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In a world where the arts would appear to be in terminal decline, or at least in a depression, it’s somewhat reassuring - though devastating - to discover that it’s not purely a western phenomenon. In Bi Feiyu’s The Moon Opera (2007), it’s clear that over in the Orient, cultural traditions are also on the slide, and notably so in the specialised world of the Peking Opera.

The narration pinpoints the cause, saying, “the decline of Peking Opera began with the decline of man and woman, hand in hand” and blames it on “the degeneration of the sexes.” As for solutions, well there aren’t any offered (save, the regeneration of the sexes). What The Moon Opera does, then, is take this premise and, like all great theatre, reduce the theme to the human level and make the players act it out.

But the stars of this curious performance don’t merely act, because so much more is required of them:

Peking Opera is like no other art form. Whether they are speaking, singing, reading, tumbling, or playing an instrument, though they are touted as ‘artists,’ the performers rely on the strength of their bodies; it is how they make their living. Their bodies are worn out by the time they reach a certain age, and then they are like a desert - pour water on sand, and it disappears without a sizzle.

Luckily there’s a good cast on board for a production of a piece called Chang’e Flies To The Moon, the show that “fortune did not favour”:

The Moon Opera, long a painful memory for the troupe, had been commissioned in 1958 as a political assignment. The troupe had planned to perform it in Beijing a year later as part of the festivities marking the Republic’s tenth anniversary. But before the first performance could be staged, a certain general was unhappy with what he saw at the rehearsal. “Our lands are lovely beyond escription,” he had said. “Why would any of our young maidens want to flee to the moon? It was a simple comment that raised goosebumps on the troupe leader’s flesh. The Moon Opera closed before it had opened.

Then, after the Cultural Revolution, an effort to reprise the opera in 1979 ended when its star, Xiao Yanqiu (”even at nineteen a natural for the role of a heartbroken woman”), threw boiling water in the face of her understudy, subsequently finding herself demoted from performing and, instead, teaching, a move that would remain sore in the mind for years after as “an open wound.”

It’s not until twenty or so years later, that a performance of The Moon Opera is conceived of again, this time under the suggestion of a wealthy cigarette factory owner who, recalling the past, would like to hear Xiao Yanqiu sing once more. And with this first request we begin to see some of the westernisation of the Peking Opera as the money starts to dictate the art, reducing its potency.

Xiao Yanqiu, now forty, is brought back to The Moon Opera to reprise her role as Chang’e, a woman who, on becoming immortal, decides to retreat to the moon. Even after twenty years she’s still an irrational prima donna, and in her years exiled from the stage, has maintained her reputation:

…her temper was justifiably famous. She could seem as formless as water, giving the impression that she would meekly submit to oppression and abuse. But if you were careless enough to actually come up against her, she would turn frosty in the proverbial blink of an eye, and was capable of bringing things to a shattering conclusion through sudden and reckless actions. That is why the dining hall workers at the drama school all said, “We chefs use salad oil whenever we cook, and we avoid Xiao Yanqiu by hook or by crook.”

Xiao Yanqiu’s commitment to the role features excessive dieting to retain the shape she had years before and, towards the end, even more desperate measures. Her growing commitment to the role enhances the observation that “men fight other men, but women spend their whole lives fighting themselves” - and the tragic nature of the performance is revealed.

In addition to being a gripping drama, The Moon Opera takes time to introduce the reader to the world (and theory) of Chinese opera and does so in an engaging way. The translation, for the most part, reads competently although the occasional cliché drops into the prose. But these are soon swept away under the force of myriad water based metaphors - seas, rivers, puddles, tears - that dominate Feiyu’s writing.

For a small novel, The Moon Opera packs a surprising amount of content, and digging beyond the superficial there are wonderful layers of depth to pick away at. It’s a novel that takes on the subjects of identity, gender roles, and cultural decline, amidst the wider themes of jealousy and regret, and, when the curtain drops, is worthy of a standing ovation. Although there are moments when the writing dips, The Moon Opera is quick to recover and rarely hits a wrong note.

The good thing about wanting to read all Booker nominees is that it introduces you to new authors who you may never have thought to read, and A.N. Wilson definitely falls into that list. However, there’s a downside, and that’s not every novel is going to be to your taste. Wilson’s Winnie And Wolf amply fills that category, for, if there were two topics that could have me breaking the land speed record to escape their mention, it’s opera and politics. How was I meant to live through this?

Relatively easy, it seems. That’s not to say I was overly engaged by much of the content which felt, at times, more like a lecture on Wagner’s operas than a real narrative and I often had to come up for air given how abundant in information the prose is. It’s not fair to blame Wilson for my own ignorance of its subjects and, again me, stubborness to remain slightly ignorant, but there’s just so much to take in, most of which is mere garnish, although the themes of several Wagnerian operas do harmonise with the sections of the novel.

Winnie And Wolf takes as its story the years of friendship between Winifred Wagner, daughter of composer Richard, and Adolph Hitler, referred to throughout, in private scenes, as Wolf, or otherwise H, “the polite German convention of referring to him merely by the initial letter of his surname.” It begins wonderfully, presenting an engaging scene where Wolf (Uncle Wolf, to Winnie’s four children) demonstrates some of the qualities he later became known for (his charisma and oration, his magnetism) in the telling of a fairy tale:

If he had cleverly impersonated the fisherman and his wife, he did more than convey the storm. He became it. I think everyone in the room sensed Wolf’s tempest, his elemental powerfulness. When the fisherman had to shout against the noise of the billowing ocean, Wolf himself bellowed, and it was as if we heard in that cry, not only the noise of the man, but of the elements themselves against which he contended. For, of course, this time the flounder cannot answer the wife Ilsebill’s outrageous request, and replies, “‘Go home, man! She is back sitting on her pisspot…’ And there they sit to this very day!”

And from here we’re off into character studies of both title characters, the private Wolf of the Wagners’ house in Beyreuth, and the public H of a depressed Germany, flitting backwards and forwards in time, as told by the Wagners’ secretary. Winnie is a woman who is fully enchanted by the man she believes will improve Germany’s lot and H is the astute Wagnerian, loyal friend to the family of the composer he idolises. Through H’s early dabblings in politics through his rise to Chancellor and onwards to the declaration of war, Wilson’s narrative tells the story of a benevolent woman who can see no wrong in H’s atrocities, for he was always Wolf to her.

Winnie And Wolf, begins with an introduction from Hermann Muller, assisant pastor at a Seattle church, who received a manuscript from a woman named Winifred Heidler, now deceased. Upon translating it he believes her to be the daughter of Adolph Hitler, although he doesn’t rule out the notion that it may all be fantasy. From there, the manuscript tells all in manner similar to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, an extended letter from beyond the grave explaining the intricacies of the writer’s life (a man known only as Herr N—) and the truth of the addressee’s circumstances.

There’s certainly parts to enjoy in Winnie And Wolf, notably scenes that pop up every now and again, whether they be imagined by the author or engrained in the history books. Emotions are evoked from scenes of brownshirts recklessly attacking Jews, of the public turning a blind eye to it, and, given that history tells us all we need to know of H, just how human monsters can be. It’s just the sheer volume of knowledge that Wilson (or should that be Herr N—?) wants to share that bogs it down, a problem I rarely get when reading someone like Umberto Eco. But overall it’s a fair novel taking a look back at the differences of the last two centuries (of Wagner; of Wolf) and proving itself a:

…reminder that art outlasts politics, that the sordid and cruel things we human beings have been doing to one another in the last century in Europe are not the last word, that music outsoars it and is stronger than it: that Bach outlasts Frederick the Great and that Wagner, too, outlasts his more outlandish patrons and admirers.

Ah yes, Wagner! He may outlast them, but in Winnie And Wolf he more than stays his welcome.