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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.

The Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, is probably best known for writing short stories, a few collections of which have seen translation. Typically the stories are very short, no more than a few pages, and his collection Missing Kissinger had no less than fifty tucked away within its pages. Kneller’s Happy Campers (1998) was the longest story in another collection, The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and Other Stories, published in the US. Either it deserves to be published as a standalone book in the UK or its publisher is milking it in these recessionary times.

The novella follows the life - well, afterlife - of Mordy, who has recently committed suicide and found himself in a world not unlike the one he’s just left (”I’d always imagine these beeping sounds, like a fuzz-buster, and people floating around in space and stuff. But now that I’m here, I don’t know, mostly it reminds me of Tel Aviv.”)

The big difference here is that the population is entirely made up of suicides, each person showing the traits of how they offed themselves. Mordy’s new friend, Uzi Gelfand, shows the scars on his head where the bullet went in and out, and the girls at the local bars (”you could tell straight off how they did it, with the scars on their wrists and everything, but there were some that looked really good.” Those without scars, “who did it with pills or poison”, are called Juliets. There’s even room for celebrity suicides, where Keret throws in a cameo for some humour:

Last night was awful. Uzi brought this friend of his, Kurt. Thinks the guy’s really cool ’cause he was the leader of some famous band and everything. But the truth is he’s a big-time prick. I mean, I’m not exactly sold on the place either, but this guy, he wouldn’t stop bitching. And once he gets going - forget it. He’ll dig into you like a bloody bat. Anything that comes up always reminds him of some song he wrote, and he’s got to recite it for you so you can tell him how cool the lyrics are. Sometimes he’ll even ask the bartender to play one of his tracks and you just wanna dig yourself a hole in the ground. It isn’t just me. Everybody hates him, except Uzi. I think there’s this thing that after you off yourself, with the way it hurts and everything -and it hurts like hell - the last thing you give a shit about is somebody with nothing on his mind except singing about how unhappy he is.

On arriving in this afterlife, Mordy has found himself working a deadbeat job in a pizza chain called Kamikaze. When not slaving away he’s doing whistlestop tours of the bars, getting drunk. So, when he hears that Desiree, his girlfriend from before he killed himself, has also taken her life he sets off in the car, with Uzi, to find her. Such is love.

Like much of the novella, the journey taken is just as strange and funny as the premise. However, below the surface there are serious stirrings, Keret’s afterlife holding a mirror up to the world we live in and highlighting its flaws. At one point during their road trip racism is briefly touched upon as Gelfand overlooks his own circumstances to pass sweeping comments upon a group of people:

The people outside looked a lot like the ones in our neighbourhood - their eyes kinda dim, and dragging their feet. The only difference was that Gelfand didn’t know them - which was enough to make him paranoid.

‘I’m not being paranoid. Don’t you get it? They’re all Arabs.’

‘So what if they’re Arabs?’ I asked.

‘So what? I dunno. Arabs - suicides - doesn’t that psych you out, even a little?’

Along the way they pick up a Juliet, who maintains there’s been a clerical error because she didn’t off herself, and by the time they meet the eponymous Kneller the story, if not strange enough, takes a turn for the surreal, introducing almost whimsical ideas that, given the circumstances, never really feel out of place. Kneller, presiding over a commune, talks of the ‘miracles’ that happen in the vicinity, of which we see a number happening, but after that the breakneck speed events take seems as if it’s rushing to the end so as to mask that there’s not much storyline to be had and the charming conceit that opens the novel shadows the latter half. In all fairness, the conclusion is satisfying, but the road there is unscenic.

While its bizarre humour had me wondering where Keret would lead off to next, and its informal, sometimes colloquial style, was for the most part engaging, the same couldn’t be said for its characters: they were sorely lacking a dimension. All singular minded and sketchy. As his short stories typically only take a few pages each, one wonders if he’s not more interested in the surreal twists of imagination he is capable of than giving his playthings substance. So, while I’m not a fully fledged happy camper, I was satisfied enough with the ride, although, like all the characters, I was happy to check out.

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.

Gabriel García Márquez is one of those authors who I seem to acquire the titles of without actually reading them, partly because I found his most recent release, Memories Of My Melancholy Whores, despite its brevity, to be a rather dull and unmemorable read. Last year, however, I enjoyed his early non-fiction piece The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor enough not to write him off.  

So, feeling that I should at least make a dent in my Márquez collection, I scanned my shelves, passing over his longer novels - and better known - novels, eventually plumping for brevity once more and read No One Writes To The Colonel (1961), which, at sixty-nine pages, could really have been bundled with some other short stories, if only to justify its £7.99 price tag. In the US, at least, it was released as the lead in a short story collection.

In a small town in Colombia the titular colonel and his asthmatic wife are living day to day as best they can, selling off their possessions and whatever else they can in order to buy food and medicine. Every week the colonel heads to the post office in the hope that there will be a letter for him, bringing the pension that he is owed. But he’s been waiting for over a decade and no letter has ever arrived, or looks likely to, but he stumbles on with optimism:

The following Friday he went down to the launches again. And, as on every Friday, he returned home without the longed-for letter. ‘We’ve waited long enough,’ his wife told him that night. ‘One must have the patience of an ox, as you do, to wait for a letter for fifteen years.’ The colonel got into his hammock to read the newspapers.

‘We have to wait our turn,’ he said. ‘Our number is 1823.’

‘Since we’ve been waiting, that number has come up twice in the lottery,’ his wife replied.

Aside from the pension, what gives the colonel hope is a rooster, the last possession the couple have of their son, “shot down nine months before at the cockfights for distributing clandestine literature”. While it’s a nuisance now, being only another mouth to feed, it’s only a few months until the fighting season resumes and the colonel, his optimism never waning, expects it to turn a profit, therefore, in the short run, it’s life becomes more important than his own:

Exhausted, his bones aching from sleeplessness, he couldn’t attend to his needs and the rooster’s at the same time. In the secong half of November, he thought that the animal would die after two days without corn. Then he remembered a handful of beans which he had hung in the chimney in July. He opened the pods and put down a can of dry seeds for the rooster.

No One Writes To The Colonel follows the weeks from October to January as the drudgery of everyday life under military rule drives the characters to the brink of starvation. And even with January heralding a new year, you can be sure that things are going to go on just as they are, if not worse. But it’s the notion of hope that keeps the pages turning, wondering what will happen to the colonel (and his wife) as he sticks to his guns, rather than just sell the rooster and dine out on it, relieving the pressure of waiting for the pension.

While Márquez is better known for being at the forefront of the subgenre tagged ‘magical realism’, No One Writes To The Colonel, eschews the magical part and gets right down to the realism, tackling the effects of censorship, poverty, and hope with an undercurrent of humour. Its cast infringe a little on the realism, being grotesques, but at the same time they are everymen suffering the hardships of Colombian life under martial rule.  And if no one is writing to the colonel, at least someone’s writing about him.