like to have subscribed to Sfax’s Theory:

The world had been turned upside-down - what had always been true was false, what had been important was marginal, what had been meaningful was meaningless - and it made sense, it made sense!

When the first books from the Canongate Myths series were launched, I wasn’t too enamoured with the choices of Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood, two authors that I’d read in some capacity and never truly enjoyed. Perhaps in expecting to dislike the books there could have been no outcome other than to dislike, which was what happened. And now, coming back to the series I found myself facing off against Ali Smith, yet another whose work I’ve sampled and found not for me. So, imagine my surprise when, expecting to dislike Girl Meets Boy (2007), I found there could be another outcome.

Like all other books in the Myths Series, Girl Meets Boy takes on the challenge of selecting a well known myth and, putting the author’s spin on it, updating it. Smith’s choice is that of Iphis from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the only story we are told that, thanks to a helpful idiot’s guide halfway through, has - if, like me, you didn’t know - a happy ending.

Girl Meets Boy’s first line (”Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.”)  sets out its stall in foreshadowing that there’s some loose gender definitions here. This line is recalled by Anthea, who, along with her sister Imogen, narrate the story. Anthea is the younger of the two, looked after by Imogen in a house in Inverness, left to them by their grandparents. Imogen has even gone so far as to get her sister a job at Pure, a creative consultancy charged with creating a slogan for water, where water represents the imagination:

Water is history. Water is mystery. Water is nature. Water is life. Water is archaeology. Water is civilisation. Water is where we live. Water is here and water is now. Get the message. Get it in a bottle.

This is the cry of Keith, the sisters’ knuckle-dragging boss whose opinions belong in an age darker than the projection room he’s addressing. Anthea, however, isn’t one to bottle the imagination, as her walk to work that day illustrated:

I could, if I chose, just walk to the river. I could stand up and let myself fall the whole slant of the bank. I could just let the fast old river have me, toss myself in like a stone.

Not one to go with the flow, Anthea is quick to rebel from this corporate life when she spots a boy from the window painting a slogan about water being a human right

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

But he looked like a girl.

She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

The boy is indeed a girl, and Anthea finds herself romantically involved, much to the chagrin of her sister who, in her narrative sections, is constantly interrupted by her inner thoughts, conclealed in brackets:

(Oh my God my sister is A GAY.)

(I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset.)

The blame falls on their parents’ break up and the Spice Girls with Imogen comically gathering up all the clues that she should have noticed, such as liking the Eurovision Song Contest and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And it’s this attitude that Smith takes on in her retelling of Iphus’ story, that in a time when single-sex relationships are accepted, it’s the attitude toward them that needs to change. Smith opts for chapter headings called ‘I’, ‘You’, ‘Us’, ‘Them’ and ‘All Together Now’ that ensure, in a book of reversals, that the happy ending remains unchanged.

While the slogans, thanks to their creative background, the girls go on to daub across the city seem like slapped on feminism, Smith’s prose throughout the book has a lightness to it that makes reading it a breeze, especially at its most playful, and when communicating its message of love:

She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys’ heads like a girl. She turned girls’ heads like a boy. She made love like a boy. She made love like a girl. She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree.

And for a book that has fun written all over it, in literary allusions and puns aplenty, it proved to have one more reversal up its sleeve. Reader, I liked it.

For the last few years, I’ve been aware of Robin Jenkins’s books, notably his best known work, The Cone Gatherers, as they were perennials on the Scottish Books shelves of local stores. Of the man, however, I knew nothing and was surprised to find that he died as recently as 2005. Surprised for the silly reason that his books were in the Canongate Classics series, which also featured Scotland’s favourite book, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who died way back in the 1930s.

Now, with a 21st Century makeover, a number of Jenkins’ books seem destined to light up the aforementioned store shelves, taking their bleak covers and injecting a bit of needed colour. One such title is The Changeling (1958), set around the time of writing that, fifty years on, now seems a world away. But while the world it describes has passed into history, its themes remain as constant as…as…well, Jenkins’ books on store shelves.

The life of Charlie Forbes, a middle-aged English teacher, has amounted to little more than dreams of promotion. Mocked by others for his ability to see the good in everyone, his altruistic nature, like that of the Good Samaritan in the book’s opening sentence, lends itself to the needs of others, even if it brings further disdain:

‘I’ve come to the conclusion, Mr Fisher, that it isn’t enough to draw my salary, and at four o’clock each day turn my back and retreat to my suburban sanctuary.’

‘I’m sure none of us do, Charlie.’

‘I have done so. I speak only for myself. Here, as I see it, is my chance to atone. Mr Fisher, I propose to take Tom Curdie with my family to Towellan this summer. It seems to me the experience might give the boy some support in the battle he has constantly to wage against corruption. I am here to seek your advice.’

Faced with that vast, sanctimonious, aggressive pout, the headmaster grew peeved. Originality of most kinds he distrusted, but original goodness most of all.

Tom Curdie is one of Forbes’ pupils, a “deprived morsel of humanity”, who unlike all the others in his class comes from Donaldson’s Court, “one of the worst slums in one of the worst slum districts in Europe”. While everyone believes Curdie’s smile is that “of a certified delinquent”, Forbes sees it as stoic, the smile of a boy intent on not letting his lot get him down. To give the boy a taste of a better life, and despite much derision, Forbes hits on a plan to take the boy away with his family to their summer retreat at Towellan.

The notion of summer sits bizarrely alongside the novel’s content - where a Glaswegian holiday ‘doon the water’ conjures up images of sandcastles, rock, and pestering rock pools, The Changeling is like a rock pool where turning over stones reveals nastiness in the dark. And each subsequent overturning only adds to events, leading up to the bleak conclusion.

Within the novel there are mentions of the title, referring to young Curdie, likening him to

…the changeling of Highland legend, that creature introduced by the malevolent folk of the other world into a man’s home, to pollute the joy and faith of family.

Pollute it, he does, though not directly. One incident where Curdie shoplifts, so as not to get to comfortable with this new taste of life, leads the family into a descent that they’ll do well to get out of. While his daughter, Gillian, finds complicity with the boy she initially dislikes, Forbes finds his own prejudices exposed, and his wife grieves over the lack of trust shown to his own children apropos the introduction of the slum child.

To his credit is the way that Jenkins manages to get inside the head of each of his characters, flitting between them unsentimentally, letting us know what they think and how they feel. But, sometimes telling every last detail without leaving hidden depths to the characters, lets the novel down in areas, as does, having dated a bit, the grandfatherly tone:

Tom knew very well that the majority of children were far more fortunate than he, but he had never envied them. Envy, like pity, was not in his creed. What he hoped to do or to become was apart altogether from what others did or became. To have been envious would have been to become involved and so weakened. His success, if ever it came, must owe nothing to anyone.

With Jenkins’ unrelenting grip on his characters in The Changeling, he tugs the narrative’s strings so tight that you wonder how he crams so much in, be it the exploration of the changeling legend by way of myxomatosis or of showing the class differences and attitudes in each direction. But it’s the questions that the novel throws up that make it an interesting read. Having given Curdie a taste of a better life, is it right to return him to the slums of Donaldson’s Court? Where else could he go? And even if Jenkins’ denouement is a tad unconvincing, it certainly feels right.

The overarching theme of The Changeling is that of misplaced charity. Forbes seems to live in a cocoon, safe from everyone else, convinced that his way is right. While others scoff at his big heart, that big heart isn’t always considering appropriate reasons and, as the old adage goes, what goes around comes around, proving you don’t need “malevolent folk of the other world [to] pollute the joy and faith of family.”

When it comes to writing a novel, there are two approaches: doing it for the art and doing it for the money. In James Meek’s novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), Adam Kellas is doing it for the money. And why not? His career as a warzone reporter is fraught with danger and journalists in his line of work go from one contract to the next. Writing a commercial thriller and the subsequent sales would give him the security he needs in order to sit down and write the books he really wants.

And security is what he needs, what with a divorce behind him, adding to a history of relationships which never work out and he finds difficult to get over. One such affair was with an American journalist, Astrid, during his time in Afghanistan. Yet one day, while boarding a helicopter, she jumps out as it’s taking off and he never sees her again. It’s no surprise that such a lack of closure should play on his mind. That he should let it guide him, well that’s another matter.

So when he receives an email from Astrid asking him to come and see her, he doesn’t think twice about boarding a plane, without even so much as a coat. (”He had wanted to see her for a year and now she asked to see him, and he was coming.”)

The subsequent journey fills the greater portion of the novel, although little of the journey is described. Not because it would be boring, but because Kellas is too busy wrestling with recent events to notice what’s going on. Women have left him, he’s quit his job (the book advance is a six figure sum), the war is getting to him, and in one explosive set piece, he lays waste to his best friend’s house. It’s no surprise, therefore, to hear the announcement of ‘we are now beginning our descent’ as the plane comes into New York. But for Adam Kellas, he has already begun, casting off partners, his job, and friends along the way.

That Kellas was inadequately dressed for the season marked him as a loser. The suit and shoes were plain enough warning in themselves that here was someone in themidst of their descent from security to insecurity, a man yet to settle in his new location on the bottom.

Like Kellas, Meek is no stranger to reporting from undesirable countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. So, with the benefit of experience, the sense of place brought to the novel’s locations is impressive and feels authentic. One can almost imagine the half-buried Soviet machinery “digested by the tissue of the road” and the feeling of being there, as it happens, with other journalists pushing for stories in the face of tragedy really shines through:

A barefooted Afghan man in grimy grey clothes and a gold cap squatted in the dirt in fron of the bombed house. it was his house. The explosion had killed his wife while she was sewing clothes for a wedding, and wounded his two children, his mother and brother. He squatted near the ruins, with his long clay-stained red hands resting on his knees, and reporters came to ask him questions. He answered, although he could not meet their eyes. For hours he had a changing little group of people standing awkwardly in front of him in western clothes, taking his picture, writing down his words and filming him. The same set of questions would be asked, and the Afghan man, whose name was Jalaluddin, would answer, and when that group of journalists was halfway through, another set would arrive and get him to start again from the beginning.

The authenticity of the Afghan landscape is never in question. Meek has lived and breathed it. But there are occasions in the novel where he let’s his grip on the narrative slip and intrudes on the story. Dialogue is usually spot on but is sometimes guilty of pushing ideas rather than relaying believable statements and sentiments. And a couple of events are implausible, even if they do get the story back on track. And going off track, even if it mirrors Kellas’ descent, his mind a maelstrom of regrets, is the hardest part of reading the novel. That and regular passages of lengthy paragraphs that can be suffocating in their relentlessness.

Where it picks up - or takes off, should that be? - is when the ideas behind the novel come to the fore. At its core it’s a novel about love and friendship, and about how people are never - and never can be - who we make them out to be. Layered over this, using Kellas’ novel as its emblem, is a criticism of modern society that has dumbed down and gone in search of the dollar; that has, like Adam Kellas, been seduced by America.

It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy - not a group with America, but the American government, the American majority, and the American way…Readers would be made to believe in a limited war to save civilization…

With the current political climate involving efforts to bring “the American way” to nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Meek is perhaps right that culture has begun its downward flight. But We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is not the novel to combat it, being a lesser novel to Meek’s previous effort. One wonders if The People’s Act Of Love was him doing it for the money, allowing him the leisure of writing what he wants to write. And while he slips in some remarkable imagery and turns of phrase, and proves himself more than capable of penning effective set pieces, these are lost in an abundance of prose, forcing indigestion on the tissue of the page.

I’ve been making it a rule of late that before I see a film I should have read the book, provided it’s available in English and that I know the film is based on a book in the first place. So it has been with The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and I Am Legend. It produces mixed results: the first one, good; the latter, bad. I’ve now had Bertolucci’s The Dreamers on DVD for some time and have been holding off watching it until I had read the book. And it being by Gilbert Adair, I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to get around to it.

The Dreamers (2003), as Adair notes in the afterword, is a rewrite of his 1986 debut, The Holy Innocents, a novel he was never happy with and constantly knocked back offers of adaptation, only to rescind when Bertolucci came calling. Not just rescind, but seize the opportunity to put past wrongs right, and come up with a new treatment, for both book and film, which he claims “may be twins but…they’re not identical.”

It seems in literature that when young Americans come to Paris they end up caught in the moment and find themselves moving into an apartment indefinitely and enjoying lots of sex. The Dreamers, in this respect, is no different to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, as its main character, the eighteen year old Matthew, has come to Paris, and in a friendshap “matured in the white shadow of the Cinématèque screen”, has come to know Théo and his twin sister, Isabelle, although his insecurity casts doubts on his worthiness of their aquaintance:

A lonely man thinks of nothing but friendship, just as a repressed man thinks of nothing but flesh. If Matthew had been granted a wish by a guardian angel, he would have requested a machine, one yet to be invented, permitting its owner to ascertain where each of his friends was at any given moment, what he was doing and with whom. He belonged to the race which loiters underneath a loved one’s window late at night and endeavours to decipher shadows flitting across the Venetian blind.

The comparison of Matthew’s loneliness to one of repression is apt in the context of the novel as Matthew, after an embarrassing misunderstanding with a friend back in America, found “the door of the closet out of which he had momentarily stepped proved to be a revolving one” and has buried what desires he has.

Echoing Matthew’s psyche, on a larger scale but in the background of the novel, the French government, under de Gaulle has designs on repressing the liberal movement, one incediary act being the closure of the Cinématèque, a beacon on the French cultural landscape standing outside of beaurocratic borders. And, with no films to see, the trio of Matthew, Isabelle, and Théo embody the ethos of the popular saying that the show must go on, adapting films into a parlour game called Home Movies that starts with petty gambling, only for the stakes to dangerously progress into a heady steam of sexual forfeit:

The Cinématèque had been forgotten. The had a Cinématèque of their own, a Cinématèque in flesh and blood. Which meant that the game was no longer played merely whenever the inclination siezed them. While they read during the day, or played cards, or fumbled one another, the curtain would rise on Home Movies night after night, at six-thirty, eight-thirty and ten-thirty, with matinees on Sunday.

But like a screening at the Cinématèque, things must come to and end and in The Dreamers Adair brings the final curtain down on a tragic note as the events of May 1968, spurned on by the Cinématèque’s closure, slip from protest to riot. Our dreamers, long lost in their liberal world, are woken by the heavy hand of conservatism.

When I pick up an Adair novel, this being my fifth, I’ve come to expect a level of trickery but such expectations were not met here, although, in hindsight, I suppose I should anticipate the unexpected from Adair. What The Dreamers is, then, is a stylistically tame novel that, in protest at its timidity, delivers a steamy soup of friendship, desire and sin that still needs a pinch of salt. The story is assuredly told, each observation a sparkling pearl, but somewhat lacks the wit displayed, such as showcased in Buenos Noches Buenas Aires, that, for me, typefies an Adair novel and makes it something that The Dreamers can only, well, dream of.