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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.

Although it was his first novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary (1926) was not translated until 1970, and one can well imagine the author peering over translator Michael Glenny’s shoulder as he rendered the Russian into English, suggesting changes here, le mot juste there. Either way, it all comes down to an apprentice piece by Nabokov that serves to demonstrate the early development of one of his major themes in later works: memory.

Less tricksy than later works, Mary is an extremely tight narrative centred around Lev Glebovich Ganin, a Russian émigré, uprooted by the revolution, currently living in a Berlin pension. Stuck in Berlin, and similarly stuck in a dull relationship, he spends his time dreaming of escape, of moving on with his life. All around him, also resident in the pension, are a number of fellow Russians, similarly displaced, who act as cyphers to Ganin’s predicament, while still showing enough character to be strong in their own right.

Of these residents, Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov provides the spark of the novel when one day he shows a photograph of his wife, Mary, to Ganin, who immediately recognises her as his lost love from many years before. And with the revelation that she is due to arrive in Berlin on Saturday, Ganin becomes preoccupied with his past with Mary, convincing himself that she may still be in love with him.

While Ganin’s memories recall the ealier time, his idea of what happened would seem to colour the reality, as in one scene where she submits herself so easily that one can’t suspect element of fantasy:

‘I am yours,’ she said, ‘do what you like with me.’

Like his country - a past irretrievable; no future in sight - Ganin’s state of flux allows him to find comfort in his recollections of Mary, and he finds himself delving so deep that the delights of the past are much stronger than the reality of the present:

It was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real, much more intense than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin. It was a marvelous romance that developed with genuine, tender care.

That Mary is only a few days away in arriving to see her husband, so Ganin spends those days idly dreaming of her. It would seem from all that happened between them there was never a dull moment. And if there was, Ganin won’t let it cloud his vision:

And although his affair with Mary in those far-off days had lasted not just for three days, not for a week but for much longer, he did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time in which he relived the past, since his memory did not take account of every moment and skipped over the blank unmemorable stretches, only illuminating those connected with Mary. Thus no discrepancy existed between the course of life past and life present.

With Ganin having trapped himself in the past, it therefore seems appropriate that he should, in the drab pension, be equally trapped. Other residents, such as the elderly poet, Podtyagin - who can’t return to Russia and whose French visa proves consistently problematic - find themselves similarly static.

Where Mary comes alive most is in Nabokov’s descriptive ability and the musings on memory. Not reaching the heights of Lolita - or, indeed, coming close - it comes down to what the author chooses to show. In one scene Ganin returns to his childhood, the brightness of the details coming to the fore, accompanied by nostalgia, and the notion of what was lost then comes back, once more, to Mary:

‘And where is it all now?’ mused Ganin. ‘Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again - never.

All that Ganin can hope for is to meet Mary once more and for them to run off together, to France, and continue their lives there. The only problem is that her husband is still very much on the scene. That, and the girl of his past is a malleable, comforting image compared to whoever she could be today. The ultimate joy is the ticking down to Saturday and Mary’s arrival, leaving a delicious question mark over Ganin’s head and the reality of the remembered relationship.

Having had the experience of reading Gordon Burn’s fiction - Fullalove, a novel about a hack journalist intruding on the bereaved to get a story - and his non-fiction - Best And Edwards, a literary account of the lightning quick and slow burn deaths of Duncan Edwards and George Best - and favouring the latter, it now seems Burn is intent on blurring the lines between both as his new book, Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel (2008), is exactly as the subtitle implies: the news…as a novel.

It’s a strange conceit, taking real life events and making a fiction of them, but in a roundabout way that’s exactly what happens everyday in the newspapers, on television, on radio. So here, with “the curiously intimate knowledge the world garners about an unknown figure” Burn, with himself as narrator, finds himself obsessing over important news stories and reporting back not the truth, but what susbtitutes for truth these days.

The news. Always something - usually unpleasant - happening far away to a stranger; to somebody else, somewhere that we’re lucky not to be.

The news, in this case, is predominantly focused around July 2007, in which Britain underwent “a summer of disappearances, absences, some voluntary, others not” and its cast of characters should be recognisable to anyone who followed the larger news stories of the year: Kate and Gerry McCann, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Smeaton, and Kate Middleton. Add to these the stories of floods, foot-and-mouth outbreaks, and meaningless stabbings and shootings and it shows the bleak landscape of a year fresh in the memory.

As is common in Burn’s work he turns his attention to the notion of celebrity and works with Warhol’s dictum that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And the fifteen minutes of many characters here come by horrific circumstances.

With John Smeaton (”working-class, Scottish, plain-talking man of the people”) it’s the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport and his taking the fight to a flailing terrorist that elevates him in the public eye, first as a media sensation, then political pawn:

By his second visit to number 10 in October, SuperSmeato was wishing he could just stay at home with his Xbox for a week. Have a few nights in his own bed. Even better, he would be up in the north of Scotland, fly-fishing. His mobile would be back at home, switched off, and nobody would know where he was.

In opposition to Smeaton’s media rise, there’s the tale of the McCanns, Kate and Gerry (”controlled, collected, articulate, focused”) who sought to use the media to help find their missing daughter, Madeleine, only to find themselves, because of the way the presented themselves, turned against:

‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition - a hotline to senior members of the government, for example - were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia.

The largest news story running through Born Yesterday, however, is the handover of office from Tony Blair (”One minute [he] was part of the national static, and the next he was gone.”) to his Chancellor, Gordon Brown (”an analogue politician in a digital age”). Where the Blair government was much like the media in spinning on the truth to its own ends, always presenting an optimistic mask, Brown’s tenure started differently:

The crises that piled up around Gordon Brown in his first weeks of office - the attempted terrorist attacks on London and Glasgow, the summer floods in the midlands and the north, foot-and-mouth: fire, flood and pestilence, a marvellous start for a son of the manse, as a number of people pointed out - these gifts from the gods required him to be thunder-faced, decisive, dogged, statesmanlike. The one thing they didn’t require him to do was the thing he had always had a problem with: they didn’t require him to smile.

As narrator, Burn is regularly out and about, and in the opening scene is walking through a park sometimes frequented by Margaret Thatcher and it’s here that we get the first sense of the novel’s purpose:

In office, Mrs Thatcher never read newspapers. She only read what her press secretary Bernard Ingham told her was in them. Out of office, though, the rumour mill insists she has all the papers brought to her every morning, when she sets about them with a marker pen, highlighting idiocies, striking through innaccuracies, furiously scribbling comments and corrections in the margin.

One can only assume that Burn himself echoed this action, working his way through the news of 2007 to produce Born Yesterday and instead of making corrections, made connections. For while it ultimately means nothing, he can’t help but linger on the fact that Gordon Brown, Madeleine McCann, and the first suspect in her disappearance, Robert Murat, all have problems with their eyes; or that Gerry, Kate, and the terrorists in Glasgow and London were all, to some extent, involved in the medical profession. In getting behind these connections, Burn offers up musings that add depth to what we get from newspapers, television, and radio:

It is often said that today’s abundance of media images create a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything - but only images.

Despite how high profile the stories recounted in Born Yesterday are, they still make for compelling reading in the way, Burn as prose stylist, evokes the misery of somehow being involved. Sometimes it can venture into duller territory, when providing backstory, but overall its a interesting work, full of memorable characters, literary references, and an excellent eye for detail. By giving an account of exactly what was going on in 2007, it must surely be the definitive state-of-the-nation novel.

If the unnamed narrator of Andreï Makine’s The Woman Who Waited (2004) was of the same era as the titular woman he would have been packed up and sent off to war and learnt a bit about the harsh realities of life. But the war was thirty years ago and in the Russia of the 1970s, under Brehznev, this young man has instead been packed up and sent off to university, only to have his disdain for the government shaped by the enclave of of writers, artists, and other liberals he finds himself amongst.

That’s all backstory, however, to The Woman Who Waited, which begins years later, looking back at those years and, for the narrator, the event that lingers on in his memory. Back then he was an arrogant young writer who takes up an opportunity to head out from Leningrad to a desolate village in the rural north - where a handful of old woman and just enough childen to run a single room school live - to research the folklore of the people.

The village, however, has little folklore to share, any tradition it once had now in ruins due to the war:

For it was this that had erased all other legends from the popular memory. To these elderly inhabitants of Mirnoe it was becoming the one remaining myth, a vivid and personal one, and one in which the immortals, both good and evil, were their own husbands and sons, the Germans, the Russian soldiers, Stalin, Hitler. And more specifically, the soldier Vera was waiting for.

Vera, a woman in her mid-forties, is the woman our narrator becomes fixated by. Thirty years before her husband-to-be went off to war and never returned. Through all this time there’s little in her loss to suggest she has given up the ghost or that her unflinching hope has slipped into ritual:

At this crossroads there was a small sign fixed to a post bearing the name of the village, Mirnoe. A little below this a mailbox had been nailed to it, empty for most of the time but occasionally harbouring a local newspaper. Vera went up to the post, lifted the box’s tin flap, thrust her hand inside it. Even from a long way off I sensed that the gesture was not automatic, that it had still not become automatic.

To our narrator, she’s a simple person. Indeed all these village types are. While Vera continues the wait for her husband, she spends her time teaching the children, looking after the women of Mirnoe, and, when she allows herself time, taking off to the train station to wait once more. There’s nothing in their lives, from what he can intuit, that makes them his equal. On first meeting Vera, having heard about her story, he stupidly assumes that there is nothing about her that can surprise him:

I followed her with my eyes for a long time, struck by a simple notion that made all other thoughts about her destiny pointless: ‘There goes a woman,’ I said to myself, ‘about whom I know everything. Her whole life is there before me, concentrated in that distant figure walking beside the lake. She’s a woman who’s waiting for the man she loves for thirty years, that is, from time immemorial.’

But as the two spend more time together Vera continues to surprise our narrator, consistently challenging his every preconceived idea about village life, village people, and herself. When it was once thought fit for satire , it becomes clear that “these villages were quite simply abandoned or dying, reduced to a mode of survival not very different from the stone age”. He even finds himself, in relation to the world in which he grew up, coming to understand how irrelevant some things are:

‘I also realized that up here in Mirnoe all those debates we had in Leningrad, whether anti-Soviet or pro-Soviet, meant nothing. Coming here, I found half a dozen very old women who’d lost their families in the war and were going to die. As simple as that. Human beings getting ready to die alone, not complaining, not seeking someone to blame.’

Makine’s telling of the story is beautifully translated and eminently readable, the prose often lyrical, always engaging, the lightness of its meditations hiding the weight of their message which, like its haunting tone, echo long after the last page has been turned. To the narrator, by capturing Vera in prose “a kind of murder occurs” in the way that his attempt to portray her words prove a barrier to “this being of infinite and inexhaustible potential” - but it’s Vera who is able to move on by burying her past, while the reader just sits there, reflecting.

On my regular visits to book shops there has been one book that I’ve picked up on each visit, pondered it awhile, and returned to the shelves. Not because it didn’t interest me, but because other books I picked up interested me more. However, having seen a positive review elsewhere, I decided that the next time I picked it up I wouldn’t put it down until I’d read it. So, it came to be that I read Secret (2004), by Philippe Grimbert, winner of notable French literary prizes. And besides, it’s always fun to be part of a secret.

Grimbert is by trade a psychoanalyst and it appears that for his second novel he has decided to sit himself on the couch and delve into his own family history, providing a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in post-war France. Fiction and reality are almost inseparable here as the narrator is Grimbert himself and the events are real. Secret, then, is an attempt by the author to flesh out his family history prior to his own birth, in which an unearthed secret is hidden:

Of athletic parents, Grimbert is a child of “thinness and sickly pallor”, and begins by talking of how he invented an imaginary brother, someone older and stronger, someone he’d never become, a brother “who would burden [him] with the full force of his weight”, to fill the hole in his world:

I always felt envious when I went to stay with a friend and a similar-looking boy walked in. The same dishevelled hair and lopsided grin would be introduced with two words: ‘My brother’. An enigma, this intruder with whom everything must be shared, even love. A real brother. Someone in whose face you discovered like features: a persistently straying lock of hair, a pointy tooth… A room-mate of whom you knew the most intimate things: moods, tastes, weaknesses, smell. Exotic for me who reigned alone over the empire of my family’s four room flat.

What follows then is the realisation that buried deep in his mind, the imaginary brother has his roots in a half-brother who died before Philippe was born. The novel proceeds to tell a version of Grimbert’s family history, imagined from the bones of what he knows:

For a long time I was a young boy who dreamed of having a perfect family. I used the rare glimpses they gave me to build a picture of how my parents had met. A few incidental words about their childhood, snippets of information about their youth, their love… I pounced on these fragments to create my unlikely tale. In my own way I unwound the tangle of their lives and, much as I had invented myself a brother, created from scratch the meeting of the two bodies from which I was born, as if I were writing a novel.

By doing this he learns how his father’s first marriage spawned the half-brother, despite having always had eyes for the woman who became Grimbert’s mother. But it goes deeper than that, for after his fifteenth birthday Philippe learns “what [he] had always known”: that his past is Jewish. His father, by deed poll, had changed their name from Grinberg to Grimbert, thus allowing him to “plant roots deep in French soil.” Confronted on the truth he replies that “we’ve always had that name”. And so the true nature of the Grimbert history comes to light as the author imagines what it would have been like to live in occupied France, as a Jew:

The yellow stain distinguished them to others but also allowed them to recognise each other, binding together a community that, because it was hiding itself, had sometimes not realised its own existence.

So it continues that Grimbert pieces together his family history during and after the war, taking what is known and supposing the rest, finding in his fictions reasons for why events happened as they did. And as the author works through the memory of his characters, the great secret that lies at the heart of the family is aired and the burden they represent cast aside, leading to final tragic circumstances.

Grimbert’s prose is terse, mildy poetic at times, and, along with its notion of imagining one’s family’s past, is reminiscent of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, only more optimistic, interesting, and enjoyable. At no point does the author brood on the past, each short section being a delicate meditation or revelation, culminating in the harrowing aftermath of one family’s life during wartime that is ultimately poignant in the telling. In sharing the secret of his brother Grimbert no longer needs to invent, for with the secret aired he is no longer alone.

Secret is published as Memory in the US.

Canada’s Michael Redhill was reportedly surprised to find his second novel had been longlisted for the Booker this year. If the content was given over to errors such as the misprint on the inside cover then I’d have been surprised too. But thankfully Consolation’s prose shows no such slips and it runs with two distanced narratives detailing Toronto past and present that eventually come together by the novel’s close.

Professor David Hollis, in his latter years, was suffering a debilitating disease. Having been ridiculed by his peers for his latest claims, concerning a boat under a landfilled lake, he drowns himself. Left to pick up the pieces and determined to prove him right is his wife, Marianne. Helping her is John Lewis, her daughter’s fiance, the attention shown to her mother - and her father’s claims - rocking the boat. But if they don’t prove those claims then it’s possible that the proposed stadium could bury forever the glass plates of early photos documenting Toronto rumoured to be on board.

Meanwhile, back in the 1850s, Jeremy Hallam, late of England, has come to Toronto to expand his father’s apothecary business. However, that trade already has its fair share of aggressive competitors and, after a meeting with Sam Ennis, an Irish photographer, and his model, Claudia Rowe, Hallam takes his first steps into the world of photography, a path that seemingly leads to the sunken ship and the photos speculated 150 years hence.

Of these two narratives, despite both being well polished, the historical sections shine more. Perhaps the distance helps - presenting times past surely requires more effort to evoke than does modern life with its cars and televisions. There’s a need to create a sense of place - warm coals do it; central heating is taken for granted. And so, to make the modern (well, the nineties) sections more interesting, it’s dialogue that spurs them on - exploring the triangle of John, Marianne, and daughter, Bridget.

While Hallam follows his photographic ambition and Lewis chases the claims of David Hollis, the star of Consolation is the city of Toronto itself, appearing both in its infancy:

Streets paved with little more than the accumulation of grit pressed into them by boots. Wooden sidewalks put together with penny nails. Tar-acrid log shanties with bank buildings made of Kingston stone in their backyards. German and French spoken freely in the streets and canoes out in the lake with actual Indians in them, spearing salmon at the river mouth. Then that same lake, frozen to stillness between December and April, ice-clenched with nothing coming in or out of it. And centred in it, with misplaced pride, a stuttering attempt at making an English town out of nothing, like a voice straining to be heard from a great distance. It would actually be funny, Hallam had thought, if he didn’t have to live here.

And in more mature years:

North of the main thoroughfare, the big houses that had been built in the fifties and sixties were slowly being returned to their original forms, with two-career families snapping up the properties at second-best prices and refurbishing to their hearts’ contents. But south, the houses were smaller; they were still better earners than sellers, and the area was full of tenants.

At its core, Consolation is about history. It looks at how the past only really means something when it is the past - the present doesn’t matter. One only has to imagine the bewildered expression on the Deputy Mayor’s face when Hallam shows him recent portraits of Toronto. (Why would someone do such a thing?) Also given the spotlight is the passage of time: history is always being created and nobody cares about it, even the hotel room where, once you’ve checked out, your presence is wiped away, forgotten.

Consolation is certainly a story of two halves and, with a twist thrown in (perhaps a tad predictable) it gives a good account of itself. Its strengths are in its attention to detail and the wonderful sense of atmosphere in the historical sections, and, while Redhill’s dialogue is well wrought, the modern sections are less engaging, in part because the characters were not strong enough to be noticably individual. I enjoyed this novel but, like the aforementioned hotel room, I suspect that with the next read this novel will be easily forgotten, which I’m sure is no consolation to the author.