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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.

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.

It’s a mistake to subtitle Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country (2005) with “a memoir of life in George W. Bush’s America” since a) it’s not much of a memoir; and b) its range is wider. What it is, then, is a collection of essays covering a range of topics, most of which initially appeared in the In These Times magazine. I did have reservations in reading this since I’d read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and didn’t enjoy his style at all. But with non-fiction I was willing to take another chance.

A Man Without A Country is a book that deals tangentially with aspects of Vonnegut’s life - his humour, his creativity, and his humanism - but the larger canvas centres on the issues of the day, namely the environment, politics, and war. As a swansong it’s perhaps not the greatest contribution to American letters, being a cobbled together collection of essays that seemingly Vonnegut wasn’t up to the task of editing, but it has its moments.

The first couple of pieces focus solely on the man, about how being the youngest in the family makes humour the way to be appreciated. Then Vonnegut moves on to the arts, discussing how he want to be a writer, noting, with his trademark humour:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.

Beyond the personal, Vonnegut moves on to a thin creative writing lesson accompanied by some amusing graphs showing events in the works of Shakespeare and Kafka, amongst others. But where the book is most enjoyable is when discussing issues that matter to others. On the subject of cigarettes, for example, he jokes about suing the American tobacco companies for not giving him cancer and, at the time of writing, he was eighty-two, saying:

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Vonnegut’s disdain for the Bush administration is clear but A Man Without A Country doesn’t really hit new ground, being much in line with public sentiment. Nor does it offer any persuasive reasons for others to change their ways in the wider world, as regards the planet’s state. His pot shots here and there are effective but his kindly tone soon soothes their blow and undermines there seriousness.

In one chapter Vonnegut tells of letters receieved and his replies to the questions therein, one of which sums up his attitude to life, on the being asked for reassurance that everything will be okay:

“Welcome to Earth, young man,” I said. “It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind!”

It’s the balance of optimism and pessimism that make Vonnegut’s writings here enjoyable and while he jokes for the most part, he makes it clear that he has lost faith in humanity (”I think the planet should get rid of us. We’re really awful animals.”) and the future looks bleak thanks to the mass indifference shown, pushing it to the point that we are not so much facing a man without a country as a planet without man. And I think Kurt, who’s up in Heaven now, would quite like that.

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.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of those authors who seem to have a book out every year and, with forty years’ worth of output spanning novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, and more, it feels strange never to have read anything by her. And then there’s the writing under pseudonyms, too - she’s practically monopolising literature; and she’s picked up a number of awards along the way.

So why haven’t I read her? Well, it may be something to do with the titles of those novels: Man Crazy, Middle Age: A Romance, and Missing Mom, for example. But it turns out, as her Bram Stoker award suggests, that Oates is perhaps more protean than I first thought.

So, then, to Black Water (1992), which is out of print in the UK, but still cheaply available, although I picked it up from my local library. The poor thing hadn’t been checked out for quite some time. Was it that bad? Actually, no, as it happens.

Kelly Kelleher, a twenty-six year old woman, is out for a drive with a tipsy political figure referred to only as the Senator. They’ve just left a Fourth of July party and are headed somewhere a little more secluded. But, as fate has it, they speed off down a closed road and, before the Senator can react, they have skidded off the road and find themselves in black rushing water, the car listing on the passenger side. It’s okay for the Senator - he escapes. But for poor Kelly, it’s time for her young life to flash before her eyes. And so it does, the narrative flowing between a series of flashbacks and those final panicked moments of knowing you are about to die:

She was drowning, but she was not going to drown. She was strong, she meant to put up a damned good fight.

If the premise sounds familiar, then it’s because Oates has lifted it almost wholly from the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, where Ted Kennedy escaped his car when he drove off a bridge, leaving twenty-eight year old, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown. Personally, I was unaware of the incident until doing a bit of extracurricular research on Black Water, and being ignorant of the historical basis, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t an issue. For one, Oates has changed the name, so it’s a story. Right? Secondly, it’s setting is after the Gulf War. And finally, what matter are facts when what’s on offer here is Oates’ imagination, as she invents her own version and supposes what it must be like to be that young woman in the final moments of her life as:

…the water splashed and churned about her mouth, foul-tasting water not water, like no water she knew.

Black Water’s style varies throughout, the flashbacks being detailed assessments of the burgeoning relationship between Kelly and the Senator; the manic passages in the sinking car, for want of a better phrase, being prose poetry, producing a sense of the ramblings, assurances, and fears within Kelly’s mind.

Since the drowing can only occupy so many pages, the rest are taken up by Kelly’s life. We learn about her parents, her schooling, her job - all this in order to give us someone to care about. Not so that we care about her, but so that we have a figure to jeer in the Senator. The sheer arrogance of the man as he abuses Kelly’s confidence in him (her thesis was on him; he’s single, she’s obviously interested in him, so why not?), and, in the aftermath of the incident, is concerned only with this career highlights the arrogance of power and the versions of truth that we are fed:

…so there was an instant’s shocked silence and then Ray said, “Dead–!” more an inhalation of breath than an expletive and then he said, quickly, “Don’t tell me over the phone! Just tell me where you are and I’ll come get you,” and the Senator was sobbing now, furious and incredulous and aggrieved, “The girl was drunk, and she got emotional, she grabbed at the wheel and the car swerved off the road…”

Black Water, as a novella, is certainly an interesting piece although I don’t think I overly enjoyed it. Sure, its prose was frenzied and fun - even if I was reading about a woman drowning - and its repetitive nature understandable, give that it reflected the wandering thoughts of Kelly as it came to new subjects, washed off, returned. But there was just something that didn’t catch my interest, probably the American politics aspect. It was worth going off-road for, but didn’t make the splash I wanted.

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.